How Mikhail Gorbachev Became the Most Reviled Man in Russia

Jeffrey Sommers

Gorbachev and Reagan at the signing of the INF Treaty. Photo: Reagan National Library.

Mikhail Gorbachev presented a figure of Greek tragedy proportions. Possessing good intentions and intellectual curiosity, Gorbachev nonetheless became the most reviled man in Russia, following the USSR’s demise. Yet, with Gorbachev, his worst qualities were connected to his best. Gorbachev was the wrong man at the wrong time to resolve the contradictions created by the Stalinist and then Brezhnev bureaucratic model of really-existing socialism in the Soviet Union. Increasingly hated at home, Gorbachev was beloved by world leaders in the “West” as the man who peacefully (at least by the comparative metrics of collapsing empires) unwound the USSR, even if trying to save its all-union character. Meanwhile, for China, Gorbachev delivered lessons in what not to do when reforming a sclerotic post-Stalinist system requiring economic reforms, if not transformation.

What happened when the USSR produced its first post-World War II leader untethered to Joseph Stalin (and those he appointed)? Answer: a liberalizing socialist seeking a return the origins of the USSR’s democratic anchoring in the spirit of the “Soviets.” Contra assertions of Friedrich Von Hayek that socialism represents the “road to serfdom,” the emergence of Gorbachev suggests the opposite. Terror and tyranny in the USSR arose more from war and the demands of state security services required to survive, and the paranoid politics it enabled, rather than any “inevitable” path from the socialist path taken. Once the USSR was passed the generation having gone through this trauma (and leaders linked to that generation), a communist party head emerged that sought a return to an ideology anchored in democratic socialism.

As with nearly all of the Soviet Union’s leadership, Gorbachev had provincial origins, in his case born in 1931 in Stavropol Krai just southeast of Ukraine. His maternal grandparents were ethnic Ukrainian. He rose through the party ranks with a reputation for hard work and finding solutions to vexing challenges. By 1979 he was in the USSR’s highest governing body, the Politburo, and by 1985, selected to the country’s highest post as General Secretary to lead the Soviet Union out of its economic stagnation.

Gorbachev was a serious Leninist, and not just a bureaucrat reciting historical materialist catechisms out of momentum or political expediency. Confirming what historian Stephen Kotkin asserted in his biographies of Stalin, Soviet party leaders were not party posers, but genuine believers in communism who often walked the talk. But, what many thought the USSR needed in its time of trouble was Lenin’s firm hand and not democratic socialist inspired experiments done on the fly.

Ironically, it was these aforementioned democratic characteristics, which ensured the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms.  For every crisis, Gorbachev encountered, his go to inspiration was to be found in Lenin’s writings. Like Lenin, a provincial figure that transformed Russia, he was nonetheless not Lenin. Gorbachev focused on Lenin’s democratic message for the future, but not his decisiveness, if not brutal ruthlessness that allowed him to carry off the Soviet Revolution. By contrast, Russia’s current leader, Vladimir Putin, possesses the other half of Lenin’s personality: his ruthlessness, but bereft of any democratic purpose.

Gorbachev was too much the provincial intellectual and too little the pragmatist as he sought to salvage the USSR. Rather than address practical material approaches to Russia’s economic challenges, e.g., such as his mentor Yuri Andropov’s sensible proposal to reduce waste and make transport more efficient across the USSR’s vast expanse by improving rail rolling stock, Gorbachev’s outlook was often philosophical, focusing on democratizing civic and political life in order to unleash the dynamic economic potential of its citizens. Gorbachev’s reforms let loose creative forces alright, just not ones making the economy more productive, but rather those that gave rise to the post-Soviet oligarch and later siloviki-dominated economy.

For example, Gorbachev’s Decree on State Enterprises in 1987 and Decree on Cooperatives in 1988 were conceived to unleash entrepreneurial energies and deliver greater autonomy to both managers of existing state companies as well as producing entrepreneurs. In practice, however, these measures provided structures permitting the raiding of state inventories of raw materials and often re-selling of finished goods by middlemen in cooperatives at higher prices. Worse, these decrees permitted the rise of commercial banks for the purpose of facilitating business with international customers. This gave cooperatives and state company directors the ability to create (and launder) money, which the government had to back up with real cash. This also created opportunities for early de facto privatizations of state assets. In aggregate, rather than adding new output, Gorbachev’s reforms mostly fueled even more theft. Moreover, they became the infrastructure for offshore banking and privatizations enabling the final feeding off the post-Soviet carcass during the Boris Yeltsin years. This utilization of offshore banking networks intersected with the larger global turn led by the US and the UK to financialize their economies to remain competitive in the face of global manufacturing competition. Utilizing the euro dollar offshore banking systems designed in the 1950s to avoid taxation of multinational companies in Europe, these systems were expanded in the late 1970s and 1980s for tax evasion by the rich generally. KGB trained in using these networks to move capital globally for various Soviet projects (e.g., transferring money to revolutionary movements, etc.), used their expertise in the late Gorbachev years and after to facilitate the theft of Soviet commodities by selling them at world prices and pocketing the arbitrage. All of this worked to the interests of New York and London, as their banks become the recipients of this torrent of cash. KGB agents under Gorbachev were tasked to assist Soviet cooperatives and state managers with establishing commercial banks and offshore accounts. Under Yeltsin, these businessmen created in the Gorbachev years, muscled out the KGB (Chekists). But, in the 21^st century, former Chekists (Siloviki) reasserted their power, grabbed the cash and assets of select oligarchs, and began using this wealth to rebuild Russia’s military. This represented an entropy, in which the system of offshore banking that served US and UK interests through exporting post-Soviet commodities and money to points West, eventually created challenges to Anglo-American power, exemplified in part by the war in Ukraine in 2022.

