Must do better

 In an article titled The USSR flag and student communism: a controversial combination, we read:

'The ideological concept of communism originated in 18th-century Western Europe as a result of the work of German philosopher Karl Marx.'

Marx lived and died during the 19th century, 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883.

'The brutal totalitarian practices initiated by the USSR’s leaders, particularly Joseph Stalin, lead to enormous suffering.'

Indeed, but they had nothing to do with socialim/communism.

Marx wrote; 'the existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery' (Vorwärts, 7 and 10 August 1844).   Speaking about the modern state Engels, Marx's collaborator,  pointed out:      'The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The wages workers remain wages workers—proletarians' (Anti-Duhring)    Lenin wrote of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Task of Our Time).

It was Lenin who instituted severe censorship, established one-party rule and resorted to terror against his political enemies.    Stalin took these measures to further extremes.

‘Future society will be socialist society. This also means that with the abolition of exploitation, commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed—there will be only free workers… Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need also for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power’ (Anarchism or Socialism? 1906).

Ironically, the author of this piece would thirty years later, in a complete volte-face, declare the USSR to be socialist. That same year, on the 28th August, Pravda proclaimed him divine: ‘O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,Thou who didst give birth to man, Thou who didst make fertile the earth, Thou who dost rejuvenate the Centuries, Thou who givest blossom to the spring… ‘ And a mere mortal observed:

‘There are in the USSR privileged and exploited classes, dominant classes and subject classes. Between them the standard of living is sharply separated. The classes of travel on the railways correspond exactly to the social classes; similarly with ships, restaurants, theatres, shops, and with houses; for one group palaces in pleasant neighbourhoods, for the others wooden barracks alongside tool stores and oily machines… It is always the same people who live in the palaces and the same people who live in the barracks. There is no longer private property, there is only one property – State property. But the State no more represents the whole community than under preceding régimes’ (What the Russian Revolution Has Become, Robert Guiheneuf, 1936).

And today, ‘Russian elites and oligarchs are probably some of the best in the world at hiding their wealth…’ (Washington Post, 11 April, 2022).

And finally, this howler:

'Trinity College Dublin Students Union (TCDSU) President...offered his perspective: “I am from Eastern Europe. I am a communist. I am not offended by the display of this flag … [The hammer and sickle] is a symbol of the communist movement globally, and this is a movement of equality, justice and the liberation of humankind.” '

Verily, 'flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry' (Arundhati Roy, c. 2008).

Blah, blah, blah!

 'India has defied expectations to produce a New Delhi Declaration backed by all countries at..[.last]... weekend’s G20 summit, at the expense of any meaningful condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.'

Mainstream media coverage of protests held against the summit was conspicious by its absense.   Six years ago in Hamburg rather than New Delhi,  an imaginative protest by hundreds of zombies called for us to ‘wake up!’ ‘The mud-crusted zombie figures were meant to be a symbol for “a society that has lost faith in solidarity and in which the individual struggles only for his own advance,” according to 1000 Gestalten’s official website. The act of shedding these costumes during the performance signified the idea that change can start with just one person. “We cannot wait for change to emerge from the world’s most powerful people, but we must now show all of us politically and socially responsible,” a speaker of the collective declared in an official statement’ (Popsugar.  6 July, 2017). Correct. The revolutionary change that socialists strive for cannot come from above, from leaders, but only as a result of the majority understanding the need for and acting to bring about a world of free access and production for use.

One revolutionary who shared this perspective was Rosa Luxemburg.   The irony that an artwork with this name, one by '...Jean Paul Riopelle (1923–2002) showcased at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec..' represented '.. Canada in an exhibition.. alongside the G20 Summit,'

went uneported,   

Red Rosa wrote three years before the start of the war to end all wars:

'Militarism in both its forms — as war and as armed peace — is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever honestly desires world peace and liberation from the tremendous burden of armaments must also desire Socialism' (Peace Utopias, 1911).   This quotation from another work, The Russian Revoltion (1918),

was valid then and today, not just in Russia and the Ukraine:   'Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege.'  

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON SOCIALISM

Rosa Luxemburg on Socialism – worldsocialism.org/spgb

Stalin

Thw historian, biographer and political commentator. Geoffrey Roberts states in an interview today:  'The most important thing to understand about Stalin is that he was an intellectual, driven by his Marxist ideas, a true believer in his communist ideology. And he didn’t just believe it, he felt it. Socialism was an emotional thing for Stalin.  His often-monstrous actions stemmed from his politics and ideology, not his personality.'

In the 1930s Stalin outlawed abortion and homosexuality and  pursued state capitalist industrialisation, at the cost of millions of lives, and in 1936 announced that Russia was ‘socialist’.   That very year, on 28 August, Pravda proclaimed him divine: 

O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,

Thou who didst give birth to man,

Thou who didst make fertile the earth,

Thou who dost rejuvenate the Centuries,

Thou who givest blossom to the spring...

 The same year, a mere mortal observed: 'There are in the U.S.S.R. privileged and exploited classes, dominant classes and subject classes. Between them the standard of living is sharply separated. The classes of travel on the railways correspond exactly to the social classes; similarly with ships, restaurants, theatres, shops, and with houses; for one group palaces in pleasant neighbourhoods, for the others wooden barracks alongside tool stores and oily machines. .It is always the same people who live in the palaces and the same people who live in the barracks. There is no longer private property, there is only one property – State property. But the State no more represents the whole community than under preceding régimes' (What the Russian Revolution Has Become, Robert Guiheneuf, 1936).

