No More Learning

Official sources either deny these U. S. -sponsored mass murders or justify them as necessary measures that had to be taken against an implacable communist foe. Anticommunist propaganda saturated our airwaves, schools, and political discourse. Despite repeated and often factitious references to the tyranny of the Red Menace, the anticommunist opinion makers never spelled out what communists actually did in the way of socio-economic policy. This might explain why, despite decades of Red-bashing propaganda, most Americans, including many who number themselves among the political cognoscenti, still cannot offer an informed statement about the social policies of communist societies.
3 The 1991 war waged by the Bush administration against Iraq, which claimed an estimated 200,000 victims, was followed by U. S. -led United Nations economic sanctions. A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, The Children Are Dying (1996), reports that since the end of the war 576,000 Iraqi children have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands more suffer defects and illnesses due to the five years of sanctions.
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The anti-Red propagandists uttered nary a word about how revo- lutionaries in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and other countries nationalized the lands held by rich exploitative landlords and initiated mass programs for education, health, housing, and jobs. Not a word about how their efforts advanced the living stan- dards and life chances of hundreds of millions in countries that had long suffered under the yoke of feudal oppression and Western colo- nial pillage, an improvement in mass well-being never before wit- nessed in history.
No matter that the revolutionaries in various Asian, African, and Latin American countries enjoyed popular support and were willing to pursue a neutralist course in East-West relations rather than place themselves under the hegemony of either Moscow or Peking. They still were targeted for a counterrevolutionary battering. From oppos- ing communists because they might be revolutionaries, it was a short step to opposing revolutionaries because they might be communists.
The real sin of revolutionaries, communist or not, was that they championed the laboring classes against the wealthy few. They advo- cated changes in the distribution of class power and the way wealth was produced and used. They wanted less individualistic advance- ment at the expense of the many and collective betterment for the entire working populace.
Presumptions of Power
Ruling classes throughout the world hate and fear communism not for its lack of political democracy, but because it attempts to establish economic democracy by building an egalitarian, collectivist social system--though they rarely come right out and say as much. This counterrevolutionary interventionist policy rests on several dubious assumptions that might be stated and rebutted as follows:
1. "U. S. leaders have the right to define the limits of socio- economic development within other nations. " Not true. Under no
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canon of international law or any other legal stricture do the leaders of this country have the right to ordain what kind of economic sys- tem or mode of social development another country may adopt, no more right than do the leaders of other countries have to dictate such things to the United States. In practice, the option to dictate is exer- cised by the strong over the weak, a policy of might, not right.
2. "The United States must play a counterrevolutionary contain- ment role in order to protect our national interests. " This is true only if we equate "our national interests" with the investment interests of high finance. U. S. interventionism has been very effective in building neo-imperialism, keeping the land, labor, natural resources, and markets of Third World countries available at bargain prices to multinational corporations. But these corporate interests do not rep- resent the interests of the U. S. people. The public pays for the huge military budgets and endures the export of its jobs to foreign labor markets, the inflow of thousands of impoverished immigrants who compete for scarce employment and housing, and various other costs of empire. 4
Furthermore, revolutionary governments like Cuba, Libya, Vietnam, and North Korea were--and still are--eager to trade and maintain peaceful relations with this country. These countries do not threaten the national security of the United States or its people, but the overseas interests of global capitalism. If allowed to multiply in numbers, countries with an alternative socialist system, one that uses the land, labor, capital, and natural resources in collectivist ways, placing people before profits, would eventually undermine global capitalism.
3. "The United States has a moral obligation to guarantee the sta- bility of nations that are undergoing democratic development but are threatened by revolutionaries and terrorists. " In fact, most U. S. interventions are on behalf of corrupt and self-serving oligarchs and
4 For a further discussion of this and related points, see my book Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995), chapter 4.
