By Kamran Nayeri, March 7, 2022
Humanity stands at a crossroads. Mounting social and ecological crises—some like catastrophic climate change, the Sixth Extinction, recurring pandemics (Covid-19), and nuclear holocaust are existential— call for unified world response. Yet the global anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization ruled by competing capitalist ruling classes has proven incapable of such response.
Opening guns of World War III?
It would be a grave political error to view the war in Ukraine in any framework other than a confrontation between Western imperialism headed by the United State and its military arm, NATO, and Russian imperialism with a world-class military force armed with nuclear weapons (for a discussion of Western imperialism, see, Appendix 1). Let me explain.
On February 24, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine in a speech in which he outlined the key reason as follows:
“…the expansion of the NATO to the east, moving its military infrastructure closer to Russian borders. It is well known that for 30 years we have persistently and patiently tried to reach an agreement with the leading NATO countries on the principles of equal and inviolable security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we constantly faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while NATO, despite all our protests and concerns, continued to steadily expand. The war machine is moving and, I repeat, it is coming close to our borders.”(emphasis added).
Encouraged by the U.S. and European allies, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing for membership in European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At the Munich Security Conference on February 19, five days before the Russian invasion, he asked once again for NATO membership.
Founded in 1949 with 12 member states, it was a critical part of Western imperialism’s Cold War against the Soviet Union. In response, the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc self-proclaimed socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe formed Warsaw Pact military alliance in May 1955. (See Appendix 1 for a brief discussion of Western imperialism)
After the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, the Warsaw pact was dissolved. But the U.S. and its allies not only did not dissolve NATO but continued to expand it eastward toward Russia’s borders. NATO member states grew from 12 in 1949 to 40 today. (see, Statista map below)
Led by the United States, NATO has become an instrument for the domination of Western capitalist civilization over the rest of the planet. Thus, after the unilateral invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the United States, NATO participated in the 20-year war in that impoverished country.
For an astute observer of these trends, the Ukrainian crisis was not a surprise. The reader will benefit from watching the September 27, 2018, presentation of Vladimir Pozner, the acclaimed Russian-American journalist and broadcaster, at Yale University sponsored by East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Poynter Fellowship for Journalism. Pozner spoke on the impact of increasingly hostile US foreign policy towards Russia after the Soviet Union has been disbanded and predicated a crisis. He discusses what is known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine first formulated on February 18, 1992, in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was presented as the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–99 fiscal years published by US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy Scooter Libby. It was leaked to the New York Times on March 7, 1992. At the time, it sparked a controversy as the document outlined a policy of unilateralism and preemptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations and prevent dictatorships from rising to superpower status.
George Kennan American diplomat and historian best known for his successful advocacy of a “containment policy” to oppose Soviet expansionism following World War II, was among those who opposed NATO expansion and argued it was poisoning relations with Moscow, making great-power conflict more likely and exposing nations like Ukraine to disastrous risks.
John Mearsheimer (2014), an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought had criticized Washington's policy for the 2014 crisis in Ukraine that led to the ouster of Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych, pro-Russia president.
However, the controversy Wolfowitz Doctrine died out and it became Washington’s policy towards Russia and more recently China. In fact, Joseph Biden campaigned for such containment, especially of China, in his presidential bid and in his legislative policy proposals since becoming president are animated with it. Wolfowitz Doctrine is also very much alive in the current U.S. foreign policy discussion. Take, for example, the February 22 policy recommendation of Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, that was published in Foreign Policy under the title: “Washington Must Prepare for War With Both Russia and China.”
Relative Decline of U.S. imperialism
The fundamental underlying reason for this militarist doctrine is the relative decline of U.S. capitalism. In 1960, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) constituted 40% of the world GDP. By 2014, it had declined to 20%. This registers a significant decline in the U.S. economic standing in the world.
This relative decline began with the rebuilding of European allies of the United State (especially Germany) and Japan whose economies benefitted from new and modern productive capacity and infrastructure. By the 1970s there was much talk of Japan taking the lead as an industrial power and in the 1980s some argued the same for Germany. But neither prediction came through as Japan’s economy entered an extended period of stagnation and Germany’s export-led growth could not compete with the U.S. capitalists' access to the huge domestic market (thus, Germany’s effort to build the European Union and the Euro-zone as an internal market larger than the U.S. market). Moreover, Western industrial capitalist economies, individually and taken as a group, have entered a new phase of long-term slow growth due to economic, technological, demographic, and environmental causes (climate change damages are an increasing concern).
However, China’s decisive turn to state capitalism and export-led industrialization after Mao’s death and the rise of Deng Xiaoping has made it the workshop of the world. Currently, China produces 20% of the world's manufacturing output much of it for export (West and Lansang, 2018) while the U.S. share has fallen to 18%. China excels in modern infrastructure, new industries, and products, and is highly competitive in the world market. Meanwhile, China has a ballooning internal market as 300 million Chinese have formed its middle class (the U.S. by contrast has a total population of 330 million and its middle class has been shrinking).
