EDITOR’S COMMENTS

The following website feature commenced on June 7, 2021. It is a compilation of brief comments or analysis of news stories by the editor of A Socialist In Canada, Roger Annis. Many of these comments also appeared in one of the three news pages on the website–world news, Canada news, ecology news–in the form of text in square brackets [ ]. Extensive commentary and analysis of NATO’s threats and proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is contained in articles on the website home page and ‘World news’ page.

June 19, 2022: This website feature page is temporarily suspended due to the increased number of feature articles being written and published on the website home page, and due to the articles by Roger Annis now being published in Covert Action Magazine.

Story: The end of U.S. dollar dominance?, analysis by Michael Roberts (Marxist economist in UK), published on his website, Apr 5, 2022  …There is still no real alternative in international transactions to the U.S. dollar. However, a recent IMF working paper does reveal an important trend, namely, the U.S. dollar is not being gradually replaced by the euro, or the yen, or even the Chinese renminbi, but by a collection of lesser currencies…

[Michael Roberts is a Marxist economist who analyzes the long-term trends of the world capitalist economy. In particular, he documents the validity of Karl Marx’s original theory of the tendency of the rate of profit of enterprises to decline during the course of the capitalist business cycle. His Marxism is compromised and corrupted by anti-Russia prejudice. He says that Russia ‘annexed’ Crimea in 2014, thereby dismissing the decades of self-determination struggle by the Crimean people and dismissing their overwhelming referendum vote on March 15, 2014 to secede from Ukraine and join (rejoin) the Russian Federation. Similarly, he dismisses the significance of the self-determination struggle of the people of Donbass, using the epithet ‘seperatism’ to describe their self-determination struggle. As with the entirety of Trotskyist thinkers, he condemns Russia’s anti-militarization and denazification operation in Ukraine.]

Story:
How did nearly one million pandemic deaths in the U.S. become normal?, by Ed Yong, The Atlantic, March 8, 2022  Read the essay and see related readings by Ed Yong here in pdf format: How did this many deaths become normal

[This essay in The Atlantic is highly informative yet far from the rigorous class analysis of the pandemic catastrophe that is needed. New estimates published in The Lancet medical journal of the pandemic’s toll place loss of life at 18 million. What are the powerful economic and social forces of capitalism that allowed so many people to die? How to explain the death cult ideologies of the world’s imperialist rulers that justify such loss of life see them pushing the imperialist world into military conflict with Russia? That essay has yet to be written.]

Story:
*  Ontario to drop most mask mandates on March 21, CBC News, Wednesday, Mar 8, 2022  … The province of Ontario [pop. 14 million] reports 779 people in hospital with Covid-19, down from 914 this time last week, and 17 more deaths from Covid-19 on March 7…
*  Mask-wearing a ‘personal choice’ says Public Health Agency of Canada, Global News, Mar 4, 2022
*  End of mask wearing order in British Columbia hardly noticeable in public on Day One, Vancouver Sun, Mar 11, 2022  Majority of those on transit, in restaurants, even on streets remained masked

[Canada has recorded 37,100 deaths from Covid-19; approximately 93 per cent of those were aged 60 and higher. On March 8, there were 55 deaths in the country, including 29 in Quebec and 17 in Ontario. In the first seven days of March, British Columbia recorded six deaths per day from Covid-19.  In the past seven days, there were 37,000 new Covid-19 cases in Canada. source

[The name of the ‘Public Health Agency of Canada’ has been an oxymoron since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. At the outset in early 2020, the PHAC told Canadians ‘not to worry’, the pandemic wouldn’t hit Canada. Then it advised against safety measures, such as mask wearing because it was very late in recognizing the transmission by aerosol of the SARS-CoV-7 cornavirus. Apart from promoting the ‘magic’ of vaccinations, which are essential safety measures but not guaranteed protection from the coronavirus, the federal and provincial governments in Canada have abandoned any pretense of eliminating the spread of Covid-19 infections. Instead, the official mantra is ‘live with Covid’, but the unofficial mantra is ‘let them die’. This fits closely with the mantra the ‘war on drugs’ by governments in Canada. That war kills some ten Canadian civilians per day, most of whom are poor and First Nations people.]

Harrowing IPCC report cites limits to climate adaptation, stresses climate justice, by Mitchell Beer, The Energy Mix, Mar 2, 2022

Story:
Germany’s move to help arm Ukraine signals historic shift, Associated Press, Feb 27, 2022

[Germany participated in the failed military interventions by NATO countries into Afghanistan and Mali. Its military has participated in the regime change wars in Libya and Syria, and the country is one of the staunchest supporters of the nuclear-armed settler state of Israel. Its ‘change’ to a more aggressive foreign policy, as signalled in the Feb 28 speech by Chancellor Olaf Scholtz and as hailed in corporate media outlets such as the above, is overstated. The country has long been an aggressive participant in NATO’s military aggressions, limited only by the long shadow of its history as a Nazi, fascist entity.

