The Colonial Gaze in Overdrive: The Latest Rumors and Allegations About the DPRK

Photo: KIM WON-JIN / Contributor / Getty Images

By Derek R. Ford

After weeks of wild speculation about his health, which began as rumors that he was undergoing surgery and escalated into claims that he had in fact died, Chairman Kim Jong Un visually appeared in the media at a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new fertilizer plant. It was yet another case of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK, or North Korea) magical ability to raise someone from the dead.

All of the think tank experts and media outlets are now struggling to confirm their initial theory by comparing the movement of Chairman Kim’s legs before his “disappearance” and during the ceremony and by ruminating on a “mysterious mark” on his wrist.

Lest the rumors die, on May 03 the South Korean military reported that four bullets fired from the north hit the wall of a South Korean guard post along the Demilitarized Zone. In response, troops in the south fired 20 warning shots.

A Joint Chiefs of Staff officer said the shots were unintentional, as conditions were foggy and the shots came when Korean People’s Army soldiers typically change shifts and check firearms. US Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo agreed with the assessment. Given the highly sensitive nature of the situation, the DPRK hasn’t formally responded at this point, and there hasn’t actually been any evidence confirming that the shots came from the north, let alone from the Korean People’s Army.

Despite this, speculation abounds that it was intentional. The most quoted source is Choi Kang, vice president of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, who told Reuters: “Yesterday, Kim was trying to show he is perfectly healthy, and today, Kim is trying to mute all kinds of speculation that he may not have full control over the military.”

Dr. Choi’s hypothesis might make sense if the DPRK’s military consisted of a few guys with guns. Maybe then it could be an assertion of control. But the country has an incredibly sophisticated military, and firing four rounds of ammunition isn’t much of a statement.

It might make sense if the DPRK had absolutely anything to gain from such an action. They don’t. In fact, such an action could only hurt them insofar as it is treated as a “provocative” action by the US. Whenever the DPRK does basically anything, from testing missiles to launching communications satellites, they’re quickly and routinely—and uniquely—condemned. This is an unjust situation, but one of which the North’s leadership is acutely aware. And now the United Nations Command is investigating to determine whether the shots violated the armistice agreement signed in 1953 to end—or pause—the US-led war against Korea.

It might make sense if the DPRK was looking to antagonize their fellow Koreans in the south. But that’s not the case. In April 2018, Chairman Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in signed the historic Panmunjom Declaration, the second point of which was to eliminate military tensions. Since then, the two states have made tremendous strides in doing so by removing landmines and dismantling guard posts. US war exercises have continued, although they have been significantly scaled back.

If you’re not visible, you don’t exist

More problematic with Choi’s assertion, however, one that accords with the rumors of Chairman Kim’s death, is the idea that Chairman Kim and the DPRK have something to “prove” to the West. The logic and force of the West’s colonial gaze is in full force here. Chairman Kim is injured or dead simply because he isn’t visible to the West, and the longer he isn’t visible the more likely it is he is dead. Now he’s “trying to show us” he has control of the military.

The colonialist framework holds that the colonized subject exists only insofar as they’re recognized by the colonizing power. This is the framework under which it’s logical for the colonizer to “discover” a land inhabited by people for centuries. After “discovery,” colonialism demands the constant visibility and transparency of the colonized. Any retreat from visibility into opacity is an affront to the colonial power. This explains the constant outrage from the West that the DPRK is “shrouded in secrecy” or a “hermit kingdom: because the West can’t have unfettered access, because they have to deal with assertions of national sovereignty, because they can’t send in weapons inspectors at the will.

The US is, for obvious reason, a significant factor in North Korea’s actions and policies. But as I heard Ri Ki Ho, representative of the DPRK’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in NYC, say at the 2019 Global Peace Forum on Korea: “we’re not obsessed with the US.”

Ri was speaking in the context of the nuclear talks between the US and DPRK, saying that whatever the US did or didn’t do, the DPRK would continue along the path it set forward. It makes perfect sense, but only if we divorce ourselves from the colonialist gaze.

My own take is that the rumors and accusations are primarily intended to halt inter-Korean cooperation. Thus, it’s not a coincidence that the rumors of Chairman Kim’s health coincided with the April 15 legislative elections in South Korea. The ruling Democratic Party and its allied Platform Party (which might be absorbed within the DPK) won a resounding victory, capturing 180 out of the 300 available seats in the National Assembly. The far-right, represented by the Unified Future Party, performed worse than they had in 60 years.

The election was partly a referendum on the Moon government’s engagement with the DPRK, which has encountered obstacle after obstacle primarily in the form of US sanctions and the domination of the US over South Korea’s military. The result was a clear affirmation of engagement, peace, and reunification with their fellow Korean people in the north.

The rumors and accusations, then, can be seen as an attempt to disorient and disillusion the hopes of the South Korean people, and to present these aspirations within Korea as an impossibility to the people of the world. They have the added benefit of obstructing any remaining possibility of a rapprochement between the US and DPRK under the Trump administration. Further, depending on the UNC findings, the accusations of gunfire may result in still more sanctions or something even worse.

Regardless of whatever rumors are flying, whatever allegations are in the air, whatever demonization campaign is circulating, the refrain of everyone interested in peace and justice is the same: The Korean people—in the southern and northern parts of the peninsula and in the diaspora—have the rights to peace, liberation, and self-determination, and we will do whatever we can to help them realize those rights.

Derek R. Ford is an educator and organizer, whose latest book is Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Resistance in the Time of Cholera: Preliminary Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

In Gabriel García Márquez’s classic Love in the Time of Cholera, cholera is both literal and metaphorical. So too is COVID-19. Not the virus itself necessarily (though its complicated emergence and uneven spread and effects surely implicates our current system), but the massive and largely preventable or treatable harms of the virus that have thus far gone largely unprevented and untreated are the metaphor. Not merely a metaphor, of course. Not a metaphor in the sense of being immaterial or unreal. Metaphor in the sense of representing something much more than itself, symbolizing that which is beyond itself.

Metaphor. Representation. Microcosm. Heuristic. Epitome. Choose your label. The key point is that we must pay attention to the important reality that if we focus exclusively on the COVID-19 pandemic from a medical or public health perspective we are going to miss most of what we must learn from and through this crisis. Unlike the bacterial cholera, the viral COVID-19 is not as easily treatable or preventable, though with an eventual vaccine it can become more preventable. Cholera persists for the same systemic reasons why COVID-19 and the flu persist. This is what global capitalism’s demands of sadistic efficiency and perverse profit-seeking produce. What these infections share is their dialectical imbrication within the same system that contains the potential technical means to humanely resolve various harms, but profits off of their continuation.

COVID-19 is only on our radar such as it is because of the inability of our unjust, unequal, irrational, sadistic, and undemocratic political economic system to care for all the people who need and deserve care in this world. It is the match on an accelerant-soaked woodpile. We should be paying attention less to the match and more on the precursory conditions. And this isn’t a suggestion we don’t also pay attention and attempt to organize around the specifics of the harmful effects of COVID-19 and the systemic failures specifically related to the current crisis. To not prioritize these immediate concerns would be ethically unconscionable and politically unsound. People have immediate needs. This is instead a call, as I’ve written before in a different context, to focus on the forest and the trees.

What can resistance look like before we regain the option to gather in public together and protest and lead campaigns for the necessary radical reforms needed in the short-term? What can it look like given that we then must necessarily aim towards the more systemic, revolutionary changes needed to produce a democratic, egalitarian post-capitalist world – a genuinely democratic, socialist world?

Theodor Adorno wrote of the splinter in the eye that becomes a magnifying glass. Who has the splinters in their eyes right now (beyond the everyday splinters that all precarious workers, poor, and oppressed peoples have in their eyes)? The immunocompromised. The elderly. Those without insurance or are underinsured. The otherwise at-risk. The already-infected. Our healthcare workers. Logistics, factory, and warehouse workers.

These people are already facing the tip of the spear. For many, the spear has already pierced the skin. These are the best sites of contestation and struggle at the moment. For those in other industries who are not on the front lines of the current crisis, what can we do? We can prepare for the post-social distancing struggles. We can support those who are in need and in struggle today. And we can engage in a wider array of solidarity-building activities that reach those people who are waking up politically during this pandemic. These are our best tools—and they are tools that are not unique to this crisis.

Right now, basically all forms of conventional public resistance would do more harm than good—perhaps with the exception of strikes (or preferably, strong strike-threats that are more likely than ever to be acceded to without need to resort to an actual work stoppage). It is hard to imagine a more sympathetic group of workers at the moment, with greater power to inspire fundamental systemic change, than our front-line healthcare workers. So long as they are put at disproportionate risk, not wholly different from their pre-pandemic workplace experiences no doubt, they could and should demand the world.

This isn’t just about leveraging this crisis to win previously needed workplace safety reforms and benefit increases though, while “essential workers” have much more power that they have ever had before (or at least experiencing a greater awareness of their latent political-economic power). The fights that were on-going before the crisis remain. In the US, we have immigrants in concentration camps. We have a racialized mass incarceration system. Endless warfare remains endless. Most people are struggling week-to-week to make ends meet, often to no avail. We are also seeing states like Texas and Ohio prohibit abortion procedures under the guise of bans on non-essential medical procedures. Shove a fetus inside one of these wealthy white, straight male GOP lawmakers and see if they don’t think its removal is essential. We need to keep our eyes open and voices loud, however we can.

While there are many aspects of the variable and uneven government responses to stopping the spread of COVID-19 (“flattening the curve” through differentially enforced “social distancing” and “test, track, and trace” approaches) that are absolutely vital to avoiding a more massive death toll than anyone wants to think about; they should not be viewed as permanently inviolable rules that all should follow as long as they’re told. They are also not innocuous, even so long as we are participating. Even a necessary policy is not necessarily wholly virtuous. There are questions of privacy and data-profiteering to be concerned about. While we should always be skeptical of enhancements to the power of the national security state, it does seem like compliance is the lesser evil at the moment. That may change, if things get far worse and governments fail to response adequately and justly. I write this not be produce this outcome sooner. I write it so you will be prepared to think differently about the current public health demands being placed on billions of people around the world. No one must stay home to die when acting publicly can save lives.

That said, people won’t—or shouldn’t—long withstand the demand from the capitalist class and their ideological snake oil salespeople that people go to work and die for the short-term profits of corporations, nor will they stay home and suffer, perhaps to death. At least, I see enough reason to be optimistic that people will not tolerate either of these developments. People have been made—conditioned—to withstand much over many, many decades of capitalist violence and exploitation, suffering irrationally without any sense of what possible alternatives are achievable in practice. While it is possible people will “choose” to suffer more, I have hope that this time things will be different. Either genuine socialist demands are won, or capitalism should not be allowed to be resuscitated. Either the people are resuscitated and healed, made more whole than capitalism ever allowed before, or capitalism should be allowed to die—and a new order built on its ungrievable ashes.

We are in a paradoxical, indeed dialectical, moment (though, within capitalism, when aren’t we?). The response we need to this crisis—the twin-crisis of COVID-19 and capitalism—is organized, collective, mass democratic action. Yet this is precisely what good public health guideline compliance prohibits. Still, we must comply. Compliance today is solidarity. Even if that may change, today it is undeniably true. Stay home. Wash your hands. Use the technologies available to check-in on others. This is what we can do. But the contradictions of organizing within capitalism, the extreme difficulty in getting people to show up and stand out, are not particular to the COVID-19 pandemic. We cannot do what must be done, but too many people weren’t doing what was politically necessary two months ago either. This is something we must reflect on and be honest about. This is not an indictment. It is a call for political growth.

We can use technologies to do some things, but not what is fully-required in this moment. If you’re reading this right now and are thinking, “he is wrong and I have the answer,” please speak up. We need questions and critique as ever before, but we also need answers and alternatives perhaps more than ever before. At least as much as before.

Of course, it is a cruel irony that for many people for whom work is a major time and energy occupier during “normal” times, for whom work is the primary barrier to more fully committed organizing and activist, that these people who have more time to spend on political activities are now required to stay home. I know for many people there is no irony at all; either their work responsibilities have remained unchanged (or increased) or their care and home labor obligations have increased in precise quantity to the amount their waged work requirements have diminished. For many, both sides have increased. This is not a cruel irony. It is, simply, a cruelty.

However, the cruelest irony is that we continue to live in a global society that could, actually quite easily provide for all the basic needs, and possibly beyond, for all people on this planet, and yet we are compelled to live within a system that prevents that from becoming a reality; a system that actively undermines that possibility at nearly every turn.

Postscript

I was wrong several weeks ago when I compared COVID-19 to the flu (though at that time the data was so sketchy and testing so incomplete, the 1% morality rate seemed like an exaggeration. Globally, today the percentage is closer to .5%, which is still roughly five times higher than the flu). When I said what I said, it was not to diminish the suffering or severity of COVID-19, but a somewhat misguided attempt to highlight just how many people die from the flu every year. Compare the typical response and outrage to annual flu death to that of COVID-19, and you would be left with the sad truth that no one fucking cares if people die from the flu, apparently. COVID-19 is both more contagious and deadly, but at some point we should probably have a conversation about why so many people die unnecessarily from the flu….

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University and also teaches as an adjunct professor at Florida International University. He is a contributing editor for the Hampton Institute and founding curator of  LeftHooked, a monthly socialist media aggregator and review powered by the Hampton Institute. Bryant is also the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power. He is the co-editor (with Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; Haymarket 2020), and author of “Dialectical Ends and Beginning: Why Barbarism at the End of Capitalism Means Barbarism Beyond Capitalism” in Postcapitalist Futures: Political Economy Beyond Crisis and Hope (eds. Adam Fishwick and Nicholas Kiersey, forthcoming with Pluto Press).

Joe Biden’s Iraq War Vote is Disqualifying

(Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

By Charles Wofford

Question: What happens if you kill several pedestrians because of a driving mistake?

Answer: You lose your license, probably do a lengthy prison sentence, and pay some hefty fines.

Question: What happens if you kill hundreds of thousands of people because of a “mistake” in governance?

Answer: You get to run for president.