But, it was not only in the economic realm that Gorbachev’s reforms caused chaos. Liberated from decades of control from an overbearing state, Gorbachev’s perestroika untied the heretofore tightly wrapped package of nationalism that Lenin and Stalin previously contained. Nationalists in the republics came to hate Gorbachev for his attempt at retaining the USSR, even a democratized one with autonomous republics. Meanwhile, Great Russian chauvinists despised Gorbachev for letting the Soviet system unwind and failing to use state power to keep the empire intact. One notable exception on the latter was in Armenia, where protests were causing an uncontrolled opening of the Soviet border with Iran. Gorbachev’s spouse, Raisa, asserted the resulting deaths of 200 Armenian protestors in a crackdown ordered by Gorbachev left him tormented and never the same. Yet, this limited use of force in Armenia was largely the exception to Gorbachev’s refusal to use violence against protestors. The Balts were also having none of Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the Soviet system. Gorbachev’s reforms gave them an opening to bolt for the exit, and they ran. Ukrainian, along with Russian, nationalists also awoke under Gorbachev. Many in the Russian and Ukrainian republics also backed independence from the USSR for economic reasons. Why? Russians assumed they were rich and were held back by parasite Soviet republics draining their wealth. Likewise, Ukrainians pitched independence as the road to milk and honey. Ukraine’s vast black earth belt and formidable industry in the Donbas surely would make it rich once liberated from the Soviet Union, so they thought. Thus, the implication of this is that the nationalist project of the 19^th century which was held back by both Czarist Russia and the USSR could not be chained indefinitely, and thus, wasn’t. Add to this that many in the USSR believed they indeed were rich, but that their vast wealth was being taken by other republics, and dismemberment became compelling.

But, this begs the question of whether the USSR could have been reformed and salvaged in the 1990s under different leadership?  Likely not under the existing conditions. The Soviet workforce was already urbanized. There was no ultra-cheap rural reserve army of labor to tap, as in China. Moreover, the US convinced Saudi Arabia in the 1980s to open the oil spigot to depress energy prices, thus checking Soviet power. Without access to cash, the Soviets could neither fund a transition period while modernizing or buy the technology required to do it. Unable to integrate more rapidly into the world economy, pace China, the USSR would have at a minimum needed to maintain COMECON for many years in order to enter the global economy as a producer of goods beyond commodity exports. France lobbied for keeping COMECON in the newly emerging post-Soviet bloc. The US, however, vetoed it, both to further open Russia to foreign capital, but more importantly to see its vast store of natural resources exit to global markets. Low prices for Soviet commodities in the 1980s and post-Soviet 1990s, played a significant role in restoring global profit levels after the 1970s crisis of accumulation. The post-Soviet space was a key element preventing a return to the raw materials price inflation of the 1970s economic crisis. Additionally, the US was keen to break up the Soviet bloc economies to minimize the threat of the return of a developmental state, especially one of any red and/or brown character.

Regarding China, Gorbachev proved a study for their leaders in how not to reform. Deng Xiao Ping held Gorbachev and his reforms as a study in how not to transition China out of its old Stalinist economy. But, could Gorbachev have succeeded had he moved straight away to economic reforms and used the fist to enforce them as did China in 1987 at Tiananmen? The answer, I think, is no. China’s good relations with the United States were a necessary condition for its economic miracle. The US opened to China under Nixon to further split it off from the USSR. Next, China was perfectly positioned to help the US make its supply-side, neoliberal turn in the 1980s to address its crisis of profitability of the 1970s. Moreover, in the 1980s/90s China was at the beginning of its urbanization. Its massive reserve army of labor powered the offshoring and outsourcing of manufactured goods that applied downward wage pressures sought by capital in the US. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, the process of urbanization in the USSR was done. There was no huge rural labor force that could have been exploited to make the USSR competitive in global labor markets. Soviet wages were too high and its brownfield industries were mostly uncompetitive. And, where Soviet and Warsaw Pact industries were competitive, Western multinationals sought to either buy and operate them or purchase them in order to remove competition. Meanwhile, resource extraction and surviving heavy industry were seized by Russia’s new oligarchs in the 1990’s “loan for shares,” and under Putin slowly clawed back by the siloviki. China, by contrast, was an economic tabula rasa with ultra-low wages and a strong state that kept labor discipline intact while building modern infrastructure as needed. Unlike the USSR, China was at the right place at the right time with the right global conditions to develop. The United States needed exactly what China had, and China knew what to do with that need.

On foreign relations, Gorbachev is viewed fondly in the US as the figure who advanced nuclear disarmament, while dissolving the Soviet Bloc. But, Russians thought Gorbachev was naïve in his dealings with the United States. Gorbachev basked in the acclaim of his Western partners, and increasingly took refuge in them as his domestic situation deteriorated. As the disintegration of USSR accelerated, it became psychologically too easy to take shelter in the praise offered by the West while the storms of protest hit ever harder at home.

Gorbachev seized the initiative to advance nuclear arms reductions early on, thus catching both the US and his own people off guard. Yet, his Western counterparts eventually accepted some of these initiatives. Winding down the Cold War, Gorbachev became a cause celeb in the West. Gorbachev also eventually failed as a negotiator with his Western counterparts. Desperate for cash by 1989-91, Gorbachev went hat in hand to the US and Germans. Had he asked for more earlier in exchange for his troops exiting the Warsaw Pact, he would have received massive financial assistance. But, in asking too late, his Western counterparts, while sometimes sympathetic, were disinclined to help as the game was already largely over. Not asking for money after the Warsaw Pact was already dissolving erased whatever leverage Gorbachev had. As Gorbachev was too late in negotiating for money and security guarantees on NATO, he was too early in dismantling the powers of the central bank and state enterprises financing his government. But, it wasn’t only with foreigners that Gorbachev misplayed his hand, but at home with Boris Yeltsin as well. Boris Yeltsin consistently outmaneuvered, if not humiliated, Gorbachev. Meanwhile, by 1990/91, Gorbachev’s only remaining state power resided with the state security forces, which in the main he rejected use of.

Gorbachev went from leading the only country rivaling the United States in power, but when the edifice of the failed state quickly collapsed, he was left only with a foundation in his name. The Gorbachev Foundation carried some marginal weight in the 1990s, but really none by the 21^st century. The past two decades largely saw Gorbachev silent. At a few brief moments he pointed criticism at Vladimir Putin, but very rarely, and largely ignored. And, thus, by his death on August 30, 2022, he had been already quiet for many years.

