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Today marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trumps attempt to reverse the 2020 election, overturn the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.

Two events will be held to mark the anniversary of January 6, one organized by the Democrats at the US Capitol, the other by Trump at a rally in Arizona the following week. The content of the speeches that will be given by both Biden and Trump is thoroughly predictable.

Biden will deliver a series of bromides about the sanctity of American democracy without giving any actual account of what took place in the coup attempt, who was involved and how close it came to succeeding. He will paper over the seriousness of January 6 and the ongoing threat to democracy with empty appeals for unity with a Republican Party that is deeply implicated in the coup itself.

Trump will cover his brazen plan to seize power, establish a dictatorship and kill thousands of people in the process with his standard fascistic lies. He will claim Biden stole the election through mail-in ballots and will warn of the danger of socialism. In preparation for the event, Trump and his co-conspirators like Stephen Miller and Steven Bannon will be poring through Mein Kampf and the writings of Goebbels for inspiration.

On the anniversary of January 6, five main points must be emphasized:

By January 6, Trump had been broadcasting his plans for dictatorship in public for more than one year. He attempted to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to popular protests against police violence over the course of 2020. In the lead-up to the election, he said he would not accept the outcome if he lost. When he was defeated, he blamed mail-in ballot fraud and urged his supporters to support his bid to remain in power.

In the past year, information relating to the preparations for January 6 has come to light establishing the plotters aims beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, Trump and aides Stephen Bannon and Peter Navarro organized over 100 Republican members of Congress in a bid to delay the certification of the Electoral College. Navarro himself recently told the Daily Beast, We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., [Representative Paul] Gosar and [Senator Ted] Cruz did exactly what was expected of them. It was a perfect plan.

The brazenness with which the plotters acknowledge their aims is itself a testament to the weakness of opposition from the Democrats. Navarro explained in his recent memoir, In Trump Time, that the plan, nicknamed the Green Bay Sweep after the football play, was hatched by Bannon in coordination with Trump himself. Its aim was to delay certification and provide time for paramilitary forces and pro-Trump demonstrators to follow Trumps orders to seize Congress and trap the members inside.

The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this, Navarro wrote. By law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress. The first person who Navarro communicated with on the morning of January 6 was Bannon. I check my messages and am pleased to see Steve Bannon has us fully ready to implement our Green Bay Sweep on Capitol Hill. Call the play. Run the play. Trump, Navarro wrote, was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day.

Fascist organizers of the protests held in Washington that day have told congressional investigators that they participated in dozens of planning meetings with members of Congress who were involved in the putsch plan.

Rolling Stone reported in October, Some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former presidents supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trumps efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.

Paramilitary and far-right groups brought forward earlier in 2020 to support the deadly policy of the ruling class over the course of the pandemic were called into action, some forming quick response teams with guns stashed should street fighting break out. These far-right groups were promoted by big business and the media in the spring of 2020 as the spearhead of efforts to rescind temporary lockdown measures imposed in March after a wave of strikes in the US and internationally forced an initial shutdown of production. The social layers to whom Trump and Wall Street appealed to liberate states from lockdowns at state capitals in April and May 2020 cultivated close ties with Republican leaders and answered Trumps call to descend on Congress less than a year later.

As more and more details come to light, it is now recognized on an international scale that what took place brought the US to the immediate precipice of dictatorship.

In his book Peril, journalist Bob Woodward reported that Chinese General Li Zoucheng spoke to Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was very worried that the United States was actually going to collapse. Woodward reported that after January 6, the Chinese military went on military alert, as did the Russians, as did the Iranians.

Canadian academic Thomas Homer-Dixon published an article in the Globe and Mail titled, The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare. The December 31 article warns that the United States is becoming increasingly ungovernable and could descend into civil war. Homer-Dixon warns that a second Trump presidency could be totally unconstrained, nationally and internationally and that it is not inaccurate to use the F wordfascism. Similar articles are appearing in leading publications worldwide.

Trumps plot almost succeeded. Over 120 Republican congressmen and six senators supported baseless objections to the certification of the Electoral College. A short time later, after Trump directed the crowd at the Ellipse to march on the Capitol building, members of Congress escaped the angry mob with seconds to spare. Vice President Mike Pence was whisked away to safety as the crowd called for his hanging. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer were hidden in a bunker beneath the Capitol and called the Pentagon, begging them to clear the grounds and protect their lives.

Had the mob succeeded in taking members of Congress captive, the Democratic Party would have negotiated for their release in exchange for an arrangement that kept Trump in power.

The plots failure was due entirely to tactical mistakes and inexperience on the part of the mob and its organizers. At times the plot appeared to fall short due to pure chance. Upon breaking into the building, the mob followed a police officer who led them away from where congressmembers were huddled a short distance away. At another point, the mob walked past a door that would have led them to another group of representatives.

The plot did not fail because it encountered opposition from within the political establishment and the state. Not a single institution of bourgeois politics took action to stop the coup attempt.

The police were understaffed, and many officers welcomed protesters into the Capitol building. The military stood by for 199 critical minutes as the crowd occupied the Capitol and broke into congressional offices in search of Congress members and their staff.

More details have recently emerged about the role played by the military on January 6. Newsweeks William Arkin reported on January 2 that Trump planned to call the military into the streets on the day of the putsch, and that Pentagon leadership was concerned that a split would take place in the armed forces.

The Democratic Party made no appeal to the population to oppose the putsch, even though 700,000 people live within the Washington D.C. city limits, where 95 percent of ballots cast were against Trump. Not a single Democratic member of Congress took out his or her cell phone and posted a video appeal on social media calling every opponent of dictatorship into the streets of American cities. Not a single Democratic governor or mayor called for mass protests.

President-elect Joe Biden, whose administration Trump was attempting to prevent from taking office, took hours to address the nation. When he ultimately spoke, Biden took the remarkable step of inviting Trump to deliver a televised address to the nation in the midst of his unfolding coup. In a 10-minute speech delivered the evening of January 6, Biden said, Our democracy is under an unprecedented assault and declared: Therefore, I call on President Trump to go on national television, now, to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege.

Bidens appeal to Trump set the tone for the response of the Democratic Party in the year that has followed.

The congressional investigation moves in fits and starts, largely behind the backs of the population, but Trump has not been criminally prosecuted for his role in attempting to overthrow the Constitution and establish a dictatorship. He is currently living at his compound in Mar-a-Lago. None of the congressional representatives who supported the coup attempt have been removed from Congress or charged with crimes. A ruling class which locked up thousands of impoverished people from Central Asia on suspicion of terrorism after September 11 and jailed and deported countless communists and socialists in the red scares of the 20th century has taken action only against the flotsam and jetsam of January 6, the low-level participants, while leaving those who directed the mob largely untouched. Even the rotting Weimar Republic took more action against Hitler, who was in jail a year after the Beer Hall Putsch failed in 1923 (albeit under comfortable conditions).

The Democrats response to January 6 is dictated above all by fear of social opposition from below. Their main role is to chloroform discontent, to shore up the two-party system, to use racial and gender politics to divide the working class, and to block the development of a movement against the threat of dictatorship. Their response to January 6 has been to do everything possible to minimize what took place in order to prevent the population from becoming aware of how close the country came to dictatorship.