In 8th grade, I marched with about a thousand others in downtown Flagstaff, AZ against the impending war in Iraq pushed by the Bush Administration. I was one of many: the war in Iraq saw some of the largest anti war demonstrations in recorded history, with over 3,000 separate events from 2002 through 2003, often happening simultaneously across multiple continents. I remember enduring the petty warmongering of my school teachers, some of whom thought that we ought to also invade North Korea, unaware – or uncaring – that millions would have died. I remember being told time and again that the Iraqi people did not understand democracy and we had to teach them how civilization worked. I recall the Bush Administration declaring that it would no longer respect the sovereignty of nations, but would seek out and destroy “terrorists” (a vague label with varying definitions even within the U.S. government) wherever it found them. It was a declaration of war against the entire world. I remember how apparently respectable intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens revealed themselves as false prophets, conveniently becoming wealthier and better known in the process.

Now, as then, only the far-right fringe supported the invasion. But in 2003, those people happened to be in power. Because the war was based on a lie, everyone who died in it died in vain. American soldiers did not die supporting our freedoms or rights; they died to further the corporate interests of oil tycoons such as then-Vice President and ex-CEO of Halliburton Dick Cheney. It also means that the hundreds of thousands of slain Iraqis were not merely killed, but murdered. The foundational claim of the entire war was a lie. Therefore it was not justified, and the unjustified taking of another’s life is called murder. The United States leaders who waged that war are responsible for the murders of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The war in Iraq was an atrocity. It destroyed an entire country and cast an entire region into chaos. According to a study by The Lancet, over 600,000 Iraqis had died by the end of 2006 from both violence and infrastructure ruination caused by the war, a number which is surely much higher now in 2020. Even more horrifying, Iraq has been turned into a radioactive dump. The catastrophic effect of radiation poisoning on the population is well documented, despite attempts to cover it up. Cancer rates are significantly higher in Iraq than in any industrialized nation, and congenital birth defects are extremely common. Even American soldiers are developing cancer at elevated rates. The depleted uranium used by the U.S. military in Iraq has a half life of 4.5 billion years, which means that we can expect the sun to turn into a red giant by the time Iraq is clean again. The poisoning of a nation is an atrocity on top of the war itself, and especially so in this time of global ecological crisis. This is Hitler level destruction, and Joe Biden was right there supporting it. Now he wants to be president, because, in his own words, he “knows more than most people know,” since he’s “been around a long time.” 

How can Joe Biden say that this crime, this atrocity for which he voted, was a mistake? How can he look himself in the mirror having supported the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and just say “oops?” How can he look at this radioactive genocide and not recognize his complicity? Does not his very failure to do so add to the case that he is unfit to lead? He says he voted for the war to try and prevent a war, which makes no sense. Biden has been criticized for seeming out of touch, and people are wondering about his mental fitness. But even back in 2003, he showed an inability to make sound judgments. Moreover, at the time of his vote on the Iraq War, Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an ideal spot to have a privileged view into the evidence for and against the war. His excuses do not add up; even an 8th grader had better judgment. To be a leader means to some degree to anticipate, to see further than others. Does Joe Biden see further than others?

It is one thing to make a mistake, to make a serious mistake, or even to make a mistake that hurts people. But if Joe Biden genuinely recognized any wrongdoing, he would not be running for president. Should not the magnitude of his error disqualify him from holding public office, especially the highest office in the land? Should he not at least have the decency to let someone else lead the country? This is not like using the wrong form of “there” in a high school essay, or buying decaf; this error resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and enormous ecological destruction. What is this man doing running for president at all?

Were the United States held to the standards of international law, Joe Biden would face a lengthy prison sentence, as would Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, and other senators and representatives who supported that war. The leaders and architects such as President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and others would likely have been executed. The same would be true of those generals who first put depleted uranium into U.S. weaponry starting back in the first Gulf War. After all, we put Nazis to death at Nuremberg merely on grounds of conspiring against peace. 

Having protested the Iraq Atrocity, I cannot now in good conscience vote for someone who supported it (no, I did not vote for Clinton in 2016 and I do not regret that decision). What kind of choice is it between voting for a rapist or voting for a war criminal? Who will lecture me on Donald Trump as “the most dangerous president in history” (Sanders)? Who would dare bring up “lesser evilism” when Joe Biden is party to mass murder? Who will presume to take the moral high ground when defending someone who was “tricked” by the oh-so-cunning Bush Administration into supporting an atrocity? 

Charles Wofford is pursuing a PhD in historical musicology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Brexit: The Death Rattle of British Imperialism

By Red Fightback

The British ruling class stands at a precipice. It has now been over 3 years since the 2016 EU referendum, in which the British people are alleged to have democratically decided the country’s future. The last few months in particular have seen the British ruling class plunged into near insurmountable crisis, and exposed the superficiality of capitalist “democracy” itself. Meanwhile, the working classes, who have suffered decades of austerity under successive Tory and Labour governments, are set to face ever-worsening conditions in the context of generalised economic crisis, against a backdrop of increased police presence and a strengthening of the racist border regime.

Seen in its proper historical context, Brexit was a farcical outcome of long-standing divisions within the British ruling-class, related to broader contradictions between the global imperialist powers. Britain is among the oldest of the imperialist powers. Once the dominant imperialist force in the world, able to call almost a third of the world’s resources to its aid, it has long since found itself pushed closer and closer to the precipice of destruction. The precipice, catalysed by a new era of inter-imperialist rivalries, particularly rising contradictions between Britain and the US and EU imperialist blocs, has now taken a concrete form: Brexit. As the sun begins to set for good on the British empire, we must investigate how this has occurred, and what the outlook is for the labouring masses.

We recently published a rigorous rebuttal of Corbyn and the Labour Party’s ‘radical’ credentials, which we recommend reading first. In this article, we summarise the causes of Brexit, and demonstrate why solutions offered by both Brexiters and Remainers, and Tories and Corbynites, are fundamentally anti-working class. While the EU is an inherently imperialist and anti-working-class institution, and we recognise that membership thereof and socialism are incompatible, a “working-class Brexit” was never on the table. Many ‘socialists’, including the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain (which retains some influence in the trade union movement), think that Brexit would provide conditions for a national path of socialist development in Britain, by undermining the strength of international finance capital, mediated through the City of London. Putting aside the fact that global economic conditions couldn’t be more distant from the post-war economic boom, ‘Lexiters’ evade the fundamental question of working-class control and ownership of the state and economy, and narrowly focus on ‘the City’ as the source of Britain’s woes, while relying on misleading and euphemistic rhetoric about the “traditional” working class “left behind”.

Even before the dominance of the financial sector, the social-democratic Labour Party always took the side of capital, consistently setting the police and even troops against workers’ movements, implementing ruthless cuts at times of economic difficulty, and perpetuating bloody imperialism abroad. Many Lexiters present a dangerous myth of a pre-Thatcher ‘golden era’ to justify their total opportunistic subservience to Corbyn’s old-school Labour Party. Left Remainers too, like the Another Europe is Possible campaign, draw on a romanticised and irrelevant vision of social democracy or “democratic socialism”.

Red Fightback recognises that the only acceptable and viable solution to Britain’s political crisis is a united, revolutionary working-class movement against austerity, racism and the capitalist system of exploitation.

Britain in the post-war world order: the parasitism of British imperialism

It is important, first of all, to place Brexit in its proper historical context. Both left-wing Remainers and Brexiters draw on a misleading myth of a benevolent post-war social democracy in Britain; a golden age the country must ‘return’ to; at the same time, many see Brexit as a historical aberration that suddenly threw the country into chaos. No historical events happen outside of the inescapable interconnection they have with each other, and neither can Brexit be understood without looking back at the path British imperialism has taken in the last few decades.

What we have been able to refer to as the world order up until 2016 was brewed up in meeting rooms across the US and Europe, from 1945 onwards, as the imperialist West mapped out its journey beyond the shadows of the Second World War. The situation in Europe was dire, and the outcome of the war called for a radical rebalancing of the scales of world dominance and power. US capital forged a new dominant position for itself, as European powers battled the challenge of post-war recovery and lost their formal colonial empires. British hegemony faded as well, and the position of the world's foremost imperialist power passed onto the US, evidenced in phenomena such as the rise of the dollar as the world's primary currency.

Beyond post-war reconstruction and its war debt, the position of British imperialism was most markedly affected by the loss of its physical empire, as the long-oppressed colonised peoples of the empire fought for independence. Politically, its image as a dominating power truly began to shatter after the so-called Suez Crisis in 1956, when Britain and France engineered an Israeli invasion of Egypt, in response to Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez canal (used for oil transport). However, the transition had begun as early as 1947, with the formal independence of India. Decolonisation must also be viewed in the context of US-Soviet antagonism; as the latter supported national liberation on anti-imperialist grounds, the former encouraged a superficial decolonisation where imperialism functioned indirectly through western-aligned local elites (‘neocolonialism’). British capital navigated this period in a number of ways: it anticipated the loss of its colonial empire and strove primarily to avoid the rise of communism and place heavy neocolonial shackles on the newly-independent nations; it installed the welfare state partly as a concession after decades of intense working-class struggle, and partly as a pacification measure funded by colonial exploitation; and it set the foundation for the establishment of the City of London as the world's leading financial centre to preserve British relevance and the survival of British imperialism. As shown by political economists P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, the priority of British imperialism in the period immediately following the war was to resume the construction and development of the Sterling Area, which had begun with its formalisation in 1940 and continued with the restoration of full convertibility in 1958. After the war, Britain’s capacity to manipulate sterling balances created extremely favourable (extortionate) terms of trade with its raw material-producing colonies and neo-colonies.

The end of the gold standard and the rise of the US dollar in its place through the Bretton Woods system helped the Sterling Area survive a little longer; however, the late 1950s consolidated the awareness, among British financiers, that the Sterling Area provided less opportunity than the rest of the world. The devaluation crisis of 1967 was the final blow for sterling; by then, decolonisation was nearly complete across the former Empire. This was not a peaceful process: there was, for instance, the so-called Malaya emergency, in truth a bloody and brutal counterinsurgency operation (presided over by a Labour government) against the Malayan Communist Party, and the murderous colonial war against the Mau Mau in Kenya. Both of these, coincidentally, were later used by Britain to justify its obscene delusion that it had perfected its “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency technique, which it went on to export to occupied Ireland and lend to the US empire for use in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ‘humanitarianism’ of this technique is, of course, a lie, and the brutality of colonial violence in all of these regions proves it.

As history shows – and in direct contradiction to arguments of left-wing Brexiters that British imperialism dissolved into European imperialism – British capital continued to look out for itself as it moved through the post-1945 world order. Its relationship with the US, at times both competitive and cooperative, meant that it accepted the US dollar as the world currency, yet focused on building a solid foundation for itself as a key part of the imperialist system. The strategy, developed by the jointly operating capitalist class and political leadership – as is the habit in an imperialist state – was based on “the smooth dismantling of empire in which the City's interests were largely preserved” (White, 2000). This was both an opportunity and a response to a very real impasse. As the empire formally (but not truly!) decolonised and accepted US hegemony, it was no longer as easy for Britain to directly live off the colonial dividends of oppressed nations spread across continents. British domestic capital was unable to compete on the world market. Britain was faced with the same realisation it is facing now – what claim can a nation with diminished standing have on an honourable place among the imperialist powers? Within the geopolitical reality of the era, there arose a choice: become a junior partner to the US, or join the construction of a new imperialist bloc, led by French and German capital?

The winning move for British capital came in the form of its positioning as a bridge between Washington and Brussels – a middle-man of international capital, able to facilitate financial transactions between the world's most powerful capitalists. Using its relationship with US capital and its pre-existing influential position in the world financial market, British capital raised its crown jewel – the City of London – to the status of a global financial centre, and the lifeline of British imperialism. The City had been a central hub of international capital since the 18th century, replacing Amsterdam and becoming a crucial part in the development of industry as an irreplaceable provider of imperialist credit for British industrial capital. Its significance as a banking centre grew as the role of the banks in facilitating the movement of capital increased and their merger with industrial capital progressed. The City was soon enough an excrescence on the sickly body of the British mainland, whose manufacturing power began to vanish in favour of the unstoppable growth of London's financial sector. The turning point came in the 50s, when the Eurodollar market exploded, as Britain essentially tolerated a regulation loophole in order to reap the benefits of the competitive advantage this provided (Schenk, 1998). Contrary to the mythology invoked by left-wing Brexiters and Remainers – of a peaceful social democracy only disrupted by Thatcher’s neoliberal assault – it was “socialist” Labour that began an offensive against the working-class in response to global economic crisis. In 1975-6, Labour sought two IMF loans to reinforce the pound and save the City’s financial sector. This was accompanied with public spending cuts of £3 billion, along with wage controls during a time of price inflation. The final steps were the removal of foreign exchange controls in 1979 and the “Big Bang”, or the stock exchange deregulation seven years later in 1986, both enacted by the Thatcher government. Following the latter event, “the average daily turnover of the London Stock Exchange rose from 500 million pounds in 1986 to over $2 billion in 1995”.  This was a conscious decision to boost finance while abandoning the industrial sector, in order to build an economy based almost entirely on extracting and processing imperialist super-profits. This was accompanied by a militaristic assault on the industrial working class in the North and Midlands of Britain and Wales, firstly under Wilson’s and Callaghan’s Labour, and then Thatcher.

The UK essentially depends on its capacity to attract US and European imperialist finance, but it also still plays a directly imperialist role, predicated on financial extortion against the Global South: several years after the collapse of the USSR, ‘Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean were together paying Britain £2,493m more annually than they got in official grants, voluntary aid, export credits, bank loans and direct investments from the UK.’[3] A 2016 report showed 101 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, mostly British, collectively control over one trillion dollars’ worth of Africa’s most valuable mineral resources.

In essence, the British ruling class carved a unique and valuable position amongst global capitalists as the broker of wealth between US and EU capital. This position allowed British imperialism to limp parasitically onwards, sustained by the favourable trade and currency deals between the two giants, able to rake in dividends from both the US and the EU imperialist bloc. This is only an extension of how British imperialism survives on wealth extracted through mechanisms of neocolonialism; to put it simply, “Britain uses the financial system to gain economic privileges by appropriating value from other countries while appearing to do them a service” (Norfield, 2016). British imperialism continues to earn “a net £30bn from financial services and even larger sums from its foreign investments”. Ironically enough, British media has been decrying the imminent death of the City ever since the referendum, as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Citigroup collectively moved over $500bn of balance-sheet assets from London to Frankfurt and Dublin. Other sources show that the British financial services sector has moved nearly £1 trillion to the EU since the 2016 vote.

