After Empowering the 1% and Impoverishing Millions, IMF Admits Neoliberalism a Failure

Benjamin Dangl

Last week a research wing of the International Monetary Fund came out with a report admitting that neoliberalism has been a failure. The report, entitled, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is hopefully a sign of the ideology’s death. They were only about 40 years late. As Naomi Klein tweeted about the report, “So all the billionaires it created are going to give back their money, right?”

Many of the report’s findings which strike to the core of the ideology echo what critics and victims of neoliberalism have been saying for decades.

“Instead of delivering growth,” the report explains that neoliberal policies of austerity and lowered regulation for capital movement have in fact “increased inequality.” This inequality “might itself undercut growth…” As a result, the report states that “policymakers should be more open to redistribution than they are.”

However, the report leaves out a few notable items on neoliberalism’s history and impact.

The IMF suggests neoliberalism has been a failure. But it has worked very well for the global 1%, which was always the IMF and World Bank’s intent. As Oxfam reported earlier this year, the wealthiest 1% in the world now has as much wealth as the rest of the planet’s population combined. (Similarly, investigative journalist Dawn Paley has proven in her book Drug War Capitalism that far from being a failure, the Drug War has been a huge success for Washington and multinational corporations.)

The IMF report cites Chile as a case study for neoliberalism, but never mentions once that the economic vision was applied in the country through the US-backed Augusto Pinochet dictatorship – a major omission which was no casual oversight on the part of the researchers. Across Latin America, neoliberalism and state terror typically went hand in hand.

The fearless Argentine journalist Rodolfo Walsh, in a 1977 Open Letter to the Argentine Military Junta, denounced the oppression of that regime, a dictatorship which orchestrated the murder and disappearance of over 30,000 people.

“These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst violation for human rights which you have committed,” Walsh wrote of the torture and killing. “It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery. . . . You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours to check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.”

This “planned misery,” as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine vividly demonstrates, was the neoliberal agenda the IMF has pushed for decades.

The day after Walsh mailed the letter to the Junta he was captured by the regime, killed, burned, and dumped into a river, one of neoliberalism’s millions of casualties.

Islamophobia: Why Are So Many People So Frightened?

Robert J. Burrowes

Islamophobia has become a significant factor driving politics in many western countries.

Islamophobia – fear of Muslims – is now highly visible among European populations concerned about terrorist responses from Islamic groups claiming Jihadi links. However, it is also evident among those same populations in relation to the refugee flow from the Middle East. In addition, Islamophobia is highly evident among sectors of the US population during the presidential race. It is a significant issue in Australia. Outside the West, even the (Muslim) Rohingya in Burma are feared by Buddhist monks and others.

Given that this widespread western fear of Muslims was not the case prior to the US-instigated 'War on Terror', do Muslims around the world now pose a greater threat to western interests than previously? Or is something else going on here?

In short, why are so many westerners (and others) now frightened of Muslims? Let me start at the beginning.

Human socialization is essentially a process of terrorizing children into 'thinking' and doing what the adults around them want (irrespective of the functionality of this thought and behavior in evolutionary terms). Hence, the attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviors that most humans exhibit are driven by fear and the self-hatred that accompanies this fear. For a comprehensive explanation of this point, see 'Why Violence?' http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and 'Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice'. http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/

However, because this fear and self-hatred are so unpleasant to feel consciously, most people suppress these feelings below conscious awareness and then (unconsciously) project them onto 'legitimized' victims (that is, those people 'approved' for victimization by their parents and/or society generally). In short: the fear and self-hatred are projected as fear of, and hatred for, particular social groups (whether people of another gender, nation, race, religion or class).

This all happens because virtually all adults are (unconsciously) terrified and self-hating, so they unconsciously terrorize children into accepting the attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviors that make the adults feel safe. A child who thinks and acts differently is frightening and is not allowed to flourish.

Once the child has been so terrorized however, they will respond to their fear and self-hatred with diminishing adult stimulus. What is important, emotionally speaking, is that the fear and self-hatred have an outlet so that they can be released and acted upon. And because parents do not allow their child to feel and express their fear and hatred in relation to the parents themselves (who, fundamentally, just want obedience without comprehending that obedience is rooted in fear and generates enormous self-hatred because it denies the individual's Self-will), the child is left with no alternative but to project their fear and hatred in socially approved directions.

Hence, as an adult, their own fear and self-hatred are unconscious to the individual precisely because they were never allowed to feel and express them safely as a child. What they do feel, consciously, is their hatred for 'legitimized' victims.

Historically, different social groups in different cultural contexts have been the victim of this projected but 'socially approved' fear and hatred. Women, indigenous peoples, Catholics, Afro-Americans, Jews, communists, Palestinians…. The list goes on. The predominant group in this category, of course, is children (whose 'uncontrollability' frightens virtually all parents until they are successfully terrorized and tamed).

The groups that are socially approved to be feared and hated are determined by elites. This is because individual members of the elite are themselves terrified and full of self-hatred and they use the various powerful instruments at their disposal – ranging from control of politicians to the corporate media – to trigger the fear and self-hatred of the population at large in order to focus this fear and hatred on what frightens the elite. This makes it easier for the elite to then attack the group that they are projecting frightens them.

For now, of course, Muslims are the primary target for this projected fear and self-hatred, which accounts for the US-led western war on the Middle East. Islamophobia thus allows elites and others to project their fear and self-hatred onto Muslims so that elites can then seek to destroy this fear and self-hatred. Obviously, this cannot work. You cannot destroy fear, whether yours or that of anyone else. However, you can cause phenomenal damage to those onto whom your fear and self-hatred are projected. Of course, there is nothing intelligent about this process. If every Muslim in the world was killed, elites would simply then project their fear and self-hatred onto other groups and set out to destroy those groups too.

In fact, as western elites now demonize Russia and encircle it with nuclear weapons and ABM defense systems, we simply witness another example of these elites projecting their fear and self-hatred.

If you are starting to wonder about the sanity of this, you can rest assured there is none. Elites are insane. If you want to read a fuller explanation of this point, see 'The Global Elite is Insane'.

So is there anything we can do? Fundamentally, we need to stop terrorizing our children. As a back up, we can provide safe spaces for children and adults alike to feel their fear and self-hatred consciously (which will allow them to be safely released). By doing this, we can avoid creating more insane individuals who will project their fear and self-hatred in elite-approved directions.