Ironic considering 30 years earlier Stalin's understanding of socialism was sound:

‘Future society will be socialist society. This also means that with the abolition of exploitation, commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed—there will be only free workers… Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need also for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power’ (Anarchism or Socialism? 1906).

Macron playing Russian roulette

 

The words idiot and cretin are very similar in both English and French.

The English word for madman translates as le fou. When AI was asked to supply a definition of these three it came up with Emmanuel Macron, President of France.

Okay, that’s made up but the soubriquets surely apply to aforementioned French president given the latest decision to come out of Paris.

Several news outlets are reporting that France is going to more than annoy the Russians, poking the Bear as it’s known, with its decision to supply Ukraine with fifty SCALP long-range cruise missiles each having a range of one hundred and fifty five miles.

Reuters says that Macron said, "It rebalances things and enables Ukraine to hit deep into Russian lines and can penetrate tougher targets”.

A Russian source quotes a Kremlin spokesman, ‘Dmitry Peskov described it as a “mistake,” and one that was likely to have “consequences” for Ukraine. He warned that Moscow would take “countermeasures,” without specifying details.

Peskov expressed confidence that the delivery of French long-range missiles would not change the outcome of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.

Moscow has repeatedly warned Kiev’s Western backers that, by providing Ukraine with ever more advanced weapons systems, they are risking dragging themselves into direct military confrontation with Russia.’

Has Macron been ‘leaned on’ by state actors unknown? Guesses as to whom on a postcard. Or is he trying to impress his mates in NATO prior to the upcoming NATO meeting? Will the French take to the streets to demonstrate their displeasure at this dangerous racking up of international tensions?

Violence is not condoned but the so called ‘leaders’ of European states seem hell-bent on increasing the risk of unimaginable destructive upon the working class of those states.

The position of the SPGB (World Socialist Movement) remains the one it has always articulated, the only side we take in any conflict is that of the global working class.

The solution to this threat to the safety of us all, the only solution, remains the same; abolish capitalism and replace it with the only sane alternative -socialism.

Chomsky's support for Extinction Rebellion and Ukraine

 'Chomsky: The Global South is calling for some negotiated settlement to put an end to the horrors before they get worse. Of course, the Russian invasion was a criminal act of aggression. No question about that. Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves. I don’t think there should be any question about that either...

Barsamian: The lunatics seemingly control the asylum. What signs of sanity are out there to counter the lunatics?

Chomsky: Plenty. There’s lots of popular activism. It’s in the streets. Young people calling for the decent treatment of others. A lot of it is very solid and serious. Extinction Rebellion..'.

Once upon a time he had some better ideas including:

‘Presupposing that there have to be states is like saying, what kind of feudal system should we have that would be the best one? What kind of slavery would be the best kind?’ (Manufacturing Consent, 1988).

‘A democratic revolution would take place when it is supported by the great mass of the people, when they know what they are doing and they know why they are doing it and they know what they want to see come into existence. Maybe not in detail but at least in some manner. A revolution is something that great masses of people have to understand and be personally committed to’ (Linguistics and Politics, September–October 1969, New Left Review).

The thin red line

 “….Likewise, the scattered anti-war actions that have been reported so far—protests in Russia, soldiers disobeying their orders in Ukraine, refusals to handle shipments by dockers in the UK and Italy, sabotage by railway workers in Belarus—need to take on an autonomous working-class perspective to be truly anti-war, otherwise, they will be ripe for manipulation by one of the warring capitalist powers. Support for Russia or Ukraine in this conflict means support for war. The only way to end this nightmare is not for workers to line up on one side of it, but to fraternize across borders to bring down the war machine.

This is why we say, emphatically: no war but the class war! The ruling classes are already waging their war on us and the planet. If they want more war and bloodletting, let them march on the battlefields themselves, rifles in hand, and fight it out amongst themselves. The working people of the world must not allow ourselves to become cannon fodder for their wars. Rather, it is up to us—the great majority without whom everything grinds to a halt—to stop our rulers’ war plans and create the alternative.”

No War but the Class War: Statement from NWBCW Miami

Leninspeak

Edited from Socialist Standard May 1983

It really is ironic that those members of the Militant group who faced expulsion from the Labour Party should have complained about the lack of democracy and tolerance which they allege was being shown to them. After all, as worshippers of Lenin they must know that their hero was no democrat and showed little tolerance of his opponents outside or inside Bolshevik ranks. We have yet to hear them condemn this.

One of the most amazing legacies of the Russian revolution and its aftermath
is Lenin's image as a humane, even saintly figure, despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary. To this day thousands of people all over the world will revile Stalin but revere Lenin, yet the truth is that it was the latter who commenced the reign of terror after November l9l7 and who deserves his own place in history as a brutal, lying, ruthless dictator.

  Right up till the Bolshevik seizure of power Lenin had been agitating for the abolition of the state apparatus including the army, police and bureaucracy. Every official, he said, should be elected and subject to recall at any time. He was all for freedom of the press and the right to demonstrate for "any party, any group"'
Immediately on gaining power he even promised to uphold the verdict of the coming elections for the Constituent Assembly.
As a democratic government' we cannot ignore the decision of the rank and file of the people, even though we may disagree with it ...and even if the peasants continue to follow the Social-Revolutionaries, even if they give this party a majority in the Constituent Assembly, we shall still say, be it so'
(Report on the Land Question,8 November 1917')

All of this was, of course, mere window dressing, for Lenin knew that the Russian people would never have supported what he really had in mind for them. Far from abolishing the state apparatus he set about strengthening it, especially the secret police (Cheka), in order to impose the Bolshevik dictatorship. And instead of officials being elected and recallable the Bolsheviks simply appointed their own men who were answerable to them alone'

 Gradually all opposition press was outlawed and their demonstrations
forbidden'. When the long-called-for elections for the Constituent Assembly resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Bolsheviks. Lenin dissolved the Assembly by force.