This parasitism has characterised the British position in the world for the last 60 years, which also gives it an enormous incentive to join the US in interfering with other countries. The capitalist system must go on unbothered. So, as Marxist economist Tony Norfield puts it, what does Britain do? How does it make a living? In his words:

Britain is extremely dependent on the revenues from financial services trading and direct investment. The British state’s promotion of the financial sector, especially from the 1980s, built on its existing advantages in the world economy, and the City of London became the broker of the world. Its financial dealings draw in the money and investment funds of the whole planet, from which it derives dealing revenues, and they provide the funds for the outflow of British direct investment to exploit higher profits from overseas.

This is the foundation of British imperialism, and its continuation is the unifying cause of British politics. It is why, despite deindustrialisation, the ruling class in Britain manages to extract enormous profits – there are over 150 billionaires living in Britain – while millions upon millions are kept in poverty and perpetual employment insecurity.

Britain and EU imperialism

This repositioning of British imperialism took place as French and German capital moved to build their new imperialist tactical alliance, and Britain did not at all forget about the EU throughout this time. While the preservation of independence was a priority for at least a fraction of British capital, integration in a Europe persistent in its mission to build a new imperialist bloc to prevent another war, and create the capacity for Europe to rival the US and the Soviet Union, was very appealing. What we now know as the EU began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) at the beginning of the 1950s. The ECSC was founded in direct opposition to the risk of imperialist competition leading to imperialist war. Another war of redivision would have remained a risk without the minimisation of competition in key markets such as coal and steel. At the same time, the US promoted Western European integration through its Marshall Plan as a means of isolating Warsaw Pact countries and containing Soviet influence; strengthening the imperialist NATO alliance, and securing petrodollar markets.

It is important to note that this uneasy relationship between Europe and the US, which had gained tutelage over Europe and was promoting its integration, yet would come to fear its rise as an imperialist rival, was managed in part through the establishment of NATO in 1949. The treaty established US military dominance in Europe and military dependence on US forces; later, after the end of the Cold War, it consolidated itself as a vehicle of imperialist brutality, evidenced through interventions such as in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Today, despite being “brain dead” by its’ leaders own admission, it continues to fulfil its role of “containing” Russia and ensuring that Eastern Europe is packed full of US troops, military equipment, “dark” interrogation sites, and so on.

The alliance of Franco-German capital that was to become the EU proceeded towards further cooperation in 1957, with the foundation of the European Economic Community. Britain remained reluctant with regard to European integration up until the success of Franco-German capital, powered by the EEC, convinced British capital that it would be advantageous to participate in the new European project. Ten years later, in 1967, when the Sterling Area was on its deathbed and decolonisation (or rather, recolonisation under new terms) was nearly complete, admission into the European Economic Community (EEC) and the common market was a shared goal among most British politicians. At the time, French President de Gaulle was saying no to Britain for a second time. Dissent had already made itself visible, but Labour leader Harold Wilson refused to legitimise the faction of anti-European campaigners who did oppose integration.

Britain finally joined the EEC in 1973 under the Conservative government of Edward Heath. Two years later, Labour lost a referendum aimed at overturning integration, and Britain was firmly on the path to merging with the European bloc. Labour though soon settled into Britain’ role as dual servicer of US and European finance. Also during this time, “socialist” Labour joined the EEC in propping up Portuguese fascism, as well as white supremacist rule throughout southern Africa, where Britain had extensive mining interests.

This does not mean, of course, that British capital was ever the vanguard of integration. Indeed, dissent persisted from very early on within the capitalist class, due to the inherent instability of a European project based on German leadership and French toleration. A key opponent to further integration was Margaret Thatcher herself, who famously returned a defiant “no, no, no” to President of the European Commission Jacques Delors in 1990, with regard to the latter's proposal to formalise European institutions such as the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers into the supranational decision-making bodies they are today. Aiming to preserve a level of independence, particularly with regard to currency and monetary policy, Britain always sought special terms and conditions.

A particularly devastating moment for Britain, and one that added fuel to the anti-EU fire was so-called Black Wednesday in 1992. Britain had entered the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1990. The City had unconditionally chosen the EU in order to destroy all remaining barriers on capital flow and accumulation. The ERM was in a way the precursor of the euro, and as such Britain was pushed by its financial sector into the scheme. However, the British economy was too weak to keep up with the European Currency Unit (ECU), and Britain was forced to withdraw from the ERM in September 1992. Black Wednesday triggered an ever-growing wave of anti-EU sentiment throughout the British capitalist class, and particularly in the Conservative party, which only added fuel to the fire started that same year by the Maastricht Treaty. The Treaty transformed the European Communities into the European Union, and set the stage for the creation of the euro, through clauses that sought to regulate members' fiscal policies. The so-called “Maastricht Rebels” opposed the Treaty, and they opposed John Major's government so heavily throughout the mid-90s that the split eventually cost them the 1997 election. UKIP was also born out of this schism, with the Anti-Federalist League as its predecessor. Nigel Farage also left the Tories in 1992 in disagreement with the Treaty. Another visible example of dissent was James Goldsmith's foundation of the Referendum Party in 1994 - indeed, most of its former candidates were recruited to UKIP by Farage.

It is important to be clear that the EU always was, and still is, an anti-working class and imperialist endeavour. With the capitalist counterrevolution in the former USSR, the EU imposed economic ‘shock therapy’ on Eastern Europe, slashing public jobs and gutting social security; thereby creating the conditions that have led to the rise of fascism in the region. Left Remainers rightly point out that xenophobia dominated the Brexit campaign, but hypocritically they ignore the racist reality of the EU. The ‘Fortress Europe’ policy in Western Europe has dehumanised and caused systemic violence against non-EU migrants. Western Europe refuses to take responsibility for the millions of refugees displaced by decades of imperialist interventions in the Middle East and North Africa. Recent EU bailouts have served to prop up especially German and French banks which had taken on government debt in floundering southern European countries. The bailouts were accompanied with sweeping privatizations and cuts in the debtor countries. After the Troika’s intervention, Greece’s economy collapsed by 30% while pensions and wages fell catastrophically by 40%. The rapid capitulation of Greece’s “democratic socialist” party, Syriza, to international finance should be a clear warning for those placing all their hopes in social democracy.

The two factions, pro- and anti-EU, only grew further apart during the Blair era. It is this antagonism that brewed up for almost two decades, and finally, 3 years ago, managed to overturn decades of integration (which fuelled the most shameless parasitic exploitation) and throw British imperialism into crisis. Throughout the previous 50 years, Britain had been able to fully take advantage of the favourable position it had manoeuvred itself into. With a foot in Brussels and one in Washington, but its head firmly in the City of London, the British capitalist class facilitated the movement of capital between continents and lived almost exclusively off the interest, dividends, finder's-fees, and other kickbacks it received from this arrangement. However, this favourable position for the British ruling class was always going to run out of borrowed time. For one, a country so embedded in international finance, with no solid domestic economic foundation to fall back on, will be much more vulnerable to looming future crises. Indeed, Britain is yet to recover from the 2008 financial crisis.

Secondly, with inter-imperialist rivalry once again on the horizon, the unsustainability of British parasitic imperialism is exposed for all to see. As capitalism falls deeper into crisis and the world is entirely divided between great powers, the expansion of the EU imperialist bloc has necessarily forced it into competition against the US and its dominance. Since the 2008/9 global financial crisis, contradictions within the imperialist power bloc (USA, Britain, West Europe and Japan) have been spilling over. The limits of US dominance were recently displayed by its inability to topple the Russian-backed Assad government in Syria. France and Germany are looking to increase their independence from the US, notably via the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia. The situation is one of geopolitical volatility, seen most recently with the flagrant assassination by the US of the leading military figure in Iran, an oil-rich country which deals with Russia, China and the EU. Britain is now forced to decide upon its favoured ally. That is to say, the contradiction in the British position has forced the hand of the British ruling class by seeing them hold a referendum that would decide, supposedly, if Britain would favour involvement in the EU bloc, or if Britain would favour greater involvement in US imperialism, as has happened with the Brexit referendum.

In reality then, far from being a new battleground in British politics (as some would claim), Brexit is a symptom of a long-standing ruling class disagreement between which would be of more benefit; greater ties with the EU, or greater ties to the US. It is not in itself the principal political battleground, which is between the capitalist class and the increasingly-squeezed working class.

The referendum: democracy for whom?

This antagonism came to a head in the few years leading up to 2016. In 2013, David Cameron, a Europhile, called a referendum on EU membership, in an opportunistic bluff calculated to win over UKIP voters and stabilise Conservative power by shattering the Eurosceptic wing of the party. As we strive to make sense of Brexit, the myths centred on a supposed democratic referendum, where the voice of the people broke through the manoeuvres of the “political elites”, must be denounced and debunked. In reality, the true character of the referendum - a factional war within the British capitalist class - shone through from the beginning, both in how the choice was presented, and in the real outcomes it presented for the working class.

While immediately, the referendum on EU membership was an expression of inter-imperialist rivalries at a time of global economic downturn, the political campaigns were largely centred on the ‘issue’ of immigration. As journalist Paul Foot observed in 1976: “Race hate and race violence does not rise and fall according to the numbers of immigrants coming to Britain. It rises and falls to the extent to which people’s prejudices are inflamed and made respectable by politicians and newspapers”.

An especially graphic moment came when Leave.EU – a UKIP-led organisation, co-founded by capitalist Arron Banks – produced a racist poster showing Middle Eastern refugees queuing at Europe’s borders. A day after this ‘Breaking Point’ billboard went up, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a white supremacist connected to Britain First. In this context, the argument that Brexit lacked racist implications because much of the immigration in question is European is facile. The most striking characteristic of Brexit-related racial violence (which includes some 6,000 reported racist hate crimes in the four weeks following the referendum) was ‘the way its perpetrators made little attempt to distinguish between black and brown citizens and white European migrants – in their eyes, they were all outsiders.’[5]

Restricting the number of immigrant workers in the British economy is one of the primary objectives of Brexit; nationalistic and racist sentiments, particularly prevalent in rural and deprived areas with few immigrants, but also among the metropolitan middle classes, see foreigners as the reason for their low wages and lack of job opportunities.

Racist conspiracy theories about immigrants who “take advantage” of the British welfare system by going on benefits and not contributing to society also fuelled the Leave vote. These same conspiracy theories have been used as justification to decimate what little welfare state still remains. However, according to most research (including the government’s own reports), immigration does not push down local wages or increase unemployment. Nevertheless, this rhetoric was used by both right-wing groups and Labour. Should Brexit take place, immigrant workers will face the brunt of the effects. The deaths of 39 young Vietnamese people found in a lorry in Essex were only one especially shocking instance of the systemic violence migrants are subjected to. The “hostile environment” will undoubtedly worsen as the government further strengthens its border controls, increases deportations and places more and more restrictions on who can enter the country. Restrictive Visa requirements will lead to migrant workers accepting more and more exploitative working conditions, as a refusal to do so would mean unemployment and thus deportation. The strengthening of the border will mean increased government surveillance on migrant communities in an attempt to catch “illegal” immigrants.

Restriction of immigrant labour will not solve the problem of poverty and exploitation within Britain, as this is the nature of the capitalist economic system; therefore, as conditions continue to worsen (and the burden of this will primarily be on immigrant communities), it is likely that anti-immigrant sentiment will continue to increase. This, coupled with the government's increasing emphasis on creating hostile conditions for immigrants and the tighter restrictions on immigrant labour, will mean that the living conditions of immigrants (both from the EU and from the rest of the world) will only continue to get worse. The government will remain bound by World Trade Organization rules and free trade agreements, which all call for a reduction in barriers to trade (i.e. labour protections and rights), so the situation will remain bad for all workers in this case. No one wins; neither the ‘British’ workers, nor the immigrant workers.

Of course, it is not surprising that the ruling classes were able to use the issue of immigration to craft the Brexit narrative. Centuries of imperialist plunder have generated a certain structural white privilege, which has led some white workers to incorrectly, and short-sightedly, respond to their own hardships by seeking to narrowly defend their relative privileges – in employment, housing allocation, social security provision etc. – instead of joining with workers of colour in combating the overarching conditions of capitalist exploitation. Anti-immigrant sentiments have, however, been overwhelmingly manufactured by political elites. Bourgeois politicians have particularly sought to distract from the neoliberal assault on the entire working class, by appealing to a uniform ‘white working class’ identity – and in the process, erasing histories of multiracial proletarian solidarity, such as at the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street, or the Grunwick film processing plant dispute led by Asian women.

Indeed, many Lexiters have responded to Corbyn’s recent election defeat by parroting euphemistic right-wing rhetoric about the “traditional” (i.e. white) working class “left behind” in the North and Midlands, whose “authentic” demands were supposedly betrayed by Labour’s call for a second referendum. This narrative has manifold problems, including the reality that the working-class poor in the metropole are equally left behind. The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) has for instance adopted the slogan ‘British workers demand Brexit’. This is disingenuous: the Brexit vote was disproportionately delivered by the ‘propertied, pensioned, well-off, white middle class based in southern England’; and the proportion of Leave voters in the lowest two social classes (the so-called precariat) was just 24%[6]. It is certainly true that many workers saw the referendum as a means to register their class-based anger towards the political establishment. For decades the working-class in former manufacturing regions have been attacked by successive Tory and Labour governments, but crucially it is the duty of socialists to foreground the pivotal issue of working-class control of the state and economy, rather than pandering to vague chauvinist sentiments, or promoting conspiratorial notions of ‘cosmopolitanism’/‘multiculturalism’. Given their lack of any strong internationalist or revolutionary perspectives, Lexiters, who often themselves adopt reactionary nationalist rhetoric, have played directly into the hands of the Right.