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antidemocratic militarists (who take power with or without the ben- efit of U. S. -sponsored showcase elections). Third World oligarchs are frequently educated at elite U. S. universities or end up on the CIA payroll, as do their police chiefs and military officers, many of whom receive training in torture and assassination at U. S. counterinsur- gency institutions. 5
4. "Fundamental social change should be peacefully pursued within the established order of nations rather than by revolutionary turmoil" U. S. policymakers maintain that they favor eliminating mass poverty in poorer countries and that they are not opposed to the laudatory objectives of social revolution but to its violent meth- ods. They say that transformations must be effected gradually and peacefully, preferably through private investment and the benign workings of the free market. In fact, corporate investment is more likely to deter rather than encourage reform by preempting markets and restructuring the local economy to fit foreign capital extraction needs. International finance capital has no interest in bettering the life chances of Third World peoples. Generally, as Western invest- ments have increased in the Third World, life conditions for the ordi- nary peasants and workers have grown steadily more desperate.
Whose Violence?
People throughout the world do not need more corporate investments, rather they need the opportunity to wrest back their land, labor, natural resources, and markets in order to serve their own social needs. Such a revolutionary development invites fierce opposition from apostles of the free market, whose violent resis- tance to social change makes peaceful transformation impossible to contemplate.
Even in countries like the United States, where reforms of limited scope have been achieved without revolution, the "peaceful" means
5 On the U. S. training of torturers and assassins, see Washington Posty 9/21/96.
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employed have entailed popular struggle and turmoil--and a con- siderable amount of violence and bloodshed, almost all of it inflicted by police and security forces.
That last point frequently goes unmentioned in discussions about the ethics of revolutionary violence. The very concept of "revolu- tionary violence" is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermina- tion of whole villages, and the like.
Most social revolutions begin peaceably. Why would it be other- wise? Who would not prefer to assemble and demonstrate rather than engage in mortal combat against pitiless forces that enjoy every advantage in mobility and firepower? Revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, and El Salvador all began peacefully, with crowds of peas- ants and workers launching nonviolent protests only to be met with violent oppression from the authorities. Peaceful protest and reform are exactly what the people are denied by the ruling oligarchs. The dissidents who continue to fight back, who try to defend themselves from the oligarchs' repressive fury, are then called "violent revolu- tionaries" and "terrorists. "
For those local and international elites who maintain control over most of the world's wealth, social revolution is an abomination. Whether it be peaceful or violent is a question of no great moment to them. Peaceful reforms that infringe upon their profitable accu- mulations and threaten their class privileges are as unacceptable to them as the social upheaval imposed by revolution.
Reforms that advance the conditions of life for the general public are not as materially intractable or as dependent on capital resources
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as we have been led to believe. There is no great mystery to building a health clinic, or carrying out programs for food rationing, land redistribution, literacy, jobs, and housing. Such tasks are well within the capacity of any state--if there is the political will and a mobi- lization of popular class power.
Consider Kerala, a state in India where the actions of popular organizations and mass movements have won important victories over the last forty years against politico-economic oppression, gen- erating a level of social development considerably better than that found in most of the Third World, and accomplished without out- side investment. Kerala has mass literacy, a lower birth rate and lower death rate than the rest of India, better public health services, fewer child workers, higher nutritional levels (thanks to a publicly subsi- dized food rationing system), more enlightened legal support and educational programs for women, and some social security protec- tions for working people and for the destitute and physically handi- capped. In addition, the people of Kerala radically altered a complex and exploitative system of agrarian relations and won important vic- tories against the more horrid forms of caste oppression.
Though Kerala has no special sources of wealth, it has had decades of communist organizing and political struggle that reached and moved large numbers of people and breathed life into the states democracy. "Despite its relatively short periods in the leadership of government. . . it is the Communist party that has set the basic leg- islative agenda of the people of Kerala," notes Indian scholar V. K. Ramachandran (MonthlyReview, 5/95). All this is not to deny that many people in Kerala endure unacceptable conditions of poverty. Still, despite a low level of income and limited resources, the achieve- ments wrought by democratic government intervention--and pro- pelled by mass action--have been substantial, representing the difference between a modestly supportable existence and utter misery.