Later on he explained away those earlier promises on the grounds that
"This was an essential period in the beginning of the revolution; without it we
would not have risen on the crest of the revolutionary wave, we should have
dragged in its wake" (Report of the Central Committee to the 11th Congress of
the Russian Communist Party 27 March 1922.)

  In the run-up to the November coup Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won widespread support with their slogan "peace, bread and land". Of course the
promises of politicians are always easier to make than to fulfil, as the Russian
workers and peasants very soon discovered. The peasants, having got rid of the
landlord, now had their grain and cattle forcibly taken from them in return for
worthless paper money. Those who resisted were shot and many villages were
burnt. Lenin claimed that his policy of robbing the peasants was necessary to avoid famine but inevitably, the peasants retaliated by burning their crops and killing their cattle and so Lenin's policy produced famine anyway. In the cities and towns unemployment was rife and the workers, in or out of a job, were starving.
  Lenin's response to the plight of the Petrograd workers was to tell them to
"...set out in their tens of thousands for the Urals, the Volga and the south,
where there is an abundance of grain, where they can feed themselves and
their families . . "( To The Workers of Petrograd, 12 July 1918.)
 How the workers and their families were go get to these areas in view of the
fact that the civil war had broken out in each of them, Lenin didn't say.

 Early in 1919 many strikes and protest demonstrations were crushed with
great loss of life. Starvation continued to be the workers' lot for several more years but anyone who argued that the chronic food scarcity could be eased by allowing the peasants to trade their produce instead of having it stolen by the state should, said Lenin, be shot. This argument was "counter-revolutionary" - until Lenin himself made it official policy early in l92l.

 Another myth surrounding the period of Lenin's dictatorship is that at least
there was democracy within the Communist Party. This is the so-called "democratic centralism", but Lenin no more welcomed opposition from his own comrades than he did from anyone else' Communists who criticised him or his policies were denounced as "unsound elements", "deviationists" or worse' and their arguments “mere chatter", "phrase mongering" and “dangerous rubbish".

 Lenin's anger boiled over at those communists who wanted free trade unions
independent of party control' He raged at the "loudmouths" and demanded complete loyalty or else they would throw away the revolution because,
"Undoubtedly, the capitalists of the Entente will take advantage of our party’s
sickness to organise a new invasion, and the Social Revolutionaries will take
advantage of it for the purpose of organising conspiracies and rebellions." (The Party Crisis, 19 January 1921 )

 He also complained that the debate on the trade unions had been
". . an excessive luxury. Speaking for myself I cannot but add that in my
opinion this luxury was really absolutely impermissible" (Report on the political activities of the Central-Committee to the l1th Congress of the Russian
Communist Party, 8 March 1921.)
In short, shut-up and don't rock the boat. Faced with this attitude the
dissidents had no chance. Their various groups, such as "Workers' Opposition",
were expelled (even when they agreed to abide by majority decisions against them)and many of their leaders and members were jailed or exiled.

 All Lenin's actions were the result of his single-minded determination to seize
power and hold on to it, even if it meant that millions of Russian workers and
peasants died in famine and repression. The seizure of power was' given the chaotic condition of Russia at the time, comparatively simple: to hold on to power he had to create a state apparatus which, under his personal direction, was used to terrorise all opposition into submission.

 The Leninists of today will argue that all of this was a case of the end
justifying the means, that it was done in order to bring about socialism. But
undemocratic means can never bring about democratic ends; any minority which seizes power can only retain it by violent, undemocratic methods. In any case, even before 1917 the Mensheviks and many European social democrats had used Karl Marx's theory of social development to demolish the idea that socialism could be established in a backward country like Russia. The absence of larger-scale industry and the consequent smallness of the working class, both of which are essential ingredients for socialism, plus the presence of a vast, reactionary peasantry made socialism impossible.

 This earned them Lenin's undying hatred, a hatred which only increased as he saw their view justified by events. All that was left to Lenin in the circumstances was to commence building up state-capitalism. The Russia of Soviet Union is a grim reminder of how well he succeeded.  V.V.