The notion Brexit was a working-class victory is farcical. More than half the donations made during the referendum campaign came from just ten wealthy donors. The Brexit camp, including Leave.EU and the official Vote Leave campaign led by Tory elites like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (and a sprinkling of Labour MPs), enjoyed the greater share of elite funding. The Leavers received £17.5 million of the donations – ‘almost exactly one vote for every pound given towards the Brexit campaign’ – compared to Remain’s £14.2 million. Brexit was secured by targeted advertising campaigns, stolen data, fake social media accounts and overrun spending limits. If we were to also consider those who were won over by loosely defined promises of “taking back control”, or of £350 million a week for the NHS, and compare these tall tales with the real causes of Brexit, the idea of a democratic referendum loses any kind of connection with reality.

The left-wing Remainers, however – foremost among them, the Corbynite and ex-Trotskyist Paul Mason – are no better. They believe in a “progressive” Europe; a notion based on the myth that reformist social democracy can ‘tame’ capitalism. Left Remainers point to the relative stability of the post-war economic boom period, but the conditions for this model no longer exist. Even if they did, social democracy, including “socialist” Labour, has never had any no qualms about turning on the working class at the first sign of trouble. We stand in solidarity with EU workers facing the erosion of their rights, but we cannot do so without maintaining a correct assessment of the EU as an anti-worker organisation - in fact, EU labour migration happens predominantly from its southern and eastern ‘periphery’ to its western ‘core’, being only a reflection of the wider global value extraction from South to North. This cannot be ignored, and any response by EU workers to the prospect of a hard Brexit must take into account the hostile environment faced by non-EU migrant workers for years, and forge true internationalist solidarity out of this struggle.

Neither were Left-wing Brexiters (‘Lexiters’), like the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party leader Alex Callinicos, and the Communist Party of Britain, correct in their optimistic assessment that the referendum was a working-class victory because of its supposed effect on EU imperialism. They correctly identify the imperialist and anti-working-class character of the EU, but they wrongly view imperialism as a unified bloc, and thus portray Brexit as a tactical anti-imperialist decision. The most extreme example of this line comes from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which argued that ‘the votes of the xenophobes will be what is needed to pull Britain out of the EU come the referendum on 23 June this year – which will in all probability prove disastrous for British imperialism.’ Lexiters ignore the existence of inter-imperialist divisions. Post-Brexit Britain, whether led by Johnson or a Labour government, expects to retain close relations with the US, the world’s most militaristic power. The UK is the world’s second largest arms exporter, and UK capitalists have reaped enormous profits from Middle Eastern wars, most recently in Syria and Yemen. The inability of social democracy to break with imperialism was demonstrated by the fact that Corbyn’s "democratic-socialist" Labour supported NATO and committed to increasing military spending.

It is time to call things by their name: the working class was not featured on the referendum ballot. As we will continue to make clear not only throughout this article, but through our theory and practice as applied to the tasks we face as a party, the working class will find its liberation outside of the parliamentary circus the ruling class puts on to distract us from the absence of bread.

2016-2019: the dissolution of bourgeois unity

The shock that the Leave victory sent throughout the ranks of all classes in Britain was monumental, most notably through the numerous political crises it kickstarted within the British parliamentary parties. From the moment Britain narrowly voted to leave in June 2016, up to the Tory victory in the 2019 general election, the Tory party had been riven with splits and rivalries. In 2017, prime minister Theresa May called a snap general election, aiming to strengthen her party’s hand in Brexit negotiations. But the result was a hung parliament, with the Tories losing 13 seats. A minority coalition government was negotiated, with the Conservatives gifting £1 billion to the right-wing, homophobic Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). This was also the closest Jeremy Corbyn got to power. It could be argued that the ruling class consensus regarding the amount of concessions they can still offer to the working class - in essence, barely any - regained its role as the negotiations lurched towards a conclusion.

The amount of time spent on factional conflict before a deal was even being drafted, let alone after the first Withdrawal Agreement was presented to Parliament, tells a very rich story about the scale of conflict within the ruling class. For hard-line Tory Brexiters, even the extremely limited provisions for workers’ rights presented in May’s leave deals were too much. Meanwhile, measures to keep the six occupied Irish counties within EU structures, in order to prevent a hard British border in Ireland, were rejected by the DUP. Theresa May resigned in June 2019, after a third failed attempt at getting a Brexit deal through parliament.

The Tories’ salvation came in the form of Boris Johnson  - elected leader of the Conservative Party, and thus prime minister, in July 2019. In his victory speech, he pledged to “deliver Brexit, unite the country, and defeat Jeremy Corbyn”. He faced mounting opposition from Parliament due to his primary focus on delivering a “no-deal” Brexit, which deepened the divisions within the Conservative Party. The decision of the 21 rebel Tory MPs on the 2nd of September to vote against the party whip and back the motion that lead to a law forcing a delay to Britain’s exit date - otherwise known as the Benn act - was another key event that exacerbated these divisions. The 21 MPs were consequently expelled from the party, leading to former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Amber Rudd, resigning in protest of their expulsion. She detailed in her letter that she no longer believed “leaving with a deal is the Government’s main objective” and stated “The government is expending a lot of energy to prepare for ‘no deal’ but I have not seen the same level of intensity go into our talks with the European Union”.  

Johnson’s government swiftly set about exposing the farce of bourgeois “democracy” in Britain, with the prorogation scandal. The short-lived outrage over what was shamelessly called a ‘coup’ exposes a deeper truth about the historical moment we live in: the crisis had intensified until the point where bourgeois democracy itself became an obstacle. This democracy - restricted and insufficient, being no more than a chance of the oppressed classes to elect their exploiters for the next five years - was proven to be disposable should the factional conflict within the ruling class demand it. On the 28th of August 2019, Johnson’s government was granted permission by the Queen to prorogue parliament for a five-week period, ending a few weeks before the 31st of October, when Britain was previously due to leave the European Union. This move has caused controversy in the upper echelons of bourgeois politics, as well as a backlash of outrage from citizens around the country, thousands of whom took to the streets in protest. On the 24th of September, after a much-publicised trial, the British Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s prorogation was unlawful.

What is the political significance of Johnson’s prorogation? The significance lies in Johnson’s Brexiter stance, which consequently informed his insistence on delivering Brexit on the 31st of October, whether that be with a deal or no deal. The mounting pressure this saga had placed upon Johnson lead us to his attempt to prorogue Parliament up until a few weeks shy of what was then the Brexit deadline. Practically, this would have decreased the amount of time for Parliament to discuss a Brexit deal to less than 3 weeks, thus undermining the ability of MPs to debate and ultimately stop a no-deal.

Johnson subsequently moved to expel his own MPs over their allegiance to the Benn Act, a law passed by the opposing faction of parliamentary democracy that was intended to avert a no-deal Brexit. This move laid bare the farce of "democracy" that the bourgeois class present - in his zeal to achieve Brexit, even bourgeois democracy was too much of an obstacle for him, so he lashed out at his own 'team' in anger. Johnson was always perfectly aware of the economic shockwave that Brexit would bring, and knew that it would only truly impact the working class. He, and his compatriots in the bourgeois class have only one priority: their avarice. The difference between him and the 'opposition' is merely the expression of that avarice.

Deal or no deal: the facade dissolves

Brexit has been the story of false choices. As the ‘choice’ between Leave or Remain was settled swiftly in 2016, ‘deal or no deal’ occupied much more of Britain’s political life in the past three years. And yet it remained equally false. For the working classes in Britain, the difference between Johnson’s deal and a no-deal is a matter of degrees of severity. Brexit will undoubtedly compound the existing economic crisis. Since the 2007/2008 financial crash, global trade growth has slowed massively compared to the average of 10% a year in 1949-2008: the World Trade Organisation has forecasted a 1.2% expansion for 2019. The pound reached historic lows in September 2019, and has lost 20% of its value since the 2016 EU referendum. The government has already spent billions on preparing for a no-deal outcome ahead of the first aborted Brexit deadline of March 29 and the second of October 31. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimate that Johnson’s present deal would cost the UK economy £70 billion over the next decade. Johnson’s new negotiated Brexit deal (yet to be ratified by parliament at the time of writing) is similar to May’s, but even more antagonistic to workers’ and environmental rights. It also contains a twist in a novel solution to the ‘Irish question’.

It must be pointed out that we can easily add 1921 to the list of years whose ghosts have been haunting Britain’s ruling class as they attempted to manoeuvre out of this crisis. The imperialist partition of Ireland, and Britain’s ongoing illegitimate occupation of the six Northern counties led to the issue of the so-called ‘Irish backstop’. This was an attempt to solve an impossible paradox: Britain must leave the customs union, Britain cannot imagine relinquishing control of the six counties, but there can be no border in Ireland. Theresa May’s proposed Irish ‘backstop’ amendment, negotiated in December 2017 and updated in November 2018, was an insurance measure to guarantee that, even if UK-EU negotiations failed, the so-called Irish border - in reality, the British border in Ireland - would remain free flowing post-Brexit. In Johnson’s new deal, Ireland’s six northern counties will remain aligned to some EU single market regulations on goods. The occupied North will also remain in the same customs area as the rest of Britain’s territory, so it will be included in future British trade deals. All necessary EU-related checks on goods will take place between Britain and the occupied six counties of Ireland. Significantly, the DUP will not be given a veto for this arrangement. Four years after Brexit, the elected representatives of the six counties would decide by simple majority whether to continue the arrangement (i.e., majorities from both nationalist and loyalist constituencies will not be required).

While, of course, we hold no sympathy for the hard-unionist homophobes in the DUP, their betrayal by the Tories could spell the possibility of a new line of struggle for Irish unity. Increased autonomy from Britain suggests a heightened possibility of future Irish reunification, and a final end to the North’s incorporation into British political structures as a subordinate entity. Demographic shifts – namely a growing Catholic population – will also play a role. In a recent poll, 51% of respondents in the north of Ireland said they would vote to join the Republic of Ireland if a referendum was held tomorrow – rising to 60% among those aged 18 to 24. Reunification would enable a much needed independent and unified path of class struggle in Ireland. In the six counties, although poverty among pensioners has fallen over the last decade, a staggering 25.12% of all children are living in poverty. There are, however, worrying rumblings from far-right loyalist groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association, and British media’s obsession with the IRA has created a dangerous amnesia about the brutality of Ulster-Protestant extremist terrorism. It is also crucial to note at this stage that Irish unity is one side of the struggle: the other is the defeat of all British imperialist influence in Ireland and the final victory of the 32-county socialist republic proclaimed in 1916.

The EU is no paragon of workers’ rights. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) prevents any EU measures to enforce minimum pay or the right to strike. The EU has done nothing to prevent the passing of dozens of anti-trade union laws in Britain. But Johnson’s proposed deal would provide the groundwork for an unprecedented strengthening of capitalists’ capacity to exploit at the expense of workers; removing legal obligations to abide by EU standards on labour rights. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research: “This deal opens the door to a decade of deregulation. It puts workers’ rights, environmental protections, and consumer standards at risk. It places the whole British economy and the NHS on the table for trade negotiations with Donald Trump.” Food standards will also be lowered. Additionally, the government’s proposal for ten ‘free ports’ post-Brexit, allowing companies to import and re-export goods outside normal tax and customs rules, would complete the transformation of Britain into an offshore haven for parasitic finance.

According to a statement by Johnson’s ally Michael Gove, a no-deal exit is also still on the table, in light of Johnson's 11-month deadline for a new trade deal. The government’s leaked Operation Yellowhammer document, officially subtitled ‘Reasonable Worst Case Planning Assumptions’, but originally described as ‘Base Case’ assumptions, outlined some likely disastrous impacts of a no-deal scenario, including widespread economic disruption due to an absence of predictability or planning; the stretching of resources at a time they are already stretched thin by winter conditions (e.g. flooding, already causing issues in swathes of northern England); medical shortages (some of which are predicted even with a negotiated deal) and fresh food shortages, as well as local fuel shortages. No wonder the document also points to the possibility of widespread rioting. None of this matters to hard Brexiters who, like many of Johnson’s friends, hope to reap enormous speculation dividends from a no-deal scenario.

As Lenin taught us to ask, who stands to gain? A deal has been the option much preferred by the predominantly EU-sympathising City; indeed, they are more likely to have switched from supporting the Tories to at least giving some consideration to the Lib Dems, who had been promising to throw Article 50 in the bin and reset the Brexit clock to before the referendum even happened. The ultimate futility of the finance sector’s wish for things to be just like they used to will no doubt become apparent with time, because, with the alliance between US and EU imperialists now starting to fall apart, London’s fence to sit on is also rapidly disintegrating. Indeed, this was the entire point of Brexit; moreover, the uncertainty around Brexit has already cost those sections of the City dependent on EU trade and investment dearly.

Meanwhile, the Brexit radicals in the Tory & Brexit parties and UKIP (at least while it still had a thin veneer of not being yet another fascistic party, which was promptly discarded in the Batten era) have been pushing the Brexit Overton window so far towards no-deal, 2016 seems almost unreal by comparison. Leaving the customs union completely was the ‘hard Brexit’ of days gone by - days we almost long for as we weigh up the choice between chlorinated chicken and no chicken at all, should food shortages become a generalised reality. However, outside of the national chauvinists earnestly hoping for British dominance to persist outside of the comfortable space between the two sides of the Atlantic, there are also those who would profit the most from a shockingly hard Brexit: financiers like Crispin Odey, also based in the City, who are hoping to gain profits from shorting the pound and betting against Britain. It is this faction that guides the political shift towards no-deal.

Indeed, while the withdrawal agreement has now passed, the Sisyphean task begins once more - the yet-to-be-negotiated trade deal looms large on the horizon, with merely months remaining to complete it. Johnson has written himself into a corner with recent law changes to prevent an extension of the transition period - given that settling merely the terms of departure took over three years, it is clear that something is amiss in Johnson’s expectation of an “epically likely” trade deal. Is this sheer bluster and bravado on the Tories’ part, or does it suggest that the choice has finally been taken, and that the British bourgeoisie are pivoting to the US sphere of influence?

What this tells us, above all else, is that there is no end to the crisis. We are rapidly heading towards the final crisis of capital, and there is no unity left to be found within any of the factions of the ruling class. It is a time for redivision and repositioning, and history teaches us that any such movements are indescribably violent for the working classes. Brexit is not in itself the real political division at play, and neither will its ‘conclusion’ spell the end of the generalised disarray experienced by the ruling classes of the world’s imperialist powers.