The relative economic decline of the U.S. has brought with it its relative political and military decline. Although in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it appeared that the U.S. has become the hegemonic power in a unipolar world, soon a multipolar world emerged and the U.S. dominance is now challenged in the Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America that since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 Washington has called its “backyard.”
The process of the deindustrialization of the United States has undermined entire industries and regions and resulted in the withering away of the U.S. middle class—that is largely the white aristocracy of labor—fanning the flames of reactionary nativism, white nationalism, and backward-looking capitalist economic policies (hence, Trump’s “Make America Great Again”). The Trump presidency and its domination of the Republican Party are a consequence of the decline of the U.S. as the world's leading capitalist power.
Many Democratic Party politicians have decided that the neoliberal policies since the 1980s have run their course. They are in favor of Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to revamp American hard and soft infrastructure and offer social policies to motivate workers to beef up the middle class to enhance productivity growth and to expand the domestic market. They favor launching new industries and new products to better compete in the world market. This turn in policy proposals especially when combined with the “socialist” campaigns of bourgeois liberal politicians like Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez has attracted some millennials whose economic and social prospects are bleak. Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2010 and Biden’s multi-trillion dollar legislative agenda (even though largely stalled) represent this shift. (see, for a critique of Ocasio Cortez's "Green New Deal," see, Nayeri 2019)
The relative decline of U.S. capitalism has also undermined the decades-old two-party system. While Democratic and Republican parties generally agreed on their imperialist foreign policy, they debated their difference on domestic policy as a way to reach a common ground. Today, there is very little the two parties agree on except on key planks of their imperialist foreign policy resulting in political paralysis.
It has also created political and military tension between the U.S. and China and Russia, hence the asceascendencydency of the Wolfowitz Doctrine in Washington and the threat of a nuclear Third World War. Those who reject its possibility should remember why and how World War I and World War II were fought. Britain was an undisputed world power in the nineteenth century. But by 1913, both Germany and United States surpassed Britain as the workshop of the world after completing their industrialization.
The Pro-Western imperialism government in Ukraine
The Western governments and mass media have turned Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, into a world hero for their own end (For a discussion of the pro-war reporting of corporate media se. For instance, the editorial in The New York Times of March 4, 2022, entitled “‘I Want Peace.’ Zelensky’s Heroic Resistance Is an Example for the World,” uses him to push for more militarism by the U.S. and European governments, more nuclear reactors in Germany (although Germany has been shutting them down for safety reasons), and more sanctions on Russia. The U.S. together with its European allies are plotting for a long war against Russia by trying to figure out “the line of succession” in Ukraine should Zelensky be taken prisoner or is killed. Meanwhile, they have budgeted billions of dollars to finance this war, are shipping arms to Ukraine, and even allow “volunteers” to go fight against Russians. It is notable that Biden and the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, are leading this militarist imperialist policy. (See, Appendix 3 for a brief discussion of corporate mass media)
If we take the interests of the working people of Ukraine and world peace as our starting point, president Zelensky’s conduct must be criticized. Even as president Biden was engaged in psychological warfare by his daily announcements that Russia will attack Ukraine tomorrow, Zelensky continued to assure Ukrainians they face no threat of invasion from Russia. At the same time, he told the media that his goal was to avoid panic in the Ukrainian stock market. That is, he placed the interest of wealthy investors above the interest of ordinary Ukrainians. Meanwhile, he continued taunting Putin by repeated calls for joining NATO.
In the first few days of the invasion, Zelensky posted videos of himself asserting that the people of Ukraine are resisting and stopping the Russian armed forces. At the same time, he banned adult males, ages 16-60, from leaving the country so they can be enlisted to fight the Russian army. He even distributed automatic rifles to the population even though few knew how to use them, thus making them legitimate targets of the Russian army. He has refused to consider the key Russian demand of neutrality for Ukraine in his negotiations with Moscow even as the Western military experts are unanimous that the Russian army will eventually prevail and the key Ukrainian cities are facing increasingly bloody war and so far over a million and half Ukrainians have fled the country Ukraine has a population of 44 million. In 2020, 15.99 percent of the population was aged between infancy and 14, 67.06 percent was between 15 and 64 years old and about 16.95 percent was aged 65 and older. (See, Appendix 2 for a discussion of class differences faced by refugees in Poland)
The threat of nuclear holocaust
Pushed against the wall, the Putin leadership which has imperialist ambitions of its own has invaded Ukraine. Before the invasion, Putin warned the U.S. and NATO that Russia is a leading nuclear power and any interference in the war by them may lead to a nuclear confrontation and subsequently has placed them on high alert. Although the Biden administration and NATO have not publicly declared it, it would be foolish not to understand that they too have their nuclear weapons on high alert. In a nuclear war, who shoots first may appear to be decisive. Thus, a nuclear war between the U.S. and its NATO allies and Russia is entirely possible and the world is facing a nuclear holocaust.