Food Sovereignty Russian-Style

				Earlier this month, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stated that Russia will not import GMO products because Russia has enough space and resources to produce organic food. This was not a political statement of posturing, given the current cool relations between the U.S. and Russia over the Ukraine. As it turns out, Russia’s food security is light years ahead of the U.S. A significant portion of the Russian population own “dachas,” or seasonal garden homes, where they can grow their own food. At the height of the communist era, it is reported that these dachas produced 90% of the nation’s food. Today, with the land now privatized, they still comprise about 40% of the nation’s food. Compare that with the United States, where less than 1% of the population controls the food, and small-scale family farms have for the most part been bought out by huge Biotech corporations. While many in the world are completely dependent on large scale agriculture, the Russian people feed themselves. Their agricultural economy is small scale, predominantly organic and in the capable hands of the nation’s people. Russians have something built into their DNA that creates the desire to grow their own food. It’s a habit that has fed the Russian nation for centuries. It’s not just a hobby but a massive contribution to Russia’s agriculture. In 2011, 51% of Russia’s food was grown either by dacha communities (40%), like those pictured above in Sisto-Palkino, or peasant farmers (11%) leaving the rest (49%) of production to the large agricultural enterprises. But when you dig down into the earthy data from the Russian Statistics Service you discover some impressive details. Again in 2011, dacha gardens produced over 80% of the countries fruit and berries, over 66% of the vegetables, almost 80% of the potatoes and nearly 50% of the nations milk, much of it consumed raw. Food sovereignty puts the people who produce, distribute and eat food at the centre of decisions about food production and policy rather than corporations and market institutions that have come to dominate the global food system. In 2003, the Russian government signed the Private Garden Plot Act into law, entitling citizens to private plots of land for free. These plots range from 0.89 hectares to 2.75 hectares. Industrial agricultural practices tend to be extremely resource intensive and can damage the environment. 70% of global water use goes to farming, and soil is eroded 10 to 40 times faster. Read the Full Article Here.

Russia's other war - against migrants

Thanks to Western sanctions, the low price of oil, and systemic weaknesses in Vladimir Putin’s style of crony capitalism, the currency has lost roughly 50 percent against the dollar this year. Most migrants convert their rubles into dollars to send home.

As the value of the Russian ruble plummets and Russia’s economy tumbles into recession, millions of Central Asian migrants have seen their real wages dwindle. On top of that, Russian authorities are introducing new, expensive regulations for foreigners who wish to work legally in the country.

According to Russia’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, there are about three million Uzbek labour migrants in Russia, the most from any Central Asian country. Others estimate the number of Uzbeks could be twice that. Unofficial estimates put their remittances in 2013 at the value of roughly a quarter of Uzbekistan’s GDP. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are even more dependent on labour migrants, with remittances contributing the equivalent of 30 percent and roughly 50 percent to their economies, respectively. Data from Russia’s Central Bank shows that the funds Uzbeks send home dipped nine percent year-on-year during the third quarter of 2014. Analysts predict the fall will continue. The Russian business daily Kommersant estimates that remittances fell 35 percent month-on-month in October alone.

"My salary was 18,000 rubles a month, which several months ago would be equivalent to 500 dollars. Now, it is less than 300 dollars,” Sherzod, a 29-year-old from the Ferghana Valley who was working at a shop in Samara, told EurasiaNet.org. Sherzod returned home in November and he is not planning to go back to Russia. “The salary is too low.” Sherzod says that faced with falling real incomes, many Uzbeks working in Russia find themselves in a quandary. Thousands are eager to return home. But many simply do not have funds to buy a return ticket. Others worry about being seen in their native villages as failures."

It is not only falling wages that labour migrants must consider. Starting on Jan. 1, Russia will require labour migrants to pass tests on Russian language, history and legislation basics, as well as undergo a medical examination and buy health insurance (the entire package will cost migrants up to 30,000 rubles (currently about 500 dollars), by some accounts). The Moscow city government is also more than tripling the fee for work permits, from 1,200 rubles monthly to 4,000 rubles (currently 64 dollars). Citizens of countries that are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which will come into force on Jan. 1, will not be affected by the new regulations. That adds pressure for migrant-feeder countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to join. (Kyrgyzstan is hoping to join in early 2015) Russian media outlets have quoted a migrant community leader who projected new requirements for guest workers, along with the falling ruble, will prompt up to 25 percent of migrants to leave Russia in the coming months.

Declaration of Internationalists against the war in Ukraine

SOYMB blog re-posts this anti-war statement. We would also draw attention to the ex-ambassador-turn-activist, Craig Murray, statement.:

“The boundaries of states are accidents of history.  Ukraine’s certainly are.  There never had been a Ukrainian national state until 25 years ago, and the boundaries of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic were never intended to define a nation state... Putin is not acting from a belief in self-determination, but from naked Russian nationalism.  That is what is so amusing about the deluded left wingers supporting him against the nationalists of Kiev.”

WAR ON WAR!
NOT A SINGLE DROP A BLOOD FOR THE “NATION”!

The power struggle between oligarchic clans in Ukraine threatens to escalate into an international armed conflict. Russian capitalism intends to use redistribution of Ukrainian state power in order to implement their long-standing imperial and expansionist aspirations in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine where it has strong economic, financial and political interests.

On the background of the next round of the impending economic crisis in Russia, the regime is trying to stoking Russian nationalism to divert attention from the growing workers' socio-economic problems: poverty wages and pensions, dismantling of available health care, education and other social services. In the thunder of the nationalist and militant rhetoric it is easier to complete the formation of a corporate, authoritarian state based on reactionary conservative values and repressive policies.

In Ukraine, the acute economic and political crisis has led to increased confrontation between "old" and "new" oligarchic clans, and the first used including ultra-rightist and ultra-nationalist formations for making a state coup in Kiev. The political elite of Crimea and eastern Ukraine does not intend to share their power and property with the next in turn Kiev rulers and trying to rely on help from the Russian government. Both sides resorted to rampant nationalist hysteria: respectively, Ukrainian and Russian. There are armed clashes, bloodshed. The Western powers have their own interests and aspirations, and their intervention in the conflict could lead to World War III.

Warring cliques of bosses force, as usual, force to fight for their interests us, ordinary people: wage workers, unemployed, students, pensioners... Making us drunkards of nationalist drug, they set us against each other, causing us forget about our real needs and interests: we don`t and can`t care about their "nations" where we are now concerned more vital and pressing problems – how to make ends meet in the system which they found to enslave and oppress us.