Climate-change driven floods ravage Pakistan, killing more than 1,100 and threatening millions with hunger and disease

Sampath Perera

Heavy monsoon rains and climate-change induced glacier melting have produced catastrophic floods and landslides in three of Pakistan’s four provinces.

Pakistani authorities have attributed 1,136 deaths to the floods since June 14, including those of over 350 children. The true death toll is undoubtedly higher as rescue crews have been unable to gain access to many flooded areas. Speaking to reporters Sunday after a helicopter tour of the Swat Valley in the north of the country, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said, “Village after village has been wiped out.”    

Passengers wait by a damaged road next to floodwaters, in Bahrain, Pakistan, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Naveed Ali)

The floods have also destroyed crops, drowned cattle herds and other livestock, swept away houses and devastated Pakistan’s already meagre, dilapidated infrastructure.

33 million people, about 15 percent of Pakistan’s population of 225 million, are said to have been directly impacted by the floods. With close to a million homes reported to have been destroyed or badly damaged, the numbers sleeping in the open air or tents has swelled into the high hundreds of thousands, possibly millions.  

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) reported on Tuesday that the flash floods—which began in June, but have swelled to Biblical proportions over the past two weeks—have already destroyed 157 bridges, ruined 3,457 kilometres (about 2,200 miles) of roads, and inundated 2 million acres of agricultural land, killing crops and washing away top-soil.

Pakistan Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has estimated the cost of the flood damage at $10 billion, or more than a fifth of the country’s total annual budget of $47 billion.

Approximately a third of the country is currently under water, with Baluchistan, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces worst affected.

As bad as the official tally of more than 1,100 deaths and 1,500 injuries is, the government figures are widely seen as gross underestimates of the true extent of the catastrophe.

A report published by the UN’s ReliefWeb on August 29 observed the “actual [casualty] figures are expected to be significantly higher.” It also warned of further impending rainfall, noting, “More devastation is expected in the coming days, which could be unprecedentedly severe.”

News reports paint a harrowing picture of social devastation and suffering.   

Rasheedan Sodhar, a 25-year-old teacher, told Al-Jazeera that she and 19 family members had fled her village near the Arabian Sea in the southern province of Sindh on Sunday as it was submerged by floodwaters. Their house was destroyed and livestock swept away. “We have nothing left. We are alive, but we are not able to live any more.”

The entire Sodhar family is now living in the open air in scorching heat in the nearby town of Mehar. “We barely get one meal a day,” said Rasheedan. “Our children are crying all day. [How] can you tell them to stop crying when there is no home for them?” 

Muhammad Fareed told BBC that his daughter was killed by the flooding of the Kunhar River, an Indus River tributary, in the northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “She told me, ‘Daddy, I'm going to collect leaves for my goat.’ She went to the bank of the river and a gush of water followed and took her away.”

Pakistan has experienced weeks of heavy rainfall, and months of stifling heat since last spring. In March and April, temperatures regularly surpassed 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) and in some places 50 degrees. As of last week, according to the NDMA, Pakistan had experienced 2.87 times more rainfall than the national 30-year average, and in Baluchistan and Sindh more than five times.

Both the extreme heat and torrential rains are connected to climate change. High temperatures result in the retention in the air of more precipitation, which subsequently falls as rain. For every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature, 7 percent more precipitation is captured in the air.

The extended heat wave has also accelerated long-term glacier melting in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountains. This has triggered a phenomenon known as glacial lake outburst floods, as lakes of newly unfrozen water surge down from the Himalayas to swamp large swathes of the country. More than 3,000 glacial lakes have formed in Gilgit-Baltistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa regions, with dozens identified by the UN as posing an imminent threat of glacial lake outburst flooding

The vast majority of Pakistan’s population is impoverished. With millions displaced and their livelihoods destroyed, and much of the country inundated by potentially badly-contaminated flood water, there is a grave risk of mass hunger and disease. Both malaria and tuberculosis kill tens of thousands of Pakistanis each year. And as around the world, there is an ever-present threat of new waves of mass COVID-19 infections and deaths.

In a pretense that serves to highlight nothing so much as the ruling elite’s indifference to the Pakistani people, the government cynically maintains that just 30,500 people have died from COVID-19 during the more than two-and-a-half years of the pandemic. Studies based on science-based excess mortality projections place the true death toll between 700,000 and 900,000.

Earlier this week, the United Nations issued a “flash appeal” for a pitiful $160 million to provide food, sanitation, drinking water, and emergency education to flood victims in response to what it termed a “colossal crisis.”

“Pakistan is awash in suffering,” stated UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. “The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids—the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding.”

Even assuming the UN meets its target, which is extremely doubtful given the pathetic sums pledged so far by the major powers, the “flash fund” would provide the equivalent of just $4.50 for each of the 33 million people impacted by the floods.

For its part, Pakistan’s government has announced a meagre 25,000-rupee ($112) assistance payment to each flood-affected family. As has been true in previous crises, due to corruption, mismanagement, and the wanton neglect of the authorities, it can be expected that only a fraction of those in need will receive even this tiny sum.

The hypocrisy of the imperialist powers, who never tire of proclaiming their commitment to human rights and democracy to justify one war after another, has been on full display amid the calamity in Pakistan. The United States has to date provided Pakistan a piddling $100,000 in assistance through USAID. This infinitesimal amount is a miniscule fraction of the additional $3 billion in military hardware Washington approved to wage war in Ukraine just last week, let alone the $50 billion US imperialism has pledged in weaponry and assistance to Ukraine since February.

Canada and the UK have pledged similarly derisory sums to Pakistan flood relief, $5 million and $1.5 million respectively.