In addition, if you are fearless enough to recognize that elites are manipulating you into fearing Muslims and others whom we do not need to fear, now would be a good time to speak up and to demonstrate your solidarity. You might also like to sign the online pledge of 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World'. http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

Suppressed fear and self-hatred must be projected and they are usually projected in socially approved ways (although mental illnesses and some forms of criminal activity are ways in which this suppressed fear manifests that are not socially approved).

In essence, Islamophobia is a manifestation of the mental illness of elites manipulating us into doing their insane bidding. Unfortunately, many people are easy victims of this manipulation. 

Colluding In Lies: The Brexit Debate

Binoy Kampmark

The Brexit argument (whether Britain should remain or otherwise in the European Union), has become hysterically hyperbolic. That was the view of former Tory MP Gyles Brandreth, expressed with usual alacrity on the news quiz show Have I Got News For You.

Times in Britain are viciously partisan. No one wants to see their dog left out of this particular fight. The result is a vicious mauling being handed out by all sides on whether the leavers or stayers have the upper hand.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, one of Britain’s more prominent tax think tanks, went in against the Vote Leave campaign, suggesting that the austerity regime would be prolonged by a departure from the EU. That would be the only way to plug consequential multi-billion pound holes in the budget arising from lower foreign investment and poorer trade returns.

The IFS also took issue with various figures being used by the Leave campaign, most notably the suggestion that Brussels receives £350 million every week from the sceptred isle. That particular figure has become the holy marker for former London mayor Boris Johnson. According to the body, that assessment conveniently ignored the role of the rebate and a range of other subsidies for business and research. Taken together, the amount ending in EU coffers was more likely £150 million.

Vote Leave, in what has been symptomatic of the debate, could only dismiss the IFS projections as issuing from a “paid-up propaganda arm of the European Commission”. Naturally, “The IFS was not a neutral organisation.” Objectivity is suffering a long drawn out death.

Then came a study by Migration Watch which emphasised the undesirables coming into the country. While Johnson and company rail against the succubi of Brussels, they also fear the influx of humans.

Migration Watch duly supplied some ammunition with a suitably alarmist prediction, claiming that up to half a million refugees and their assortment of relatives would make their way to Britain after 2020. The supposition there is that those granted asylum in other EU countries – Germany, Greece, and Italy – would leapfrog their way into the UK on acquiring citizenship.

The group’s report asserts that leaked documents from Germany suggest that each person granted asylum would be followed by up to four family members. Building on figures farmed from Eurostat that 1 million migrants would be successfully granted asylum for 2015 and in the first quarter of 2016, the numbers are predictably inflated for effect.

According to the group’s chair, Andrew Green, “The UK could well face a significant secondary flow of refugees from Europe in the coming years adding to the already huge strain being placed on housing and public services.”

Britain Stronger in Europe, the official front for the cause to stay in the EU, had another position, rubbishing the projections as counterfeit. For Emma Reynolds, MP for Wolverhampton North East and former shadow communities secretary, the “overwhelming majority of refugees will never get the right to come to Britain”. Another charming state of affairs.

On the side of the stayers, the situation has also been absurd, focusing on subjects emptied of political content. Vapid videos from the In Campaign are proliferating about how a lifestyle is at risk if the vote of June 23 favours departure. One, Votin, proves particularly grating in its semi-literate framing, using grammatically challenged terms. The unfortunate casualty in that production is the letter g. There is “earnin”, “makin”, “roamin” and “chillin”; there is “ravin” topped off by the smashing hashtag “#votin.”

Its supposition is that the young are suitably disengaged in mindless activity to avoid the argument altogether. The reaction from that very segment was savage. “It failed to speak their language,” snorted The Telegraph, “instead implying they are stupid.”

The corporate sector is similarly using another tack that emphasises a rather different notion of governance. For them, the profit factor, rather than the representative, democratic one, counts. Their apocalyptic warnings say little about reforming the EU and everything about keeping capital free.

Airbus, for instance, has insisted that leaving the EU would lead to a fall in investment in Britain. The company itself employs somewhere in the order of 15,000 people. Such direct arguments, even threats, tend to resemble acts of electoral bullying. If you vote to leave, goes this line of thought, you vote for the dire consequences of unbalanced budgets and lower growth.

Rather than drawing constructive arguments from each side, the descent to a bottom in the maelstrom of illogical fear has been undertaken. Between the dogmatic Brexiteers and the warning stayers, there is much more nonsense to be had before the referendum.

The Boiling Pot

Richard Heinberg

On the surface, things appear normal. The status quo of life in America circa 2016 isn’t to everyone’s liking, but at least the system is still working after a fashion. The price of oil is going up a bit: that means the cost of driving is also creeping higher, but steeper prices provide a little welcome relief for an oil industry otherwise teetering on the brink of financial ruin. There are tiresomely long lines at airports, but that means people have the wherewithal to pay for plane tickets. Most people are disgusted with the presumptive U.S. presidential candidates, but at least the machine of electoral politics is still marginally functioning. The stock market is up, unemployment is down. We’re muddling through.

Or are we? Beneath the lid, a pot of trends is coming to a boil. If Carl Jung was right about the existence of a collective unconscious, it must be seething with nightmares right about now.

So far, 2016 is the hottest year in history. And not by just a smidgen: every single month so far has set a record. This handy little animation has been making the rounds of environmental websites in the last couple of weeks; it shows a climate system that is shooting off the rails.

Slow, linear change is giving way to self-reinforcing feedbacks and non-linear lurches. Last December (just 6 months ago), delegates to climate talks in Paris agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade. Extend the temperature trend shown in that animation for just another few months and we may well be beyond that threshold. How long until we get to two degrees? Three?

Arctic sea ice this month is by far at the lowest extent ever recorded and temperatures in Siberia are rising four times faster than in the rest of the world, releasing enormous amounts of methane and carbon stored in permafrost.

In the energy world, the growth of unconventional oil and gas supplies appears to have postponed peak oil for a decade (conventional oil production flatlined starting in 2005; all the supply increase since then has come from tight oil, tar sands, heavy oil, and deepwater oil)—but at what cost?Unconventional oil production carries higher environmental risks, including increased greenhouse gas emissions per liter of finished fuel.