Let’s review the facts. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, there are nine countries in the world today with nuclear weapons. In order of the year of the first nuclear test, they are United States (1945, currently has 7,260 nuclear weapons), Russia (1949, 7,500), United Kingdom (1952, 215), France (1960, 300), China (1964, 260), India (1974, 90-110), Pakistan (1998, 100-120), Israel (no firm date available, 80), and North Korea (2006, 6-8). Furthermore, the top four members of the Nuclear Club have thousands of these weapons deployed for use: U. S. (2,080 deployed weapons), Russia (1,780), U. K. (150), and France (290). Needless to say, even if a small fraction of these weapons are used the entire world will be annihilated.
The question of Ukrainian self-determination
Thus, the war in Ukraine is not simply a question of the self-determination of that country, it is a war between Western imperialism headed by the United States and Russian imperialism over their sphere of influence with a difference. Western imperialist states headed by the United States are the aggressors as I have argued above. It is imperative to recognize that the responsibility lies first and foremost with the United States imperialism and its European and NATO allies. Had president Biden and his NATO allies accepted Putin’s reasonable demand that they stop expanding NATO to the borders of Russia, there would not have been an invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the tragedy in Ukraine is the shared responsibility of Western imperialist states and the Ukrainian pro-Western government as well as Putin and Russia. This realization has important policy implications to which I will return at the conclusion of this essay.
The Russian leadership also has imperialist ambitions as clearly stated by Putin in his speech ordering the invasion of Ukraine. Deriding Lenin and the Bolsheviks who granted self-determination to all oppressed nationalities in Tsarist Russia, including Ukrainians, Putin showed nostalgia for a revival of the empire once held by the Tsars. The rise of Putin in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union is in part due to the U.S. imperialism’s anti-Russian policy and partly because of the dominance of Stalinism in the world socialist movement in the twentieth century. Let me say a few words about the latter.
The October 1917 socialist revolution in Russia was the cumulation of the rise of self-organized and self-mobilized organizations of working people, in particular, the soviets (councils of workers, peasants, and soldiers), that overthrew the Tsarist regime in February 1917 and by October overthrew the pro-capitalist and pro-war government of Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky who represented liberal bourgeois and reformist socialist parties (for a lucid and engaging account of this period, see, Miéville, 2017). As the Tsarist empire was a prison house of oppressed nationalities, these revolutions also brought them into revolutionary politics as they asserted their right to their language and culture and the desire for self-government. The Bolsheviks supported them through their policy of unconditional right to self-determination for oppressed nationalities. The policy was motivated by the desire to unite the working people across the vast span of Russia to carry out a socialist revolution to emancipate humanity from capitalist wage-slavery and all forms of oppression and exploitation. To advance to socialism in economically backward Russia, the Bolshevik leadership looked to the advance of the world revolution, in particular to the working classes of industrial Western Europe. Revolutions in Europe erupted but were crushed. The Russian revolution remained isolated in a mostly agrarian society ruined by participation in World War I and the civil war which was started by the counter-revolutionary White armies in 1918. On March 2, 1919, the Bolsheviks spearheaded the founding of the Communist International made up of socialist-minded parties who looked favorably to the October socialist revolution and aimed to advance a similar course in their own countries.
However, by 1923 the bulk of self-organized and self-mobilized organizations of Russian working people had been disbanded and the Bolshevik Party, renamed as the Communist Party in 1919, fell victim to bureaucratization in society and the state. A conservative party bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin was able to consolidate power by destroying the leadership, program, and norms of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party (for a recent well-researched account of this period, see, La Blanc, 2017). The Communist International was purged of its revolutionary socialist leadership and cadre. Worse of all, Stalinism’s claim that it represents “Actually Existing Socialism” backed by anti-communist campaigners of the Western capitalist countries confused an untold number of working people of what revolutionary humanist communism of Marx and Engels and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party represented.
In The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where It Is Going? (1936), Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the Bolshevik Party who led the fight against Stalinism, predicated that either the Russian working class will rise again through a political revolution to retake power or capitalism will be restored in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But for over seven decades Stalinism was responsible for the destruction of revolution either by contributing to their defeat or by conditioning the anti-working class outlook of their leadership that came to power.
Today, there can be no doubt that it is capitalism that rules the planet and it is causing existential social and ecological crises facing humanity.
Catastrophic climate change
The imperialist confrontation in Ukraine has created a crisis far greater than the war. It is no secret that humanity faces four existential crises: catastrophic climate change, the Sixth Extinction, recurring pandemics, and nuclear holocaust. All these crises are global and require a unified world response. No one nation or national policy can resolve these. In each case, there is also urgency as the window of opportunity to address them may be very short.