The calamity unfolding in Pakistan is part of a rapidly escalating climate catastrophe around the world. Europe has been in the grip of one of its worst droughts in recorded history this summer, with crops failing en masse, and food and energy supply lines breaking down. In February and March, floods caused by unprecedented rainfall ravaged the coast of Queensland and New South Wales in Australia, killing 22 people and causing over $1 billion in damage to infrastructure. Dozens of people lost their lives in flooding in the US state of Kentucky earlier this month, while wildfires have raged across Alaska in the far north and near Yosemite National Park in California this summer.

These increasingly deadly events underscore the urgency of a global response to climate change. But as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, the profit and geo-strategic interests of the rival cliques of nationally-based capitalist elites, above all those of the United States and other imperialist powers, block the coordinated mobilization of the world’s resources necessary to address and reverse climate change. 

Underscoring the irrationality of capitalism, climate change has rapidly become a new source of intense inter-capitalist competition, as countries rush to lay claim to the sea lanes and resources of the Arctic Ocean, now made accessible by the melting of the polar ice cap; and to seize control of the natural resources vital for the production of electrical vehicles and other technologies that are essential for developing a carbon-neutral economy.

Indeed, a major aim of the war that the US and its NATO allies have instigated with Moscow over Ukraine is to subjugate Russia so as to gain unfettered access to its vast energy and mineral wealth. 

Pakistan’s flood catastrophe is also an indictment of all factions of its venal capitalist elite. Pakistan’s ruling class has looted and squandered the country’s resources in alliance with imperialism ever since its creation 75 years ago through the bloody communal partition of the subcontinent.

Countless billions have been squandered in funding Pakistan’s nuclear-armed military, always the linchpin of its reactionary alliance with Washington, and in pursuing its strategic conflict with India.

Decades of International Monetary Fund dictated “structural adjustment programs,” implemented with the aim of making Pakistan a magnet for global investment, have plunged tens of millions of Pakistanis into ever-deeper poverty and hobbled the country with decrepit public health care and education systems.   

The current interim coalition government headed by the Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) assumed office in March, with the military’s support, for the express purpose of implementing yet another round of IMF-dictated austerity.

On Tuesday, Planning Minister Iqbal, a top leader of the PML-N, and Sherry Rehman, the PPP climate change minister, pleaded for flood aid from the “international community.” In doing so, Iqbal made the argument that the industrialized, i.e., advanced capitalist, countries have produced the lion’s share of the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

None of this, of course, stood in the way of Pakistan’s government securing IMF approval on the very same day for the release of a $1.1 billion tranche of a suspended emergency bailout package that was conditional on the government imposing massive new burdens on the country’s workers and toilers at the behest of international capital. These include regressive tax increases, the elimination of energy price subsidies, and the accelerated privatization of state assets.

Dutifully enforcing the IMF’s demand that Pakistan’s federal and provincial governments record budget surpluses, the PPP-led Sindh provincial government is forcing government employees to finance its Fund Relief Program by deducting the equivalent of two days’ pay from lower-grade employees and five days’ pay from those in higher grades. Workers forced to pay the levy have remarked that they too are affected by the floods.

Speaking to the Financial Times this week, Cimate Change Minister Rehman claimed, “In living memory, we have not seen such a biblical flood come to Pakistan.” While it is true that climate change is contributing to the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, Rehman is well aware that this is a bald-faced lie. In 2010, when the PPP led Pakistan’s government and was similarly in the process of imposing IMF austerity, Pakistan suffered devastating floods that killed 2,000 people and inundated one fifth of the entire country. At the time, the UN characterized the floods as was “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in UN history.”

In the subsequent 12 years, nothing substantive was done to improve flood-preparedness or public health infrastructure.

In the budget for the financial year that started July 1, Pakistan’s government allocated a mere 100 million rupees ($0.457 million) to disaster response and emergencies, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 30 killed as rival Shia groups struggle for power in Baghdad

Jean Shaoul

Fighters from the Saraya Salam (Peace Brigades) loyal to influential Shiite Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr deploy in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Murtadha Ridha) [AP Photo/Murtadha Ridha]

In the worst violence seen in Baghdad for years, at least 30 people have been killed and 380 injured in two days of violent clashes after supporters of Muqtadr al-Sadr, the Shia populist cleric, stormed government buildings and clashed with security forces and militia groups belonging to his Shia rivals in the Coordination Framework.

The violence erupted after al-Sadr announced his “final retirement” from politics. Hundreds of his supporters in his Sairoon movement took to the streets and broke through the concrete barriers of the heavily fortified Green Zone, where Iraq’s federal parliament and government buildings, as well as the US and other foreign embassies, are located.

Protests also broke out in Iraq’s southern provinces, where al-Sadr’s supporters burned tires and blocked roads in the oil-rich province of Basra, and hundreds demonstrated outside the governorate building in Missan.

The caretaker government of Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew, while Iran, which has sought to bring Iraq’s Shiite factions closer together, closed its borders with Iraq, as millions of Iranians prepared to visit Iraq for an annual pilgrimage to Shia sites.

On Monday night, al-Sadr said he was going on hunger strike until the violence and the use of weapons stopped. The next day, in a bid to disassociate himself from the violence, he apologised and called on his followers to leave the Green Zone and the camps where they have been protesting for the last four weeks, prompting many of his supporters to leave.

Al-Sadr’s retirement threat—the fourth this erratic and unprincipled politician has made over the last eight years—and the violence he knew it would unleash are bound up with his determination to take direct control of Iraq’s sectarian-ethnic political system at the expense of his Shia rivals in the Coordination Framework.

While al-Sadr, who comes from a leading Shia clerical family, led the main Shia resistance to the US occupation, he has no progressive answers to the enormous social problems confronting the Iraqi people. Posing as a nationalist opposed to foreign interference in Iraq, he has links to both Washington and Tehran. He has acted as kingmaker in forging ruling coalitions and placed his own supporters in key positions in the cabinet, the state-owned oil company, powerful ministries and local authorities. They take a cut of government contracts to pass on to his organisation, which runs a militia and provides jobs and social welfare for his impoverished supporters in Baghdad’s slums.