Many Third World peoples produce dedicated and capable pop- ular organizations, as did the communists in Kerala, but they are
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usually destroyed by repressive state forces. In Kerala, popular agita- tion and input took advantage of democratic openings and in turn gave more social substance to the democracy. What is needed for social betterment is not International Monetary Fund loans or cor- porate investments but political organization and democratic oppor- tunity, and freedom from U. S. -sponsored state terrorism.
U. S. foreign aid programs offer another example of how imperi- alist policy masquerades as social reform within Third World nations. Aid programs are not intended to effect serious social bet- terment. At best, they finance piecemeal projects of limited impact. More often, they are used to undermine local markets, drive small farmers off their land, build transportation and office facilities needed by outside investors, increase a country's debt and economic dependency, and further open its economy to multinational corpo- rate penetration.
Free Market for the Few
Third World revolutionaries are branded as the enemies of stabil- ity. "Stability" is a code word for a society in which privileged social relations are securely entrenched. When popular forces mobilize against privilege and wealth, this causes "instability," which is judged to be undesirable by U. S. policymakers and their faithful flacks in the U. S. corporate media.
Here we have a deceptive state of affairs. What poses as a U. S. commitment to peaceful nonviolent change is really a commitment to the violent defense of an unjust, undemocratic, global capitalism. The U. S. national security state uses coercion and violence not in support of social reform but against it, all in the name of "stability," "counterterrorism," "democracy,"--and of late and more honestly, "the free market. "
When he was head of the State Department policy planning staff during the early years of the cold war, the noted author George
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Kennan revealed the ruthless realpolitik mentality of those dedicated to social inequality within and between nations. Kennan maintained that a wealthy United States facing an impoverished world could not afford "the luxury of altruism and world benefaction" and should cease talking about "vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. . . . The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better" (PPS23, U. S. State Department, Feburary 1948). Speaking at a briefing for U. S. ambassadors to Latin America, Kennan remarked: "The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shame- ful since the Communists are essentially traitors. . . . It is better to have a strong [i. e. , repressive] regime in power than a liberal govern- ment if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists " In a 1949 State Department intelligence report, Kennan wrote that communists were "people who are committed to the belief that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people" So they had to be dealt with harshly without regard for such niceties as democratization and human rights.
It is said that the United States cannot renege on its commitments to other peoples and must continue as world leader; the rest of the world expects that of us. But the ordinary peoples of the world have never called for U. S. world leadership. Quite the contrary, they usu- ally want the United States to go home and leave them to their own affairs. This is because U. S. commitments are not to the ordinary people of other lands, but to the privileged reactionary factions that are most accomodating to Western investors. As Kennan s remarks indicate, the U. S. policymaking establishment has been concerned not with advancing the welfare of impoverished peoples around the world but with defeating whoever allies themselves with the com- mon people, be they Reds or not.
Whatever their grave shortcomings, do not U. S. -supported Third World rulers represent something better than the kind of tyranny
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that communists and revolutionary totalitarian bring? Academic cheerleaders for U. S. interventionism, such as Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, think so: "However bad a given evil maybe, a worse one is always possible and often likely," Huntington concludes, going on to defend as "lesser evils" the murderous regimes in Chile under Pinochet and South Africa under apartheid. 6
We might recall Jean Kirkpatricks distinction between "benign" authoritarian right-wing governments that supposedly are not all that brutal and allow gradual change, and horrid totalitarian left- wing ones that suppress everyone. The real distinction is that the right-wing government maintains the existing privileged order of the free market, keeping the world safe for the empowered hierarchies and wealthy classes of the world. In contrast, the left-wing "totalitar- ians" want to abolish exploitative property relations and create a more egalitarian economic system. Their favoring the have-nots over the haves is what makes them so despicable in the eyes of the latter.
U. S. leaders claim to be offended by certain features of social rev- olutionary governments, such as one-party rule and the coercive implementation of revolutionary change. But one-party autocracy is acceptable if the government is rightist, that is, friendly toward pri- vate corporate investment as in Turkey, Zaire, Guatemala, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries (including even communist countries that are sliding down the free-market path, such as China).