Conclusion: There is no working-class solution to Brexit

As we have seen, both the Brexit and Remain camps proposed anti-working-class solutions to the crisis in British imperialism. What is true is that a sizeable number of Brexiters were those workers completely abandoned by the mainstream political parties: several million who don’t usually vote but used the referendum as a protest against deteriorating social conditions. A staggering 14 million people in the UK - a fifth of the population - live in poverty. The author of a United Nations report released earlier this year stated that long-term UK government policies, some initiated by Labour, have caused “systematic immiseration”.

Brexit, which promises further deregulation, is not a solution: the prime enemy of the British working class is not the Brussels bureaucracy (though they are an enemy), but rather successive Labour and Tory leaderships. Left critics of Corbyn’s Labour have rightly noted its anti-migrant stance, and further noteworthy is Labour’s failure to tackle austerity even at the council level. Corbyn’s reformism would, in the long-term, be helpless to stem the impact of economic crisis on the working class, or counter the rise of the far right. As we outlined thoroughly in our General Election analysis, Corbynites hopelessly seek to ‘tame’ capitalism, permanently deferring the issue of true working-class control and ownership of the economy and state. A hundred years’ experience of the British Labour Party teaches us that the traditional ‘two-step model’ advocated by most self-professed ‘revolutionaries’ in Britain--that is, of electing a Labour government, then allying with the Labour “left”, and exerting ‘pressure’ to magically achieve working-class control of the state--is totally bankrupt.

The declassing of even relatively privileged white-collar workers in the wake of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, and the likelihood of a post-Brexit recession, points to the possibility – and necessity – of working-class convergence and unity. The working class, regardless of gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/religion/disability etc., has a shared interest in ending the everyday precarity, exploitation and severe strain on mental wellbeing intrinsic to the capitalist wage-labour relation. This is not a zero-sum struggle, where a gain for one is a loss for others: battles along the way against racism, transphobia, misogyny and ableism will only temper the revolutionary edge of our movement. The working class must champion its differences, while uniting in struggle against the repressive tyranny of the racist hostile environment; the decades of income squeezes, and gutting of social security, associated with ‘austerity’; and the looming threat of environmental devastation.

*

Brexit has been many things for all classes in Britain.

The call for all communists in Britain should be clear: we must recognise Brexit as the expression of a division within the British ruling class (itself determined by wider inter-imperialist contradictions between the EU and USA); a division in which we should not be taking sides. We must expose EU imperialism, but simultaneously oppose the conspiratorial chauvinism that has characterised Lexiters’ arguments, and champion unconditional socialist internationalism at time of global far-right re-convergence. Crucially, socialists must cast aside all opportunist illusions in any reformist national path of social democracy which, as explained above, rely on dishonest and irrelevant appraisals of a post-war ‘golden era’; and acknowledge that Labour (even with Corbyn at the helm) is and always was the second capitalist party in Britain.

Analysis can and must be undertaken with a view to fully encompass all contradictions and antagonisms which drive forward the march of history, and to pick out of all the potential outcomes the one that will see the working class victorious on a world scale. For us, this means revolutionary opposition to all factions of the British bourgeoisie, be it big or small. It means preparing to defend the working class against rising imperialist rivalry which could spark a world war; participating in the formation of a new communist international against imperialism; a new united front against global fascism; and building an environmentally sound socialist revolutionary movement – for our demands, like those of James Connolly, are most moderate: we only want the Earth.

Resist imperialist war, resist the organised murder of the working class. Our day will come, but as any new world is born in agony, pushing against the dying body of the old one, it is our duty to help it emerge in the right form.

This piece was written by the RFB Theoretical Development Committee and published at Redfightback.org.

References

1. White, Nicholas J. “The Business and the Politics of Decolonization: The British Experience in the Twentieth Century.” The Economic History Review, vol. 53, no. 3, 2000, pp. 544–564.
2. Catherine Schenk, The Origins of the Eurodollar Market in London: 1955-1963, Explorations in Economic History, 1998, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 221-238
3. Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain (Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 31.
4. Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (Verso Books, 2016)
5. Brendan McGeever and Satnam Virdee, ‘Racism, Crisis, Brexit’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41:10 (2017), p. 1808.
6. Gurminder Bhambra, “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class”, British Journal of Sociology 68/S1 (2017), p. 215.

Lies and Legacy: A Conversation on Fidel Castro

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Patxi Ariet, the son of Cuban immigrants to the US who supported Fidel Castro, about Castro, Cuba, the US media coverage of Cuba/Castro, and Cuba's future.

What are your thoughts on Castro's death and the media's reaction?

The death of Fidel Castro marks the end of an era in the history of Cuba. To me it marks the end of the 20th century and the Cold War era and moves Cuba into the 21st century and makes room for the youth of Cuba to continue the revolution in the spirit of Fidel Castro. As to the media coverage, I feel that it was highly choreographed as to what was said. At first Fidel was referred to as the "Leader of the Cuban people," when the news first broke about his death. As the day went on, however, he went from leader to Dictator.

We saw the political line of the American government come out through all media sources in the United States. Whether this was print or broadcast, the line was the same. There was also very little attention to given to Cubans in the island. The emphasis was on the Cuban exiles and their story out of Miami. Showing people living in Key Biscayne, which is one of the most exclusive and wealthiest parts of Miami, to get their take on the death of Fidel and of course to through some punches at his legacy. This was to be expected though, every emperor rejoices in the death of their enemy.

Tell us about your life and growing up as a Cuban whose parents supported the revolution? Why did your parents support the revolution?

To say the least, I did not fit in with the other children that came from staunch Anti-Castro, Republican homes. I would listen to the stories they have heard from their parents and I would tell mine. My family supported the revolution because they remembered and were not blind to the abuses of the Batista government. They saw the need for a total change in Cuba and its relationship with the United States. I would hear about how Havana was controlled by the Mafia and American corporate interests. They would tell me the stories about the "Saca Uñas," the Nail Pullers.

These were special secret police that would kidnap, interrogate, imprison, even kill Anti-Batista Cubans, or just those that did not do what the secret police told them to do. My own great grandfather who was Captain of the Police force in Havana was forced to resign his post when he refused to assassinate people for the government. These were stories that many Cubans in Miami would never talk about or allow their children to hear. Along with the corruption my family remembered the poverty and injustice outside of Havana.

How people could just be thrown off their land by the whim of the foreign land lords. My own grandfather used to deliver medicine for free and provide medical care for free in these areas because they did not have any money for food much less healthcare. This is why the revolution was necessary in their eyes.

How have people received your support for Castro? Have you been shunned by members of the Cuban community?

Depends on who I am talking to. An American will sit with me and discuss the Cuban missile crisis and Bay of Pigs, of course from the American perspective. These conversations usually end with, "Huh, I didn't know that", from the person I'm speaking to. As far as the Cuban community, the reaction is a bit different. I never try to disrespect or put down the experiences of those Cubans that I'm speaking to that lived through the early days of the revolution. I know that any revolution is a difficult thing to live through, change is always a painful process and I try to sympathize with what they went through. For the most part I am either kicked out of where I am by the Anti-Castro supporter, or I am drawn into a long conversation about the horrors of Fidel and then kicked out.

There is a type of shunning that comes with being a Pro-Castro Cuban in Miami. People automatically know your name, recognize your face. Create elaborate stories about you, about how you are a spy for the Cuban government, how you must have killed 100 political dissidents to get to where you are. This is the basis of the Anti-Castro propaganda, lies and exaggerations. I remember once I was at a schoolmate's house doing a project for school.

My parents struggled to send me to La Salle high school in Miami, one of the two obligatory schools Cuban exile children chose from to attend. I was doing a project at the house of a class mate whose mother was Anti-Castro, gun-ho republican. She was speaking to me about President George W. Bush's policy towards Cuba. She went on and on, when she finished all I said was, "The embargo is the reason for the shape Cuba is in, but Fidel and the revolution has still managed to help the people of Cuba." I was immediately told to leave. This is normal and you learn to keep your mouth shut in certain areas. I am much more well-received in American areas

There are some who would argue mistakes were made by Castro, Talk about those mistakes, but also how the media seems to ignore anything positive Castro has done.

Every government makes mistakes. To err is human. Unfortunately, when the leader of a country makes mistakes, some people suffer from it and it becomes the focal point of propaganda. In my humble opinion I feel Fidel could have done more in the way of "Socializing" industry and not just Nationalizing them. Industry should have been for the benefit of every Cuban and controlled by the workers of those industries. I see this as a major flaw to an exact Socialist state. This mistake, however, I do not even hold to much against Castro. I was never in his position and I trust he did what he thought was best to maintain the revolution in Cuba and make sure it was in the best interest of the Cuban people in the long run. I also know that there is scarcity due to the embargo so this could also be a reason to nationalize all industry, to make sure that enough is produced and distributed among the people.

However, the media looks at these "flaws" as evidence of an Evil dictator that refuses to adequately feed his people. Of course, they don't mention the free healthcare and education systems across the islands, nor how Cuba send doctors all over the world to help those in need that cannot afford medical care. They don't mention how every Cuban has a job, can read and write, has housing.

You never hear about the low infant mortality rate that is even lower than in the US. You don't hear the fact that no one starves to death on the Island. There is scarcity, yes, but everyone eats and no one is starving to death. The western media ignores these facts and make Cuba look like a prison.

They distort why some people are in jail, they distort the numbers of people in jail, yet fail to mention that the US has the highest prison population in the world! How the prison system in the US is used as a modern day slave system to contract inmates, mostly of color, out to companies to do jobs for little or no pay. This is never brought up, yet the few small incidences in Cuba are blown out of proportion to be used as propaganda. It is disgusting.

What would you say is the impact Castro has had over the years and the impact he is still having?

Over the years Castro has impacted millions of lives. To begin with, in Cuba has impacted every single Cuban those who love him and those who hate him see this man as the one that changed their lives. Around the world he has impacted many, many others over the years. From his stance against the Belgians in the Congo during their fight for independence. Him sending troops to Angola to defeat the apartheid soldiers sent in from South Africa, which were supported by the US.

To the peoples of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador who looked to Fidel Castro as well as Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos as an inspiration to overthrow those in their countries that wanted to use them as slaved to continue making money and who have repeatedly sold them out to the United States so they can further their own economic interests. Even after his death he is impacting and will continue to impact millions of people daily.

He has become the symbol of revolution, the symbol of fighting for what you believe in and fighting for the right of your country and your people to be free. He stood up to the biggest empire this world has ever known and lived to be an old man. That is inspiring. His actions will never be forgotten and it is because of his action that his words and his legacy will be immortal. History has truly absolved him.

If possible, have you been in contact with anyone in Cuba who can speak to how the Cuban people are feeling?

I have a few friends of mine that are from Cuba and travel to Cuba quite frequently. None, unfortunately, that have visited the island after the death of Fidel. I can speak to how he was spoken about while he was alive. I have heard some say he was like a grandfather. Others who criticized him for not giving in to the Americans so they can have more things. Overall though the people of Cuba do not regret the revolution nor do they wish for the state to be overthrown.

As any patriotic citizen of their country, they feel that Cuba can be better, and it is exactly that feeling that Fidel Castro inspired in people and that is why Cuba will be better. Notice that those that have criticized Fidel were not harassed, nor put into prison. They criticized him openly and without fear of the state.

What do you think the future hold for Cuba, especially with regards to its relations with the US?

I think Cuba will continue to grow and move towards Socialism. With the next generation preparing to take the helm of the country I am excited to see what happens. When it comes to relations with the US. I am afraid that under President Donald Trump, the doors of diplomacy will be closed once again and the Cold War with Cuba will continue. I do not see Cuba giving in to the demands of a demagogue like Trump. I feel optimistic, however, that this will not limit Cuba's interaction with the international community and that Cuba will continue to grow economically in the world despite the attempts of Mr. Trump to strangle it.

President Rodrigo Duterte's Killing Fields and People's War in the Philippines: An Interview

By Andy Piascik

E. SAN JUAN, Jr., emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies, English and Comparative Literature, is currently professorial lecturer at Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He was a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously he served as Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium; and visiting professor of literature at Trento University, Italy; and at National Tsing-Hua University and Tamkang University, Taiwan.

San Juan received his A.B. from the University of the Philippines and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Among his recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington), US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave), Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell) and Between Empire and Insurgency (University of the Philippines Press). Forthcoming books are Learning from the Filipino Diaspora (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) and Filipinas Everywhere (De La Salle University Press). His recent anthologies of poems in Filipino are Kundiman sa Gitna ng Karimlan, Ambil, and Wala.

San Juan has received awards from MELUS (Katherine Newman Prize); Association for Asian American Studies, Gutavus Myers Center for Human Rights; Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, Italy; Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University; Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh;; and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. He is a member of the editorial advisory board for Cultural Logic, Humanities Diliman, Malay, and Kritika Kultura.

Who is President Rodrigo Duterte and who and what does he represent?

San Juan: For 22 years, Duterte was mayor of Davao City, the largest urban complex in Mindanao island, Philippines. TIMEmagazine dubbed him "the Punisher" for allegedly organizing the death-squads that eliminated drug dealers and petty criminals via "extra-judicial killings" (EJK)-no arrests or search warrants were needed, the suspects were liquidated on the spot. That's the modus operandi today. If Davao City became the safest or most peaceful city in southeast Asia, it was also called "the murder capital" of the Philippines.

Drug addiction is rampant in the Philippines. Previous administrations either turned a blind eye or coddled druglords, often police and military officials, infecting poor communities and generations of unemployed and unschooled youth. My relatives in Manila and friends in the provinces have complained that their children have been corrupted by the drug culture in neighborhoods and schools, so that when Duterte ran for president last May, he got 16 million votes (39% of total votes cast), 6.6 million votes ahead of the closest rival, Mar Roxas, a grandson of Manuel Roxas, the first president of the Republic in 1946. This implies that people want a government leader who can rid the country of the drug menace.

News reports described Duterte's victory as an upset, like Trump's win over highly favored Hillary Clinton. Is it accurate to say that voters simply wanted a change, regardless of the substance of Duterte's platform?

While the U.S. set up the electoral system in the Philippines, the feudal/comprador classes manipulate it so that personalities, not ideology, and bribery determine the outcome. Democracy in the Philippines is actually the rule of the privileged minority of landlords, bureaucrat capitalists, and business partners of foreign mega-corporations (called compradors) over the majority.