Al-Sadr’s announcement of his “final retirement” followed the resignation of the 83-year-old Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, a close associate of al-Sadr’s father and spiritual leader of the Sadrists, who challenged his right to act as the heir of his father, Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, saying, “You cannot lead by their names. In reality you are not a Sadrist even if you are from the family of Sadrists.” Haeri called on his followers to transfer their allegiance to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and “obey” Iran’s supreme leader as “the most worthy and competent [individual] to lead the [Muslim] nation.”

Al-Sadr’s Shia rivals—organised in the Coordination Framework under former premier Nuri al-Maliki’s party, the State of Law Coalition, and the pro-Iran Fatah Alliance, the political arm of the Shia-led former paramilitary group Hashed al-Shaabi—are equally corrupt and are widely despised.

The worsening political crisis in Washington’s puppet state, which is at the centre of regional and international political conflicts, threatens outright civil war between the rival Shia parties and their militias, and the breakup of the state, as Iraq’s venal politicians fight for control of the country’s oil wealth and the spoils of political office following last October’s elections.

It comes amid an ongoing political deadlock, with no new government in place more than 10 months after the elections. Al-Sadr’s Sairoon movement won the most votes in a dismal 41 percent voter turnout.

The elections came amid mounting hostility towards the entire political regime set up by Washington after its criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. With no settlement between the country’s rival puppet masters in Washington and Tehran, Iraq’s political factions have been unable to agree on a new government.

Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, a former intelligence officer with no political base, assumed the premiership with Washington’s support in May 2020 after the month-long mass social protests of October 2019. Those protests demanded jobs and an end to poverty, corruption and the entire ethno-sectarian political system, and led to the forced resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi.

Mahdi’s government had sought to suppress the protests with lethal force, deploying the security forces and paramilitary groups to shoot down more than 600 protesters, further inflaming tensions until the pandemic and the accompanying restrictions emptied the streets.

Al-Kadhimi not only continued the economic and social policies of his predecessor, but also implemented new measures aimed at securing loans from the International Monetary Fund that have devastated workers’ incomes. He continued the repression of oppositionists and reneged on his pledges to investigate the killings by the security forces and to introduce legislation that would overturn Iraq’s sectarian political system, key demands of the protest movement.

With Iraq’s political factions set against any changes that would limit their privileges, patronage and wealth, al-Kadhimi has been unable to set a budget for 2022, despite the increase in oil prices, that could help alleviate the crushing social and economic conditions engulfing the vast majority of the Iraqi people.

Al-Sadr announced his intention of forming a government with the largest Sunni and Kurdish blocs, leaving the Iran-aligned Shia parties in opposition, in a break with the practice of including all the political parties in government. Refusing to be excluded from the patronage system, his Shia opponents in the Coordination Framework blocked his coalition-building process via a series of procedural and legal interventions, including using the Federal Supreme Court to block the nomination of a president and launching missile attacks on his Kurdish allies.

In June, al-Sadr withdrew his entire bloc from parliament, in a move aimed at forcing his rivals to agree to a new government and opening the door to street protests, counter-demonstrations and instability to force the dissolution of parliament and new elections. When the Coordination Framework, now the majority party in parliament, nominated Mohammed al-Sudani for the premiership, al-Sadr’s supporters stormed the parliament to prevent it selecting a president from the Kurdish parties, the first move in the process of nominating a premier, and have refused to move until their demands are met.

While the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), ruled by the corrupt Barzani family, had originally backed al-Sadr’s bloc, with the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court’s February ruling that the KRG was not entitled to keep its oil and gas revenues, largely derived from sales to Turkey, the KRG began to push for a new constitutional arrangement that would cede more power to the Kurds and other ethnic constituencies, rupturing relations with al-Sadr.

Since the resignation of al-Sadr’s Sairoon bloc from parliament, al-Sadr has called for early elections, the dissolution of parliament and constitutional reforms. His supporters protested outside the Supreme Judicial Council in the Green Zone when it refused to order the dissolution of parliament, saying it had no authority to do so. Al-Sadr has refused to participate in Kadhimi’s efforts to set up a national dialogue of all Iraq’s political parties, the first session of which was held two weeks ago. While most of the political parties have agreed to hold early elections, they differ about the arrangements for holding them and who is to organize them.

It is clear that whatever the composition of a new government, if and when it is formed, it will only heap more hardship and suffering on top of the chronic shortages of electricity and water and the soaring cost of food and other essentials that have already created widespread hardship.

The lessons of the failed Egyptian Revolution are of enormous importance to the Iraqi working class. A mass movement of the working class brought down the hated military dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

However, because the mass movement was dominated by bourgeois opposition parties and sections of the affluent middle class, all of whom were bitterly opposed to any challenge to capitalist rule, the military, backed by US imperialism and its Gulf allies, seized the opportunity for a brutal crackdown, instituting a reign of terror under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Mubarak’s former general and deposed President Mohammed Morsi’s minister of defence.

Energy bill surge threatens UK arts/culture venue cuts and closures

Paul Bond

Soaring inflation and rocketing energy costs are pauperising millions of workers and their families. The increases now having a devastating impact throughout society are an indictment of capitalism’s inability to safeguard any aspect of cultural or artistic life. Art and culture venues across Britain face crippling bills that could see many close. 

The rising energy price cap, placing an upper limit on the price per kilowatt hour used, applies only to households. It is predicted that the energy cap increase just announced, bringing typical bills to £3,549 a year from October, will shoot up to £5,400-a-year in January and to £7,200 by April.

Small businesses including arts venues do not even have a price cap safeguard. Rising energy costs have seen venues’ outgoings triple recently. Steeper rises are forecast, against predictions that inflation could reach 21 percent by early next year.

In The Times, music critic Richard Morrison’s comparison was revealing: “Will many go under, as happened a century ago when the country emerged from the First World War only to stagger into a nightmare decade of hunger marches and mass strikes?”

The crisis follows a decade of stagnating grants, exacerbated by the government’s wilfully negligent response to the impact of COVID on the arts. Over a decade the Treasury’s arts budget was cut by two thirds from its 2010 level, forcing venues and organisations to rely on commercial income.