And it took massive investment to finance the surge in unconventionals. If it hadn’t been for easy-money central bank policies in the wake of the 2008 global financial crash, it’s likely the fracking boom would have been an unnoticeable blip. A few years of sky-high oil prices were also necessary. But high prices weakened demand for oil, just as drillers flooded the market with the wrong grades of crude in the wrong places at the wrong time. The result: an oil price crash (starting in mid-2014) and financial bloodletting within the industry.

We appear to be in a new era in which oil prices are either high enough to stimulate new supply, in which case they are also high enough to cripple the economy; or they are low enough to stimulate the economy, but also so low as to decimate the industry. There is no longer any tenable middle ground.

Today’s price of $50 per barrel is high in historic terms, but still too low to allow the industry to recover from the past two years of staggering losses. The trouble is, the unconventional production binge required a lot of cash, and most of it was borrowed. According to data compiled by FactSet and Yahoo Finance, the U.S. energy sector is drowning in $370 billion of debt, double the amount a decade ago. Just to make interest payments, energy companies shelled out $16.7 billion in 2015—half of their total operating profit. And despite rebounding oil prices, the situation is getting worse, with over 86 percent of energy sector operating profits going to interest payments in the first quarter of 2016. Unless prices zoom back past $100 a barrel, the tens of billions of dollars in debt coming due between 2017 and 2020 will likely trigger a wave of defaults and bankruptcies.

That could spell serious trouble for an economy that has been on life support for eight years now. After the nearly catastrophic crash of 2008, low interest rates, bailouts, and quantitative easing succeeded in restoring a sense of economic normalcy, though at the cost of more financial bubbles (in housing, fracking, and tech) and increased economic inequality. But what will the wizards of finance do when things turn ugly again—as they inevitably will, sooner or later? Negative interest rates will prove more than a little unpopular with savers, and throwing trillions more at banks and investors won’t help the masses afford to pay interest on their mounting debt or to buy more consumer goods.

A pressure cooker needs an escape valve, and this year politics is serving that function for the pressure cooker that American society has lately become. Bernie Sanders is giving voice to popular anger at increasing economic inequality, and at Wall Street’s immunity from being held culpable for the 2008 crash and its continued predation on the rest of the economy. Donald Trump is a megaphone for the blind fury of the wage class at its ongoing destruction by globalization and immigration. There is a heavy scent of anti-establishmentarianism in the air; that leaves poor Hillary Clinton, the consummate establishment politician, trying desperately to sound like an outsider and a critic of the globalized, financialized governmental megamachine she has labored for decades to help build, manage, and sell to voters.

For the next six months the upcoming U.S. presidential election will probably be the main focus of discussion for both the media and Main Street. A lot depends on the outcome, but a good outcome is hard to imagine; only shades of bad. Sanders is the only candidate with a sound energy and climate policy, but he has a vanishingly small chance of actually becoming the next president. Clinton is the odds-on favorite: she has the backing of Wall Street, the Washington foreign policy establishment, and the military-industrial complex. She would doubtless continue most of the current administration’s domestic policies (including its confused and largely self-defeating climate and energy policies), but her stance toward Russia, China, and the Middle East would likely be far more combative—hardly what we need at a moment when global tensions are likely to be exacerbated by weakened economies.

But don’t count Trump out. Riding on a tide of white working-class wrath, he has managed to surpass the expectations of all of his critics. While it is next to impossible to divine actual policy proposals from his muddled, self-aggrandizing speeches, he did manage to give broad hints at his energy and climate intentions in a talk in North Dakota last week, where he made it fairly clear that he just doesn’t care about climate change, that he really likes fossil fuels (including coal), that he doesn’t like wind or solar that much, and that he understands so little about the country’s resource reserves and energy production statistics that he somehow thinks it physically possible for the U.S. to become a significant net exporter of oil and gas. As to his likely foreign policies, your guess is as good as mine.

A Trump presidency could lead to a nearly unprecedented period of turmoil for the nation: blue states and red states would be at each other’s throats. The fallout for relations with other countries are unknown, but the implications for climate and energy would clearly be horrific.

“Blowing off steam” is a phrase often used to describe the harmless pranks of teenagers, though it could also apply to a continent-destroying super-volcano. In the American political context, the scale of the impending steam and magma release is uncertain. But pressure is building and the available outlets are few.

Whoever the next president turns out to be, her or his term in office will likely coincide with another financial crash, which could well turn out to be much worse than the 2008 debacle. Social pressures from rising inequality and dashed expectations will build to explosive levels. And climate impacts may well take forms that even a Donald Trump cannot ignore.

Altogether, the next eight years are unlikely to be as safely corked and bottled as the last. They say crisis is opportunity. We may be facing more opportunities than we know what to do with; may we seize them skillfully!

Australia: Jobs losses continue to mount amid collapsing wage levels

Terry Cook

Recently released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on jobs and wages confirms that tens of thousands of workers are either without work of any kind or are being forced into insecure, low-paid casual and part-time employment.

The worsening situation—a direct outcome of the pro-market policies of Liberal and Labor governments—gives the lie to the claims of both parties that they will create jobs and improve living standards if they win power in the July 2 federal election.

According to ABS labour force figures for April, unemployment remained at 5.7 percent, unchanged from the previous month. While part-time employment increased by 20,200, the number of full-time jobs fell by 9,300 in April. Since December, over 75,000 new part-time jobs have been generated with 50,000 full-time jobs eliminated.

The job situation facing young people is far worse. The official national youth unemployment rate is now 12.3 percent with another 20.2 percent of youth underemployed. The number of young people starting apprenticeships has fallen by 100,000, or 40 percent, in the past three years.

Casualisation has also contributed to a sharp fall in the number of hours worked. ABS figures show that in April, the total of hours worked dropped 1.1 percent to 1,614 million. In the past 12 months to April, the total hours worked fell by 0.5 percent making it the first time in three years that the annual total has declined.

The ABS figures understate the real levels of joblessness because the agency regards anyone who has worked for one hour a week as employed. An alternative survey by Roy Morgan Research showed unemployment for April stood at 10.4 percent and under-employment at 7.7 percent—a total of over 2.3 million people.

Another indicator of Australia’s mounting jobs crisis is provided by FTI Consulting, which provides data on the number of companies entering external administration. According to its figures, 10,299 businesses went into administration over the last 12 months to March, an increase of 18 percent on the previous corresponding period.

