On Class Conflict: The Ongoing Global Struggle

Excerpt from "Proletarian God: Building the Socialist Future" by Siegfried Barazov

A specter continues to haunt the world: the specter of communism.  So many times pronounced dead it returns like a vengeful ghost to menace the rich and the well-born, to shatter the tranquility of monarchs and presidents, to disturb the profiteering fanaticism of bankers and business moguls, and to drive liberal politicians into peals of denial and protestations of loyalty to god, country, and the profit motive.  Above all, it is a phantom that embodies the fear of a capitalist class order that knows, deep down, that it is replaceable.  That for all their power, all their riches, all their palaces, mansions, cathedrals, works of art, armies, bombs, weapons of mass destruction, and carefully crafted propaganda, those who live off of the labor of the masses are ultimately at the mercy of a god that they keep in chains but whose power they cannot live without. 

The present crisis is a world crisis, the product of an economic system that treats human beings and human life as expendable commodities.  This system is called capitalism and its pathology of profit before human life and human life in the service of profit has tainted every sphere of human relations along with our relations with the natural world we rely on.  Child labor, starvation wages, austerity measures, cutbacks, structural adjustment, humanitarian bombings, cancer villages, private prisons, and global warming are the logical results of a system in which the vast majority of human beings on this planet must toil to create wealth, leisure, and luxury for the rich while often barely surviving themselves.  The capitalist owning class that controls the means of production in the modern world inevitably shapes that world in its own image: those who control the mines, the factories, the free-trade zones, media conglomerates, and banking cartels dominate and control the political system that exists primarily to secure their own profits at the expense of the people.  Thus the parasites who live and grow rich off of the labor of others are the masters of the modern age while the working class creators and builders of civilization and the makers of all that advances human wellbeing are consigned to the status of servants, slaves, and commoners.  In Michael Parenti’s words: “Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them.  The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system” in which scheming billionaire investors can destroy the lives of millions and have their crimes written off as just another part of the “natural” processes of the business cycle.[1] 

For thousands of years the rich have exploited the poor in order to remain rich and for thousands of years the poor have fought back in any way they could: strikes, uprisings, sabotage, boycotts and revolutions.  There is a war that rages on even now in every workplace, in every city, in every country, on every continent.  It manifests itself politically, economically, culturally, and in every other aspect of society and human thought.  It is a war between the haves and the have nots, between master and slave, boss and worker, owner and employee, landlord and landless, exploiter and exploited.  As Karl Marx said in 1848 these forces have “stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight…that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.[2] This war is called class conflict and it has burned and persisted for as long as civilization itself; for as long as the few have exploited the many in the name of profit, turning the collective suffering of generations of toilers – slaves, serfs, and working class proletarians alike – into private riches for pharaohs, kings, slave traders, feudal lords, wealthy merchants, capitalist industrialists and bankers.  This war is the subject of this book and working class victory over capitalism, the victory of the exploited over the exploiter, is its unapologetic goal and desired outcome.  For there can be no neutrality in the battle to lay claim to human civilization; the battle lines of class conflict are its very foundation.

---

[1] Michael Parenti, “Capitalism’s Self-Inflicted Apocalypse,” January 2009.

[2] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto.  A.J.P Taylor eds.  London: Penguin Books, 1967.

Weekly Brecht: Questions from a Worker Who Reads

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy loads of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who raised that city up each time?
In which of Lima's houses, glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
On the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Where did the masons go?...
Philip of Spain wept when his fleet went down.
Was there no one else who wept?
Frederick the Great won the Seven Years War.
Who won it with him?...
A victory on every page
Who cooked the victory feast?
A great man every ten years.
Who paid the costs?...

Show Transcript: Defeating Fascism

Listen to the full show here.

Back in the USSR: Defeating Fascism

Opening Theme

Welcome brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, I am Siegfried and this is Back in the USSR.  A few weeks ago this show talked about the deadly events in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month (which, at the time I mistakenly said was in North Carolina), and how brave anti-fascists shut down the biggest far-right rally that’s been held in North America in years, in spite of the fascists having police protection, in spite of the lethal violence that the fascists used against the anti-fascists, which claimed the life of Heather Hayer and injured many others, and in spite of the demonization that the anti-fascists received and continue to receive from the mainstream media, which has done the utmost to equate fascist violence and anti-fascist self-defense as somehow being the same thing.  Since then the struggle has continued, in Canada as well as in the States and even leftist figures like Chris Hedges have joined the mainstream media chorus condemning anti-fascist resistance as somehow “helping” the far-right – a position disturbingly similar to that expressed by Donald Trump.