Let me take the case of the unfolding climate catastrophe. On February 28, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of world experts convened by the United Nations, released it Sixth Assessment Report. Their press release included the following:
- “This report recognizes the interdependence of climate, biodiversity, and people and integrates natural, social and economic sciences more strongly than earlier IPCC assessments,” said Hoesung Lee. “It emphasizes the urgency of immediate and more ambitious action to address climate risks. Half measures are no longer an option.”
- “Our assessment clearly shows that tackling all these different challenges involves everyone – governments, the private sector, civil society – working together to prioritize risk reduction, as well as equity and justice, in decision-making and investment,” said IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair Debra Roberts.”
- “Climate Resilient Development is already challenging at current warming levels. It will become more limited if global warming exceeds 1.5°C (2.7°F). In some regions, it will be impossible if global warming exceeds 2°C (3.6°F). This key finding underlines the urgency for climate action, focusing on equity and justice. Adequate funding, technology transfer, political commitment, and partnership lead to more effective climate change adaptation and emissions reductions.”
- “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner.
Multiple elements in the Earth system are believed to be at risk of undergoing abrupt and irreversible changes in response to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Called tipping points, it is defined as when small changes will become significant enough to cause a larger, more critical change that can be abrupt, irreversible, and lead to cascading effects. The concept of tipping points was introduced by the IPCC 20 years ago, but then it was thought they would only occur if global warming reached 5°C above pre-industrial average temperature. Recent IPCC assessments, however, have suggested that tipping points could be reached between 1°C and 2°C of warming.
Tipping points include key components of the Earth system such as the Arctic sea ice, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that will undergo significant alteration due to global warming (Lenton et al., 2008). An abrupt decline of the Arctic sea ice is already well underway (IPCC, 2019A, Chapter 6; 2019B ).There is evidence that it has occurred repeatedly during the last glacial period (Henry et al., 2016). Such past changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation likely led to abrupt climate changes known as Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events (Dansgaard et al., 1993). These are the most significant instances of large-scale climate change in the past.
Contrary to the scientific consensus as described in IPCC reports, the key polluters have refused to take the necessary steps to lower and quickly end pollution. There have been 26 United Nations-sponsored Conference of the Parties (COP), the first one in Berlin in 1995 and the most recent one in Glasgow, Scotland, from October 31 to November 13, 2021. Yet, no enforceable international agreement has been reached to stop adding more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the immediate future.
What does capitalism have to do with it?
The reasons for such inaction are well understood. Because the capitalist state serves the class of capitalists, each nation-state pursues its own imperative of capitalist accumulation (accumulation of wealth as capital through making more profit) instead of the interest of humanity and the health of the planet. Economic interests trump public interests (in rare cases, public interests can serve capitalist accumulation such as in public education and infrastructure such as roads). Given this background, two widely accepted capitalist economic behavior are relevant to our concern.
First, there is what economists call the externality problem. Economic actors do not directly bear the climate change-related costs associated with the greenhouse gases emissions that they can dump free of charge into the atmosphere. Thus, they have little interest to curtail or end the emission of greenhouse gases. In the fierce capitalist competition and international capitalist rivalry, capitalist firms and capitalist governments would not accept cutting back such negative externalities if they would increase production costs, hence increasing unit prices of their products while rivals would continue to pollute and sell at a lower price cornering more of the domestic or world market. (for a discussion see, Rezai, Foley, and Taylor, 2009)
Second, there is what economists call the “free-rider problem.” Climate change mitigation is a non-excludable, non-rival public good. This means that it is not possible to exclude non-compliant firms and countries from enjoying the benefits of compliant firms’ and countries’ reduction of greenhouse gases emissions, nor can the public good be depleted by one country’s enjoyment of it.
Countries dump varying amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The overall emissions level in a country can be explained by the size of its population, the size of its GDP, its energy mix, and other factors. In 2017, global carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion reached 32.8 billion tons according to the International Energy Agency. China, the largest contributor, was responsible for 28% of these emissions, followed by the United States (14%), the European Union as a whole (10%), India (7%), Russia (5%), Japan (3%), S. Korea (2%), Canada (2%), Indonesia (2%), and Iran (2%). All other countries produced about 25% of emissions.’’
Finally, the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization is just the latest form of organization of class societies in which the ruling classes use exploited working people to expropriate wealth from nature. All civilizations have been variously configured social formations (e.g., made up of various modes of production) to expropriate wealth from nature. Thus, they have generated social and ecological crises that often have led to their demise. To end these crises, it is necessary to transcend the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization.
For space reasons, I will not discuss how the other existential crises we face are rooted in the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization (for the Sixth Extinction, see, Nayeri 2017; for the Covid-19 pandemic, see, Nayeri, 2020). But I think this short essay has sufficiently documented how inter-imperialist struggle over the sphere of influence is now threatening the world with nuclear annihilation and why the capitalist character of the world economy bars any effective action to stop catastrophic climate change. The current crisis which was brewing in the background has now forcefully burst into the public discourse. While the Covid-19 pandemic is ebbing in the Global North, it is still disastrous in the Global South due to unequal access to vaccination. Other pandemics may be lurking somewhere and will burst out any time as no one had yet addressed the root causes of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Sixth Extinction if left unaddressed will reach a tipping point in which the web of life that supports humanity will collapse sometime towards the end of this century.