We might recall that unforgettable moment when President George
6 American Political Science Review, 82, March 1988, 5. In that same statement, Huntington describes Mangosutho Buthelezi, the CIA-supported head of the South African Inkatha Freedom Party, as a "notable contemporary democratic reformer. " It is a matter of public record that Buthelezi collaborated with the top- level apartheid military and police in the murder of thousands of African National Congress (ANC) supporters. Colonel Eugene de Kock, the highest ranking officer convicted of apartheid crimes, who once described himself as the government s most efficient assassin, testified that he had supplied weapons, vehicles, and training to Buthelezi's organization for a "total onslaught" strategy against demo- cratic, anti-apartheid forces (AP report, San Francisco Chronicle, 9/18/96). There is no denying that Buthelezi is Huntington s kind of guy.
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Bush--whose invasions of Panama and Iraq brought death and destruction to those nations and who presided over a U. S. military empire that is the single greatest purveyor of violence in the world-- lectured revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela on the virtues of non- violence, even going so far as to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. , during Mandelas visit to Washington, D. C. in June 1990. Mandela's real sin in Bushs eyes was that he was part of a revolutionary move- ment that engaged in armed struggle against a violently repressive apartheid regime in South Africa. Bushs capacity for selective per- ception had all the unexamined audacity of a dominant ideology that condemns only those who act against an unjust status quo, not those who use violence to preserve it. It would have come as a great relief to people around the world if the president of the United States had adopted a policy of nonviolence for his own government. In fact, he had done no such thing.
The Freedom of Revolution
U. S. politico-economic leaders may find revolutionary reforms undesirable, but most people who live in revolutionary societies find them preferable to the old regimes and worth defending. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was a fiasco not because of "insufficient air coverage" but because the Cuban people closed ranks behind their government and threw back the invaders.
Another "captive people," the North Vietnamese, acted in similar fashion in the early 1970s. Instead of treating the severe destruction and disruptions caused by the U. S. aerial war against their country as a golden opportunity to overthrow "Hanoi's yoke," they continued to support their beleaguered government at great sacrifice to them- selves. And in South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front enjoyed tactical opportunities for supply and surprise, largely because it was supported by people in the countryside and cities.
During the Vietnam era, explanations as to why people sided with
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the communist revolutionaries came from some unexpected sources. U. S.
ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge admitted, "The only people who have been doing anything for the little man--to lift him up-- have been the communists" (New York Times, 2/27/66). In a similar vein, one faithful propagator of the official line, columnist James Reston, wrote with surprising candor, "Even Premier Ky [U. S. -spon- sored dictator of South Vietnam] told this reporter today that the communists were closer to the peoples yearnings for social justice and an independent life than his own government" (New York Times, 9/1/65). What Lodge and Reston left unsaid was that the "little man" and the "peoples yearnings" for social justice were the very things that U. S. leaders were bent on suppressing.
Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or "Stalinist" sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary govern- ments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom.
There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is free- dom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not wor- ship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.
Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular free- doms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self- determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patri- archal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, con- sider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary
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repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as com- pared to before.
U. S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory any- where represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The asser- tion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U. S. - sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U. S. -supported puppet gov- ernments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.
Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on.
Today, no one in U. S. policy circles worries about the politico- economic oppression suffered in dozens of right-wing client states. Their professed desire to bring Western political democracy to nations that have had revolutions rarely extends to free-market autocracies. And the grudging moves toward political democracy occasionally made in these autocracies come only through popular pressure and rebellion and only with the unspoken understanding that democratic governance will not infringe substantially upon the interests of the moneyed class.
What Measure of Pain?
Is the pain of revolution worth the gain? Cost-benefit accounting is a complicated business when applied to social transitions. But have
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we ever bothered to compare the violence of revolution against the violence that preceded it? "I do not know how one measures the price of historical victories," said Robert Heilbroner, "I only know that the way in which we ordinarily keep the books of history is wrong. " We make no tally of the generations claimed by that combi- nation of economic exploitation and political suppression so charac- teristic of the ancien regimes: the hapless victims of flood and famine in the Yangtze valley of yesterday, the child prostitutes found dead in the back alleys of old Shanghai, the muzhiks stricken by cold and starvation across the frozen steppes of Russia.