We will not succumb to nationalist intoxication. To hell with their state and “nations”, their flags and offices! This is not our war, and we should not go on it, paying with our blood their palaces, bank accounts and the pleasure to sit in soft chairs of authorities. And if the bosses in Moscow, Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv, Donetsk and Simferopol start this war, our duty is to resist it by all available means!

NO WAR BETWEEN “NATIONS” – NO PEACE BETWEEN CLASSES!

KRAS, Russian section of the International Workers Association

Internationalists of Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Israel, Lithuania

Anarchist Federation of Moldova

Fraction of the Revolutionary Socialists (Ukraine)

The Sochi Winter Fairy Tale

The 2014 Winter Olympics have begun in Sochi, Russia and there has been no shortage of criticism for Russia’s human rights abuses in Chechnya and Dagestan, the country’s crackdown on civil society, and most visibly Russia’s recent laws criminalising gays and lesbians. Though the major media prefer to criticize the human rights record of the Olympic hosts only when they take place in Russia or China, there are significant problems with all Olympic games.

The Olympics serve the interests of the global wealthy in a number of important ways. To better understand the Olympics one should understand the organization behind the Olympics and take a critical look at some of the recent impacts the games have had on host cities.

The organization in charge of the Olympics is called the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the “supreme authority of the Olympic movement”. The members of this unelected, multi-billion dollar, transnational organization include royalty, corporate executives, politicians, and retired military personal. If these savoury characters aren’t enough for you, they even have the war criminal Henry Kissinger as a member of honor. The organization’s members had until recently served life terms, and no women were included in the organization until 1981. The IOC bears some resemblance to other transnational organizations like the G8, IMF, and OECD. The stated goal of the IOC, like all unelected, transnational organizations, is to build “a peaceful and better world”. Casting aside this predictable rhetoric and examining the effects that the Olympics have had on host cities shows exactly what the IOC means by this statement.

The cost of hosting the Olympic games routinely runs over budget with no real way to determine the true cost. The total cost of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics is estimated to be 7 billion dollars, and analysis done last August shows Vancouver taxpayers are taking a 300 million dollar loss on just the Olympic village project alone.  The estimates of the London Olympics’ cost are between £13 and £24 billion. This incredible price tag demonstrates how serious David Cameron really was about the “age of austerity” and his commitment to cut excess government spending. Both Canada and the UK have been in the midst of austerity budgets with significant cuts being made to social services at the same time these states were throwing around untold amounts of government money. All this tax money went to developers, resort and hotel owners, real estate industry, transnational corporations, T.V. networks, and private security firms. The Olympics play an integral role in actualizing economic policies where wealth is transferred from the poor to the rich.

The Olympics leaves host cities with huge debts, potential cuts in social services, and privatization. Since the Olympics nearly always run over budget the IOC developed a rule, which states that the financial responsibility for the games must be assumed by the host city and the organizing committee. The Olympics sponsors are given monopoly rights to vend (so much for Olympic competition), and in the true to the spirit of neoliberalism London’s Olympic bid even included tax haven status for Olympic sponsor corporations. The Olympics have taken a page from the corporate playbook by forcing countries and host cities to wage battle with one another. They offer miniscule taxes, meager wages, and lax environmental regulations, all to see who will have the honor of being exploited by the Olympic industry. A recent report on the 2012 London Olympics lists the average price for a ticket to medal events was about $375. What’s worse is that the study shows that significant amounts of tickets, for some events over 50%, were never available to the public, but were reserved for VIPs, sponsors, officials, and the media.

The militarization of the Olympics perhaps reached its height during the 2010 London Olympics. During the 2010 games Britain underwent the largest military build up in London since World War II. The UK had more troops in London than in Afghanistan during the Olympics. There was an 11 mile electrified fence, 55 teams of attacks dogs, a Royal Navy ship anchored in the Thames, drones flying overhead, surface to air missiles on the roofs of apartments, and air force jets on stand by. Along with the militarization of the Olympics came increased police powers. These powers were predictably used to arrest hundreds of protestors and to trump up terrorism charges. In fact, in the year before the London Olympics UK terrorism arrests increased by 60%.

As militarized Olympics became more common, so too did “street sweeps” where homeless and sex workers were cleansed from the street. In the run up to 1996 Olympics in Atlanta 9,000 arrest citations were given to mostly African-American homeless men. Stories of homeless forced out of Olympic cities are common. According to the Center on Human Rights and Evictions the Olympic games alone have displaced more than two million people in the last 20 years, mostly the homeless, the poor, and minorities such as Roma and African-Americans. Olympic redevelopment projects commonly target low-income areas, which result in increased rents and destruction of low-income communities. Though promises of low income housing as part of the Olympic redevelopment are common, few ever become a reality.

The Olympic likes to pretend it offers a vision of a “better world”, but for an actual better world, one which benefits all the inhabitants, not just the wealthy, we need socialism.

Adapted from here

The Greatest Threat To World Peace Today - US

In their annual End of Year poll, researchers for WIN and Gallup International surveyed more than 66,000 people across 65 nations and found that 24 percent of all respondents answered that the United States “is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.” Pakistan and China fell significantly behind the United States on the poll, with 8 and 6 percent, respectively. Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea all tied for fourth place with 4 percent.