A way forward
To resolve these existential crises and many other regional crises I did not even cite for space reasons, humanity must transcend the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization in the direction of an Ecological Socialist world. Any sketch of such future will include a much smaller population achieved through the empowerment of women and democratic family planning, localized economies that produce and consume a new matrix of products necessary and sufficient for modest comfort, human wellbeing, and development, consistent with a culture of being rooted in an intimate loving relationship with Mother Earth and our nonhuman kins.
To arrive at this future society, we must break with anthropocentrism and all institutions of capitalism and class society. Only self-organized and self-mobilized working people can emancipate humanity. There is no other way.
Opposition to the current imperialist war where working people are organized to fight and kill each other for enhancing the power and wealth of ruling elites must be our starting point.
- No to U.S./E.U. war moves against Russia. No trust in the Biden administration and Democratic and Republican politicians and corporate mass media!
- No to NATO expansion! Dissolve NATO!
- End all Western sanctions against Russia!
- Russia out of Ukraine! For an immediate truce and demilitarization of Ukraine.
- No money for war, money for human needs
- For immediate nuclear disarmament! No to nuclear power!
To fight for these demands will require a massive international anti-war movement, especially in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Ukraine. A good place to start is through an educational effort to involve working people to discuss the current crisis. Such anti-war effort must include education about other existential threats to humanity and how these are connected to the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization (Our Current Way of Life!).
Appendix 1: Corruption in Russia and history of capitalism
There is much written about Russian oligarchs. Somehow, Russia is presented as a corrupt form of capitalism, and the United States and European allies an image of being a clean version of capitalism. Not only this is far from the truth, it also is an ahistorical view of capitalism.
Paul Krugman. a famed macroeconomist turned political pundit for The New York Times, is deeply engaged in fanning the flames of Western capitalism’s militarism and war against Russia. In “Laundered Money Could Be Putin’s Achilles’ Heel,” (February 24, 2022) he offers advice about how to make sanctions against Russia more effective: “Yet the world’s advanced democracies have another powerful financial weapon against the Putin regime, if they’re willing to use it: They can go after the vast overseas wealth of the oligarchs who surround Putin and help him stay in power.”
He cites a study by Filip Novokmet1 ·Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman (2018) that estimates in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P.
Krugman then pauses:
“There are two uncomfortable facts here. First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain. Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultra-wealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.”
On February 20, a self-described whistle-blower leak of data from 18,000 accounts at Credit Suisse, one of the world’s most iconic banks, is exposing how the bank held hundreds of millions of dollars for heads of state, intelligence officials, sanctioned businessmen, and human rights abusers, among many others.The story was first reported in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung which share the data with a nonprofit journalism group, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and 46 other news organizations around the world.
However, a few days later, the corporate media went silent about why Credit Suisse’s corruption story just it went quiet about Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who organized murder of The Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was a dissident.
While governments and corporate media of the Western countries are using the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine to drum up support for their war against Russia, there was no outrage about the 20-year invasion and war in Afghanistan led by the United States assisted by NATO with the excuse of fighting terrorism. The U.S. and its allies were instrumental in the creation of the colonial settler Zionist state in Palestine that turned millions of Palestinians into refugees, placed millions of others under occupation in the West Bank and over a million in the Gaza Strip in the largest open-air prison. Palestinians who remained inside Israel proper have been turned into a second-class citizens. This apartheid state that has been recognized as such by human rights groups such as Amnesty International as such still received $4 billion in U.S. aid and arms.
The history of Western civilization is tied with the rise of capitalism which began with what Karl Marx called primitive capitalist accumulation. In Britain, these included proletarianization of peasantry through enclosure movement, that is, the division or consolidation of communal fields, meadows, pastures, and other arable lands; commodification and privatization of means of social production and consumption, and, production for profit, that preconditions for capitalist accumulation. The capitalist mode of production presupposes money capital to invest in the purchase of means of production and labor-power, that is, worker’s capacity to labor to turn raw materials into commodities embodying surplus-value (value above and beyond of production costs) which then can be sold in the market at a profit.
In Great Britain, these internal processes were combined with colonialism that began with its first tentative efforts to establish overseas settlements in the 16th century. In 1660, by the royal Stuart family and City of London, the Royal African Company was established which traded an average of 5,000 enslaved Africans a year between 1680 and 1686.
Other West European countries followed a similar policy which enabled them to accumulate sufficient money capital as well as markets for raw materials to industrialize on a foundation far larger than their own internal market creating what has been called the Western civilization.
The colonization of Asia and Africa and the Americas was part of the internationalization of the process of primitive accumulation of capital. These included the British empire, The French colonial empire, The Dutch colonial empire, the Portuguese Empire, the Belgian colonial empire, and the Italian Empire which collapsed after World War II largely due to the anti-colonial revolutions.