Over the course of Trumps term in office, the Democrats ignored Trumps attacks on democratic rights and opposed him on foreign policy grounds, alleging that he was an inefficient steward of the interests of American imperialism. Brought to power on a wave of opposition to Trump, the Democrats have continued the COVID-19 policies of his administration, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives to fuel the speculative bonanza on Wall Street.

Their endless references to race and gender and sexual orientation are aimed entirely at enriching privileged sections of the wealthiest 10 percent of society and have nothing to do with defending the democratic rights of the population. In the most flagrant example, the Democrats have continued the worst aspects of Trumps attacks on immigrants, deporting record numbers to countries devastated by decades of imperialist war and US-backed dictatorship. The fight against Trump and dictatorship will not take place through this party.

It is widely understood that Trump and the Republicans are planning another takeover. Columns in the corporate press noting the anniversary of January 6 acknowledge that dictatorship is an imminent possibility and ponder the likelihood of civil war.

The Republican Party has transformed itself into a fascistic party that is not prepared to accept the result of democratic elections. As Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky recently told AP, Its not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore.

Following Trumps lead, the Republican Party has legitimized vigilante violence as a part of the political process. Its own congressional representatives routinely threaten Democratic opponents with violence in order to secure their right-wing political ends. Threats of violence against Democratic congressmembers have increased by 107 percent in the last year. The Republican Party is engaged in naked efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters through illegal voting restrictions and is installing local election officials who will overturn future elections. It is preparing its next authoritarian moves in plain sight.

Officials from within the military now warn that Trump is attempting to solidify his support within the Pentagon in preparation for his next conspiracies. In December, the Washington Post published a statement by ex-generals titled, The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection which warns:

As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, weall of us former senior military officialsare increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk. In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.

The Post statement warns of the potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command within the Pentagon and concludes that in the 2024 election, With loyalties split, some [commanders] might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

Even the editorial board of the New York Times recently acknowledged that the Democrats inaction is paving the way for future putsch attempts. The Times January statement, entitled Every Day is Jan. 6 now, concludes:

We should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they werent serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.

This is an acknowledgment that the entire corporate media has been engaged in a systematic effort to downplay the seriousness of the events of January 6 and that, in doing so, the media establishment has objectively facilitated Trumps plotting. The Times itself has played a critical role in not only downplaying the events of January 6, but elevating those responsible for carrying it out. In October 2021, the Times published an op-ed by Senator Josh Hawley, one of the most prominent coup plotters in the Senate, and later praised his sage proposals for addressing the supply chain crisis.

The events of January 6 were foreseeable. This is proven by the coverage on the World Socialist Web Site, which was warning on a daily basis for over a year leading up to the election that Trump was preparing an attempt to overturn the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.

The Times editorial statement is an indictment not only of the newspaper of record itself, but also of the left publications around the Democratic Party and representatives of libertarian tendencies who continue to downplay the importance of January 6 or who now openly sympathize with Trump.

In a January 26, 2021, article, The Meaning of January 6, historian Bryan Palmer adopts the haughty tone of an academic who is above it all. Palmers conclusion is that the events of January 6 were not an insurrection, and that the left must reject the notion that it posed a threat to democratic rights. In a section headed Insurrection as hyperbole, Palmer summarizes his argument, deriding those who call January 6 a coup attempt: Hyperbole flowed as the trail of tears grew to a tidal wave.

Palmer speaks with total indifference at the prospect of fascist dictatorship. He even commends the fascist mob for interrogating and scrutinizing critically the state institutions, as though individuals wearing Camp Auschwitz shirts defaced the Capitol because they oppose the criminal historical record of American imperialism. For Palmers denunciations of bourgeois democracy, he only serves to justify and apologize for the Democratic Partys efforts to downplay the danger.

Left Voice, a publication associated with the Argentinian Socialist Workers Party (PTS), recently wrote that January 6 was not a fascist coup or even an attempted coup. According to Left Voice, January 6 was a sign of the strength of the political establishment. Left Voice calls January 6 a moment that provided an opportunity for the establishment of the political regime and the mediaincluding politicians in both partiesto begin to reestablish legitimacy through their rejection of the right-wing rioters.

After January 6, the political crisis has diminished. In broad strokes, this is the political scenario we find ourselves in, they conclude: the crisis has receded to latency. Left Voice reaches this conclusion by declaring that the working class is passive. On January 6 and its aftermath, The masses who had been mobilized against Trump for the past four years looked to Biden and the regime to respondthey were trusted to take care of it, and there was no response from the working class and oppressed.

Paraphrasing Trotsky, these attorneys of the Democratic Party deny the responsibility of its leaders in order thus to escape shouldering their own responsibility. Although Left Voice presents itself as a critic of the Democrats, in actual fact it provides justification for the fecklessness of the Democrats by blaming the working class for the Democrats refusal to mobilize the population against the coup!

A third section of the radical middle class, comprised of anarchist and libertarian elements like Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore, were impressed by the coup attempt and have become apologists for the putsch. Deeply disoriented, they have whiplashed from supporters of the Democratic Party into defenders of fascist killer Kyle Rittenhouse and opponents of mask and vaccine mandates. Such individuals personify the worst traits of American radical politics: pragmatism, pessimism, nationalism, anti-communism and extreme individualism. Their professed concern that health restrictions infringe on individual rights coincides entirely with the interests of Wall Street and eviscerates the social rights of billions of workers to protection from sickness and death.

January 6 is not a historical accident, it is the outcome of the protracted decay of the American political system. For decades, the two parties have worked together to enforce massive cuts to social programs, to wage permanent imperialist war, to facilitate unbridled financial speculation and to abolish democratic rights. The corporate media and political establishment have deliberately cultivated far-right elements as a bulwark against the working class. The Democratic Party has replaced any prior association to social reforms with an obsession with race and identity that feeds and strengthens the far right.

In 2000, amid the crisis surrounding the US presidential election, the International Committee of the Fourth International explained that bourgeois democracy could not survive on the rotten foundations of Americas increasingly oligarchic society. In December, as the Supreme Court deliberated over whether to halt the counting of votes in Florida, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North said:

What the decision of this court will reveal is how far the American ruling class is prepared to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic and constitutional norms. Is it prepared to sanction ballot fraud and the suppression of votes? Is it prepared to install in the White House a candidate who has attained that office through blatantly illegal and anti-democratic methods? A substantial section of the American ruling elite, and perhaps even a majority on the Supreme Court, is prepared to do just that. This is because, among this social layer, there has been a dramatic erosion of support for traditional forms of bourgeois democracy.

The disastrous development of the coronavirus pandemic over the course of the last year has enormously intensified the social contradictions that gave rise to the events of January 6. The forces of political reaction mobilized by Trump have proved critical in the ruling classs murderous policy to reopen business and schools and infect as many people as possible with COVID-19.

None of the economic and social issues giving rise to the events of January 6 have been addressed. The Democratic Party has proven itself totally opposed to implementing policies required to raise living standards and stop the spread of the pandemic because it represents the interests of the same financial aristocracy that prioritizes profits over life.

But the last years have seen a historic global increase in strikes and mass protests against inequality. The working class, more internationally interconnected and urban than ever before, is the social force that has the power to crush fascism and the threat of dictatorship.

Opposition is growing daily to the unbridled spread of the pandemic at workplaces and schools across the world. Protecting society from mass infection and the specter of fascism requires attacking both at their common source: the capitalist system. The dizzying celebration of parasitism and speculation that is the Dow Jones, Nasdaq and S&P 500 is driving the spread of the pandemic, and the massive growth of inequality requires the adoption of ever more ruthless and anti-democratic methods of rule. The wealth of the financial aristocracy must be expropriated, trading must be suspended, the major corporations must be nationalized, and Wall Street must be closed down.