Recent high-profile insolvencies this year include Queensland Nickel, the electronic retail chain Dick Smith, furnishing and fashion retailer Laura Ashley and iron ore company Arrium, employing over more than 11,000 people.

Along with these are a raft of lessor publicised failures including the travel division of Round the World Experts, video-on-demand company Quickflix, marketing company Brand New Media and pet supplies distributer Animal Supplies Group, which all entered administration in April and May. According to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, 159 retailers entered external administration between January and March, up from 149 in the first quarter of 2015.

Thousands more jobs are under threat with the ongoing collapse of the mining boom, as mineral commodity prices continue to decline in response to falling demand in Asia, particularly in China, Australia’s main export market.

On Tuesday, iron ore prices dropped to $US50.27 a tonne which will see further cost cutting and jobs losses, particularly at Australia’s smaller and medium producers where higher production costs make them more susceptible to price falls. These include Atlas Iron Limited, BC Iron Limited, Grange Resources Limited and the Fortescue Metals Group, all of which have shed jobs over recent months.

In May, ABS data released the slowest quarterly growth in average wage rates in the 18-year history of the statistical series. In the March quarter, wages rose by just 0.4 percent in the private sector and 0.5 percent in the public sector.

Media, telecommunications, IT, rental, hiring and real estate industries saw wage growth of just 0.1 percent; education and training recorded a 1 percent increase; and in transport, postal and warehousing wages rose by 0.7 percent in the March quarter. The mining sector, once the main growth area in the economy, increased by a meagre 1.4 percent. On average, Australian wages rose by just 2.1 percent in the past year.

Commonwealth Bank senior economist John Peters told the media that the low wages growth was because businesses confronted a “much more flexible labour market” and a “lacklustre jobs market.”

In fact, increasing numbers of employers, with the support of the unions, are utilising the economic downturn and threat of further sackings and plant closures to not just put downward pressure on pay demands but to impose wage freezes.

Two weeks ago, Alcoa, with the backing of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), used the threat of closure to impose a one-year wage freeze on its 540-strong workforce at its aluminium smelter in Portland, Victoria.

In March, Australian Paper forced 160 workers at its Maryvale mill in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley to accept a pay freeze and a four-day week as part of a new union-negotiated workplace agreement.

In South Australia, steel maker Arrium demanded 400 workers at its iron ore mine accept a 10 percent pay cut just before the company went into administration in May.

Last November, BlueScope Steel management, in collaboration with the unions, axed 500 jobs and imposed a three-year pay freeze at the company’s Port Kembla steel operations, south of Sydney, after threatening to shutter its entire operations.

UK population poorer and hungrier

Dennis Moore

Official statistics and a recent report paint a desperate picture of the lives of millions of people in the UK in 2016. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and a report by the Food Foundation, “Too Poor to Eat, Food insecurity in the UK,” reveal huge increases in the numbers of people who have experienced poverty in the last three years and who are regularly unable to put food on the table.

One in three people, 3.9 million, have experienced poverty in Britain in the last three years. The ONS figures show that the numbers of people who are moving in and out of poverty is high.

The data was calculated based on the number of people who earned less than the 60 percent of the national average after tax—£9,995 or £20,907 for a family including two adults and two children.

The UK, compared with other European Union (EU) countries, showed a greater turnover of people in and out of poverty, resulting in a higher proportion of people suffering hardship. Between 2011 and 2014, 32.5 percent of the UK population had experienced income poverty at least once.

In 2014, the UK had the twelfth-highest figure among the EU countries, with 16.8 percent of the population at risk of poverty. Between 2010 and 2013, 7.8 percent of the UK population entered poverty, with only Greece and Ireland having higher entry rates.

A major contributory factor influencing people falling into poverty, and the chances of escaping, is low pay and overall job insecurity.

The proposed solution to low-pay -“social mobility,” via getting better, higher paid work - is a chimera. In reality, the number of low-paid, insecure jobs is increasing. An investigation conducted by the Resolution Foundation think tank last year found that over a 10-year period just a quarter of low-paid workers managed to move into better-paid jobs.

Poverty among older people is also on the increase. A study carried out by the Independent Age charity shows that nearly one million over-75s are living in poverty. Once in poverty, it is more than likely they remain poor, with over 75s being twice as likely to be living in poverty persistently for the last four years.

“Too Poor to Eat” shows that 8.4 million people living in Britain are struggling to put food on the table, with over half of those regularly going a day without eating. The data for this report was gathered by the United Nations, via a national representative telephone survey carried out with 1,000 adults in 2014. No British government has collected data on food insecurity since 2003. Last year the ruling Conservatives rejected calls to monitor hunger.

The number of people in the UK who struggled to put food on the table in 2014 is equivalent to the entire population of London. This is the situation in the fifth-richest country in the world.

The foundation estimates that 4.7 million people aged over 15 were severely “food insecure.” Food insecurity is defined as experiencing hunger, inability to secure enough food of sufficient quantity and quality to enable good health and participation in society, and having to cut down on food due to financial necessity.

With 10.1 percent of adults in the UK having suffered food insecurity in 2014, this places the UK in the bottom half of EU countries experiencing food insecurity—below Estonia, Hungary, Malta and Slovakia.

The report noted there has been a marked increase in the numbers of people who accessed assistance from food banks. The Trussell Trust, a major provider of food banks in the UK, saw a massive increase in the number of people receiving food parcels for three-day emergency assistance between the years 2008/9 and 2014/15. In that period, the number of people requiring parcels increased from 25,899 to more than 1 million.

However, food bank data alone underestimates how many people face food insecurity. The data from the Food Foundation shows that 17 times more people are food insecure. Many poor people use other food banks, and it is likely that many more do not access food bank assistance at all.

Rachel Loopstar, an Oxford University food poverty expert who worked on the Foundation study, said, “We knew the number of people using food banks did not capture everyone who faces not having enough to eat in the UK; what these figures tell us is just how much bigger the problem of hunger really is.”

The cost of food has gone up by 8 percent in real terms since 2007, with research carried out by Cambridge University showing that the cost of healthy food rose more in the last 10 years than unhealthy food.