[Germany and France have been masters of diplomacy to delay and obstruct implementation of the 2015 Minsk 2 peace agreement for Ukraine. This diplomacy has sought to distract and confuse Russia, and delay ad infinitum any implementation of Minsk. But it has become less and less credible and tenable. The illusion of a ‘gentler’ imperialism in relations with Russia, as practiced by Germany and France, is shredding. Germany’s new policy direction is not a ‘change’ but a lifting of its mask, revealing the imperialist beast that was always there, all along.]

Story:
‘Stop The War’ coalition in Britain condemns Russian intervention in Ukraine, says it should return to talks long sabotaged by NATO and Ukraine. Reference: ‘Stop the drive to war, return to diplomacy’, statement by Stop the War (Britain), Feb 25, 2022

[This statement by Stop The War reads: “If there is to be a return to diplomacy, the British government should pledge to oppose any further eastward expansion of NATO and should encourage a return to the Minsk-2 agreement.” In the real world, the Russian government has used every diplomatic channel available during the past eight years to halt NATO aggression. And before that, it has long protested NATO expansion in the rest of eastern Europe. All to no effect on the warmongering NATO.

[Russia and the world have learned a painful lesson ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, which is that the NATO countries care nothing of democratic norms; they only know perpetual aggression. The progressive and antiwar people of the world need to face up to the sad and tragic reality that the NATO countries understand only one language–that of force. So the world must force upon NATO a political settlement, one which creates a democratic Ukraine and respects the multinational character of the country and its surrounding regions. In a proper world, there would be mass protests in Western capitals demanding the dissolution of NATO and welcoming the foundation of a new and democratic Ukraine.]

Story:
U.S. stokes tensions by building military base in Poland 100 miles from Russian border, by Marjorie Cohn, published in Truthout, Feb 23, 2022

Story:
Bernie Sanders denounces Russia for ‘indefensible’ invasion of Ukraine, report in Common Dreams, Feb 23, 2022

[The editors of Common Dreams have gone over entirely to an anti-Russia viewpoint on the conflict in Ukraine, publishing selective reporting in recent days that boosts the viewpoint and policy of the U.S. government and NATO. Russia has signed a mutual defense agreement with the two Donbass republics. What happens next is in the hands of NATO and its Ukraine subordinate. Will they pursue their aggression against Donbass, including with sanctions against Russia? All indications are ‘yes’.

[A report in Common Dreams on Feb 23 warns of the dangers to the Ukrainian population should one of that country’s 15 nuclear stations be damaged by military conflict. But the report says not a word of the dangers to the populations in Donbass and Russia caused by the eight year-long low-intensity war by Ukraine and NATO against Donbass. This war is real, not imagined, and can easily escalate as NATO pursues a reckless military expansion into Ukraine. Russia has delivered a diplomatic masterstroke in Donbass to block THIS war danger.].

Story:
Ukraine president brandishes nuclear weapons threat against Russia, RT, Feb 19, 2022  and  Text of speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the Munich Security Conference, Feb 19, 2022

[There are four items of most note in the speech by Volodymyr Zelensky to the annual Munich Security Conference (Wikipedia): 1. The Ukrainian gov’t wants more weapons from the NATO countries. 2. It wants closer cooperation with NATO, if not outright membership. 3. It wants more and harsher sanctions to be imposed against Russia. 4. The speech promulgates the big lie that attacks against the civilian populations in Donbass are not being waged by Ukrainian armed forces and paramilitaries but, rather, by the armed forces of the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

[Note that for months now, liberal and even many left-wing writers in the West have peddled the story that Zelensky and the Ukrainian gov’t as a whole are unhappy with the ‘Russia invasion’ hysteria being generated by NATO governments and their stenographers in Western media. This has gone hand-in-hand with the equally false, and naive, story that the leaders of France and Germany are uneasy if not opposed to sanctions and war threats against Russia by NATO. Another perpetrator of these myths has been the Russia-based news service RT. Only strong, antiwar protest by the peoples of the NATO countries can forestall the drive by the war alliance to sanction and weaken Russia and further expand NATO’s offensive and nuclear weapons capabilities.

[The Budapest Memorandum of 1984 provided for the eventual relinquishing of nuclear weapons by three constituents of the Soviet Union–Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Wikipedia The disarmament was carried out in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.]