The movement in the working class can recognize its immense potential only through the struggle to democratize every aspect of political, social and economic life, including democratic workers control over production and COVID-19 safety. This means freeing the worlds productive forces from the dictatorship of capitalist profit and placing production under the democratic, social control of the working class.

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Trump and the danger of fascism in America

The fascist insurrection in Washington DC is a turning point in the political history of the United States.

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One year since the fascist coup attempt of January 6 - WSWS

Joseph Alois Schumpeter was one of the most prominent political economists during the first half of the twentieth century. He published prolifically in both German and English on questions of economic theory, economic sociology, economic and social policy, and the history of ideas. A phrase Schumpeter coined to describe the essence of capitalism as he understood it, creative destruction, has become one of the most familiar terms in the economic lexicon.

In politics, Schumpeter was a liberal conservative or perhaps a conservative liberal but he was also deeply influenced by his Marxian contemporaries. As a student at the University of Vienna, Schumpeter was a member of Eugen von Bhm-Bawerks legendary graduate seminar, along with three leading Austro-Marxists Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, and Emil Lederer and the free-market liberal Ludwig von Mises.

This experience no doubt encouraged Schumpeter to explore many of the same questions that his Marxist contemporaries had posed, although the answers that he formulated differed sharply from theirs. He disagreed with the Marxist view of capitalisms inner contradictions while believing that the ultimate victory of socialism was inevitable anyway. For Schumpeter, the drive toward imperialism and war that was so evident in his own time stemmed from precapitalist social forces that were still at work in European society rather than the logic of capitalism itself.

Schumpeter was born into a prosperous middle-class family in the Moravian town of Triesch on February 8, 1883, a month before the death of Karl Marx. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 7, 1950. Schumpeters father, a merchant, had died in 1887, and his mother soon remarried. His new stepfather was a general in the Austro-Hungarian army, so the young Joseph grew up in a distinctly upper-class environment.

He was educated in Vienna at the prestigious Theresianum Academy of Knights of Vienna. Schumpeter went on to spend five years at the University of Vienna between 1901 and 1906, where he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy in addition to economics. His first publication came in 1906, when he was only twenty-three years of age.

From 1909 to 1911, Schumpeter was professor of economics at the University of Czernowitz, moving first to the University of Graz (19111921) and then to the University of Bonn (19251932). In addition to these academic posts, he worked as a lawyer and a financial speculator not to mention a brief stint as minister of finance in the new post-Habsburg Austrian republic between March and October 1919 and spent some time in Britain and the United States.

Schumpeter spent the last eighteen years of his life at Harvard University, where he was president of the Econometric Society (in 1942) and the American Economic Association (in 1948). Were it not for his unexpected death, Schumpeter would also have served as the founding president of the International Economic Association in 1950.

Although there is a substantial literature on Schumpeters life and work, no comprehensive edition of his works has yet been published, whether in English or in German. Richard Sturn suggests that this may reflect the absence of a specific Schumpeter school of economics. Probably best known today as a historian of economic thought, Schumpeter was the author of two hundred journal articles and several influential books, two of which ran to more than a thousand pages: the two-volume Business Cycles and the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis.

However, those interested in Schumpeters thinking, especially from the left, will probably turn first to his most celebrated work, 1942s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which is a mere 425 pages in length. The book consists of five parts, respectively titled The Marxian doctrine, Can capitalism survive? Can socialism work? Socialism and democracy, and A historical sketch of socialist parties.

It would be impossible in the space of a short article to give a satisfactory account of this complex, scholarly, and highly opinionated work. I will concentrate instead on Schumpeters analysis of the economics of imperialism, which provides an entry point into his broader approach to the capitalist mode of production, its history, and its prospects.

Twenty-three years before the appearance of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter published a lengthy article on The Sociology of Imperialism in a German-language academic journal, which did not appear in English until just after his death. In the version that I have consulted, there are ninety-six pages of text, amounting to perhaps 35,000 words.

Schumpeter began with a brief introductory section outlining the nature of the problem, in which he argued that aggressive attitudes on the part of states need not be a simple reflection of the populations concrete economic interests. Indeed, in the case of imperialism, we might say that nations and classes seek expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, victory for the sake of winning, dominion for the sake of ruling. In this spirit, he defined imperialism as the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion.

The author did acknowledge that neo-Marxist theory had attempted to provide an economic explanation for imperialism, reducing it to the economic class interests of the age in question (emphasis in original, and hereafter). Although he conceded that the Marxist view was by far the most serious contribution that had been made to the analysis of imperialism and agreed that there was much truth in it, Schumpeter proceeded to criticize it at some length.

He began by describing the strongly anti-imperialist sentiments that had prevailed in mid-nineteenth-century Britain in a section with the strange title Imperialism as a catchphrase. After a lengthy account of the way imperialism had operated in ancient times, the medieval period, and the age of absolute monarchy, Schumpeter devoted the final third of the essay to discussing the relationship between imperialism and capitalism.

At the start of this concluding section, Schumpeter returned to the prevalence of non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations towards war and conquest. He believed that many and perhaps most wars throughout history had been waged without any adequate reason. According to Schumpeter, this in turn was strong evidence that psychological dispositions and social structures acquired in the dim past . . . tend to maintain themselves and to continue in effect long after they have lost their meaning and their life-preserving function.

On the strength of this analysis, Schumpeter rejected the argument of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist thinkers that there was a necessary link between imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism was in fact atavistic in character and stemmed from the living conditions, not of the present but of the past put in terms of the economic interpretation of history, from past rather than present relations of production. In political terms, we should see imperialism as the product not of capitalist democracy but rather of the earlier stage of absolute autocracy.

Schumpeter insisted that under capitalism, there was much less excess energy to be vented in war and conquest than in any pre-capitalist society. In a capitalist society, the pursuit of profit absorbed the energies of the population, with wars of conquest rightly seen as troublesome distractions, destructive of lifes meaning, a diversion from the accustomed and therefore true task.

The economist cited what he considered to be strong evidence of the powerful anti-imperialist tendencies at work in capitalist society. Those tendencies included deep opposition to militarism, military expenditure, and war, which were most powerful among industrial workers but also manifested in large sections of the capitalist class.

It was no accident, he suggested, that of all the capitalist nations, the United States was the one least inclined toward imperialist adventures and also the least burdened with pre-capitalist elements, survivals, reminiscences, and powerful factors. We should look upon the imperialist tendencies that could indeed be found within capitalism as alien elements, carried into the world of capitalism from the outside, supported by non-capitalist factors in modern life.

Schumpeter then directly addressed the neo-Marxist claim that imperialism was the product of a new, dangerous stage of monopoly capitalism. He acknowledged that some sections of the capitalist class do indeed benefit from imperialism most obviously entrepreneurs in the war industries. However, Schumpeter argued, where free trade prevails no class has an interest in forcible expansion as such.