The National Diet and Nutrition Survey, jointly funded by Public Health England, an executive agency of the Department of Health, and the UK Food Standards Agency, reports sharp differences in nutrition consumption between the poorest 20 percent as against the richest 20 percent of the population. The poorest eat less fish, fruit and vegetables, fibre and protein and eat more sugar.

The stagnation or even decline in incomes impacts on food spending, with government data showing that disposable income has gone down every year since 2004 for the poorest 20 percent of UK households.

In response to the ONS data, Labour Shadow Treasury Minister Rebecca Long-Bailey said, “These figures should shame [Prime Minister] David Cameron.”

They are just as much an indictment of the Labour Party and its trade union backers. Over the last 30 years successive Labour and Tory governments have overseen a significant rise in poverty across the UK, driven by decreases in wages and attacks on welfare provision. Drastic cuts to public services are administered via mainly Labour run local authorities.

Under the 1997-2010 Labour government, the income inequality gap grew to its widest since records began in 1961. Poverty increased markedly under Labour, even prior to the 2008 global financial crash and the resulting mass austerity programmes. Some 11 million people were living in poverty by March 2008, a rise of 200,000 since 2006, with 2.9 million children living in poverty in 2007-08.

Argentine court sentences Plan Condor defendants

Rafael Azul

Eighteen former military officers were sentenced in Argentina last Friday for their participation in the chain of continent-wide assassinations and kidnappings that were part of Operación Cóndor (Operation Condor) in the 1970s and 1980s.

Operation Condor was the name given to the agreement to integrate the security forces of seven Latin American dictatorships (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Perú, and Uruguay) to hunt down and eliminate left-wing political opponents.

The agreement was formally signed on December 28, 1975, in Santiago, Chile. Formally absent from the meeting was the US government. Though their signatures were missing, the fingerprints of the the CIA, the Pentagon and the US State Department, headed then by Henry Kissinger, were all over the document.

According to J. Patrice McSherry, author of “Operation Condor: Cross-Border Disappearance and Death,” the foundations of this repressive plan had been established by US military intelligence:

The reigning national security doctrine incorporated counterinsurgency strategies and concepts such as “hunter-killer” programs and secret, “unconventional” techniques such as subversion, sabotage, and terrorism to defeat foes. Much of counterinsurgency doctrine is classified, but scholars have documented many of its key components. Michael McClintock, for example, analyzed a classified U.S. Army Special Forces manual of December 1960 Counter-Insurgency Operations, one of the earliest to mention explicitly, in its section “Terror Operations,” the use of counterinsurgent terror as a legitimate tactic. He cites other secret U.S. army special operations handbooks from the 1960s that endorsed “counter terror,” including assassination and abduction, in certain situations. One March 1961 article in Military Review stated, “Political warfare, in short, is warfare…that] embraces diverse forms of coercion and violence including strikes and riots, economic sanctions, subsidies for guerrilla or proxy warfare and, when necessary, kidnapping or assassination of enemy elites.” In short, “disappearance” was a key element of counterinsurgency doctrine.

During the course of the trial in Argentina, more than 500 witnesses described in detail many of the aspects of Operation Condor that directly applied these US military tactics. Their testimony firmly established the conspiracy that existed among the participating governments to abduct, illegally transport across national borders, torture and murder perceived political enemies. This policy is currently known as “rendition.”

One of the better-known examples of such abductions is that of the daughter and son-in-law of the famous poet Juan Gelman. In 1976, Argentine authorities abducted María Claudia García Irureta Goyena, 19, and Marcelo Ariel Gelman, 20. They were never to be seen again. It is now known that María Claudia was transported by an Argentine “work group” to Uruguay were she was killed after giving birth to her daughter, Macarena, who was given to the family of a police officer. Juan Gelman himself was forced into exile by the dictatorship.

This policy of “rendition,” to other countries to be tortured and killed, now widely practiced by the CIA and other US agencies, was one of the key innovations of Operation Condor.

Originally among the accused, in addition to those that were tried—all of them but one Argentine citizens (along with former Uruguayan military commander Manuel Cordero)—was former Peruvian dictator Francisco Morales Bermudez, whose extradition to face trials in Italy, and Argentina, was blocked by the Peruvian Supreme Court.

The trial against the 18 began in 2013. Since then, seven of the defendants, including Jorge Videla—the general who originally led the murderous military junta that ruled Argentina—have died. Videla headed the military-fascist junta between 1976 and 1981, during the height of the bloody suppression of working class resistance and elimination of political opponents across national borders.

The 1975 document and much of the information that led to the trial were discovered hidden in a Paraguayan police station in 1992. These are now known as the “Terror Archives.” Paraguayan lawyer Martín Almada discovered these files, acting on a tip. The Terror Archives corroborated suspicions of the existence of the plan, and of the US participation in the context of its above-described “National Security Doctrine.” The documents, compiled by officials of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship, detailed the coordinated attacks by the Latin American security forces against alleged leftists in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Uruguay.

Included in Plan Condor were the assassinations of Chilean general Carlos Pratts, killed in Buenos Aires, and former Chilean foreign envoy Orlando Letelier, killed with a car bomb in Washington, D.C. It is widely and strongly suspected that the deaths of Brazilian presidents João Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek were also part of Operation Condor. Goulart, a left-nationalist politician who was overthrown in 1964, died in Argentina in 1976. The Argentine junta blocked an autopsy on Goulart. A former member of the Uruguayan secret police came forward in 2008 with testimony that he had been poisoned.

The targets of Condor were not just well-known activists or organizers who opposed the dictatorships. Despite Condor, many of these did manage to survive in exile in México, the US and Europe. The files of the dead and disappeared are filled with the names of workers and youth fighting heroically to defend their economic and social rights, who identified with the various left-wing currents, and who sought to defend their factories, neighborhoods, schools and jobs.

Also part of Operation Condor was the sinister disappearance of infants born in captivity from disappeared mothers, “adopted” by persons connected to the regime. The Catholic Church vetted this policy, which had been widely used by the Franco fascists during and after the Spanish Civil War.

The 2013 trial was the latest in a series of trials in Argentina that began in 1999, following court decisions that declared unconstitutional amnesty laws and pardons to the military dictators and their collaborators.

In this trial, the defendants—most of whom are already in prison for their complicity in other acts of repression and murder under the Videla dictatorship— had been found guilty of the kidnapping and murder of 105 people—45 Uruguayans, 22 Chileans, 14 Argentines, 13 Paraguayans and 11 Bolivians—the tip of the iceberg in an operation that resulted in an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 disappearances across Latin America. If one were to include those victims of political and labor repression that occurred in Latin America between 1964 and 1983, the estimated number rises to 350,000.