Actually, before we go any further I’d like to quote Michael Parenti’s analysis of this common technique by the mainstream media known as “false balancing”, which the Capitalist press uses all the time when it wants to downplay right-wing violence while demonizing progressive forces fighting back against it.  This is from Michael’s book “Contrary Notions”: “In accordance with the canons of good journalism, the press is supposed to tap competing sources to get both sides of an issue.  In fact, both sides are seldom accorded equal prominence.  One study found that from 1997 through 2005 conservative guests on network opinion shows outnumbered liberal ones usually by three to one, while leftist radicals were too scarce even to be counted.  In sum, “both sides of a story” are not usually all sides.  The whole left-progressive and radical portion of the opinion spectrum is amputated from the visible body politic.

False balancing was evident in a BBC report that spoke of “a history of violence between Indonesian forces and Timorese guerillas” – with not a hint that the guerillas were struggling for their lives against an Indonesian invasion force that had slaughtered some 200,000 Timorese.  Instead, the genocidal invasion of East Timor was made to sound like a grudge fight, with “killings on both sides”.  The US-supported wars in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s were often treated with the same kind of false balancing.  Both those who burned villages and those who were having their villages burned were depicted as equally involved in a contentious bloodletting.  While giving the appearance of being objective and balanced, such reports falsely neutralize their subject matter and thereby distort the issue.”

That’s Michael Parenti on “false balancing” in the media.  And of course there are other dimensions to it as well, particularly with regard to this false equation between fascist violence and anti-fascist resistance.  A recent article by the journalist Finian Cunningham noted how the Pentagon denounced American Nazis after the violence in Charlottesville, but continues to train and arm Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the Ukraine in its ongoing aggressive campaign against Russia.  Last week I talked about how the CIA for years spent billions of dollars training and arming terrorist forces in Syria, which are effectively fascist and far-right in orientation as well…and certainly make it known their desire to exterminate whole ethnic and religious groups if they ever take power in the country, which, thankfully, is now extremely unlikely.  But their genocidal violence has taken the lives of tens of thousands of civilians over the past six years in Syria and Iraq.

To quote Finian Cunningham’s article, “there is a long history of such American support for Nazis in Ukraine going back to the end of World War Two, when the Pentagon and CIA covertly backed the Gehlen Organization of former Third Reich General Reinhard Gehlen and his Ukrainian Nazi partisans in their sabotage operations against the Soviet Union…Modern-day regiments under the control of the Kiev regime, such as the Azov Battalion, publicly self-identify with Nazi-collaborating descendants and former pro-Nazi Ukrainian leaders like Stefan Bandera. This Neo-Nazi ideology of the Kiev-run military is a central impetus in why these forces have waged a three-year war on the ethnic Russian population of the breakaway Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. The latter refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the Kiev regime which seized power in February 2014 in a coup d’état against an elected government. The American CIA backed that violent coup.

The Pentagon’s supply of weaponry to Kiev forces will no doubt embolden their regiments to step up violations of the truce which was supposed to be implemented under the Minsk Accord. Hundreds of breaches are reported on a weekly basis in which towns and villages in Donestk and Lugansk come under fire from heavy artillery. Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, has recently remarked that his defense forces «are not fighting Ukrainians, but rather Banderites» – that is, Neo-Nazi militia who adulate their Third Reich hero Stefan Bandera for assisting the German SS exterminate thousands of fellow Ukrainians deemed to be «sub-human».” These far-right “banderites” are the people who set fire to the Trade Union building in the city of Odessa in 2014, slaughtering or burning alive dozens of unarmed left-wing demonstrations they had trapped there.  Just as in Charlottesville, the police did essentially nothing to stop this lethal fascist violence.