By 2020, most UK venues with producing companies earned around 85 percent of their running costs, receiving 15 percent or less in government subsidies.

The inevitable result is that venues which managed to survive this far now confront the effect of devastating rising costs. Even venues championed as funding models are now at risk.

The Lowry Arts & Entertainment Centre's main entrance in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester [Photo by Skip88 / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Lowry in Salford is a modern gallery and theatre complex, hosting the collection of painter L.S. Lowry, and presenting or commissioning some 900 productions across all genres annually. It has around 850,000 visitors each year. Chief Executive Julia Fawcett told the Guardian it generates more than £30 million GVA [gross value added] per annum and operates in line with the government’s (non-)funding model. Only 6.3 percent of the charitable institution’s total funding comes from public money, in grants from Arts Council England (ACE), Salford council and Greater Manchester combined authority. The Lowry takes 93.7 percent of its income in earnings and contributions.

The fragility of the model can be seen in the impact of the pandemic. In 2020-21, The Lowry posted losses of £659,000.

Built in 2002, it is more energy efficient than older venues, but all venues are expensive. Rising costs of materials are seeing theatre set construction costs increasing 30-40 percent. The Lowry’s estimated annual building-related costs are £1.9 million. Rising supply costs will triple its energy bills this winter, posing “a major challenge,” as its energy bills are expected to reach nearly £1 million. This, said Fawcett, is “substantially more than the figure the Lowry receives annually from [ACE]’s National Portfolio funding programme”—around £860,000.

The arts are at the mercy of the corporate profiteers. Fawcett could not state explicitly what quotes they had received from energy companies because The Lowry are renegotiating commercially sensitive contracts.

Sadler’s Wells, Britain’s London based national dance venue, has also announced an expected tripling of its energy costs to around £900,000. This follows more than a decade of standstill funding, amounting to a real terms cut of 25 percent in its ACE grant. 

Chief Executive Sir Alistair Spalding said, “Frankly, we are looking at ticket prices.” He expects to raise top-end prices for big, popular shows, pushing the arts further out of the reach of working families.

Richard Morrison pointed to top West End prices of £325 for a recent production of Cabaret starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley. This accelerates the death of theatre as a popular art form, as an impresario told Morrison, “You will always get people willing to pay top whack for top stars, but middling shows with middling performers are drawing smaller and smaller audiences.”

Despite the warning signs, the impact has not yet been seen in full, in part because some venues are still working through the end of earlier contracts.

Ventnor Exchange, on the Isle of Wight is championed by ACE as a model of small-scale regional arts development. The creative arts hub and social enterprise combines theatre with a record shop and bar, using profits to fund local cultural opportunities for young people, including the annual Ventnor Fringe arts festival.

Jack Whitewood, Co-Director of Ventnor Exchange, spoke to the WSWS about their situation. “Energy bills have risen dramatically in recent months. Fuel and power generation costs at Ventnor Fringe were up 82 percent on 2021, and there is the additional knock-on effect of the rise in haulage and transport costs too, caused by the rising fuel costs. Similarly, our electricity bills at Ventnor Exchange have more than tripled in the last six months.”

Jack Whitewood, Co-Director of Ventnor Exchange outside the venue [Photo by Jack Whitewood @jack_whitewood/Twitter]

He said the “dramatic and rapid rise in costs … is very concerning.” They had expected rising costs, “but not at this scale or speed.” As “the current trajectory is not sustainable,” they were looking at reducing energy costs where possible, particularly at the Fringe.

However, they had “limited manoeuvre to cut energy consumption at Ventnor Exchange short of reduced hours.”

Whitewood and his team are looking to open co-working facilities, both to support the venue’s work and in recognition of the impact of the crisis on families and small businesses.

He was blunt on the future: “We’ve heard far too little from the government on how they will support families with rising energy prices, and there has been complete radio silence on the pressures facing small businesses and charities, who do not benefit from any energy price cap at all. Many businesses are indebted from COVID, so unless there is urgent action, I would predict there is a real risk of a rise in unemployment in the coming months.”

Ventnor Exchange’s problems are not unique. Mark Davyd, of the Music Venue Trust (MVT), has said 50-100 members of that network face a “frankly imminent crisis” that is “likely to close more music venues than COVID.”

The MVT is a British charity founded in January 2014 to help protect, secure and improve the UK’s music venues. One venue reported an electricity bill 640 percent higher than its last. The additional £31,000 being demanded is higher than the manager’s salary.

Museums, particularly in older buildings, report wild energy increases. Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle has already raised adult admission to £15 following a 138 percent increase in its annual fuel bill.

The Catalyst Science Discovery Centre and Museum in Widnes was sent a tariff increase of 400 percent by its existing supplier. While looking for alternative suppliers, this hike was increased to 460 percent. They eventually negotiated a contract with a different supplier with an increase of 353 percent, from £9,700 to £44,000.

MA policy manager Alistair Brown warned, “Without additional government intervention, organisations will have to make difficult decisions about whether to close for the winter, cut opening hours, or cut other areas of activity simply in order to afford their energy bills.”

Brown called for “concerted action from government—as we saw during the COVID crisis—to help reduce the sudden shock of these huge bills.” 

This will not happen, as the Johnson’s criminally slow and inadequate response to the pandemic’s impact on culture demonstrates. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has pledged only to maintain the domestic price cap, while handing over a further £29 billion in a bailout to the energy conglomerates.

A theatre executive told Richard Morrison, “The mood music out of DCMS [the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport]” about such a rescue package “is saying ‘not a chance’.”

The government’s “levelling up” agenda would see money removed from major arts bodies unless they relocate activity to towns deemed “culturally deprived”. This is being used to dress up further cuts and funding freezes. The same executive said, “Things could get pretty bloody when the Arts Council announces its next round of funding in October.”

Jack Whitewood told us he had not yet heard anything from ACE. “I would imagine many cultural venues, especially those with large buildings, will be sounding the alarm very soon.”