Much of the animosity toward America comes from Muslim Middle Eastern and North African nations, all located in a region most likely to be affected by American military actions over the past decade. Forty-four percent of Pakistani respondents, for instance, voted America as the most dangerous nation, despite Pakistan’s acceptance of U.S. foreign aid. The Chinese and Russians rated the United States as dangerous even more than Pakistanis did, at 54 and 49 percent, respectively.

However, a plurality of people polled in several officially American-allied nations also rated the United States as dangerous. Thirty-seven percent of Mexicans and 17 percent of Canadians view their neighboring country with suspicion on the world stage. A surprising 13 percent of American respondents rated their own nation the biggest threat to world peace as well.

taken from here

The Bolsheviks

According to the Julian calendar, the insurrection and the capture of power by the Bolsheviks took place on the night of October 26, which falls on November 7 in the modern Gregorian calendar. The American journalist, John Reed, the John Pilger of his time, who witnessed the events of the revolution first hand wrote in his  book, Ten Days that Shook the World, “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is an undeniable fact that the Russian revolution is one of the greatest events in human history, and the rule of the Bolsheviki is a phenomenon of worldwide importance.”

As anti-Bolshevik communists, the Socialist Party has discovered that the trouble with critiques of the Russian Revolution from the Left is that they sound ever so plausible since their numbers are full of academics with PhDs in the minutiae of political history. Their analysis is usually based on "the lie of omission", the purposeful ignoring of events and over-emphasis of others to bolster their interpretations and political bias.

The contribution of the Socialist Party of Great Britain with its analysis of the nature of the Russian state is deliberately over-looked. The SPGB was probably the earliest Marxist political party to declare the regime as non-socialist and over the years has been the most consistent critics of the proponents of Bolshevism.

Galloway memories

"... If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union , yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life..." - George Galloway, the ex-Labour Party and now Respect MP.

New Russia, Same Old Oppression

From MOSCOW (Reuters) -

Three women from the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail on Friday for their protest in a church against President Vladimir Putin, an outcome supporters described as the Kremlin leader's "personal revenge".

The group's backers burst into chants of "Shame" outside the Moscow courthouse and said the case showed Putin's refusal to tolerate dissent in his new six-year term as president. Dozens were detained as tensions rose and scuffles broke out.

The United States and the European Union condemned the sentence as disproportionate and asked for it to be reviewed, although state prosecutors had demanded a three-year jail term and the maximum sentence possible was seven years. But while the women have support abroad, where their case has been taken up by a long list of celebrities including Madonna, Paul McCartney and Sting, opinion polls show few Russians sympathise with them.
"The girls' actions were sacrilegious, blasphemous and broke the church's rules," Judge Marina Syrova told the court as she spent three hours reading the verdict while the women stood watching in handcuffs inside a glass courtroom cage.

She declared all three guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, saying they had deliberately offended Russian Orthodox believers by storming the altar of Moscow's main cathedral in February to belt out a song deriding Putin. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Marina Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, giggled as the judge read out the sentences one by one.
They have already been in jail for about five months, meaning they will serve only another 19, and could be released if Putin were to pardon them. The Orthodox Church hinted it would not oppose such a move by appealing, belatedly, for mercy.

Pussy Riot took on two powerful state institutions at once when they burst into Moscow's golden-domed Christ the Saviour Cathedral wearing bright ski masks, tights and short skirts to protest against Putin's close ties with the Church.
Putin's opponents depicted the case as part of a crackdown by the ex-KGB spy against a protest movement that took off over the winter, attracting what witnesses said were at times crowds of 100,000 people in Moscow to oppose his return to power.

"They are in jail because it is Putin's personal revenge," Alexei Navalny, one of the organisers of the protests, said outside the court. "This verdict was written by Vladimir Putin." Putin's spokesman did not immediately answer calls following the verdict, but the president's supporters said before the trial that he would have no influence on the court's decision.

Declaring the sentence to be just, Irina Yarovaya, a parliamentary deputy from Putin's United Russia party, said: "They deserved it."
A police source told Itar-Tass news agency 50 people had been detained by police near the court after scuffles broke out. Among them were Sergei Udaltsov, a leftist opposition leader, and Garry Kasparov, the chess great and vehement Putin critic.

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Despite the fall of the so-called 'communist' block, or more correctly totalitarian state capitalism, the allegedly new found 'freedom' of Western style democracy has been revealed as the sham it is in every other country, a small token gesture that can be removed at any time. As with many countries, the accepted sense of 'freedom of speech' is often found wanting in practice, as underlined by this case.
SussexSocialist

Russian rich get richer

Over the next five years, the number of rich Russians worth over $100 million is set to grow by 76 percent, ahead of the global figure of 37 percent. That’s according to a new survey by the Knight Frank real estate consultancy and Citi Private Bank.

 Given the bonanza for the super-rich, the negligible growth in real wages of 0.8 percent, coupled with the apparently underestimated official inflation rate, means that real living standards for the majority of Russians fell.

The wealthiest Russians are amassing capital also through the redistribution of income from the majority of the population. This widening income gap points to deep internal fissures in society. Since the era of privatization many of the wealthiest people in Russia are not “self-made,” but were either appointed “oligarchs,” as in the 1990s, or have been given access to the immense sources of profit in the country.

 Forbes magazine has prepared a new list of 200 richest people of Russia. The overall wealth of these businessmen is about 450 billion U.S. dollars.

Alisher Usmanov, the founder of Metallinvest, general director of “Gazprominvestkholding” and large share holder of Facebook, tops the list with a fortune of 18.1 billion U.S. dollars.