In a lengthy discussion of the economic effects of tariffs and the broader political implications of protectionism, Schumpeter cited Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding favorably, crediting them with having been the first to recognize and describe the importance of what was happening in this field. He also praised Hilferding for having taken his distance from a pessimistic view about the prospects of capitalism that he found in the work of Marx:

It is not true that the capitalist system as such must collapse from imminent necessity, that it necessarily makes its continued existence impossible by its own growth and development. Marxs line of reasoning on this point shows serious defects, and when these are corrected the proof vanishes. It is to the great credit of Hilferding that he abandoned this thesis of Marxist theory.

A footnote to this passage anticipated one of the most striking arguments that Schumpeter later made in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:

Capitalism is its own undoing but in a sense different from that implied by Marx. Society is bound to grow beyond capitalism, but this will be because the achievements of capitalism are likely to make it superfluous, not because its internal contradictions are likely to make its continuance impossible.

Schumpeter was much closer to the neo-Marxist position on the role of financial capital in the growth of monopoly. He drew an interesting distinction between (financial) capitalists and (industrial) entrepreneurs: Although the relation between capitalists and entrepreneurs is one of the typical and fundamental conflicts of the capitalist economy, monopoly capitalism has virtually fused the big banks and cartels into one. This process had created a social group that carries great political weight, and which possessed

a strong, undeniable, economic interest in such things as productive tariffs, cartels, monopoly prices, forced exports (dumping), an aggressive economic policy, an aggressive foreign policy generally, and war, including wars of expansion with a typically imperialist character.

He also identified further motives for this group to support imperialism, including an interest in the conquest of lands producing raw materials and foodstuffs, with a view to facilitating self-sufficient warfare, and the profits to be derived from rising wartime consumption. While unorganized capitalists would at best reap a trifling profit from these activities, organized capital is sure to profit hugely.

And yet, Schumpeter warned, the final word in any presentation of this aspect of modern economic life must be one of warning against over-estimating it. The only capitalists with a real material interest in what he termed export monopolism were the entrepreneurs and their ally, high finance. Small producers and workers had nothing to gain.

His conclusion was that export monopolism, contrary to the arguments of Marxist thinkers, did not arise from the inherent laws of capitalist development. Capitalism remained intensely competitive, and it was a basic fallacy to describe imperialism as a necessary phase of capitalism, or even to speak of the development of capitalism into imperialism.

So what did explain the rise of imperialism? Once again, Schumpeter emphasized the survival of precapitalist interests, methods, and ways of thinking: Established habits of thought and action tend to persist, and hence the spirit of guild and monopoly at first maintained itself, even where capitalism was in sole possession of the field. In its everyday life, its ideology, and its politics, Europe remained greatly under the influence of the feudal substance . . . while the bourgeoisie can assert its interests everywhere, it rules only in exceptional circumstances, and then only briefly.

Schumpeter summarized what he considered to be the historical and sociological sources of modern imperialism, which he saw as

a heritage of the autocratic state, of its structural elements, organizational forms, interest alignments, and human attitudes, the outcome of pre-capitalist forces which the autocratic state has reorganized. It would never have been evolved by the inner logic of capitalism itself.

According to Schumpeter, the pro-military interests within the capitalist class joined up with these precapitalist forces in an alliance which kept alive war instincts and ideas of overlordship, male supremacy, and triumphant glory ideas that would otherwise long since [have] died. He finished off the article by affirming the ancient truth that the dead always rule the living.

Discussion of imperialism was rather limited in Schumpeters subsequent work. There were three references to the subject in his Business Cycles. They included a lengthy footnote on Rudolf Hilferding in which he stated that the rule of the financier over industry, still more over national politics, is a newspaper fairy tale almost ludicrously at variance with facts. The index of History of Economic Analysis did not contain the word imperialism, but Schumpeter used the term in his one substantial reference to the neo-Marxists, which largely consisted of an apology for the authors inability to deal with their ideas in any great detail.

However, Schumpeter did devote six and a half pages to the question in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, where he summarized the Marxian theory of imperialism and commended its strong points before proceeding to offer some sharp criticism. While this analysis came in the chapter titled Marx the teacher, it also acknowledged the later contribution of neo-Marxist theorists such as Bauer, Hilferding, Max Adler, Rosa Luxemburg, and Fritz Sternberg. All of these writers drew on Marxs account of the falling rate of profit as articulated in volume III of Capital.

According to Marxs presentation, a rising organic composition of capital combined with a declining rate of exploitation in the advanced capitalist countries put constant downward pressure on the profit rate and created a powerful incentive for the export of capital to less developed parts of the world. If this framework was valid, Schumpeter observed, imperialism would have a strong economic basis, with colonization used to safeguard overseas investment and internecine war between rival bourgeoisies, an inevitable consequence. As he noted, the Marxists regarded this as a stage, hopefully the final stage, of capitalism.

This Marxian synthesis, Schumpeter conceded, did seem to follow beautifully from two fundamental premises . . . the theory of classes and the theory of accumulation, and also appeared to display a close alliance with historical and contemporaneous fact. Yet on closer inspection, he insisted, this was not the case. In fact, the heroic time of colonialism had been precisely the time of early and innovative capitalism when accumulation was in its beginnings. Such expansion benefitted the proletariat more than the capitalists, and it was never under the control of the latter:

As a matter of fact, very little influence on foreign policy has been exerted by big business. Capitalist attitudes towards foreign policy are predominantly adaptive rather than causative, today more than ever. Also, they hinge to an astonishing degree on short-run considerations equally remote from any deeply laid plans and from any definite objective class interests.

For Schumpeter, the Marxist theory of imperialism was ultimately a superstition, comparable to the conspiracy theories about Jewish influence propagated by antisemites. Continuing his practice in Business Cycles, Schumpeter pulled no rhetorical punches, referring to the neo-Marxian theory as a horrible platitude that consisted of nursery tales.

What do Schumpeters rather sparse writings on imperialism tell us about his attitude toward Marxian political economy as a whole? First, while Schumpeter viewed the capitalist system as being quite unstable, he did not think it was destined to collapse, still less to stagnate. In his perspective, capitalism was subject to cyclical fluctuations, but the upswings were every bit as strong as the downturns, with depressed conditions never lasting for very long.

In spite of this, Schumpeter still believed the triumph of socialism to be inevitable in the long run, although this was not a political prospect that he welcomed. However, this would be due to the victory of anti-capitalist ideology rather than the objective economic contradictions of the capitalist system.

Second, he argued that successive waves of intense innovation would ensure that competitive forces remained strong enough to prevent the emergence of a late stage of monopoly capitalism, as the Marxists claimed would happen. Moreover, the ability of many entrepreneurs to finance their innovations out of retained earnings would keep the power of the banks in check.

These two propositions led to a third: for Schumpeter, there was no irresistible pressure for imperialist expansion on narrowly economic grounds. Capitalist countries might or might not benefit from a particular instance of imperialism. But imperialism as such was not, contrary to the Marxist view, a necessary condition for the survival of the capitalist system.

In fact, according to Schumpeter, the mutual gains to be made from trade and international investment were so large that capitalism was in fact an innately peaceful system, as nineteenth-century liberals such as Richard Cobden had maintained. It was a fundamental mistake to identify twentieth-century capitalism with aggressive militarism and the annexation of overseas territories.

For Schumpeter, imperialism was thus an atavism: a survival of the precapitalist, feudal mode of production that was not motivated by any rational demand for the preservation of the capitalist one, which could survive and indeed fare much better without it. Even in predominantly capitalist states, it was noncapitalist, aristocratic social forces that largely determined foreign policy, with the same irrational elements that had prevailed in precapitalist societies serving as an ideological justification.