And what of today? No one is tallying the thousands of nameless victims who succumb to U. S. -trained torturers in Latin America, the hundreds of villages burned by counterinsurgency forces, the millions who are driven from their ancestral lands and sentenced to permanently stunted and malnourished lives, the millions more who perish in the desperate misery and congestion of shanty slums and internment camps. Their sufferings go unrecorded and are not figured in the balance when the revolution metes out justice to erst- while oligarchs and oppressors or commits excesses and abuses of its own.
And how do we measure the pain of the tens of millions of chil- dren throughout the world, many as young as six and seven, who are forced to work seventy hours a week confined in ill-lit, poorly ventilated workshops, under conditions reminiscent of the most horrific days of the Industrial Revolution? The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a sweeping multinational free-trade act that amounts to a carte blanche for global capitalism, offers no protection for children who are exploited, abused, overworked, and underpaid. During GATT negotiations, leaders of Third World countries successfully argued against placing any restrictions on child labor, arguing that children have always worked in their cul- tures and such traditional practices should be respected. To pro- hibit child labor would limit the free market and effect severe
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hardship on those poor families in which a child is often the only wage earner.
Even if the longstanding practice of children helping out on farms is acceptable (assuming they are not overworked and are allowed to go to school), the practice of "locking them into a hotbox of a fac- tory for 14 hours a day" is something else. Furthermore, they maybe the only wage earner "because adult workers have been laid off in favor of children, who are infinitely more exploitable and provide bigger profits for prosperous factory owners" (Anna Quindlen, New York Times, 11/23/94).
Traveling across Cuba in 1959, immediately after the overthrow of the U. S. -supported right-wing Batista dictatorship, Mike Faulkner witnessed "a spectacle of almost unrelieved poverty. " The rural pop- ulation lived in makeshift shacks without minimal sanitation. Malnourished children went barefoot in the dirt and suffered "the familiar plague of parasites common to the Third World. " There were almost no doctors or schools. And through much of the year, families that depended solely on the seasonal sugar harvest lived close to starvation (Monthly Review; 3/96). How does that victimiza- tion in prerevolutionary Cuba measure against the much more widely publicized repression that came after the revolution, when Castro's communists executed a few hundred of the previous regime's police assassins and torturers, drove assorted upper-class moneybags into exile, and intimidated various other opponents of radical reforms into silence?
Today, Cuba is a different place. For all its mistakes and abuses, the Cuban Revolution brought sanitation, schools, health clinics, jobs, housing, and human services to a level not found throughout most of the Third World and in many parts of the First World. Infant mortality in Cuba has dropped from 60 per 1000 in 1960 to 9. 7 per
1000 by 1991, while life expectancy rose from 55 to 75 in that same period. Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, polio, and numer- ous other diseases have been wiped out by improved living standards
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and public health programs. 7 Cuba has enjoyed a level of literacy higher than in the United States and a life expectancy that compares well with advanced industrial nations (NACLA Report on the Americas, September/October 1995). Other peoples besides the Cubans have benefited. As Fidel Castro tells it:
The [Cuban] revolution has sent teachers, doctors, and workers to dozens of Third World countries without charging a penny. It shed its own blood fighting colonialism, fighting apartheid, and fascism. . . . At one point we had 25,000 Third World students studying on schol- arships. We still have many scholarship students from Africa and other countries. In addition, our country has treated more children
[13,000] who were victims of the Chernobyl tragedy than all other countries put together.
They don't talk about that, and thats why they blockade us--the country with the most teachers per capita of all countries in the world, including developed countries. The country with the most doctors per capita of all countries [one for every 214 inhabitants]. The country with the most art instructors per capita of all countries in the world. The country with the most sports instructors in the world. That gives you an idea of the effort involved. A country where life expectancy is more than 75 years.
Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people. It's the hatred of the ideas that Cuba repre- sents. {Monthly Review, 6/95).