The Russian poor get poorer and the rich richer

Many describe Russia as a kleptocratic dictatorship with Putin as chief thief. Putin has secretly accumulated more than $40bn (£20bn). The sum would make him Russia's - and Europe's - richest man. He owns vast holdings in three Russian oil and gas companies, concealed behind a "non-transparent network of offshore trusts". Putin "effectively" controls 37% of the shares of Surgutneftegaz, an oil exploration company and Russia's third biggest oil producer, worth $20bn, he says. He also owns 4.5% of Gazprom, and "at least 75%" of Gunvor, a mysterious Swiss-based oil trader, founded by Gennady Timchenko, a friend of the president's. Members of Putin's cabinet personally control the most important sectors of the economy - oil, gas and defence. Medvedev is chairman of Gazprom; Sechin runs Rosneft; other ministers are chairmen of Russian railways, Aeroflot, a nuclear fuel giant and an energy transport enterprise.
"The crown jewels of the country's wealth have ended up in the hands of Putin's inner circle," Vladimir Rzyhkov, a former independent MP, wrote in the Moscow Times.

Latest statistics from Russia reveal that those in poverty has risen 2.1 million since last year. The report showed that 14.9 percent of the population was below the poverty level.

Natalya Zagvozdina, the head of consumer research for the CIS at Renaissance Capital, noted that food prices inf lation of around 15 percent for the last year in Russia had especially hit the low-income population of the country. With little increase in pay for pensioners and public sector workers, the rising price of the consumer basket caught up and overtook more of them in the first half of 2011. Disposable incomes did not grow much for workers in the private sector either, said Orlova, where social taxes were also taking their toll as employers were less likely to raise salaries.
Natalya Orlova, the chief econo- mist at Alfa Bank, said that one of the key factors playing a role in rising poverty indicators was high income inequality, which was becoming more pronounced since the beginning of the 2008 economic crisis. “In Russia we have seen very weak disposable income growth, for the first half of this year it was slightly above one percent, and most likely this growth that we did have was driven by the increase in the richest population. These statistics show the impact of the crisis – the poorest sector of the population is becoming even poorer”

"The top 10 percent of the population receive 15 times as much as the poorest 10 percent," President Medvedev said. SOYMB wouldn't be at all surprised if this is very much an under-estimate

According to Forbes magazine, Russia had 101 billionaires in 2011, almost double the number of the previous year. Moscow is home to more of the world's wealthiest people than New York.

We also read:
Moscow, a city of 11.5 million has as many as 5 million migrants, more than half of them undocumented. The migrants, many of them from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, exist on the fringes of society, harassed by police, victimized by employers and disliked by Russians, once their fellow Soviet citizens. In Moscow, deep-seated prejudice against Central Asians (and people from Russia's Caucasus Mountains) gives restive young nationalists a target for their anger. Ethnic tension has been rising fostered by Putin’s populist brand of aggressive nationalism. About one Central Asian is killed every month in a racially motivated attack in the city, and many are beaten up, with numerous assaults unreported. Last year, according to the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, a Moscow nonprofit organization, 37 people were killed in Russia in racially motivated attacks and 368 reported injured, most of them Central Asians. The migrants come anyway, driven by desperation. Once they get work, employers may abuse workers and fail to pay them, leaving the migrants little recourse.

Lenin paved the way for Stalin

Today is the 20th anniversary of the failed coup by Leninist-Stalinist hardliners in what was the USSR.

Karl Marx was not simply volunteering his name to a way of life that would exist in post-capitalist society. The main purpose of his years of intensive investigation of capitalism was to expose that system as the final form of class exploitation of property while demonstrating that it had created the economic potential for the establishment of universal freedom.

Both Marx and his co-worker, Frederick Engels, referred to that universal freedom as socialism or communism which terms they used interchangeably. Marx did not attempt to draw a detailed picture of socialism; at the time of his writing capitalism was still a rapidly developing system and the level of development it had achieved when the working class abolished it would have an obvious bearing on the structure of the new society. What he did show, with repetitive clarity, was the part played by commodity production, wage labour and money in capitalism’s exploitive process and, thus, their necessary extirpation from life in socialism.

But capitalism, though a burgeoning economic system in the middle of the 19th century, had not economically matured to the point where Marx’s vision of a classless society in which free access to needs would be the mode of distribution could be realised. Against the possibility that working class political demand might exceed the economic capacity of the system to deliver Marx and Engels mooted the possibility of a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”: patently working class hegemony over the processes of production that would allow for the speedy development of production to the point where free access to need was possible.

It was a reasonable thesis in the circumstances of the time but, given its political distortion by Lenin and the various conflicting elements that, following the Bolshevik coup d’etat in Russia in 1917, attached themselves to Lenin’s political ideas, it was to prove seriously damaging to the Marxian concept of socialism

Ironically when Lenin used the question of a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in 1917 the historical circumstances that had led to Marx speculating about dictatorship no longer existed. Capitalism’s rapid development had made the question irrelevant in conditions where a majority of the working class were capable of undertaking the conscious, democratic political action to bring about a revolutionary change in the base of society.

But both the economic and political basis for a revolutionary change were absent in Russia in 1917. The Russian proletariat was a small fraction of the mainly peasant population. The Bolshevik slogan was ’Peace, Land and Bread’, hardly the sophisticated slogans of socialist revolutionaries! Lenin might well have thought of Engels’s admonition that a leader gaining power in circumstances that do not permit the implementation of his principles necessarily comes into conflict with those principles. Socialism was not on the political agenda in Russia nor did the Bolshevik coup provoke the hoped-for social revolutions elsewhere in western Europe.