New Zealand Labour government to expand exploitative migrant labour schemes

John Braddock

New Zealand’s Labour government announced last week that it will ease restrictions on temporary migrant workers to address severe labour shortages in critical areas. Despite the removal of most COVID restrictions and the reopening of international travel, the Reserve Bank has described labour shortages as the worst in 50 years.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at press conference at Parliament in Wellington, Oct. 11, 2021. (Robert Kitchin/Pool Photo via AP) [AP Photo/Robert Kitchin/Pool Photo via AP]

With official unemployment running at 3.3 percent, Immigration and Workplace Relations Minister Michael Wood told media that the immigration system was being “streamlined” to help employers struggling with not enough workers.

An extra 12,000 tourists can now come to New Zealand and work over the next year, while people on existing work holiday visas will be given a six-month extension. About 4,000 working holiday-makers are in the country and more than 21,000 temporary workers have had their visas approved.

With employers resolutely opposing growing demands by workers for wage increases above the rate of inflation, Wood announced lower wage thresholds for migrant workers in key sectors, particularly aged care, hospitality, construction, meat processing and tourism.

In May, the government “tweaked” the immigration system to make it easier for some migrants to get residency, with then-Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi declaring there would be no return to relying on low-skilled and low-paid migrants. For most jobs, employers were required to pay migrants the median wage of $27.76, which is above the legal minimum of $21.20.

Under the new rules, tourism and hospitality employers will be able to pay these workers $25 per hour. Meat processing companies can pay $24 for entry-level jobs, with a cap on visa numbers set at 320. Workers will get seven-month visas. The pay thresholds will be updated each year in line with changes to the median wage.

Wood flatly denied that the reduced pay was discriminatory or illegal, and said local workers would not be disadvantaged, telling Radio NZ: “This is actually a positive policy that will assist in terms of ensuring that we have sufficient labour supply for key parts of our economy and will lift conditions for workers in those sectors.”

This is a lie. The new policy is another measure that will be used, with the support of the trade unions, to push down wages as inflation, currently 7.3 percent, devastates workers’ living standards.

This week 135 staff, a third of the workforce, were summarily sacked at the main ski fields on Mt Ruapehu in the central North Island, following one of the worst ski seasons in decades. Operator Ruapehu Alpine Lifts shut down the Turoa field, retaining just 17 of the company’s designated “essential skills” international workers to carry out technical work.

Heavy restrictions remain on permanent immigration. Labour took office in 2017 allied with the Green Party and anti-immigrant NZ First, promising to sharply reduce migrant numbers, which it has done. Even now, thousands of visa holders and family members are still unable to return. Despite a desperate shortage of healthcare workers, the government has placed draconian residency requirements on overseas applicants for nursing positions.

In another policy to boost the exploitation of temporary migrants, Labour has announced a new program for Pacific Islanders, purportedly to develop “labour mobility” in the region. Minister for Trade and Export Growth Phil Twyford said this would build on the “successes” of the current Recognised Seasonal Employers (RSE) scheme, expanding it into the meat and seafood processing sectors.

The RSE scheme, launched by the then Labour government in 2007, allows for 16,000 low-paid workers annually from Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji to work in the $NZ10 billion horticulture and viticulture industries. A similar program, begun under Australia’s Rudd Labor government, has run there since 2008.

A recent investigation by Stuff reporter Kirsty Johnson revealed some RSE workers are housed six to a room, charged $150 a week to sleep in freezing and damp conditions, falling sick repeatedly, and denied paid sick leave. One worker living in a crowded motel unit became so unwell he was coughing blood, but his boss initially refused to take him to the doctor, telling him to go and buy paracetamol instead.

The government’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Saunoamaali’i Karanina Sumeo subsequently investigated the workers’ conditions. She wrote on Twitter that many RSE workers “live in sub-standard, over-priced, overcrowded, damp and mouldy homes without basic amenities,” adding that some of what she had seen warrants criminal investigation. Pacific workers’ visas tie them to a specific employer which, according to Sumeo, can result in employer “over-reach” into controlling a worker’s basic rights.

Previous investigations in both New Zealand and Australia have exposed appalling conditions faced by the highly vulnerable workers, who are at the sharp end of relentless assaults by employers and successive governments on conditions and wages. In March, the Vanuatu government initiated its own inquiry into the Australian program, citing concerns about exploitation.

Governments promised that RSE workers would earn enough during their stay, in New Zealand capped at seven months in any year, to send money back to their families and provide economic “benefits” to the fragile island economies, which depend heavily on remittances. In reality, RSE workers are mostly paid the minimum wage as a base rate, before crippling deductions to cover airfares, visas, phones, housing and transport.

Attacks on immigrants’ rights escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Figures released to Stuff under the Official Information Act revealed complaints about exploitation and mistreatment went up by 259 percent from 2020 to 2021. Many people on temporary visas, including some on the RSE scheme, were unable to return home. Some were surviving on food stamps due to visa conditions leaving them unable to find work.

Canberra and Wellington have recently announced forthcoming reforms of the Pacific schemes. Australia’s Labor government will extend its program to include a four-year visa, and the ability of workers to bring their families with them.

New Zealand has promised a “full review” of its scheme next year. Wood declared that the RSE scheme was “important to New Zealand” and the Pacific but “we must treat people fairly.” Workers should have no confidence in such false promises, which have been made again and again with no improvement in conditions.

The aim of the Australian and New Zealand governments is to tighten their grip over the Pacific region, which they regard as their own colonial “backyard.” Their hypocritical references to the Pacific “family” are a cover for a diplomatic and military build-up in the region, supporting the US-led confrontation with China, which threatens a catastrophic war.

New Zealand’s practice of importing Pacific people as a source of disposable and cheap labour has a long and brutal history. During the early 1960s, thousands of Pacific workers were recruited for menial and factory jobs, only to find themselves later victimised by racist immigration laws, and subject to infamous “dawnraids” forcefully expelling them from the country.

The RSE schemes are just as inhumane, notwithstanding the fact that Pacific governments, which depend heavily on aid from Australia and NZ, have collaborated in implementing them. In a visit to New Zealand in June, Samoa’s Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa avoided laying any blame over the appalling conditions facing workers. She assured horticulture employers that her government simply wants to “raise the quality” of the RSE scheme.