Some colonial projects resulted in a colonial settler state, including in the United States (Zinn, 198). American imperialism followed wrapped in ideological and political garb of Manifest Destiny to Monroe Doctrine, and more recently Wolfowitz Doctrine .
Appendix 2: American Free Press?
I have been a subscriber of The New York Times since 1977 except for three and half years I lived in Iran where I was born. As a socialist since 1971, I have had no illusion about the ideological makeup of The Times. I read it because it is one of the main sources of public debate among the ruling capitalist class in the United States.
Since the Ukrainian war began, I could not help to see The Times was reporting and analyzing the conflict not as on “objective grounds” of good journalism it claims to follow but as a partisan voice in the war supporting the Biden administration’s policy. So I paid attention to see what sources The Times uses for its reporting. On the seventh day of the war, The Times reported an estimated 400 Russian causalities. Meanwhile, president Zelensky was admitting to only about 130 Ukrainian military and civilian casualties for the same period. That meant Russians lost about 2,800 military personnel while Ukrainians suffer about 130 military and civilians. That did not make sense. One would be hard-pressed to find any reports of Ukrainian armed forces causalities in The Times (I have not seen any). Soon after The Times claimed Ukrainian air superiority, president Zelensky begged the U.S. and NATO to enforce no-fly-zone over Ukraine.
Aside from reports by the Times journalists based in various cities often away from the frontlines of the conflict who reliy on Ukrainian government officials and interviews with local people, The Times relies for its analytical reports on the Institute for Study of War. So I looked them up. Here is from Wikipedia’s entry:
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is a United States–based think tank founded in 2007 by Kimberly Kagan. ISW describes itself as a non-partisan think tank providing research and analysis regarding issues of defense and foreign affairs. Others have described ISW as "a hawkish Washington" group[1] favoring an "aggressive foreign policy".[2] It has produced reports on the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, "focusing on military operations, enemy threats, and political trends in diverse conflict zones".[3] It has also published real-time reports on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The non-profit organization is supported by grants and contributions from large defense contractors,[2] including Raytheon, General Dynamics, DynCorp and others.[4] It is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
Wikipedia also has this to say about the founder of ISW, Kimberly Kagan:
Kimberly Ellen Kagan (born 1972) is an American military historian. She heads the Institute for the Study of War and has taught at West Point, Yale, Georgetown University, and American University. Kagan has published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Weekly Standard and elsewhere.[1] She supported the 2007 troop surge in Iraq and has since advocated for an expanded and restructured American military campaign in Afghanistan.[2] In 2009, she served on Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategic assessment team
Thus, I urge caution to take what your read about the war in The New York Times with a grain of salt. If The Times’ reporting relies on the pro-war “non-profit” funded by the military-industrial complex, one can imagine how the orchestrated video appearances of president Zenelnsky who is by no mean impartial can be a trustworthy source of information. In fact, I think it is not Mr. Zelensky that is pushing the Biden administration and the Western powers into a direct military conflict with Russia but Western war makers that are using him to prepare the public opinion to support them in such a war.
It is not just Russians who must work hard to find the truth. Wein the “Western democracies” must try just as hard.
References:
Armon Rezai, Duncan K. Foley and Lance Taylor. “Global Warming and Economic Externalities.” 2009.
W. Dansgaard, S. J. Johnsen, H. B. Clausen, D. Dahl-Jensen, N. S. Gundestrup, C. U. Hammer, C. S. Hvidberg, J. P. Steffensen, A. E. Sveinbjörnsdottir, J. Jouzel & G. Bond. “Evidence for General Instability of Past Climate from a 250-kyr Ice-Core Record.” Nature, July 1993.
Henry, L. G. J. F. McManusw, B. Curryn, L. Robertsa, A. M. Piotrowki, and, L.D.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report. “Global warming of 1.5°C,” 2019A.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report. “The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.” 2019B.
Keigwin. “North Atlantic ocean circulation and abrupt climate change during the last glaciation.” Science, July 29, 2016.
Le Blanc, Paul. October Song: Bolshevi Triump, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924. 2017.
Lenton, Timothy M., Hermann Held, Ekmar Kriegler, and Hans Joachim Schellnbuber. “Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system”, PNAS, February 12, 2008.
Lomann, Johannes, Daniele Castellana, Peter D. Ditlevsen1, and Henk A. Dijkstra. “Abrupt climate change as a rate-dependent cascading tipping point.” Earth System Dynamics, December 2021.
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-------------------. "A Future for American Capitalism or The Future of Life on Earth?: An Ecosocialist Critique of the "Green New Deal." Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. March 25, 2019.
-------------------.“The Coronavirus Pandemic as the Crisis of Civilization.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. March 19, 2020.
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Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States:1892-Present. 1980.
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to R. Hassanpour for reading an earlier draft and offering helpful comments to improve it. All errors of omission and commission are mine.