All presidential candidates promise change for the better. In the last two decades, the popular demand has been: get rid of corruption, drugs, rapes, wanton murders, etc. Over 75% of 130 million Filipinos are impoverished, sunk in palpable misery. Consequently, over 12 million have travelled to all continents to earn bare subsistence-about 5,000 OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) leave every day for Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, North America, Europe, etc.

Scarce decent jobs, starvation wages for contractual labor, unaffordable housing, lack of adequate medical care and schooling-symptoms of terrible underdevelopment- have pushed millions out of the country, or driven them into the hills and forests to take up arms against an unjust, exploitative system whose military and police are trained and supplied by Washington-Pentagon, IMF/World Bank, and global capitalist powers. The country has been a basket-case in Asia since the Marcos dictatorship in the seventies, outstripped by smaller nation-states like Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.

Relatively unknown to the MetroManila political milieu, Duterte's reputation as a scourge of druglords was glamorized to the point that he became a harbinger of change. His slogan was: "Change is coming." The public responded to this propaganda. Although unlike Roxas and his group, among them the Aquino-Cojuangco clan and Makati (Manila's Wall Street) corporate moguls, Duterte does not belong to the traditional elite dynasties, his campaign was supported by some of the biggest corporate stakeholders, such as the Floirendo agribusiness, and by billionaire investors (Uy, Te, Alcantara, Villar) engaged in mining, public utilities, construction with huge government contracts, etc.

We cannot underestimate the Marcos family's contribution, which added to the P375 million that Duterte allegedly spent. This fact explains why Duterte allowed the controversial burial of the Marcos cadaver in the National Heroes' Cemetery. Duterte's father, and other relatives in Cebu, collaborated with the Marcos martial-law regime.

Duterte thus belongs mainly to a hitherto excluded fraction of the comprador bureaucrat capitalist class, with links to the patrimonial landlord families. He now serves as a "populist" front of the parasitic oligarchy that has dominated the class-conflicted order of this dependency since the U.S. directly ruled the country from 1899 to 1946 as a classic colony, and a pacified neocolony during the Cold War up to now. Duterte's regime prolongs the moribund structure of colonial institutions and practices that feed off the labor of the peasantry, workers, middle stratum, women, Moros, and the Lumads (indigenous) communities-these last two are now mobilized to oppose this predatory status quo.

What is your assessment of Duterte's intent of becoming more independent of the United States and the moves he's made in that direction thus far?

This was a burning topic before the US elections, when the Cold War was being revived. Duterte got the cue. His move to invoke his youthful experience with the nationalist movement during his student days was a smart one. Tactically, he beguiled the leaders of BAYAN (the major anti-imperialist legal opposition) and their parliamentary foot soldiers to join him against the lethargic Roxas-Noynoy Aquino fraction of the oligarchy. Obviously he needed symbols of radical change monopolized by BAYAN, which reinforced the outsider image.

Part of his strategy is to firm up his base in the Mindanao-Visayas elite and consolidate his hold on the ideological State apparatus controlled by holdovers from the previous reactionary administrations. He has been doing this when Obama, the US State Department, and the UN entered the scene and began scolding him for his murderous method of amplifying EJKs, his jettisoning of the Philippine Constitution's Bill of Rights and various UN covenants guaranteeing the right to life and due process for all citizens. Karapatan (a human-rights monitoring NGO), church groups, and civil-society associations blasted Duterte for the "brazen impunity" shown by the orgy of police violence and State terrorism.

Cognizant of those criticisms, Duterte offered to renew peace talks with the National Democratic Front Philippines (NDFP) and its military arm, the New People's Army (NPA) which, up to now, is still stigmatized by the US State Department as terrorist. This broke the long stalemate in the peace talks during the Arroyo and NoyNoy Aquino regimes. Duterte made a token release of 18 political prisoners involved in the talks and promised to grant amnesty to 434 jailed dissenters. This was hailed by the local media as constructive and a promising change-maker. At the same time, Duterte also made noises about the meddlesome US military presence in Mindanao, the annual U.S.-Philippines "Balikatan" exercises, and the US intervention in the China Sea prior to his visit to China and Japan. This triggered heavy media coverage, projecting Duterte as a Latino anti-imperialist crusader like Fidel Castro or Chavez.

For a while, there were rumors of a CIA plot to kill Duterte. When former president Fidel Ramos berated Duterte for his anti-U.S. polemics and withdrew his support, was there a symptom of some crisis in the regime?

No, it was a calculated publicity technique to divert attention away from the bloody police-vigilante blood bath. Duterte's complaint was mere grumbling, blowhard gestures of the bully in the hood. His "pivot to China" may have calmed down the turbulent waters of the South China Sea, with the US fleet continuing to maneuver from its bases in Hawaii, Guam, and Okinawa. Obama dismissed Duterte as uncouth, ignorant of diplomatic niceties. Vietnam and Japan rolled out their red carpet to the cursing Leviathan of what academics designated as "Hobbesian" Philippines. Poor Hobbes, maybe Machiavelli's Borgia would have been the more appropriate analogy.

Nothing to worry about for Washington and the Pentagon. The U.S. military presence all over the islands, legitimized by the 1947 Mutual Assistance Agreement and the 1951 Philippines-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty, plus the recent Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), insure the continued stranglehold of Washington-Pentagon on Duterte's military, police, and various security agencies. With Trump's condoning of Duterte's "killing fields," Duterte has proved himself a wily demagogue whose touted popularity, however, is fast eroding on the face of mammoth protests all over the islands, and in the Filipino diaspora around the world.

Are we likely to see a decrease in the U.S. military presence in the Philippines soon?

Not at all. First of all, as I already mentioned, all the onerous treaties that subordinate the Philippine State security agencies are safe and stable. Even the Supreme Court and the trial courts follow U.S. protocols, as laid down initially by two well-intentioned civilizing missionaries, Justice George Malcolm and anthropologist David Barrows. Legal scholar Eric A. San Juan has clearly documented this fact in a recent essay, "Cultural Jurisprudence" (Asian Pacific Law & Policy Journal, 2013). In short, we have been thoroughly Americanized according to the racialized, utilitarian bourgeois standards of the industrialized metropole.

Of course, the entire ideological state apparatus, including the military-police, court and prison system, was systematically crafted by the U.S. colonial administrators for surveillance and repression of those unruly natives, as proven by Professor Alfred McCoy's research, Policing America's Empire. Incidentally, Professor McCoy has also documented the role of the pro-U.S. military in the People Power revolt against Marcos in 1986 and the subsequent coups against Corazon Aquino marked by the assassination of radical militants Rolando Olalia and Lean Alejandro.

Duterte's cabinet reflects the conjunctural alignment of class forces in society today. Vice-president Leni Robredo represents the Roxas-Aquino oligarchy which (except for Robredo, whose victory is now challenged by Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's patron) lost the May elections. Except for three progressive ministers, all the officials in Duterte's Cabinet are pro-U.S., chiefly the Secretary of Defense General Delfin Lorenzana and the Foreign Affairs Secretary Alfredo Yasay.

More revealing of Duterte's retrograde bent is the newly appointed Chief of Staff of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) Eduardo Ano, the notorious architect of summary killings and abductions of activists in the last decade. He is the prime suspect in the kidnapping of activist Jonas Burgos, among others. The party-list youth group KABATAAN called Duterte's appointment of this bloodstained general a signal for more massacres of civilians, forced disappearances of critics, and military occupation of the countryside. This is in pursuit of U.S.-inspired counterinsurgency schemes launched from the time of President Corazon Aquino and intensified by the Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo and Noynoy Aquino regimes.

Like General Fidel Ramos, who succeeded Corazon Aquino, all the military and police officials in the Philippines follow U.S.-ordained training, ideological indoctrination, and political goals. Their logistics, weaponry and operating procedures are transplanted wholesale from the Pentagon and U.S. State Department, following treaty regulations. Military aid to the Philippines rose during the Carter and Reagan administrations in support of the beleaguered martial-law Marcos regime. From 2010 to 2015, the US military aid totalled $183.4 million, aside from other numerous training and diplomatic exchanges, for example, the active presence of CIA and FBI agents interrogating prisoners at Camp Crame police headquarters.

Given the massive archive of treaties, ideological control, customary habits, and various diplomatic constraints, only a radical systemic change can cut off the U.S. stranglehold on this neocolony. At least, that's a first step in changing people's minds, dreams, and hopes.

Will President-elect Trump water down Obama's "Asian pivot" in view of his isolationist impulse, instead of allowing Duterte to assert a more "independent" foreign policy?

That remains to be seen. As of now, there is no real sign of a foreign invasion from China or anywhere else-it's the U.S. that has re-invaded several times. There's no sign of a brewing confrontation in the South China Sea today. The threat to the global capitalist system comes from the masses of oppressed workers and peasants, women, Lumads, and especially the formidable forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which Duterte has to address by diplomatic means before long. From Marcos up to Noynoy Aquino, for over four decades now, the Moro people have resisted total subjugation and genocide. It would be foolish, if not suicidal, for Duterte to persist in implementing a militaristic approach-unless the U.S. (via his generals) needs to dispose of surplus weapons following the imperatives of the profiteering military-industrial complex.

For all his braggadocio and macho exhibitionism, Duterte is unable to halt the attacks of the dwindling Abu Sayyaf group, the al-Qaeda-inspired gang of kidnap-for-ransom Moros in Basilan and Sulu. Like drug addiction, the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of a deep and widespread social and political cancer in society. Studies have shown that its followers have been paid and subsidized by local politicians, military officials, businessmen, and even by U.S. undercover agents. Only a radical transformation of class-race relations, of the hierarchy of power linked to property and economic opportunities, can resolve the centuries-long grievances of the BangsaMoro peoples.

Will you address Duterte's crackdown on drug dealing and drug use, the one thing about him people in the U.S. are likely to have heard about?

This is probably the only issue that preoccupies the infotainment industry eager for high ratings/profits. The international media (e.g., Telesur, Al-Jazeera, UK's Guardian, CNN worldwide) does not allow a day to pass without headlining or commenting on the new "killing fields" in the Philippines. The New York Times, December 7 issue, devoted a long elaborate video/print special to this topic, in English and in Filipino (at YOUTUBE) entitled "They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals." This equals in visual power the TIME report "The Killing Season: Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's War on Drugs" (October 10) that provoked Duterte's wrath. Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and social media have blanketed the atmosphere with Duterte's EJK performance.

Right now, however, reports of Russian meddling in the US elections have marginalized Duterte's antics, overshadowing even the horrible wars in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. We might have a reprieve on the carnage in that remote outpost of the Empire.

The New York Times reporter Daniel Berehulak counted 54 victims of police raids in the 35 days he accompanied the guardians of law-and-order in the urban complex of Metro Manila.

Filipino addicts and small-time pushers inhabit impoverished squatter areas in suburban Caloocan, Pandacan, Tondo, outside the gated communities of the rich in Makati or Forbes Park. As of now, the total victims of police and vigilante violence of Oplan Tokhang (the rubric for the drug war) has reached 5,800 suspects killed: 2000 by the police, the rest by vigilante or paramilitary groups. According to the Philippine National Police (PNP) headquarters, there have been 35,600 arrests that netted 727,600 users and 56,500 pushers. Duterte himself initially said he will kill another 30,000, enough to fill the waters of Manila Bay and to make funeral parlors thrive. This represents a new level of ruthlessness that has converted the country into "a macabre house of mourning."

Most of the victims are part of the vulnerable, marginalized sectors of society. Curtailing their basic rights to a life of dignity, denying them due process and equal treatment under the law, will surely not solve addiction. Everyone recognizes that Duterte's plan is an insane program of solving a perennial socio-economic malady. Scientific studies have shown that drug addiction springs from family and social conditions, contingent on variable historical factors. Only education in healthcare, a caring and mutually supportive social environment, as well as support from government and health agencies, can reduce the havoc wrought by this epidemic. Not by stifling human lives, no matter how damaged or dysfunctional. But as we've remarked, the hegemonic norms of a class-divided society do not allow this consensus to prevail.

So is there another motive or underlying purpose behind this terrible war against drugs?

Surely there is a larger political intent: dividing your enemy, splitting communities, demoralizing the angry citizenry. To some degree the climate of fear and terror has sown animosities among members of the middle class, and incited antagonisms among the lumpen and ordinary citizens toward the relatively well-off and those who welcome authoritarian policies and security in exchange for liberties. Meanwhile, the police ride roughshod over everyone, and so far there is no sustained legislative or court opposition to the relentless executive coercive power behind this unconscionable outrage.

Karapatan chairperson Tinay Palabay has acutely seen through the smokescreen of this drug campaign: the State's program to pursue counterinsurgency under cover of a hitherto well-meaning campaign. The AFP has labelled national-democratic militants as drug suspects, such as the case of anti-mining activist Joselito Pasaporte of Compostela Valley, Davao.

Under cover of the drug war, Oplan Bayanihan, the counter-insurgency low-intensity war of the AFP, proceeds in the form of civic action-peace and development programs. During Duterte's 100 days in office, Palabay's group has documented 16 victims of political murder, 12 frustrated killings, two cases of torture, and nine victims of illegal arrest and detentions, mostly involving indigenous peoples in Sumilao, Bukidnon, and farmers massacred in Laur, Nueva Ecija. As of December 12, the NDFP has documented 18 activists killed, 20 survivors of attempted assassination, and 13,000 persons victimized by forced evacuations from their homes. Consider also 14,000 cases of schools, clinics, chapels and civilian infrastructure being used as military barracks in violation of peace agreements in respect for human rights signed by both the government and the revolutionary NDFP.

Irked by Karapatan, Duterte has vowed to kill all human rights activists. His agents are already doing their best to sabotage and abort the peace talks. If he dares to carry out this pompous threat, he might drastically shorten his own tenure and stimulate the opposite of what he wants: mass fury against tyrannical rule and police-state barbarism.

What is the state of the revolutionary armed struggle that has been going on in its modern form since 1969?