Finally, Schumpeter considered the entire Marxian approach to the capitalist mode of production to be deeply flawed on several levels. For him, the most crucial Marxist error was the assertion that the forces of production dominated everything else in society, including class relations, institutions of government, and political ideologies. Schumpeter insisted that society was much more complicated than that, even in its capitalist phase.

His encounter with the Austro-Marxists certainly had a heavy influence on Schumpeter, prompting him to ask many of the same questions. However, he came up with some very different answers, and would surely have been equally skeptical toward the economic, political, and social theories that are prevalent among Marxists today. A serious engagement with Schumpeters work can thus be an important and stimulating challenge for those who still identify with the Marxist critique of capitalism.

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Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism - Jacobin magazine

Victor Grayson: In Search of Britains Lost Revolutionaryby Harry TaylorPluto Press 16.99

HARRY TAYLOR hasnt solved every riddle involving Victor Grayson, but his investigation of this complex and enigmatic figure is thorough and enthralling. Grayson, a charismatic and fiery socialist orator, was seduced into serving the establishment he hated before his mysterious disappearance in September 1920.

The book builds on earlier biographies by socialist journalist Reg Groves and Labour peer David Clark, but roundly refutes a bizarre conspiracy theory concocted by right-wing journalist Donald McCormick. The motives for further investigation are Taylors discovery of fresh information, and his conviction that Graysons story holds lessons for the British left in the wake of the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn. Theres a sense in which were haunted by Grayson.

We begin with a childhood of privation and challenge in working-class Liverpool. In a pivotal episode, the teenage Grayson stows away on a ship bound for Chile and is put ashore in Pembrokeshire. The 165-mile walk to his home city reveals it has no monopoly on destitution.

The book explores the tension between Graysons Christianity and socialism, the bisexuality that led to him being blackmailed, his attractiveness to older and wealthier female admirers, and his natural flair for oratory. Taylor rejects the established image of Grayson as a hot-headed troublemakerwith no grasp of ideology or policy. His calls for direct action were consonant with the beliefs of the Labour leadership at the time, and he had a working knowledge of Marxs writing.

The tragic sweep of Graysons life is punctuated with fascinating cameos. For example, I was surprised to discover he received support from writers Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, whose suspicion of socialism was offset by disillusionment with the party-political system.

Graysons legend centres on an astonishing by-election victory at Colne Valley in 1907, achieved without official Labour Party support, but with a blend of Christian socialism, Marxist economics, and dazzling eloquence. In Parliament, his provocative attempts to secure an unemployment debate led to Labour MPs unanimously supporting Liberals and Tories in voting for his suspension. His behaviour was attributed to drunkenness, but Taylor finds evidence of a premeditated and principled stand.

Graysons drinking did eventually derail his career. Later, he mustered working-class support for the first world war on behalf of his old adversary Churchill, served at Passchendaele and condemned striking workers.

Taylors compelling scholarship assesses Graysons career in the context of his era, but we are challenged to draw conclusions relevant to our own. The author focuses on the need for a Labour Party responsive to the needs of working people and based on strong structures and organisation.

Another moral to be drawn about progress towards socialism is the need to focus on the song rather than its singer.

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Focus on the song rather than its singer - Morning Star Online

Debate

14:30

by Eric Kaufmann

Not so hip anymore

Random House, the publishing giant, recently cancelled plans to publish a collection of Norman Mailers political writings on the centenary of his birth in 2023 after a junior staffer objected to the title of his 1957 essay, The White Negro. Mailers essay celebrated what he took to be the uninhibited, expressive ethos of the African-American hipster, with his jazz, style and dance. This Hip sensibility was contrasted to the spiritually repressed and boring Square quality of white America.

Left-modernism is the dominant ideology in western elite culture, sometimes referred to as the successor ideology. Its an uneasy compound of liberalism and socialism in which the cartridge of liberalism, with its historic concern for the rights of minorities and desire to be free of social constraints, is plugged into the slot in socialisms victim-oppressor console once reserved for the working class.

Mailers Beat Generation exemplified the Left-modernist ethos, valorising the downtrodden as spiritually superior to the white middle class. Mailers critique in The White Negro recalled Carl Van Vechtens 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. Van Vechten belonged to Americas first generation of cultural Leftists, the Young Intellectuals, who brought drug-taking, modern art and critiques of white Protestantism to New Yorks Greenwich Village in the 1912-17 period.

Van Vechtens innovation was a form of slumming in which white bohemians started going up to Harlem to see black jazz. Like Mailer, Young Intellectuals like Van Vechten viewed African-Americans as a source of spiritual depth and liberation from the oppressive structures of Protestant white America. As Mailer wrote in his essay, In such places as Greenwich Village, a mnage--trois was completedthe bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro.

The phenomenon of WASP Americans turning against their own ethnic group began in pre-World War I Greenwich Village. For Randolph Bourne, a key figure in the Young Intellectuals, writing in 1917, The Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of what every dominant race is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon the minority peoples. Bourne equated Anglo-Saxondom with masculine domination, blending anti-whiteness and feminism into a kind of wokeness avant la lettre.

By the 1920s, in the wake of immigration restriction and the prohibition of alcohol, the Left-modernist critique of the countrys WASP ethnic majority had become a staple of the American literary world, featuring in novels such as Main Street or even The Great Gatsby.

Where socialism believes in equality-in-similarity, Left-modernism celebrates equality-in-diversity, with little emphasis on community. As radical fifties avatar C. Wright Mills confided, he could appreciate liberty and equality, but not fraternity. Left-modernism appealed to bohemian intellectuals because it allowed them to combine artistic experimentation and self-expression with egalitarian politics. When the Soviet Union banned artistic experimentation in favour of socialist realism in 1938, this helped alienate a significant section of the western cultural Left, many of whom turned against communism.

From the 1910s to the 1960s, Left-modernism largely managed to keep its twin balls of radical Leftism and modernist individualism in the air. But with the victory of civil rights and the rise of minority social movements as Left-modernism acquired institutional power through the expansion of universities and television the ideology wobbled on its axis, elevating its Leftist superego over its modernist id.

Viewed through its new politically-correct lens, the anti-white romanticisation of black Americans exemplified by Van Vechten or Mailer became a personification of the very whiteness they railed against: a micro-aggression rooted in colonialist domination and cultural appropriation.

Mailer chose to ride the shark of anti-whiteness, so his estate shouldnt be surprised when it turns on him.

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Norman Mailer is reaping the anti-whiteness he sowed - UnHerd

It is my responsibility to close the Ninth Legislatures Seventh Ordinary Period of Sessions and, at the same time, I come before you, the highest representation of our people, to comply with a legal mandate: to render accounts and report on my administration as president of the republic. I will do so by sharing some assessments of the situation we have faced in this period, the issues on which we have focused our work, and the issues toward which we must direct our principal efforts. I do so on a day of special significance for all Cubans, the day on which the always loyal Camilo Cienfuegos disappeared, a symbol of Cuban citizenship, of courage, an eternal hero of Cuban youth, and, like them, joyful and profound.

By speaking these words publicly, I will surely be able to count not only on your opinions, but also on those of our people. We will rely on them to improve our work, with the responsibility that comes with being a public servant.