Those sentenced on May 27 include Argentina’s last military ruler, Reynaldo Bignone, who is now 88 years old. Bignone is already serving a 25-year prison sentence for his role in other aspects of the “Dirty War.” He is now sentenced to an additional 20 years.

Maximum 25-year sentences were handed to former commanders Santiago Riveros and the Uruguayan Manuel Cordero, as well as to former agent of the Argentine secret services Miguel Ángel Furci. The latter was accused of crimes against humanity in the clandestine center Automotores Orletti, an infamous Buenos Aires torture center that was the first stop for many Condor victims exiled from, or rendered from Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil.

Reacting to the sentencing of the military assassins, the organizer of Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Nora Cortiñas, declared: “Perseverance pays off.” However, she voiced regret that the death of many repressors prevented them from “sitting in the dock”.

Also absent from the dock were those who participated in Operayion Condor before it had a name, and in the so-called dirty war during the years that preceded the 1976 coup in Argentina, under the presidencies of Juan Domingo Perón and his widow Isabel Perón (1973-1976). These included officials in the Peronist trade union bureaucracy that collaborated with the security forces and provided many of the assassins for the Triple A(Argentine Anti-communist Alliance) death squads.

Also not facing trial was the Catholic Church, which turned a blind eye to the assassination of priests, nuns and lay persons who identified with “liberation theology” and concern for the oppressed. At the same time, the church organized masses, confessions and absolutions for those that carried out the executions of workers and youth, throwing them into the Atlantic Ocean on death flights. Among these is current Pope Francis I (Jorge Bergoglio), who as Buenos Aires archbishop collaborated with the junta and may have conspired in the kidnapping of priests and civilians.

Most importantly, absent from the docks for their crimes against humanity are the top officials in the White House, CIA and the Pentagon who supervised the transnational murder and repression in Latin America, along with leading political figures such as former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who collaborated directly with the dictatorships.

The task of holding them accountable for their crimes falls to the international working class and future workers’ tribunals.

Union of Concerned Scientists warns of US-China nuclear war

Peter Symonds

The US-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) issued a stark warning last week over the mounting danger of nuclear conflict between the United States and China, declaring that the two countries were just “a few poor decisions away from starting a war that could escalate rapidly and end in a nuclear exchange.”

The report included an examination of the nuclear arms race currently underway between the US and China, the failure of diplomatic efforts to mitigate tensions and the dangerous dynamic that is heightening the danger of war. Its bleak assessment offers no hope that the drive to war can be halted other than through enlightened diplomatic efforts—a solution that is negated by its own analysis of their complete lack of success to date.

The UCS paper is notable, given the rising barrage of anti-Chinese propaganda in the US and international press, for the absence of criticisms of Chinese “expansionism” and “aggression.” If anything, it cautiously highlights Washington’s confrontational approach to Beijing, especially under the Obama administration. As part of his “pivot to Asia,” Obama has deliberately inflamed dangerous regional flashpoints including disputes in the South China and East China Seas as a means of isolating China from its neighbours.

The report explains: “In 2009, the Obama administration broke with past policy by emphasising it would use military force to police long-simmering disputes between China and its neighbours over competing sovereignty claims. The change responded to PRC [People’s Republic of China] statements describing its sovereignty claims as a ‘core interest’. The United States backed up its new policy with new military bases, deployments, and exercises in the region. It sailed US Navy task forces into PRC-claimed waters that the United States does not normally patrol. The stated objective has been to compel a compromise on PRC sovereignty claims. The PRC responded by accelerating ongoing island-building activities, excluding foreign fishing vessels from disputed waters and constructing new military facilities in the region.”

While it refers to potential triggers for conflict, the UCS paper is focussed on the rising risk of a clash spiralling into nuclear war. The US, which has engaged in one war of aggression after another over the past 25 years, outspends China on the military both in absolute terms and relative to GDP. Yet as the UCS explains, the Pentagon is deeply concerned that China’s military modernisation threatens America’s absolute dominance in Asia by potentially restricting US military operations in the Western Pacific.

The report states:

“The Obama administration decided to counter those perceived threats by investing in new submarines, a new stealth bomber, improved missile defences, and anti-satellite weapons… Currently, the United States plans to invest more than a trillion dollars in comprehensive upgrades to its nuclear forces. It also plans to spend several hundred billion dollars modernising the US nuclear weapons complex—the laboratories and facilities that research, design, produce, and maintain nuclear weapons. These plans include developing two nuclear weapons intended for fighting a nuclear war against the PRC: the Long-Range Stand-Off nuclear-armed cruise missile and a redesigned B61 nuclear gravity bomb.”

China, which has a relatively small nuclear arsenal—an estimated 260 war heads as opposed to about 7,000 for the US—confronts the possibility that a US first strike could completely destroy its ability to retaliate and render it completely vulnerable. It has not increased the number of weapons but has taken some measures to protect its nuclear deterrent against a US attack.

The issue is at the heart of the failure of limited talks between the US and China to ease nuclear tensions. The UCS report noted that while discussions have produced some limited confidence-building measures on other military matters, “strategic dialogues on their nuclear forces, missile defences, and anti-satellite weaponry are perfunctory.”

The paper highlighted what it regarded as “one critical set of bilateral dialogues” that focussed on “preserving strategic stability—a euphemism for making sure that if a conflict starts it does not end in a nuclear exchange.” Chinese experts proposed that, like Beijing, Washington adopt a no first strike policy. But as the report explained: “The Obama administration considered this option but concluded that there is ‘a narrow range of contingencies’ where the United States may need to resort to the first use of nuclear weapons” to counter conventional attacks including by China.

Chinese officials then sought an assurance from their American counterparts that the US would not seek to negate China’s ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons if struck first. Again, the US was not prepared to offer such a guarantee, with some officials concerned this would be “a sign of appeasement”. In other words, Washington is determined to achieve what is known as nuclear primacy over China—the ability to strike first and obliterate China’s nuclear arsenal, as well as tens if not hundreds of millions of its people.