As of last week, the revolutionary elan has peaked with huge nationwide mass demonstrations against Duterte's decision to allow the burial of Marcos in the National Heroes Cemetery. This has politicized millennials and a whole generation otherwise ignorant of the horrendous suffering of the people during the Marcos dictatorship. It has mobilized anew the middle strata of students, professionals, workers, women and the urban poor, as well as Lumads, Moros, and the peasantry who constitute the majority of the citizenry. The anti-Marcos-dictatorship resurgence has diminished Duterte's popularity, exploding the myth of his supposed incorruptibility and pro-change posture. It's more of the same, and even worse.

It's a mixed picture that needs to be viewed from a historical-dialectical perspective. While the size of the NPA has declined from about 25,000-30,000 fully armed guerillas in the 1980s to less than 15,000 today, its influence has increased several times. This is due to deteriorating socioeconomic conditions since the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. Thanks also to the immiseration of workers' lives and the pain inflicted by the vicious rampage of the military and police in the countryside. Large areas in Mindanao, Luzon and the Visayas are under the sway of partisan units of the NPA. Meanwhile, the MILF continues to preserve and defend its liberated zones from AFP incursions.

Meanwhile, the character of people's war has changed in its quality and direction. The shift to political and diplomatic tactics within the strategy of protracted war (following Mao's teaching) has made tremendous gains in organizing women, students, the urban poor, and Lumads.

Various cultural and social formations engage in pedagogical and agitational campaigns to expose the chicanery and deception of the Duterte regime. Not a single perpetrator of human rights violations has been arrested and punished, such as the soldiers guilty of the Lianga and Paquibato massacres, the murderers of personalities such as Romeo Capala, Fernando Baldomero, Fr. Fausto Tentorio, William Geertman, Leonardo Co, Juvy Capion, Rebelyn Pitao, Emerito Samarca, and hundreds more. Meanwhile General Jovito Palparan, who murdered many activists, continues to enjoy army custody instead of regular civilian detention. The scandalous "culture of impunity" is flourishing in the killing fields of the tropical neocolony.

Many disappeared activists (among them, Jonas Burgos, Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeno, Luisa Dominado-Posa, and others) have not been accounted for by the State, while martial law victims and their families have not been indemnified. All these existing anomalies may explain the belief that given the corrupt bureaucracy and justice-system, the only feasible alternative is to join the armed struggle against the rotten, inhuman system. This is why the communist-led insurgency cannot be defeated, given its deep roots in the 1896 revolution against Spanish tyranny and the resistance against U.S. imperial aggression from 1899 up to the present.

What is your assessment of Duterte's overture to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the BangsaMoro insurgency?

As I noted earlier, Duterte's overture was hailed as a positive step to solve a durable, national-democratic insurgency dating back to the sixties, when the Communist Party of the Philippines was re-organized and the NPA founded. The peace talks began with Corazon Aquino's recognition of the role played by the underground resistance in overthrowing Marcos and installing her. Similarly, Duterte implicitly recognized the political traction of the left-wing representatives in Congress in the last few years. While Duterte welcomed the unilateral ceasefire declaration of the NDFP, lately he declared that he would not grant amnesty nor release any more prisoners unless the NDFP stop fighting and submit to the government's dictates. The severely punished prisoners are now pawns in Duterte's gambit to coopt the subversives. Duterte's mandate has been changed to: One step forward, two steps backward.

Duterte allows his military and police to terrorize the citizenry. No substantive reform of those decadent institutions has been carried out. Criminalization of political activities still continues with the AFP arresting Lumad teacher Amelia Pond and peace advocate John Maniquez, charging them with murder, illegal possession of firearms, etc.-the usual alibi of detaining activists which proved utterly barbaric in the case of the Morong 45 during Macapagal-Arroyo's tenure. Rape, torture, robbery, threat of assassination, and warrantless arrest of innocent civilians remain the State's formula for safeguarding peace and order in society.

No tangible step has been made to seriously confront the Bangsamoro insurgency-unless Duterte's attempt to cement his friendship with Nur Misuari, leader of the other Moro group, the Moro National Liberation Front, is a tactic to divide the enemy. That may be his Achilles' heel.

On this arena of diverse antagonisms, with fierce class war raging all over the country, Duterte finds himself in dire straits. Sooner or later, he will be compelled to either defy the pro-U.S. imperialist hierarchy of the AFP and the fascist PNP if he is sincere in challenging the status quo, or suppress a rebellion from within his ranks. He has to reckon also with the opposition of the more entrenched, diehard cabal of the Ayalas, Cojuanco-Aquino, the comprador owners of malls and export industries, as well as the traditional warlords and semifeudal dynasties that depend on U.S. moral and financial support. That will be the day when Duterte's fate as "Punisher" will be decided. Meanwhile, the struggle for national liberation and social justice continues, despite the trumped-up charges inflicted on anyone denouncing Duterte and his friend, president-elect Donald Trump.-##

Andy Piascik is an award-winning author who writes for Z, Znet, Counterpunch and many other publications and websites. His novel In Motion was published earlier this year by Sunshine Publishing (www.sunshinepublishing.org).

Capitalism as a Form of Human Sacrifice: The Comedy of Innocence and The Comedy of Guilt

By Nick Partyka

The mention of human sacrifice is likely to conjure a bevy of fantastic notions, images of exotic locales, and perhaps visions of pre-historic peoples dancing around a fire or an altar. For some, the idea may even trigger a visceral disgust. Despite killing untold numbers of persons for heresy or apostasy, the main religions of the Western world reject human sacrifice as a part of their practice of religious worship. The God of Abraham, that little episode with Isaac notwithstanding, does not require the shedding of human blood as a feature of the way He proscribes being worshiped. Many things may still be sacrificed as part of Christian religious practice, but blood, human or animal, is not one. Certainly this God, through the medium of his Earthly spokespersons, has commanded, or at least endorsed, the shedding of others' blood, e.g. that of Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and heretics. But, even here, the shedding of blood is not a mainstay of conventional worship. We rational, modern, scientifically minded people are quick to dismiss the idea of human sacrifice. Though the form has changed, we still practice human sacrifice, and it remains an important part of how society and community are reproduced. Moreover, we preserve significant features of sacrificial rituals as practiced by ancient people.

Among Marx's first words in the Manifesto are his famous, and oft quoted, line, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".[1] But, importantly, he continues, "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another".[2] Class society is based on hierarchy, that is, on social relations of domination and subordination. And this social relationship of domination is not an end in-itself, but rather it is the means by which wealth, resources, status, and opportunities are funneled into the hands of the dominating class. Class society has always functioned in this way, as a fundamentally predatory mechanism whereby the wealthy exploit the poor. And, as long as class-based society persists, so too will this mechanism of predation and exploitation, as well as the inequalities and divisions that come with it. This is one of Marx's most essential points; wealth and poverty go together, because poverty is the direct result of the accumulation of capital.

Ritual sacrifice is typically thought of as a relic of the ancient past, something barbaric or ignorant peoples engaged in, as something enlightened societies eschewed once they developed a truly scientific, i.e. modern, way of thinking. Unfortunately for the victims, ritual human sacrifice is a widespread practice in contemporary society. It is the very foundation of how the dominant class reproduces its wealth, power, and position. We share with our ancient peers the need to justify human sacrifice, to rationalize our actions, and thus to appease our conscience. It is in this vein that while the ancient Greeks made use of a "comedy of innocence", we modern Westerners have adopted the "comedy of guilt". The ancient Greeks needed their sacrificial victims to be willing in order to appease their guilty conscience. Perhaps the most salient example is Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. We moderns also need our victims to be responsible for their own murder, that is, they must be the authors of their own demise. Thus, for example, the string of incoherent, blatantly racist, exaggerated, and downright preposterous legal excuses given for the murder of unarmed citizens by police, especially people of color.

Just as with the ancient Greeks, myth helps sustain our preferred justifications for ritual sacrifice. Myth is essential because at the heart of ritual sacrifice lies the deadly contradiction. Namely, the question, as Walter Burkett asks it, "Can what is not a gift really be a sacrifice?" If society can't get the victim to agree to be sacrificed, then the act is much more a murder than a sacrifice, and hence an unworthy form of offering for a God(s). Complicating the matter is one major difference, namely, that unlike the ancients, we specially select, and then groom for the purpose, the eventual victims of sacrifice. In their ritual comedy, the ancient Greeks only had to trick an animal into a performing a simple gesture, our modern ritual comedy requires highly elaborate, sophisticated, and inter-connected social, economic, and political institutions. Within these institutions lurk apparitions like the welfare queen, the food-stamp surfer, the ghetto gang-banger, the lazy immigrant, et cetera. These are myths created by the dominant class to rationalize and justify the ritual sacrifice of some members of the community.

The Comedy of Innocence

For the ancient Greeks, ritual sacrifice was an integral part of the practice of their religion.[3] The sacrificial ritual consisted of the killing, butchering, and eating of the sacrificial animal. Blood sacrifice was one the most important ways in which the ancient Greeks connected to their Gods. The obvious similarity of animal blood to human blood, the sense of worshiping a God in animal form, the wearing of clean clothes, the wearing of animal masks during the ritual, all point to the way in which the animal sacrificed stood in for human sacrifice. The Gods required sacrifice in order to be propitiated, and thus provide the things Greek people needed in order to flourish. There is a certain quid pro quo about this practice. The Gods want things, and human wants things. So, humans give the Gods what they want, and thus the Gods will give humans what they want. Humans, of course, want things like good weather for growing crops, calm seas for sailing and trading, for favor in battle, et cetera. Human sacrifice, despite appearing in Greek literature, was certainly considered to be taboo by the ancient Greeks; in fact, the Furies are thought to hunt down and wreak vengeance upon those who commit blood crimes. Indeed, there remains no archeological evidence for human sacrifice among the Greeks. Thus, the sacrificial animal stands in for humans, and also for the God, in the ritual sacrifice.

The sacrificial ritual was an important way that community was re-created by the Greeks. Most members of the community had roles to play in the ritual. This ritual was an elaborate process, and it would begin with cleansing, and festooning the chosen animal. Because the Greeks made use of animals like cattle and sheep, the most important sacrificial animals, for their secondary products, they would have been older animals, chosen based on having a suitably healthy and unblemished appearance. The Gods demand a good looking sacrifice, not an ugly or deformed one. The process then moved on to a ritual procession to the sanctuary which included singing and dancing, and invocations to the particular God the sacrifice is intended for. Once the procession reached the sanctuary the comedy of innocence would then be performed. After this, the clan chief, a person of political and thus also religious power, would kill the animal, catching its blood in a basin, then spatter some over the altar, and the rest being burnt. Then the animal would be skinned and butchered, the inedible bits set aside for reconstituting the animal symbolically. These innards, the splanchna, are then burned on the altar. Lastly comes the cooking and eating of the meat.

The offerings to the Gods must be burnt, for it is in the form of smoke that the sacrifice rises to the sky, that is, to a place where the Gods can consume it. If the blood of a sacrifice was allowed to drain into the ground, this would be a sacrifice to chthonic Gods, that is, the Gods of the underworld. Moreover, the Gods require sacrifice because without it, they cease to exist. Indeed, there is no God where there is no sacrifice, no ritual observance of the God. The Gods thus depend on sacrifice to sustain their own existence. This comes out in Aristophanes' The Birds, where two disaffected Athenians defect to form a new kingdom in the sky with the birds, after which they begin an embargo on humans' sacrifices to the Gods, in effect threatening to starve the Olympians. Whether the offering is burned up or poured out, if the Gods do not receive sacrificial offerings, and in the appropriate form, they will eventually perish.

Even without potential embargoes, as described in Aristophanes' play, the mechanics of the sacrificial ritual posed problems for the Greeks. They utilize myth, and the comedy of innocence to alleviate the moral dilemmas their form of religious worship created. Consider again Walter Burkett's question, How can something that is not a gift be a sacrifice? The Greeks get the meat of the animal, all the useable pieces, and the rest is symbolically reconstituted, and then offered to the Gods. Why, one might reasonably ask, are the Gods satisfied with what they receive? Here the myth of Prometheus helps the Greeks have their cake and eat it too. In one form of the myth Prometheus tells the humans to sew up innards and entrails, the inedible bits, back inside the skin. He then helps the humans by tricking Zeus into choosing the "reconstituted" animal instead of a pile of meat. In a different version of the myth Zeus intentionally picks to get the worse end of the deal, no doubt because of his benevolence. In fact, in the first version of the myth, it is precisely because Prometheus tricked Zeus, that Zeus took fire away from humans. This is why Prometheus then has to do what he becomes best known for, namely, stealing fire from Mt. Olympus and giving it back to humans. This is how, through myth, the Greeks could answer Burkett's question in the affirmative.

The other problem that had to be confronted was that the idea of a cow, sheep, ram, or pig consenting to be sacrificed by a human in the name of a God is laughable. Humans and animals possess no reliable means of communicating, especially for such a complex notion as ritual sacrifice. Moreover, even if a machine enabled humans and animals to communicate, it is by no means clear that we could sufficiently explain to them notions like God and ritual sacrifice for them to make a suitably informed choice that could alleviate humans' guilt. Thus, the Greeks made use of the comedy of innocence to resolve their feelings of guilt at killing an animal they have raised, and have a relationship with, and stands in symbolically for humans. As we saw above, this process would occur at the beginning of the sacrificial ritual. The human participants would stand in a circle, water would be brought in a vessel, and there would be a ritual washing of hands. Water would then be offered to the animal, or perhaps sprinkled on its head, inducing the animal to make a gesture that the humans could interpret as it giving its assent to be sacrificed. In another variation of this process a select few animals might be arrayed around the altar, upon which were places some food item cows would find hard to resist. The first animal to move in for a taste of the treats displayed before it could then be interpreted as assenting to be sacrificed. Since the animal could be said to go "voluntarily" to the sacrificial altar any feelings of guilt the Greeks had would be assuaged.

One can see now how the practice of ritual sacrifice in ancient Greek religion made a comedy, a mockery, of the innocence of the sacrificial animal by conducting a sham of a ceremony through which the animal agrees to be killed. This is how the Greeks again answer Burkett's question in the affirmative. Something which is not a gift can be a sacrifice, if the sacrifice itself consents to be sacrificed. The sacrificial animal in effect makes a gift of itself. And then, since the animal stands in for both God and human, each makes itself the sacrifice, giving itself as a gift to the other. This reciprocal giving formed the basis of the on-going relationship between humans and the Gods. It also helped re-create and reinforce the sense of community through participation in the ritual sacrifice and meal. Thus, through myth and comedy the Greeks were able accomplish two important tasks in how they rationalized their practice of ritual sacrifice. First they were able to obtain important elements of reproducing their community, that is, meat products, and at the same time to appropriately honor the Gods.