First, I must emphasize the very complex world context, rocked by multiple crises created by the unjust global order, which have worsened because of two long, hard years of pandemic. Less than a week ago, deaths due to COVID-19 worldwide numbered around 5 million and the number of infected persons exceeded 243,700,000. The World Health Organization estimates that, if we consider the level of mortality directly or indirectly linked to the new coronavirus, the pandemics toll could be two to three times higher than official records indicate; but the real impact on all aspects of life on a planetary level is yet to be known. What no one doubts is its high cost for the world economy, already impacted by the prolonged prevalence of unsustainable consumption patterns, which have increasingly narrowed the zones of luxury and comfort while the world of the excluded dramatically expands.

Despite Cubas advantagesdue to its free, universal public health system and its capacity for rapid scientific development, which put us at the forefront in research and vaccine production globallywe were unable to escape the pandemics blows.

As has been addressed in this assemblys sessions, since 2019, the economy has functioned under exceptional conditions. The combined effects of the tightening of the blockade and the escalation of the pandemic led the country to lose more than $3 billion in revenue during this period. In addition, significant non-budgeted expenditures were made to confront COVID-19, to protect workers and the population in general. All this has limited our capacity to assume indispensable expenditures to sustain state supplies, fundamentally of food and medicines, as well as the resources needed to maintain the national electric system. This difficult situation provokes dissatisfaction and unease within the population. To give you an idea: some $300 million were needed just for health services and disposable supplies to treat COVID-19 patients, while the operation and maintenance of the national electric system requires at least $250 million a year.

The failure to complete regular maintenance in a timely fashion and our inability to acquire the necessary resources to guarantee electric service caused the aggravating power outages that we have experienced since June 21, 2021. Although the limitations have not disappeared, fuel for the generation of electricity is available, and a certain level of financing was secured (under very difficult conditions), which will allow the recovery of 608 megawatts of power generation capacity before the end of 2021, thus gradually improving service across the country.

In this context, conditions that favor inflation have emerged due to the existence of a demand that is much higher than supply, making it the principal priority of the governments work. One solution would be to increase supply through greater participation by national producers in our domestic market.

Thanks to the sustained control of COVID-19, a gradual process of economic and social recovery has begun, contributed to by measures approved for greater autonomy for socialist state enterprises and the improvement and diversification of economic actors.

The plan of the economy and state budget for 2022, which we will evaluate next December, will be directed at projecting the recovery of fundamental levels of activity, achieving greater autonomy in administrative management at the territorial level, prioritizing compensatory measures to assist the most vulnerable, and consolidating the implementation of the Tarea Ordenamiento [economic reforms process], among other priorities.

Thanks to our system, to the integration of all forces in pursuit of an objectivethat is, thanks to unity around the partyCuba found immediate answers to the unforeseen pandemic and, at the same time, the reprehensible tightening of the blockade. It is necessary to point again to the contemptible opportunism of our adversary. Precisely during the months when the pandemic peaked in our country, power outages became frequent and the supply of goods and services declined significantly, creating a favorable climate for exasperation and discontent. The historical enemy of the Cuban nation, the United States, understood the importance of the moment and launched attacks on our economy with even more viciousness. In direct contradiction to president Joe Bidens recent declarations before the United Nations General Assembly supporting multilateralism and cooperation in the struggle against the pandemic at a global level, the blockade on Cuba was tightened, new sanctions were imposed, and a new destabilization plan was set in motion, following their soft coup manual to the letter.

We have never sat back waiting for change in a policy that for over sixty-two years has shifted only to tighten the siege. The enemys formula is based on the idea that our great material difficulties will weaken the resistance of the people and finally bring us to our knees. Against a socialist project like ours, violent or military actions, invasion, occupation are never ruled out; but the first bet is on demoralization, on surrender. This is why the message of hatred of communism, the antisocialist emphasis, the persecution of every possible economic solutionin short, the blockadecontinue, no matter how much they damage, how much they erode the faith of a people in its own strengths.

However implausible and immoral it may seem, this is the imperialist plan for Cuba. The hypocritical cover-ups and deceptions about an alleged revision of the policy, which the current government repudiated during the electoral campaign that brought Biden to power, are no longer believable. Fraudulent justifications touting the supposed intention to support the Cuban people, and only deny the government any help, are no longer valid.

The evidence is there for all to see that the objective has been, from the beginning, to provoke economic hardship, punish the people, erode their standard of living, restrict their sources of income, limit consumption, and undermine social services on which much of their well-being, and the meeting of basic needs, depends. The goal is to condemn the Cuban population to the role of hostage in a genocidal policy with hegemonic designs.

This is why Washington is so annoyed by Cubas success in confronting the pandemic, in particular the outstanding results of our vaccination program, developed with ingenuity, effort, and our own resources. It explains the determination to disparage our public health system and deny this extraordinary achievement of Cuba, which exposes the deceitful portrayal they want to impose on our reality. Every vaccine created and administered, every immunized compatriot, every infection avoided, and every life saved are victories for the national cause and defeats of the imperialist aggression against our country. It may seem incredible to describe it this way, but there is no other way to describe the shameless use of a pandemic, with cold political calculation, against an entire people.

As I recently pointed out during the closing of the last plenum of the Communist Party of Cubas Central Committee, in the current climate of our bilateral relations with the United States, that countrys embassy is playing an increasingly active role in political subversion efforts. In contrast, I can categorically state that our embassy in Washington has never conducted any activity meant to subvert the established order in the United States, or undermine its political, legal, or constitutional foundation. Our diplomatic mission in that country is limited to an intense effort to favor bilateral relations, to lift the economic blockade, and to counteract slander campaigns against Cuba and the revolution.

The record of our diplomatic representations in the United States has always been absolutely spotless, despite our genuine concerns and legitimate opinions on the unjust nature of the U.S. political system and the political, economic, and legal abuses committed there on a daily basis. The U.S. government shamelessly uses the privileges enjoyed by its embassy in our country. U.S. diplomatic officials frequently meet with counterrevolutionary leaders, providing them guidance, encouragement, logistical support, and direct and indirect financing. On their communication platforms, including digital networks, they issue offensive statements on a daily basis that constitute open interference in the internal affairs of our country.

It is only fair to ask what the U.S. governments response would be if any embassy accredited in Washington engaged in instigating, guiding, motivating, and financing any of the multiple extremist groups whose illegal activities threaten the stability, life, and public order of that country. It would be good to know how the U.S. government would respond to an embassy accredited in its territory that publicly engages in promoting civil disobedience, political demonstrations, and massive marches against the established legal order.

Recent provocations have made clear that a concerted operation against Cuba, based in the United States, is underway, involving millions of dollars directed toward generating an image of Cuba as a failed state, where citizens rights are trampled. The plan also includes efforts to recruit other countries to join the economic aggression, and to pressure the United States itself to take even more punitive action on a larger scale.

The truth always prevails, no matter how powerful the tools are today to hide or distort it. Lies may spread as fast as the COVID-19 virus and have the power to confuse and infect many, but they will not be able to break the will of this heroic people, tested so many times. Despite the plans of imperialism, we are defeating the pandemic, as we have defeated and will defeat their aggressive plans, no matter how vicious the campaigns or the slanders. The blockade is and will continue to be, in the foreseeable future, a fundamental obstacle to our strategies and potential for economic growth and development, but it is not an insurmountable impediment. We will continue to struggle against it tirelessly, with the support of the international community.