So, PR aside, the US state is absolutely in bed with right-wing violence at home and worldwide.  This is the case today just as it was the case during the Cold War when the US backed the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan that gave rise to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, backed death squads and drug traffickers in Latin America, and even gave support to right-wing terrorists in Western Europe in Operation Gladio.  To say nothing of how the FBI backed right-wing terrorism against the civil rights struggle, the Black Liberation struggle, and against anti-war movement during the Vietnam War years, including operating hand in glove with the KKK.  In its efforts to suppress progressive and revolutionary forces at home and abroad, the American state has been more than willing to empower the most murderous political forces imaginable, including outright fascists.

In the last Back in the USSR show concerning anti-fascism, I said that the worst insult, the most intolerable thing that a communist can experience is being equated with the fascist/Nazi scum that they’ve been bravely fighting against since fascism first ever reared its ugly head in the early 20^th Century.  Fascists hate communists for a reason, because communists have been the most dogged opponents of far-right violence from the beginning and that remains the case today.  We communists don’t tolerate fascists, we don’t tolerate sympathy for fascists, we do not debate fascists, we fight fascists, we seek the ultimate and total destruction of fascism everywhere in the world, and we are proud to say this: Bash the fash.

Song 1: Oi Polloi – “Bash the Fash”

OK, you’re listening to Back in the USSR here on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried, and to be honest, I feel most of what I’ve said about resisting fascism should be a no-brainer.  I mean we’ve witnessed the Holocaust, we’ve witnessed World War II, we’ve seen what fascists do, so why are people turning a blind eye to what’s going on in Ukraine right now, attacking President Donald Trump on bogus accusations of collaborating with Russia while turning a blind eye to his racist anti-immigrant domestic policy, or dismissing Charlottesville as an isolated incident, or letting Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystina Freeland off the hook when she openly defends and celebrates her Nazi-collaborating grandfather after his wartime deeds were recently exposed for all to see last year? Why? 

The struggle against fascism, which once united countless millions of people across the world, has broken down and this has a lot to do, in my opinion, with the demonization or systemic forgetting of the communist, anarchist, and radical forces that fought so fiercely and effectively against fascism throughout the 20^th Century.  People don’t know who their real heroes are, nor, after decades of Cold War propaganda, do they know who their real enemies are.  And this has to change.

Now I could give you an example from the Spanish Civil War and the heroes of the International Brigades, or the countless anti-fascist partisan heroes of World War II, but instead I want to give you a modern example of the Montreal-based anti-fascist activist Jaggi Singh – a man who the mainstream media has also made damn sure you’ve never heard of, and yet he’s fighting the same fight against the same right-wing forces in your own backyard.

(Read “Public statement in solidarity with activist Jaggi Singh, arrested in Montreal for having “impersonated” Nordiques’ Michel Goulet in Québec City (not a joke)”)

Play Song 2: Christy Moore “Viva La Quinta Brigada”

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Now, another thing that people are often ignorant about is where fascism comes from, who supports it, and who fascism supports with its violence and hate.  And even though I did my master’s thesis on this very subject years ago, Michael Parenti can still say it better than I can how fascism serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class and the profit motive more generally.  So I’ll play Michael’s talk “The Functions of Fascism” which will explain the monster we’re up against.  Please stay tuned.

Play Michael Parenti “The Functions of Fascism”

Play Mike Prysner “What it means to be a member of the PSL”

Play Song 3: Leed Reed “Bazooka Rap”

Play Michael Parenti “The Sword and the Dollar”

 

Weekly Brecht: The Caucasian Chalk Circle

"O blindness of the great!
They go their way like gods,
Great over bent backs,
Sure of hired fists,
Trusting in the power
Which has lasted so long.
But long is not forever.
O change from age to age!
Thou hope of the people!
...
When the house of the great one collapses
Many little ones are slain.
Those who had no share in the good fortunes of the mighty
Often have a share in their misfortunes.
The plunging wagon
Drags the sweating oxen down with it
Into the abyss."
- Bertolt Brecht, "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", Eric Bentley Translation

Show Transcript: Victory to Syria!

Listen to the full show here.
On the occasion of the Syrian Arab Army's (SAA) success in breaking the brutal ISIL siege of the city of Deir Ezzor, Back in the USSR celebrates the victories of the Syrian people and army in resisting the American-led imperial project of regime change and exposes the forces that have sought to destroy this proud and independent nation for the past six years.