The Comedy of Guilt

Ritual sacrifice is no less a part of contemporary society than it was ancient Greek society. One important difference is that while the ancient Greeks may or may not have actually engaged in human sacrifice, contemporary capitalist society definitely does.[4] And, where the ancients situated their comedy at the beginning of their sacrificial ritual, we moderns place our comedy at the end of our sacrificial ritual. Unlike the ancients we select our sacrificial animals more or less at birth, and then groom them assiduously for their role. The most important difference between us and our ancient Greek counterparts is that while they made a comedy of the innocence of their sacrificial victim, we moderns make a comedy of the guilt of our sacrificial victims. Only if presented with "choices" at the beginning, and then voluntarily making the wrong choice can we moderns revel in the joy of the punishment of the sacrificial victim. We go out of our way, quite a ways out sometimes, to establish the guilt of the sacrificial victim. For, indeed, there can be no joy in punishment unless the victim is guilty. However, the institutional structure of capitalist society is such that the mechanisms for establishing guilt are so decisively flawed that it constitutes a comedy of guilt.

Capitalist society precisely structures inequality so that those on the bottom have the least wealth, the fewest resources, the fewest opportunities, the worst schools, the worst healthcare, the unhealthiest neighborhoods, are destined for the worst jobs, for social marginalization, mass incarceration, political disenfranchisement, and for an early death. These people try to make their ends meet as best they can, and when this requires bending or breaking the law, they are punished severely. A society based, most fundamentally, on private property delights in seeing people punished for crimes against property. This makes the observers feel more secure in their property holdings, and helps reaffirm the basic notions and prejudices of a form of community based on the ownership and exchange of private property. Just like with the ancient Greeks, the comedic aspect to our modern sacrificial rituals helps assuage our collective guilt, it helps us to answer Burkett's question in the affirmative. The comedy of guilt, just like the comedy of innocence, makes the voluntary action of the would-be sacrifice the key element. Modern capitalism needs its sacrificial victims to be willing, or, as it is in our case, unwilling to abide by the eminently reasonable prescriptions of a system of law designed to uphold the bourgeoisie as a class, and thus the system of social relations that sustains their position of ideological hegemony.

One particularly dark variation on this ritual comedy of guilt can be observed in the extremes to which authorities, pundits, and everyday people on social media, will go to place blame for their own death on those unarmed, mostly people of color, killed by police. Legally speaking, we simply allow the police to claim that they felt that their lives were in danger, thus excusing the use of deadly force. In these instances one can observe the comedy of guilt being played out as predominantly white officers try again and again to explain how and why they felt so threatened that they had to kill an unarmed civilian. Darren Wilson, in one particularly ghastly instance of this ritual, went so far as to make Michael Brown out to be a demon, to imbue him with super-human qualities, and thus perceive him as posing a deadly threat to Wilson's life. In another, rather macabre, instance of the comedy of guilt there is the case of Tamir Rice. Many attempted to place the blame on this little boy because the officer perceived him as older, and as more threatening. Many even tried making his own murder Tamir's fault by blaming him for playing with a realistic-looking toy gun in public, which he should not have been doing in the first place. In this same vein one can observe the comedy of guilt being played out in cases like that of Trayvon Martin & Dontay Ivy, Eric Garner & Freddy Gray, Laquan MacDonald & Jamar Clark, Sandra Bland & so many many others. "If only the now deceased citizen hadn't done x when confronted by the police", or "if they had only said y when stopped by the police", "if only they hadn't been engaging in z low-level criminal offense at the time, or just prior", are the refrains sung during the ritual comedy of guilt.

More mundane variations on this sacrificial ritual, and the comedy that accompanies it, occur on a daily basis. Indeed, they form the very foundation of capitalist society. Without ritual sacrifice, the form of community which is most central to reproducing bourgeoisie society cannot be sustained. For the Greeks, ritual sacrifice was also about sustaining community. In their case the sustenance is more physical in nature, that is, they needed the calories. The Greeks sacrificed animals because they needed to eat, but also to honor the Gods. Today, we also need to eat, but the way we feed ourselves is much more complex than it was with the ancient Greeks. The sustenance derived from ritual sacrifice is, however, much more financial in nature today than in more distant epochs. The plain truth is that capitalism profits from the use, exploitation, and destruction of the poor, in particular black and brown bodies, and the bodies of women. This is as true today as it was in the halcyon days of the Atlantic slave trade. After slavery there was Segregation, after Segregation there was Jim Crow, after Jim Crow there arrived mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is the modern form taken by the capitalist machine which feeds on the poor, on black and brown bodies, and on the bodies of women, and profits from their poverty, captivity, marginalization, and also their deaths.

Poverty and inequality are the structural products of capitalism. They are also the main drivers of the feelings of desperation and exclusion that incline many to engage in illegal activities. Simply put, capitalism is a pyramid scheme whereby the opulence of the few is subsidized by the exploitation of the many. Thus, the kinds of material and social circumstances that studies have routinely shown to be criminogenic are the direct result of the "healthy" operation of a capitalist economy. Thus, capitalism can never be without crime, since it creates so many potential criminals, and incentivizes the rewards of successful crime so heavily. This is the main reason why the search for guilt, after certain kinds of individuals commit certain kinds of crimes is so comedic, to the point of being a mockery, a sham. Capitalist society chooses, almost from birth, those it will subject to the kinds of social and material pressures that drive people to crime in order to meet their needs, either for material resources or for social status. Then, after some of these people succumb to the pressures and incentives arrayed before them, capitalists utilize their power to organize public rituals of sacrifice, or as we call it, the criminal justice system. Capitalist elites intentionally dis-invest in public social services, e.g. education and healthcare, then when people find it impossible to live with dignity, they resort to any means necessary to provide. Capitalist elites criminalize this behavior, then apprehend, try, and if convicted, punish those who refuse to accept the social station assigned them. One grotesque example of the comedy of guilt in this connection is the widespread criminalization of homelessness.

One other prominent, and almost Kafkaesque, example of the way capitalist society makes a comedy of the guilt of its sacrificial victims is the insidious school to prison pipeline scholars have done much work to illuminate. The poorest students - usually people of color - are crowded into the worst neighborhoods, are segregated into the worst schools, and are suspended, expelled, and otherwise disciplined at an alarmingly disproportionate rate. These students are, without a sufficient education, left to fend for themselves in an economy we're constantly being told is globalizing and shifting to reward highly educated, high-skill workers. These people, again, mostly people of color, are increasingly caught up in the criminal justice system, where they are stopped and questioned, arrested, charged, tried, and convicted much more often than their white peers. Then they are given more sever treatment at sentencing, less lenience at parole, few to no resources for re-integration upon release, then thrust into the same job market for which they were originally poorly suited, only now at a further disadvantage; and also likely formally politically disenfranchised. Capitalist society condemns an entire segment of the population, the working classes, to systematic deprivation of resources and opportunities, and then punishes these people when they do whatever they have to in order to get by. Once these poor and marginalized persons have been caught-up in the criminal justice system their labor is exploited for profit by the prison-industrial complex. Dis-investing in resources for the re-integration of former convicts into their communities ensures that recidivism rates will be high enough to produce a reliable pool of labor to exploit. The privatization of prisons, which are proliferating in America, only exacerbates these incentives by cutting out the middle-man of the allegedly impartial "democratic" state.

Outside of, though certainly many times in conjunction with, the prison-industrial complex, the poor and marginalized are preyed upon and exploited by other elements of the capitalist ruling class. Sub-prime loans, student loans, and payday loans are all ways that the desperation, humiliation, and aspiration of the poor and marginalized are used against them for profit. The dominant neo-liberal narratives about education and the job market, for example, endlessly repeat how essential a college education is for success. And yet, poor students who reach for a better future by getting a college degree are finding that education is not a silver-bullet for social mobility, nor a panacea for income inequality. Large debt loads, a recession weakened labor market, structural changes in the capitalist global economy, as well as racism, patriarchy, and elite privilege all combine to sharply limit the avenues of social mobility truly open to graduates from the lower classes. Even those who major in highly remunerative disciplines, get excellent grades, and graduate, often face significant obstacles to success in their chosen field, e.g. the prospect of years of unpaid internships in order to have a resume appropriate to the job one ultimately wants, that they simply cannot afford. Payday loans, with their egregiously high interest rates and heavily punitive system of fees and fines, have been decisively shown to be nothing more than economic traps to bilk the poor of what little they may have. These companies take advantage of poor people, whose delicate economic equilibrium are easily disrupted by exogenous shocks, and who typically have insufficient savings to absorb those shocks; if they have any savings at all. Payday loans offer a quick fix to the cash-strapped poor, which quickly and reliably spiral into a mountain of crushing debt the poor borrower has little to no chance of ever paying off.

And then, after the poor and marginalized have fallen victim to the trap set by predators in our rigged economy, the elite, and of course their sycophants, blame the victims for their victimization. Recent college grads should have not gone to college if they couldn't afford to pay back the loans, debtors should have forgone whatever luxury they borrowed money in order to maintain. In this elite narrative it is always the moral failings of the individual that produce their impoverished, and desperate situation. The sub-prime loan crisis at the bottom of the housing collapse in 2007-2008 is a perfect example. Poor families were targeted by the big banks for risky loans that the banks assumed, even without a financial crisis, those families could not pay back. In the boom stage, elites and their institutions proclaim to the poor that prosperity is within reach; "easy credit can get you that home in the suburbs with the good schools". When the securitized debt instrument trend caught fire the incentives for financial institutions to create debt only multiplied. Then, after the crash, all the blame was placed at the door of those greedy poor families trying to live beyond their means, i.e. live with dignity outside the ghettos assigned to them. If only those people hadn't fallen for the insidious trap set for them by the sophisticated con-artists and loan sharks on Wall-Street, then the economy wouldn't have collapsed. This is a great example of the comedy of guilt being played out before our eyes.

Conclusion

Over the years, elites have developed an elaborate lexicon and discourse that they use to condemn the poor and justify the violence visited on them. The prejudices of the bourgeoisie against the poor are reified in formal law codes, sometimes approved by "representative" governments, and then used to justify the brutality needed to harness the labour-power of the poor to the apparatus of capitalist accumulation. These prejudices can be millennia old. Interestingly, this ancient pedigree can be seen in the very word at the heart of the controversy. "Democracy" is an oft invoked concept these days, but one about which there is not always a great deal of clarity. The word comes from the Greek words, Demos, meaning 'the people', and kratos , meaning 'power'. In the ancient world the term 'democracy' would have been used by elites as a pejorative for a kind of polis where the "common man", especially those with no property, had a voice in the government. Thus, 'democracy' translates as "the force of the people". Though, one must mention here that Demos does not refer to "the people" in the way modern readers will likely infer. The demos refers to the body of native-born adult male citizens of the polis. And, even more specifically it is used to refer to those native-born adult males wealthy enough to afford the hoplite panoply.

In the ancient world, 'demokratia' was invoked by elites in much the same way that the term 'anarchy' is used by elites today. However, the word 'anarchy' comes from the Greek 'an', a prefix implying the negation of what follows, and 'archos', meaning 'ruler'. Thus, 'an archos' translates as "without a ruler". The difference is that a ruler has some kind of legitimacy on their side, whether they are a tyrannos or a basileus. A demokratia, on the other hand, has no, and can have no, legitimacy at all; it is by definition an illegitimate regime, based on use of force by the majority of the worst people against the minority of the best people. One finds this echoed in the Romans' use of the concepts of libertas and licentia. The former refers to the legitimate power of the senatorial class to make the law, and to dominate the most important functions of the state. The latter referred to the illegitimate use of force by the lower classes against the nobility. A political regime imposed by, and for the Plebian order, in the eyes of the Patricians, could never be said to act with or from libertas, even though they were acknowledged to be free men and Roman citizens. A political regime dominated by the Plebian order could only ever be said to act from licentia, that is, from wantonness, lust, and instinct. The Plebians could never act from freedom, because they are led around by their dominant pursuits, pleasure and luxury, thus they can only act from licentia.

Suchlike forms of prejudiced language are still an integral part of the acting out of the comedy of guilt in capitalist society. This is because these vocabularies help elites ritually express their rationalizations for sacrifice, and thus absolve themselves of guilt. Only once they have been self-absolved can the moral guilt of sacrificing an unwilling victim be dissolved in the mind of the elite, who have always been the ones who organized and performed sacrifice. The comedy of guilt must be continually re-performed in order for the ruling class of capitalist society to square the circle implicit in Burkett's question; How can that which is not a gift be a sacrifice? By shifting blame for the problems and peril associated with poverty and precariousness onto the poor and exploited, the elite are able to turn unwilling victims into consenting sacrificial animals. So, when the process of capital accumulation requires the consumption, degradation, and exploitation of human life, as it inherently does, elites are ready with a bevy of convenient rationalizations that deflect blame; and, in a way that allows elites to continue to feel good about enjoying their opulence, even amidst appalling poverty. The ideology of the elite has always been flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the ritual comedy of guilt. Medieval Christian rulers found a way to rationalize the exploitation and persecution of Jews for profit; early modern Europeans found a way to rationalize the Atlantic slave trade; contemporary Americans have, in this illustrious tradition, found a way to rationalize a school to prison pipeline and prison-industrial complex that continues the super-exploitation of black and brown bodies which has fueled the capitalist development of the, now, "developed" countries.

Notes

Marx, Karl. "Manifesto of the Communist Party". The Marx & Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker.:473

Ibid, 474

For excellent resources on the religion of ancient Greece see Burkett, Walter. Greek Religion. 1977. Trans. John Raffan. Harvard University Press, 1985. Also see Meineck, Peter. "When Gods Walked the Earth: Myths of Ancient Greece". Barnes & Noble Audio. Portable Professor Series: 2005.

Scholarly opinion is divided on this question. Though there are literary references to human sacrifice, e.g. Achilles' sacrifice of Trojan captives during the funeral of Patroclus, there is as yet no archeological evidence of the practice of human sacrifice among the Greeks.