Our development and the peoples well-being necessarily depends on the effort we make and the intelligence we bring to the task, aware that the cruel U.S. war will persist as long as that countrys desire to control Cubas destiny persists. The blockade is not only meant to punish us for our resistance. It is an everyday part of the effort to prevent socialism from being associated with growth, progress, or prosperity. No! Socialism is not to blame for our problems. Only socialism can explain the fact that we have survived this ferocious, genocidal siege, without renouncing development. As I expressed a few days ago at the Central Committee plenum, a worthy response to this undeserved punishment depends on us alone. Our originality must be as great as the malice of those attempting to subjugate us. The revolution has been, and will always be, distinguished by the capacity of our people to resist and create.

Our economic and social strategy for boosting the economy and confronting the global crisis caused by COVID-19 was the first response. It adjusted the countrys projections given the new situation without renouncing our development program through 2030. It is a revolutionary response with the flexibility and capacity to adapt to the complexity of absolutely new and unpredictable situations, such as the pandemic itself. It is a response based on our strengths and takes into consideration existing limitations.

Promoting the development of a government management system based on science and innovation, we created the National Innovation Council, to provide specialized advice that will have an impact on decision-making and our most pressing problems. Among the actions taken to complement the economic and social strategy, more than sixty measures have been approved to stimulate the production and distribution of food, along with others meant to increase the efficiency of state enterprises, encourage the activity of new economic actors (the so-called mipymes [small and medium businesses]), remove obstacles in processes, and create production chains.

At the same time, during a year of so many limitations, our state has undertaken an intense international effort of dialogue, exchange, and cooperation with other nations and their leaders, participating in summitsvirtually and, to a lesser extent, face to facewhich have allowed us to maintain solid relationships with the international community and, in particular, with friendly nations. As an expression of Cubas unchanging commitment to solidarity, recognized with gratitude throughout the world, some fifty-seven medical brigades from the Henry Reeve contingent have directly confronted COVID-19 in forty nations.

I have allowed myself to insist on external factors that aim to weaken us because, under the fireworks of nonconventional warfare and the deafening racket that professional haters produce on the Internet, we could fall into the error of not recognizing our own strengths, of not appreciating our indisputable progress during these last two years plagued by challenges and uncertainty worldwide. Let us begin with the legislative work, which should contribute much to the countrys institutionality.

During this Period of Sessions, complying with the agreed schedule, we have approved four important laws that represent a transcendental reform in the countrys judicial and procedural order. It is only fair to recognize the effort made under the conditions imposed by the pandemic. These norms concretize the content of Cubas Constitution and reinforce the rights of citizens, in harmony with society as a whole. They are the result of a broad, creative, and participative process, to which directors and specialists of the courts, the Attorney Generals office, collective legal teams, and university professors contributed, in addition to a segment of our people.

We must continue to perfect this practice in the drafting of legislation, to ensure that each law we approve is the result of the contributions of all those linked to the issue at hand and, when appropriate, consulted with the people through various means. The normative provisions approved place the country at the forefront of the most advanced and modern legislation in this field, and reflect a spirit of renewal, reaffirming access to justice for all, expanding due process, and thus helping to concretize the concept of the socialist state of law and social justice, recognized in Article 1 of the Magna Carta.

The Law of Courts strengthens judicial functioning in the country, reinforcing the independence of the judiciary and the role of judges in society, adjusting its structure and operations to current requirements. It recognizes essential principles in judicial matters, including the supremacy of the Constitution, impartiality, equality, free access to justice, and popular participation. The criminal process, in accordance with the law, is endowed with greater guarantees for all those involved. Notable elements include the strengthening of rights and guarantees recognized in the Constitution and international treaties, the recognition of victims and injured parties as procedural subjects, anticipated forms of solution in processes, treatment of persons between 16 and 18 years of age who are charged and prosecuted. Also significant are provisions guaranteeing legal assistance from the beginning of any process, along with court control of the precautionary measure of pretrial detention at any stage of the process, issues raised during the popular consultation of the Constitutions text.

The Administrative Process Law, in addition to making this matter independent for the first time in procedural norms, will guarantee citizens the possibility of filing claims in court if they believe their rights have been violated by the public administration. Finally, the Code of Processes standardizes procedures for civil, commercial, family, labor, and social security matters. It reinforces the protection of people in vulnerable situations and establishes measures to enforce judicial decisions, among other relevant issues.

The four laws approved pose a challenge for those responsible for the justice system, given the need for training and guaranteeing their adequate implementation to safeguard prompt and effective justice. We reiterate the will to continue meeting the legislative timeline approved by this parliament and, with it, developing the contents of our socialist Constitution.

The Eighth Party Congress opened valuable debates and offered fundamental directives that serve as references and the driving force in what we do. Addressed during the event were the most challenging problems of our reality: the gaps, failures in communication, need to promote dialogue, participation and popular control, life in our neighborhoods, work of mass and social organizations, attention to vulnerable sectors of the population, knowledge of the problems and the interests of our youth, bureaucratization of community work, but, above all, the effects of the blockade on the daily lives of all Cubans and the high level of political sensitivity demanded by the implementation of the Tarea Ordenamiento. The reform process was carried out in difficult circumstances, as it was considered a non-postponable step in increasing enterprise efficiency, but it had an undesired impact on the lives of citizens, which today is expressed, above all, in severe inflation.

Deputy prime minister Alejandro Gil explained the causes and possible solutions to this problem at length in his report, so I will not attempt to do the same, except to say that we are aware of its severity and it is the governments priority to address it and support vulnerable people. Several elements of its initial design have been rectified, taking into account the peoples opinions. We are not going to lie and say that this will be solved with the stroke of a pen; I can only say that the revolution will never do anything against the interests and demands of the people. And I am personally confident that we will meet this challenge, just as we have overcome other seemingly insurmountable challenges.

The guidelines updated at the Eighth Party Congress and what pertains to this five-year period in the National Economic and Social Development Plan through 2030 constitute the foundations of the strategy to boost the economy, which we have decided will be the responsibility of the Ministry of Economy and Planning, through its macroeconomic and other programs.

For ten years now, the Permanent Commission for the Implementation and Development of Policy Guidelines has worked on updating the economic and social model of socialist development, but we decided that it is time to deactivate the Commission and transfer its main functions to the Ministry of Economy and Planning. Today we are in a better position to improve government work in close alliance with peoples power bodies, which have much untapped potential. I can imagine no better place than this to reflect on what we expect from our peoples power. Peoples powergenuine and innovative peoples power, and thus also questioned and attacked by those who do not recognize it or fear its exampleconstitutes the foundation and essence of the Cuban political system. To strengthen it is to empower the initiative and direct action of our people in the consolidation of socialism.

This very session of the assembly has given us good reasons to propose a critical and reflective discussion of participation and popular control, and its various forms, mechanisms, and procedures. But I also point out the importance of conducting these analyses in all social environments, all state institutions and bodies at all levels, to encourage creative and responsible action in the revolutionary socialist process.

If the conversations with representatives of diverse organizations and social groupsthat is, meetings with sectors and tours of the provinces and neighborhoodshave taught us anything, it is the need to assume new styles of work that better reflect the countrys social heterogeneity, to adequately channel the concerns and contributions of the citizenry, and to respond to every demand received in a timely, pertinent, and well-founded manner within the established time frame and procedure. It is imperative to take advantage of the peoples knowledge, strengths, and initiatives, not in a formal way, but organically, respectfully, aware that in this practice the principle of co-responsibility is accentuated along the path to the greatest possible social justice. When we speak of innovation as one of the pillars of government management, we are also thinking of our peoples power. Socialist democracy demands doing, innovating, changing, and permanently transforming the forms of democratic participation.