Opening Theme

Play Song 1: Syrian National Anthem

Welcome brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, to Back in the USSR, I am Siegfried, and I just want to say, long live the Syrian Arab Army and long live the Syrian Arab Republic.  These are words seldom spoken in Western countries and, quite frankly, its sinful that they’re not.  Syria is a small heroic country that since 2011 has withstood six years of siege by one of the most powerful US-backed coalitions ever assembled: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, Britain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Canada, Germany, in fact just about every country on the planet besides a relatively small number of steadfast anti-imperialist nations, backed the overthrow of the legitimate, democratically elected government of Syria.  Tens of thousands of terrorists from more than one hundred countries traveled there, equipped with sophisticated American anti-tank missiles, Israeli tactical equipment, and hundreds of tanks drawn from surviving Warsaw Pact military stockpiles in Eastern European NATO states like Bulgaria and Croatia.  And yet the Syrian government is still in power, and it’s winning. 

Just this past week, the Syrian Army, backed by Russian air strikes, lifted the brutal three year ISIS siege of the eastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor, and already humanitarian convoys are reaching the nearly 100,000 citizens who have been trapped there for more than thirty-six months, withstanding non-stop bombardment and incessant attacks.  I’ve heard the lifting of the siege of Deir Ezzor being compared with the 1944 lifting of the siege of Leningrad when the Red Army finally broke through Nazi lines and ended the horrific ordeal of the people there.  I think it’s a very apt comparison to make, and certainly the ordeal of Deir Ezzor’s defenders, who have remained steadfast against overwhelming odds for over three years of battle, will be remembered as one of the greatest epics of gallantry in modern military history.  Just listen to this clip of Syrian Army soldiers from when the siege was first lifted on September 5^th.

(Play SANA “First scenes from the Syrian Army’s lifting of the Deir Ezzor Siege”)

And this victory is only the latest of many for the Syrian Army in 2017.  Earlier this year we witnessed the Syrian Army’s liberation of the ancient city and UNESCO world heritage site of Palmyra from ISIS, in December 2016 we saw the liberation of Aleppo from terrorist groups that were backed by the CIA and the Pentagon, and all over Syria operations continue to expel the foreign-backed militias that have been bringing such death and destruction to the country over the course of the past six years.  Listen to this Press TV news report from when the Syrian Army liberated Aleppo.

(Play Mohamad Ali, Press TV, “Syrian Army carrying out clean-up OP in East Aleppo”/RT Lizzie Phelan “Street celebreations in Aleppo on news of the Syrian Army’s retaking the eastern part of the city”)

The fight for liberation was and remains brutally hard, and Syria has lost much, listen to this report by Press TV journalist Mohamad Ali from March of this year when the Syrian Army liberated Palmyra, which, as I said, was a UNESCO world heritage site that was almost completely wrecked by the so-called Islamic State.

(Play Mohamad Ali “Press TV’s reporter shows the extent of the damage to Palmyra”)

To illustrate still further what the Syrian people were up against in this struggle for survival, I’m going to play another report from Mohamad Ali from back in January, when the Syrian Army liberated the Wadi Barada Valley near Damascus, freeing it from terrorists who had cut off the Syrian capital’s water supply and effectivelyhold millions of people hostage.

(Play Mohamad Ali, Press TV, “Syrian Army takes control of Wadi Barada Valley”)

For the Syrian people, who have suffered and endured so much, victory is finally in sight.  That’s something that should be celebrated, and yet the Western media continues to do what it has done from the start of the conflict: demonize the legitimate government of Syria, make false accusations about the use of chemical weapons, whitewash the brutal actions of the terrorist groups fighting against that government, and go all out encouraging Western military intervention against a sovereign nation on so-called “humanitarian grounds”.  And thus the media reveals itself to be just as much a part of the war on Syria as the Pentagon, the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and all the state and non-state actors who have brought nothing but terror and death to what was once a peaceful nation.

Well I want to get the record straight tonight.  Long live the Syrian people and victory to the Syrian Arab Army! Your long march is finally coming to a close.

Play Song 2: Gary Og “Something Inside so Strong”

Play Song 3: Hussein Al-Deek “Ana Souri, Ana Arabi”

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Now, I’ve talked about the Syrian conflict on a number of occasions on this show, afew weeks ago I played an interview that journalist Max Blumenthal did with The Real News Network in which he unpacked a lot of the media deception surrounding Syria, and in particular how some Western leftists have ended up siding with the US-led project of regime change in Syria – even people who in the past vehemently opposed the Iraq War.