China’s determination to preserve its ability to respond to a US first strike is compounding the danger of war. It is increasing the sophistication of, and protection for, its nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and also reportedly discussing a policy of “launch on warning”—that is, to fire off nuclear-armed missiles if a US nuclear attack is perceived to be underway.

The UCS report declared:

“It is not difficult to imagine situations that could trigger an inadvertent or accidental nuclear war. For example, PRC leaders could underestimate US willingness to use nuclear weapons to stop a conventional war. US leaders could underestimate PRC willingness to retaliate after a tailored US nuclear attack. The PRC could launch a retaliatory nuclear attack if the United States were to launch conventional missile strikes that China mistakenly believed were nuclear. The United States could make the same mistake.”

While graphically warning of the danger of nuclear war, the UCS, a pressure group of scientists established in the late 1960s, has no proposal to prevent it—other than a vain hope in a diplomatic solution. Its inadequate explanations for the escalating tensions between the two countries boil down to it being the product of competing Cold War ideologies or conflicting regional ambitions. No attempt is made to explain why this is taking place now.

The growing danger of war is rooted in the irresolvable contradictions of capitalism between world economy and the outmoded nation-state system that have been profoundly exacerbated by the worsening global crisis of the profit system since 2008/09. The United States regards China as the prime threat to its global dominance, and, confronting a historic economic decline, is determined to retain its world position through military means. The aim of the “pivot to Asia” is nothing less than the complete subordination of China to American strategic and economic interests by any means, including war.

As in the 1960s, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the threat of nuclear conflict will inevitably produce broad anti-war opposition among workers and young people internationally as the danger becomes more immediate and palpable. The crucial issue is what political perspective must guide such a movement. The only realistic means of ending the danger of war is to abolish the social order that gives rise to it on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.

US-backed offensive against Fallujah threatens “human catastrophe”

Bill Van Auken

The besieged civilian population of Fallujah is confronting a “human catastrophe” as a US-backed offensive to retake the Iraqi city from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) intensifies, a human rights group warned Tuesday.

While forces backing the Iraqi government, including troops of the elite Counter Terrorism Service, Iraqi Army soldiers, police and Shia militiamen of the Popular Mobilization Units, have moved to the outskirts of the city, stiff ISIS resistance Tuesday prevented them from advancing into its center. At least 50,000 civilians are believed to be trapped in Fallujah.

“A human catastrophe is unfolding in Fallujah. Families are caught in the crossfire with no safe way out,” warned Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which has provided aid to civilians in the area.

“The stories coming out of Fallujah are horrifying,” said Nasr Muflahi, NRC’s Country Director in Iraq. “A lack of food, medicine, safe drinking water and electricity are pushing families to the brink of desperation. People who managed to flee have told us of extreme hunger and starvation. We haven’t been able to see this for ourselves or assist people inside the town, and we are extremely concerned about the full extent of the terrors unfolding there.”

The United Nations’ humanitarian aid director in Iraq, Lise Grande, further warned that the city could be only “days away from a cholera outbreak,” because of the lack of clean drinking water.

Fallujah has been under siege for close to a year, with roads that bring in vital supplies cut by the Iraqi Army and Shia militias. Now, its residents are facing intensifying bombardment from US and allied warplanes, Apache attack helicopters and Iraqi artillery.

Fallujah was the first major Iraqi city to fall to ISIS at the beginning of 2014, six months before the Islamist militia overran Mosul, Iraq’s second largest population center, along with roughly a third of Iraqi territory.

The early victory in Fallujah was made possible by a revolt on the part of the city’s Sunni population against the Shia-dominated central government in Baghdad, which was widely reviled for carrying out sectarian repression against Sunnis.

While there have been widespread reports of ISIS exploiting the city’s civilians as “human shields”—a charge frequently made by the US military to provide an alibi for carnage inflicted by American air strikes—it is also reported that the bulk of the ISIS fighters are city residents.

This marks the third time in a little over a decade that Fallujah has been subjected to an all-out military siege. Twice in 2004, the US Marines, backed by heavy aerial bombardments, stormed the city, killing thousands and reducing the bulk of Fallujah’s homes and infrastructure to rubble. A center of resistance to the 2003 US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the city was subjected to merciless collective punishment.

Fallujah’s fate this time around has been presaged by that of previous Iraqi Sunni towns retaken by forces loyal to the Baghdad government. These include Ramadi, where at least 70 percent of the buildings were destroyed by bombardment and the population of 400,000 has been driven out, and Tikrit, where Shia militias carried out bloody reprisals against the population for the atrocities committed by ISIS, which included the massacre of up to 1,700 predominantly Shia military cadets.

Sunnis view this US-backed campaign as an exercise in ethnic cleansing designed to expel them from Iraq. The massive destruction unleashed on these cities, however, has also been seen in the predominantly Kurdish town of Kobane, which was largely razed to the ground, as well as the Yazidi town of Sinjar. It is a function of the type of warfare employed by the Pentagon, in which proxy ground forces, often with the participation of US special operations troops, rely on heavy air support to defeat ISIS.

While the US military is supporting the offensive against Fallujah with intense air strikes, the Pentagon had reportedly opposed the move against the city, seeing it as a distraction from the buildup for an attack on Mosul, Iraq’s second city, which had a population of some 2 million before falling to ISIS in June 2014.

Washington is also uneasy about the prominent role being played by Iranian advisers on the ground as well as the Shia militias, which provide much of the manpower for the siege. The US views Iran as its major regional rival for hegemony over the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular.

For Iraq’s Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, the siege of Fallujah is seen as a political imperative for his government, which has faced mounting popular opposition from within Baghdad’s impoverished Shia majority. Crowds have twice stormed the heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of the central government, to protest rampant corruption and the failure to ensure essential services.

Also fueling the growing popular anger is a series of terrorist attacks centered in poorer Shia neighborhoods. The government has charged that Fallujah, less than 40 miles west of the capital, is the center from which these attacks are planned and executed.

Unfolding parallel to the siege of Fallujah is a separate anti-ISIS operation to the north also backed by extensive US-led air strikes. This operation, directed at preparing an offensive against Mosul, is being conducted largely by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and allied militias, with the participation of US special forces, who are increasingly engaged in combat.

Similarly, Kurdish paramilitaries of the YPG (Kurdish People’s Protection Units) are providing the main ground forces for a campaign across the border in Syria aimed at re-taking the city of Raqqa, the capital of ISIS’s self-styled caliphate.