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Appendix 1: Capitalism, corruption, imperialism
There is much written about Russian oligarchs. Somehow, Russia is presented as a corrupt form of capitalism, and the United States and European allies an image of being a clean version of capitalism. Not only this is far from the truth, it also is an ahistorical view of capitalism.
Paul Krugman. a famed macroeconomist turned political pundit for The New York Times, is deeply engaged in fanning the flames of Western capitalism’s militarism and war against Russia. In “Laundered Money Could Be Putin’s Achilles’ Heel,” (February 24, 2022) he offers advice about how to make sanctions against Russia more effective: “Yet the world’s advanced democracies have another powerful financial weapon against the Putin regime, if they’re willing to use it: They can go after the vast overseas wealth of the oligarchs who surround Putin and help him stay in power.”
He cites a study by Filip Novokmet1 ·Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman (2018) that estimates in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P.
Krugman then pauses:
“There are two uncomfortable facts here. First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain. Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultra-wealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.”
On February 20, a self-described whistle-blower leak of data from 18,000 accounts at Credit Suisse, one of the world’s most iconic banks, is exposing how the bank held hundreds of millions of dollars for heads of state, intelligence officials, sanctioned businessmen, and human rights abusers, among many others.The story was first reported in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung which share the data with a nonprofit journalism group, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and 46 other news organizations around the world.
However, a few days later, the corporate media went silent about why Credit Suisse’s corruption story just it went quiet about Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who organized murder of The Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was a dissident.
While governments and corporate media of the Western countries are using the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine to drum up support for their war against Russia, there was no outrage about the 20-year invasion and war in Afghanistan led by the United States assisted by NATO with the excuse of fighting terrorism. The U.S. and its allies were instrumental in the creation of the colonial settler Zionist state in Palestine that turned millions of Palestinians into refugees, placed millions of others under occupation in the West Bank and over a million in the Gaza Strip in the largest open-air prison. Palestinians who remained inside Israel proper have been turned into a second-class citizens. This apartheid state that has been recognized as such by human rights groups such as Amnesty International as such still received $4 billion in U.S. aid and arms.
The history of Western civilization is tied with the rise of capitalism which began with what Karl Marx called primitive capitalist accumulation. In Britain, these included proletarianization of peasantry through enclosure movement, that is, the division or consolidation of communal fields, meadows, pastures, and other arable lands; commodification and privatization of means of social production and consumption, and, production for profit, that preconditions for capitalist accumulation. The capitalist mode of production presupposes money capital to invest in the purchase of means of production and labor-power, that is, worker’s capacity to labor to turn raw materials into commodities embodying surplus-value (value above and beyond of production costs) which then can be sold in the market at a profit.
In Great Britain, these internal processes were combined with colonialism that began with its first tentative efforts to establish overseas settlements in the 16th century. In 1660, by the royal Stuart family and City of London, the Royal African Company was established which traded an average of 5,000 enslaved Africans a year between 1680 and 1686.
Other West European countries followed a similar policy which enabled them to accumulate sufficient money capital as well as markets for raw materials to industrialize on a foundation far larger than their own internal market creating what has been called the Western civilization.
The colonization of Asia and Africa and the Americas was part of the internationalization of the process of primitive accumulation of capital. These included the British empire, The French colonial empire, The Dutch colonial empire, the Portuguese Empire, the Belgian colonial empire, and the Italian Empire which collapsed after World War II largely due to the anti-colonial revolutions.
Some colonial projects resulted in a colonial settler state, including in the United States (Zinn, 198). American imperialism followed wrapped in ideological and political garb of Manifest Destiny and then of Monroe Doctrine, and more recently Wolfowitz Doctrine .
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Appendix 2. Class differences in receving Ukrainian refugees in Poland
Corproate media reports of well over 1.5 million Ukrainians refugees in eastern Europe. The following interview is taken from Labor Notes, March 2, 2022 about class differnece in reception of these refugees who are workers.
Ignacy Jóźwiak of the Polish union Workers' Initiative interviewed Witalij Machinko, leader of the Workers’ Solidarity Trade Union in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 27. This interview comes to us via the International Trade Union Network of Solidarity and Struggle. It has been translated through Polish and French, and we apologize for any errors in the process.
Even before the current crisis there were a large number of migrant Ukrainian workers in Poland; several years ago Polish unions worked together with Machinko's organization to establish a Ukrainian Workers’ Trade Union in Poland, with the goal of improving their working conditions and raising their salaries to achieve equal pay for Polish and foreign workers by 2017. –Editors
Ignacy Jóźwiak: Witalij, first of all, tell us what is the current situation of workers in Ukraine. What are your union members doing?
Witalij Machinko: Some go to work and some stay home or hide in bomb shelters. Some are trying to go to Poland; others have gone to Western Ukraine to stay with their families.
Are they going to work?