People like Amy Goodman.  Who will actually be giving a talk in Guelph next week, and I have to say, regardless of what her progressive credentials are in America, her reporting on Syria has been abyssmal: repeating mainstream media lies about chemical weapons and alleged atrocities without giving a critical perspective or any sort of counter-point, uncritically interviewing members of the Western-based Syrian opposition who, like the Western-based Iraqi opposition before them, openly call for US-military intervention to oust a legitimate government of a sovereign state, and just generally being pro-imperialist.  It’s really disgusting, and she and her collaborators should be ashamed. 

But of course they’re far from alone, even leftist political organizations, some who still dare to call themselves “socialist”, have jumped on the regime change bandwagon since 2011.  I’d like to share this one article with you from the Greanville Post which not only exposes how the CIA backed some of the most murderous rebel groups in Syria, but how some psuedo-leftist groups like the ISO ended up as stooges for American foreign policy.

(Read: “The abandonment of the CIA’s Syrian “rebels” and the pseudo-left accomplices of US imperialism” by Bill van Auken)

Play Song 4: Garbage “Stupid Girl”

Well, brothers and sisters, I think that last song pretty much expresses how I feel about the positions of those leftist organizations, not to mention Amy Goodman, on this particular issue.  Collaboration with imperialism is something no leftist should ever do, and when they do it deals a blow to every kind of progressive change.

But another thing that article in the Greanville post highlights is the truth that this war was effectively manufactured outside Syria.  That political crisis in 2011 that saw protests and which led to the major democratic reform of the country’s constitution did not have to become a war.  And in contrast to the Western media’s repeated lies, it was not the Syrian government that caused it to become a war.  The Egyptian government killed far more people in street demonstrations in 2011 than the Syrian government did and today there is no war consuming hundreds of thousands of Egyptian lives.  No, this was a war made outside Syria and imported very, very deliberately by the CIA, the US-government and its regional allies, primarily Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.  They gave the insurgents guns, gave them training, gave them billions of dollars worth of aid, imported legions of foreign fighters from just about every continent, and completely prepared the ground for the rise of groups like the so-called Islamic State and the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front. 

This was an imperialist war of aggression from the start, the destruction of a sovereign nation by proxy, a sovereign nation that was founded on an anti-colonial ideology of Arab unity and which has historically defied US hegemony in the region.  This made it a target, just as Venezuela and Cuba are targets because of their defiance of American hegemony in Latin America.  And the media of course has played its role in demonizing Syria as a “rogue state” just like it did with Iraq, and its reporting on the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government very nearly did clear the way for an Iraq War 2.0.  There is nothing new about these tactics, its classic imperialism at work.  I’d like to play a short song about that, it was sung by a group of IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland during the conflict there, and it expresses profound solidarity with all the victims of imperialism wherever they may be, understanding that they all face a common foe.  It’s called “Monsters, Devils, and Strangers”.

Play Song 5: BIK “Monsters, Devils, and Strangers”

Now in a little while I’m going to play a talk by Canadian writer Stephen Gowans about his recent book entitled “Washington’s Long War on Syria”, explaining the history of the conflict and of Western intervention in the country, but first I want to play this Press TV interview with London-based writer and activist Catherine Shakdam, director of the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, who is another person who has bravely spoken the truth on Syria and consistently confronted the warmongering propaganda machine of the Western media.  Please stay tuned to Back in the USSR.

(Play Catherine Shakdam, Press TV “Advisor to Syrian President, War Almost Over”)

You’re listening to Back in the USSR, and to follow up that talk by Catherine Shakdam, I’d like to play a clip of the Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett, who has just been fearless, absolutely fearless in her reporting of the conflict, busting through all manner of media lies, particularly surrounding the battle for Aleppo, a city that she herself visited.  This year she did a cross-Canada tour that I’m proud to say that my comrades from the Communist Party of Canada helped facilitate.  This is from when she spoke at a UN press conference in 2016.

(Play Eva Bartlett, “Canadian journalist on the lies about Syria, UN Press Conference, December 9, 2016”)

Play Song 6: Bruce Cockburn “If I had a Rocket Launcher”

(Play Stephen Gowans, Montreal Book Launch, May 2, 2017 “Washington’s Long War on Syria”)