Josef Stalin, who subsequently, by an ironic inversion of the ‘Great Man’ theory of history, became the Lucifer of the Left and the architect of evil in the Russian empire, wrote a pamphlet called Socialism or Anarchism in 1905 in which he summed up the Marxian view of socialism:

“Future society will be socialist society. This means, primarily, that there will be no classes in that society… this also means that with the ending of exploitation, commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished…”

Obviously material conditions in Russia in 1917 could not accommodate the establishment of socialism so Lenin moved the goalposts, changing the Marxian objective to suit the realities existing in the country. Capital development through state monopoly was the only option open to him and the Communist Party, but in a monumental act of political dishonesty that would bear heavily on the world-wide working class into the future, he proclaimed that socialism was state-capitalism and a mere stage on the way to communism

So the State became the national capitalist and the Communist Party the ruthless state boss enforcing a dictatorship over the workers in a frenetic effort of capital accumulation. Not only was Russia in the rigid control of a dictatorship but Lenin and the Communist Party were clearly not opposed to the emergence of a single dictator; thus, Lenin in a speech on the 31 March 1920 to the Ninth Congress of the Bolshevik Party :

“We are thus reiterating what was approved two years ago in an official resolution of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee! … namely, that Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory, and that the will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary.”

Many contemporary exponents of Leninism ascribe the awful saga of totalitarian rule that emerged from this sort of thinking to Stalin, Yes, Stalin did head the list of political gangsters that terrorised Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution. But it was the elitist nonsense promoted by Lenin, as evidenced above and the undemocratic political structures established by the Communist Party that created the pathway to the massive evils of Stalinism.

Unfortunately today a common rejection of socialism is based not only on the Russian experience but, also, on the tyranny that Leninist thinking and political strategy has enforced elsewhere as ‘socialism’

RICHARD MONTAGUE.

Russia's racists

Up to 1,000 people were arrested in Moscow recently as nationalist youths rampaged throughout the city for the second time in a week, shouting racist slogans and calling for the death of immigrants. The protests, originally organised by Spartak's unofficial fan club, have spread to include Russia's disaffected youth, sparking fears that racial tensions may have irreparably boiled over. Racism is widespread and widely tolerated in the country, with dozens of immigrants killed and hundreds injured each year. The Moscow SOVA (Owl) Center for Information and Analysis, Russia’s leading xenophobia monitoring NGO, has been closely watching the multifarious Russian ultra-nationalist scene since the middle of this decade. According to SOVA, in 2004-2009, Russian racists killed on average between one and two persons per week – a death rate that has no equivalent anywhere in the world.

Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin’s has purposefully instrumentalised Russian imperial nostalgia, national pride, and ethnocentric thinking for the legitimisation of his authoritarian regime. These events are the repercussions of this strategy. Putin and his associates may have succeeded in consolidating their rule over the country today but ,at the same time, their manipulation of the national feelings and social anxieties of post-Soviet Russia’s crisis-stricken population has been a play with fire.

Neither the Russian nor the Western public have so far become fully aware of the magnitude of Russia’s neo-fascist subculture. The overwhelmingly ultra-nationalist Russian skinhead movement has been estimated to have between 20 and 70 thousand members – depending on the definition of such membership. In any way, this would seem to make the Russian skinheads the largest informal, clearly neo-fascist youth movement in the world.

A Fifa spokesman said. "There are eight years to go before the 2018 Fifa World Cup … In working with Fifa, we are confident that the Russian authorities will … ensure adequate security plans will be in place."

Trotsky and a pick in the head

On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in his home in Mexico with an ice-pick by undercover NKVD agent Ramón Mercader. Trotsky was taken to a hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day, dying at the age of 60 on 21 August 1940.

Trotsky developed the theory of the “degenerate workers' state”. He argued that the Soviet economy was basically socialist but that a party bureaucracy had smashed workers' control. Trotsky thought that the existence in Soviet Russia of nationalisation and planning meant that its economy had a socialist basis and that to establish socialism, only a political revolution displacing the bureaucracy was required, rather than a full social revolution as in the West. Trotsky’s mistake in equating state ownership with socialism prevented him realising the state capitalist nature of Russia. Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. However, the reality was that the apparatchik and nomenklatura in Russia constituted the capitalist class eating up surplus value.

Trotsky may have proclaimed that “socialism in one country” is impossible. But, it didn’t mean that he thought nothing could be done in one country if a vanguard was ruthless and determined enough it could, he argued, establish a “Workers State”, based on nationalisation and planning, i.e. that “state capitalism in one country” was possible.Trotsky can scarcely criticise Stalin for brutality, when he was as nearly as ruthless. In fact there is a good case that Stalin rose to power as part of a Stop-Trotsky faction, the fear that Trotsky as commander of the Red Army (with a predilection for being seen in public in military uniforms) could assume the role of a military dictator. Such fears would have been stoked by his support, in 1921, for the militarisation of labour.

Trotsky having been comprehensively out-manoeuvred by Stalin and driven out of Russia positioned himself as head of the loyal opposition to the Bolshevik regime, that he and his followers "maintained its fidelity to the official party to the very end” .

A contemporay article on the death of Trotsky can be read here

Trotsky - The Prophet De-bunked can be read here