The 2019 Constitution and the laws approved by the current legislature of the National Assembly of Peoples Power provide the legal foundations to support our actions, which we will continue to develop along with the legal system: actions that stimulate, promote, and concretize popular participation have defensive and constructive importance for socialism. Immobility and formalism in government bodies at the local level are as harmful as paternalism, such as in the delivery of goods and resources without considering the importance of social participation.

Participation is the essence and best defense of our socialism. The opposite only serves the enemies of the revolution and their objective of returning to capitalism in Cuba. Freedom of discussion, the exercise of criticism and self-criticism, is vital to continue advancing, to create and love. We must listen, dialogue, attend to the proposals of our people. We must conduct popular consultations on matters of local and national interest, promote participatory budgets to decide, among us all, where and how best to spend public funds, with emphasis on the locality, the neighborhood, the municipality. We reaffirm here the will of the party, the state, and Cuban society to respect, promote, and guarantee constitutional rights, a commitment that was expressed during the process of constitutional reformthat had as its culmination the binding referendum to approve the 2019 Constitutionand in all the actions that are taken on a daily basis to ensure the protection of rights.

These hard pandemic months provide the best evidence of how the statesupported by scientists, health personnel, educators, workers, campesinos, soldiers, youth, and studentshas worked hard to reduce infections and fatalities, in communities and neighborhoods, in workplaces, in mass political and social organizations. Citizen participation saves lives! The protagonists of this process are those who construct our sacred unity, those who develop the nations capacity for resilience, the guardians of dignity: our people. As we advance in mass vaccination, paying special attention to children and adolescents, we demonstrate our commitment to the comprehensive protection of the rights of the new generation in Cuba. That such efforts are everyday events in no way makes them less extraordinary.

We are committed to recognizing and advancing the rights of families, developing the principles of family plurality, diversity, equality, and non-discrimination. As a result of this intention, we now have a preliminary draft of the Families Codea solid, rigorous document based on human dignity as the supreme value that sustains the recognition and exercise of duties and rights. We are convinced that, through processes of specialized consultation, popular consultation, and debates in the National Assembly of Peoples Power, we will reach the legislative referendum with a draft Families Code that will place Cuba among the most advanced countries in the world on the question. These are just some examples among many, including the National Program for the Advancement of Women, the National Program Against Racism and Racial Discrimination, and the Decree Law on Working Women and Maternity, among others, which show that the revolution respects, promotes, and guarantees equality and democracy.

This assembly recently approved an important declaration denouncing the interference of the U.S. government in our internal affairs and its unacceptable role as instigator and facilitator of current provocations. In this same hall, where the Constitution of 2019 was discussed at length until its approval, I cannot fail to refer to both the subtle and flagrant attempts with which adversaries of the revolution, many of whom attacked the process that led to its approval, today seek to use the rights it guarantees to destroy the work that the Constitution defends and protects. According to Article 56 of the Magna Carta: The rights of assembly, demonstration, and association, for lawful and peaceful purposes, are recognized by the state as long as they are exercised with respect for public order and compliance with precepts established by law. The exercise of rights implies the fulfillment of duties, among them, respect for the order established in the Constitution, which is an expression of the principle of popular sovereignty. The law of laws cannot be interpreted at ones convenience, much less in the interest of those who are the first to disrespect it. The Constitution, in Article 7, stipulates it is the supreme law of the state. All are obliged to comply with it. The provisions and acts of state bodies, their directors, officials, and employees, as well as those of organizations, entities, and individuals are to abide by its provisions. Our Constitution consecrates the principles of independence and sovereignty of peoples, recognizes the right to self-determination expressed in the freedom to choose our own political, economic, social, and cultural system, condemns direct or indirect intervention in the internal or external affairs of any state, including armed aggression, any form of economic or political coercion, unilateral blockades in violation of international law, and any other type of interference or threat to the integrity of states.

Rights are not unlimited. The limits are also stipulated in the Constitution, and include the rights of others, collective security, general welfare, respect for public order, the Constitution, and laws. A demonstration ceases to be peaceful at the moment when participants seek to alter the normality of community life, social peace, express the intention to subvert the constitutional order and position themselves as the opposition to socialism, and, even more so, when all this is done following a script serving the political interests of a foreign government that has maintained an economic war against our country for six decades.

I would like to particularly express our gratitude to the scientific community, called on to provide us with the tools that only science can and should contribute to economic and social processes in this era. Thanks to Fidels visionary policy of promoting science, and the continuity Ral provided to that work, thanks to the talent, dedication, and commitment with which several generations of Cuban researchers have been trained, our government has been able to face the terrible threat of a pandemic like no other in Latin America or the third world. When we review these years in the not-too-distant future, we will be obliged to speak first of all of the health professionals, the creative scientists, and academics who came out of their classrooms to share knowledge.

And we will also talk about our armed institutions, the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior, which made a decisive contribution in supporting efforts to confront the situation and took on the hazardous mission of producing, transporting, and delivering oxygen to hospitals in the countrys most critical hours. I must also acknowledge the Revolutionary Armed Forces enterprise system for its indispensable contribution to the nations economy, which has provided us with fundamental resources during emergencies.

Only an organized country with a leadership united in a common purposethe safeguarding of the nationcan set the highest goals in the most difficult hours. Knowing that our nation, blockaded and without financial resources, could not aspire to protect its population from the threat of the pandemic, we asked our scientific community for a sovereign solution to confront the spread of the disease.

Today, we are the first country in Latin America with three vaccines and two vaccine candidates under development, and the first in the world to begin vaccinating children between 2 and 18 years of age. Along the way we experienced hard blows: peaks in new infections, full hospitals, crises in the availability of beds and oxygen, painful deaths, increased tension with breakdowns at electric plants, limited availability of medications and food. The anti-Cuban mob, calculating that our end was near, went for our throats with demands for a humanitarian intervention and even military invasion. They did not even bother to look at the history of how nations saved by Yankee or North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops have ended up in this century. But the Cuban people do know this history, they are informed, and the good people of the world know it too. With this consciousness, solidarity donations were organized, and they continue to arrive in Cuba.

In the last few weeks, the number of new infections and deaths has dropped significantly. Students are getting ready to go back to school and the country is preparing to open borders to oxygenate the economy. We feel like celebrating for our children, doctors, scientists, our vaccines, and our people; for Fidel, who returned again and again to his legitimate faith in human beings to save lives and illuminate the horizon. There is more than one reason that our celebration should be responsible and restrained. In many parts of the world, new outbreaks of the pandemic are occurring amid the crisis caused by the economic slowdown. This is the world we live in and it is up to us to assume the risk. Let us make this success last.

On November 15, 2021, Cuba will reopen its borders, students will return to school; Havana, the capital of dignity, will await its 502nd anniversary, to celebrate as it has not been able to do in the last two years. National life will resume its course, with the greatest joy, but alert. The peace and harmony that distinguish life in our streets will continue to reign. No one is going to spoil our party! We are now vaccinated against COVID-19, and we have always been vaccinated against fear! We have a homeland, and we defend life! And we remain true to Patria o Muerte! We will win!

See the original post:
Socialism Against the Siege - Monthly Review