Like governments throughout the world, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s administration has for years sought to scapegoat immigrants for the housing crisis, social inequality and pressure on public services. Its cynical moves to ramp up the exploitation of migrant workers is part of its escalating assault on the entire working class.

Ukraine announces beginning of offensive to retake Kherson

Clara Weiss

On Monday, the Ukrainian government and military announced the beginning of a counter-offensive against Russian troops, focused on recapturing the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine.

Natalia Humeniuk, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern command, declared, “Today we started offensive actions in various directions, including in the Kherson region.” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened in his Monday night address, “If they want to survive, it is time for the Russian military to flee. The occupiers should know: We will oust them to the border. To our border, the line of which has not changed.”

On Sunday, Zelensky had reportedly held a secret meeting with representatives of Ukraine’s defense and security sectors which was attended by the heads of the armed forces, the intelligence agencies, the ministry of defence, the ministry of internal affairs and the Ukrainian security service, as well as other defence forces.

Based on an anonymous source in the Ukrainian military, CNN reported on Monday that “the operation began at night with massive shelling of Russian positions and the rear.” The source also claimed that the Ukrainian military had taken four villages in the Kherson region. 

Russian authorities initially dismissed these claims, arguing that what was taking place was a “virtual offensive,” designed to garner more military support for Ukraine from NATO. However, by Monday night, Russian media reported that the Ukrainian military had suffered heavy losses in its “attempted counter-offensive” in the Kherson and Nikolaev regions. Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed that the Ukrainian army lost over 560 soldiers, 26 tanks and two SU-25 fighter jets.

The Russian press also reported that the Ukrainian army had engaged in heavy shelling of Nova Kakhovka, a city in the Kherson region that is located directly on the Dnepro River. The city has been used by the Russian army as a logistical center since almost the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February. The Ukrainian military reportedly used American-made HIMARS rocket systems to fire on the city’s electrical power plant and water station, forcing the shutdown of electrical and water supplies to the city’s almost 46,000 residents.

The current offensive was preceded by weeks in which the Ukrainian army, backed by Washington, carried out a series of strikes on military bases and ammunition depots in Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that was annexed by Russia in March 2014. On August 20, Daria Dugina, the daughter of the far-right Russian ideologue and war supporter Alexander Dugin, was killed in a car bomb that was clearly designed to murder her father as well. These attacks were an attempt to provoke a military response by Russia to provide a justification for NATO’s expansion and escalation of the war. The military strikes on Crimea were also aimed at weakening Russia’s aviation and military logistics in advance of the offensive now underway.  

None of the military efforts by Ukraine, which for years has ranked as the poorest country in Europe, would be possible without the arms and funding from NATO and, above all, the US. Amidst record inflation, Washington has spent some $50 billion on weapons for Ukraine since February alone, while ceasing all COVID-19 relief funding and targeting social welfare benefits for millions of Americans. Last Wednesday, Biden pledged another $3 billion for weapons and ammunition for at least another three years. 

Predictably, the Ukrainian military is shamelessly being cheered on by the US media. In a piece that reads largely as an advertisement for US weapons manufacturers and the Ukrainian military, the New York Times on Sunday praised the “craftiness” and “engineering ingenuity” of Ukrainian soldiers, who have been finding ways to combine highly sophisticated US weapons with their decades-old Soviet-era tanks and military equipment.  

The reality behind this US-funded and armed “craftiness” is a horrific blood bath. The US claims that the Russian army has suffered 80,000 casualties. Estimates of Ukrainian casualties are also put in the high tens of thousands. Ukrainian officials themselves admitted in the early summer that they were losing up to 500 men each day. Several weeks and likely thousands of deaths ago, the Washington Post noted in late June that the war in Ukraine was on track to becoming one of the bloodiest in modern history. In addition to the tens of thousands of dead and wounded, over a quarter of the deeply impoverished Ukrainian population of 38 million has been displaced by the war. 

US imperialism, which has laid waste to entire societies in the Middle East and North Africa, could care less about how many tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Ukrainians and Russians die in this war. 

In its recent Congress resolution, “Mobilize the Working Class Against Imperialist War,” the Socialist Equality Party stressed: “The war against Russia is the continuation and intensification of the drive for US global hegemony that was initiated with the first invasion of Iraq in 1990-91 and intensified following the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. Biden’s declaration that Putin cannot remain in power revealed the basic aims of the war: The removal of the present regime in Russia, its replacement by an American-controlled puppet, and the breakup of Russia itself—in what is referred to as “decolonizing Russia”—into a dozen or more impotent statelets whose valuable resources will be owned and exploited by US and European finance capital.

“With extreme recklessness, American imperialism is risking a nuclear war that could result in the extinction of human life on the planet. The destruction of Russia and control of the Eurasian land mass, a longstanding geo-strategic goal of US imperialism, is viewed by the Pentagon and CIA as essential preparation for and part of an onslaught against China. What was referred to by Lenin during World War I as a ‘redivision of the world’ is now underway. US imperialism intends to ‘redraw the map of the globe.’”

This assessment has been borne out by the developments in the weeks that have followed the passing of this resolution. Alongside its reckless escalation of the war against Russia in Eastern Europe, Washington has doubled down on provoking an open military conflict with China. Much like it provoked war with Russia over Ukraine, the US is seeking to provoke a war with China over Taiwan. 

Following the incredibly provocative trip by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on August 2 to Taiwan, the US sent two warships through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday. 

On Monday night, Politico reported that the Biden administration is planning to formally ask Congress to approve a $1.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan. According to Politico, the package, which is still being developed, will include “60 AGM-84L Harpoon Block II missiles for $355 million, 100 AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder tactical air-to-air missiles for $85.6 million, and $655.4 million for a surveillance radar contract extension.”

From September 1 through 7, Russia and China will be engaging in the joint VOSTOK-2022 military exercises in Russia’s Far East. India and several former Soviet states, as well as Nicaragua and Syria, are expected to join the military drills.