Cuba s sin in the eyes of global capitalists is not its "lack of democ- racy. " Most Third World capitalist regimes are far more repressive. Cubas real sin is that it has tried to develop an alternative to the global capitalist system, an egalitarian socio-economic order that placed corporate property under public ownership, abolished capi- talist investors as a class entity, and put people before profits and national independence before IMF servitude.
So a conservative think tank like the Heritage Foundation rated Cuba along with Laos, Iraq, and North Korea as countries with the
7 Theodore MacDonald, Hippocrates in Havana: Cuba's Health Care System ( 1995).
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lowest level of "economic freedom. " Countries with a high level of economic freedom were those that imposed little or no taxes or reg- ulations on business, and did without wage protections, price con- trols, environmental safeguards, and benefits for the poor. Economic freedom is the real concern of conservatives and plutocrats; the free- dom to utilize vast sums of money to accumulate still vaster sums, regardless of the human and environmental costs.
Mass productivity coupled with elitist distribution results in more wealth for the few and greater poverty for the many. So after two cen- turies of incredible technological development and unprecedented economic expansion, the number of people living in poverty in the capitalist world has grown more quickly than any other demographic cohort. The worlds slum population has increased at a far greater rate than the total global population. Amazing growth in industrial productivity has been accompanied by increasingly desperate want, misery, and repression. In short, there is a causal link between vast concentrations of wealth and widespread poverty. The next time someone preaches the free-market gospel of economic freedom and productivity, we need ask, for whose benefit and at whose cost?
Those who show concern for the elites overthrown in the whirl of revolution should also keep in mind the hundreds of millions more who are obliterated by economic reactionism. If all rebellions were to be successfully repressed today and forever, free-market autoc- racy's violence against humanity would be with us more unre- strained than ever--as is indeed happening. For these reasons, those of us who are genuinely concerned about democracy, social justice, and the survival of our planet should support rather than oppose popular revolutions.
? CHAPTER 3
LEFT ? ? ? ? COMMUNISM
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intran- sigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regimes atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods
41
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demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering sup- port among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
Genuflection to Orthodoxy
Many on the U. S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about "left intellectuals" who try to "rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements" and "then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basi- cally a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy You see later that power doesn't lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We're seeing it right now in the [for- mer] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free mar- keteers and praising Americans" {Z Magazine, 10/95).
Chomsky's imagery is heavily indebted to the same U. S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of "communist thugs" who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communists did not "very quickly" switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union's waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to
? LEFT ANTICOMMUNISM 43
capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsins violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993.
Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power- hungry Reds who pursue power for powers sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after coun- try, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.
For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.
Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing com- munist societies that they "weaken their credibility" (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in cold war condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of com- munists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticom- munist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters.
Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1. 7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being "smeared" as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations. The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still
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attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged ele- ments of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little dif- ference whether their wealth and power is challenged by "communist subversives" or "loyal American liberals. " All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
Even when attacking the Right, left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that "when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts. "1 While professing a dedication to fighting dog- matism "both of the Right and Left," individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red- baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U. S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a pro- gressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.
A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a "willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual hon- esty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous" (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a vir- ulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.
1 Mark Green and Gail MacColl, New York: Pantheon Books, There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error (1983), 12.
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Sorely lacking within the U. S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capi- talism took a century to accomplish--while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as cap- italist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa.
Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dra- matic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for "the poor little children who got fed under communism" (his words).
Slinging Labels
Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as "Soviet apologists" and "Stalinists," even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. 2 Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we
2 In the first edition of my book Inventing Reality (New York: St. Martins Press, 1986) I wrote: "The U. S. me? dias encompassing negativity in regard to the Soviet Union might induce some of us to react with an unqualifiedly glowing view of
that society. The truth is, in the USSR there exist serious problems of labor productivity, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucracy, corruption, and alcoholism. There are production and distribution bottlenecks, plan failures, consumer scarcities, criminal abuses of power, suppression of dissidents, and expressions of alienation among some persons in the population. "
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refused to uncritically swallow U. S. media propaganda about com- munist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well- publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did. 3
Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U. S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorse- ments, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration. 4
That many U. S.