Yes, war does not give you leave from work. Those who have not left, and for whom circumstances permit, are working. Even on the territory controlled by the Russian Federation.
What is the current situation of workers in Ukraine?
It is very bad. The situation of workers and their rights will now be the last concern of all.
So what role can unions play in these difficult wartime conditions, and how can we support you?
I see two main lines of support. The first concerns the protection of Ukrainian refugees and Ukrainian migrants in Poland. And the second is fundraising for citizens who remained in Ukraine and became refugees or remained in territories where hostilities are taking place.
As for Poland, unfortunately, a large part of Polish companies will try to take advantage of the context. Refugees from Ukraine do not know the regulations and do not speak the language, so the situation is very difficult. They will be forced to accept jobs different from those they had. I am very concerned about this huge illegal exploitation that will be made of our fellow citizens of Ukraine. With such an influx of refugees, this problem will be much more acute than in 2015 and 2016. That is why we need the help of Polish trade unions and European trade unions in general to help Ukrainian workers to protect their rights. I hope there will be as little need for your help as possible.
The second direction in which the Polish trade unions could help us is the organization of the delivery of basic necessities, essential medicines which are already essential in Ukraine and will be even more so in the near future. If we take our 14-year experience in Donbass and apply it to the current situation in Ukraine, in big cities like Kiev and Kharkiv where hostilities are ongoing, with the level of population it will be a huge catastrophe. If these actions are extended for another week, we will have a major humanitarian crisis, which has already begun. You have to try, even if you can’t prevent it, at least to minimize it. This is why I hope for the help of the European trade unions.
Second question, what would you like to say to trade unions and people from left movements in Poland, Europe, and the world?
I would like to ask everyone to support Ukraine, to support Ukrainian refugees, Ukrainian migrants, and to help everyone in Ukraine. Stay with us. Together we will win. It is important to send a clear signal to employers that there will be no room for their possible unfair practices. They must be afraid of this: we are already angry now, do not annoy us even more.
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Appendix 3. Corporate media and the war
I have been a subscriber of The New York Times since 1977 except for three and half years I lived in Iran where I was born. As a socialist since 1971, I have had no illusion about the ideological makeup of The Times. I read it because it is one of the main sources of public debate among the ruling capitalist class in the United States.
Since the Ukrainian war began, I could not help to see The Times was reporting and analyzing the conflict not as on “objective grounds” of good journalism it claims to follow but as a partisan voice in the war supporting the Biden administration’s policy. So I paid attention to see what sources The Times uses for its reporting. On the seventh day of the war, The Times reported an estimated 400 Russian causalities. Meanwhile, president Zelensky was admitting to only about 130 Ukrainian military and civilian casualties for the same period. That meant Russians lost about 2,800 military personnel while Ukrainians suffer about 130 military and civilians. That did not make sense. One would be hard-pressed to find any reports of Ukrainian armed forces causalities in The Times (I have not seen any). Soon after The Times claimed Ukrainian air superiority, president Zelensky begged the U.S. and NATO to enforce no-fly-zone over Ukraine.
Aside from reports by the Times journalists based in various cities often away from the frontlines of the conflict who reliy on Ukrainian government officials and interviews with local people, The Times relies for its analytical reports on the Institute for Study of War. So I looked them up. Here is from Wikipedia’s entry:
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is a United States–based think tank founded in 2007 by Kimberly Kagan. ISW describes itself as a non-partisan think tank providing research and analysis regarding issues of defense and foreign affairs. Others have described ISW as "a hawkish Washington" group[1] favoring an "aggressive foreign policy".[2] It has produced reports on the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, "focusing on military operations, enemy threats, and political trends in diverse conflict zones".[3] It has also published real-time reports on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The non-profit organization is supported by grants and contributions from large defense contractors,[2] including Raytheon, General Dynamics, DynCorp and others.[4] It is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
Wikipedia also has this to say about the founder of ISW, Kimberly Kagan:
Kimberly Ellen Kagan (born 1972) is an American military historian. She heads the Institute for the Study of War and has taught at West Point, Yale, Georgetown University, and American University. Kagan has published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Weekly Standard and elsewhere. She supported the 2007 troop surge in Iraq and has since advocated for an expanded and restructured American military campaign in Afghanistan. In 2009, she served on Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategic assessment team
One can see the web of interconnections between the military-industrial complex, American universities, and corproate media. Thus, I urge caution to take what your read about the war in The New York Times with a grain of salt. Of course, what I show here about The Times can ne shown to be true of other corprate media. If The Times’ reporting relies on the pro-war “non-profit” funded by the military-industrial complex, one can imagine how the orchestrated video appearances of president Zenelnsky who is by no mean impartial can be a trustworthy source of information. In fact, I think it is not Mr. Zelensky that is pushing the Biden administration and the Western powers into a direct military conflict with Russia but Western war makers that are using him to prepare the public opinion to support them in such a war.
It is not just Russians who must work hard to find the truth. Wein the “Western democracies” must try just as hard.
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