While the Kurdish forces, supported by US special operations “advisers” and US warplanes, are advancing from the northwest, the Syrian military, backed by Russian airpower, is advancing from the southwest.

This race for Raqqa reflects the underlying conflict between Washington and Moscow over Syria, with the US backing a war for regime change against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and Russia working in alliance with the government.

In both Iraq and Syria, Washington’s reliance upon Kurdish forces has antagonized its NATO ally, Turkey, which has demanded that the US brand Syria’s Kurdish militia as “terrorist” because of its ties with the Turkish Kurdish PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), against which the Turkish military is waging a simmering civil war.

Not only has the Obama administration resisted Ankara’s pressure on this score, the chief of the US Central Command paid a visit to the Kurdish units in northern Syria last month. Subsequently, photographs of US special forces wearing YPG patches on their uniforms provoked fresh outraged protests from the Turkish government.

At the same time, the prospect of Kurdish forces “liberating” either Raqqa in Syria or Mosul in Iraq, both predominantly Sunni cities, has sparked new fears of ethnic cleansing and partition.

The advance of the disparate anti-ISIS offensives has served to underscore the catastrophic destruction inflicted upon the region by US imperialism, which deliberately incited sectarian divisions, first as part of its divide-and-rule strategy in Iraq, and then to promote a sectarian-based war for regime change in Syria.

At the same time, the prospect of defeating ISIS only exposes even more clearly the mutually opposed interests of the various outside powers that claim to be united in their opposition to the Islamist militia, raising the specter of the present conflict spawning regional and even world war.

The return of the “grand narrative”

Andre Damon

Throughout the world, a rising tide of social struggle is upending the proclamations by anti-Marxist intellectuals that the “grand narratives” of working-class struggle and socialist revolution have been superseded.

The unfolding global wave of class conflict is currently centered in France, where workers and young people are entering another week of strikes and demonstrations against the “El Khomri” labor reform measures pushed through parliament last month with the help of emergency measures implemented by President François Hollande.

Workers at the national rail line SNCF began a rolling walkout Tuesday evening, while rail and metro workers in the city of Paris will walk out Thursday. The French Civil Aviation Authority is planning a strike beginning Friday, threatening to paralyze transportation in much of the country. This follows strikes by hundreds of thousands of workers at oil refineries and other workplaces, as well as mass demonstrations in which over a million people have taken part so far. Workers and youth have clashed with police forces mobilized under the state of emergency measures imposed in the name of fighting terrorism earlier in the year.

In the United States, where the ruling class and its propagandists have long sought to deny the very existence of distinct social classes, tens of thousands of communication workers went on strike last month. Their struggle, which the unions are working feverishly to shut down, follows the eruption of opposition in Michigan, the traditional home of US auto industry, to the poisoning of the residents of Flint and the destruction of public education in Detroit. The growth of anti-capitalist sentiment is reflected in widespread support for the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who many believe to be a socialist.

These struggles, and many more in countries throughout the world, are taking place against the backdrop of an unrelenting economic crisis, the ever-growing danger of war and the deterioration of living standards for large sections of the working class and youth.

These events must inevitably set into motion a profound political and theoretical reorientation among broad sections of the population, undermining the conceptions that have prevailed over the past half-century. The events in France are particularly significant, since the May-June 1968 strike in that country marked a significant turning point in post-war politics.

That struggle, the largest general strike in European history, shook the foundations of the Gaullist state and directly posed the question of overthrowing capitalism. The French general strike was followed by a wave of unrest between 1968 and 1975 throughout the world that directly posed the question of state power. The period saw the massive anti-Tory movement of the British working class, strike movements in Italy and Latin America and the struggle against US imperialism by the Vietnamese masses.

Capitalism weathered these storms thanks to the betrayals of Stalinism, Social Democracy and the trade unions, which allowed it to survive and restabilize in subsequent decades.

Reacting to these events with fear and demoralization, broad sections of the intelligentsia turned violently against Marxism. While blaming the working class for the betrayals of its leadership, this shift was motivated above all by fear of the working class itself. Witnessing the prospect of revolution, they cast aside their left pretensions and fled into the arms of the ruling class.

This process found perhaps its clearest expression in France, where it was associated with theoretical conceptions that came to be known as postmodernism. The basic premise of this philosophical and political tendency was that the great wave of revolutionary struggles initiated by the Russian Revolution of October 1917 belonged to a past epoch that had now been superseded.

The meaning of the term “postmodernism” was summed up by Jean-François Lyotard in a his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The postmodernists adopted an “incredulity toward metanarratives,” Lyotard wrote. “The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.”

The social content of Lyotard’s declaration was put more crudely a year later by Andre Gorz in his book, Farewell to the Working Class: “Any attempt to find the basis of the Marxist theory of the proletariat is a waste of time.”

What was the “grand narrative” that Lyotard rejected?

It was the “narrative” announced first and foremost by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, which declared that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” and that the workers have “nothing to lose but your chains.”

It was the indictment of the capitalist system in Marx’s Das Kapital, which prophesied:

Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

It was the characterization by Friedrich Engels, in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, that the state is merely an instrument of the dominant capitalist class for suppressing and subjugating oppressed classes:

Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of keeping down and exploiting the oppressed class.

And, in language that speaks so directly to our period of war, it was the Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s declaration that

Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom.

But the venom of the postmodernists was directed above all against the revolutionist who gave the most eloquent expression—in word and in deed—to the perspective of Marxism: Leon Trotsky, who in his Theory of Permanent Revolution declared, “The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena,” and in his History of the Russian Revolution defined revolution as “the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.”

In sum, the postmodern theoreticians—and the broader upper middle class social layer whose interests they articulated—rejected the idea that society is divided into classes; that the state is an instrument of class rule; that it is possible to understand the objective logic of social and economic development; that capitalism is leading mankind to catastrophe; and that it is the task of the working class, led by a revolutionary party, to overthrow this bankrupt social order on a world scale and lay the foundations of a society based on equality.

Despite the proclamations of the anti-Marxist theoreticians that Marxism is dead and buried, a new generation of youth, students and workers are living the “grand narrative” of economic breakdown, social polarization, war and dictatorship. In the coming months and years, millions will study the great works of Marxism and use them as an indispensable guide in resolving the great tasks that the working class still confronts.