Story:
The intense economic crisis in Ukraine since the coup of 2014, by Michael Roberts (Marxist economist based in Britian), published on his website, Feb 14, 2022

[This informative analysis provides much essential information about the state of Ukraine’s economy. Such information is censored out of Western media reporting. Unfortunately, the writer’s overall view of the crisis over Ukraine is flawed. He presents Ukraine as ‘trapped’–between the Western imperialist powers and Russia. He concludes his analysis with this: ‘Ukraine is trapped between the interests of Western imperialism and Russian crony capitalism.’ [end citation] Well, that’s at least an improvement over those who declare Ukraine to be ‘trapped’ between ‘two imperialisms’–U.S. and Russian. The ‘two imperialisms’ thesis advanced by liberals, Trotskyists and the remnants of ‘International Socialism’ is factually wrong. It also destroys anti-imperialist solidarity; generating, instead, inaction and passivitity as the war threats by the ‘real’ imperialisms of the world continue to be waged.]

Story:
The siege of Ottawa, by Pam Palmateer, published in The Breach, Feb 7, 2022  (Pam Palmateer is the Chair in Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University (Toronto), a regular media commentator and the author of several books, including Indigenous Nationhood and Warrior Life.)

[This is the most comprehensive overview of the right-wing truck blockades being staged in Canada in the name of opposing pandemic safety measures. Unfortunately, the writer fails to describe the dimension of Canada’s support to neo-Nazism in Ukraine and the Baltic states and its war threats against China and Russia. Pam Palmateer writes, “We should all be concerned that recent statistics show that Canada has undergone a 600 per cent increase in online hate speech.” Yes, and that concern should encompass the tidal waves of hate speech against China and Russia by the Canadian government and by state-run and corporate media. It should decry their open and blatant support to neo-Nazism in eastern Europe. These forms of racism and hate speech, too, provide fuel for the blockade bonfires burning in the city center of Ottawa and the blockading of bridges and highways between the U.S. and Canada. In so doing, they also encourage the atmosphere of threats against public health workers and institutions by anti-vaccination zealots. The right-wing blockade of Ottawa, complete with vigilantes threatening health care workers and other citizens, may be described as Canada’s very own ‘Ukraine’–a case of chickens coming home to roost.]

Story:
Memo to Congress: Diplomacy for Ukraine is spelled M-i-n-s-k, by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies, published in The Progressive, Feb 10, 2022  also in LA Progressive

[There is much commentary and analysis now being published by liberal and, sometimes, left-wing writers on the NATO expansion drive that is threatening the safety and security of the people of Russia and eastern Europe. Most get their facts wrong on the origin of the NATO-manufactured conflict over Ukraine, notably failing to mention the now six-year-old ‘Minsk 2’ peace agreement crafted to create autonomy within Ukraine for its former oblasts (provinces) of Donetsk and Lugansk. That agreement remains pivotal to any settlement of NATO’s threatened aggression against Russia and the rebellious people of Ukraine. This essay by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies avoids the factual errors and omissions of other writers on this fundamental point.

[Their essay nevertheless contains inaccuracies on how the pro-autonomy rebellion in the Donbass region (the former Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk) unfolded, beginning in April 2014. For one, the essay mistakenly labels this struggle as ‘separatist’. Wrong. It began as a struggle for ‘political autonomy’. Today, after six years of low-intensity warfare waged against them by the right-wing governing regime in Kyiv, there is little doubt that if offered a vote in a referendum, the people of the now-autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk would opt to join the Russian Federation, as did the people of Crimea in their referendum on March 16, 2014.

[Furthermore, the chronology of events in Donbass as presented by the writers is inaccurate. They write: “The civil war in Eastern Ukraine broke out in early 2014 after the people of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine as the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014. The post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the breakaway region, but the separatists fought back and held their territory, with some covert support from Russia. Diplomatic efforts were launched to resolve the conflict.”

[This muddies the order of events and reads as very similar to the inaccurate entry on Wikipedia on the subject. Firstly, there is no ‘civil war’ in Donbass. Rather, there is a war by the governing regime in Kyiv, backed by NATO, to suppress the pro-autonomy wishes of the region’s population. (Curiously, Wikipedia rather more accurately refers to an ‘ongoing civil conflict’ in Donbass, not a ‘civil war’.) Secondly, events in Donbass began as resistance to a military invasion by the newly-forming extreme-right paramilitaries in Ukraine, soon to be trained and armed by the U.S., Britain and Canada. They built their initial miitary resistance from scratch. Only after Ukraine proved intransigent in pursuing its internal war did Donetsk and Lugansk declare autonomy (again, not ‘independence’). This occurred in late May, 2014 following referendum votes in the two oblasts. Unlike the referendum in Crimea, these were not votes to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation for the simple reason that for a host of historical and diplomatic reasons, the Russian Federation was unwilling to accept the two autonomous republics into membership. Russia remains unwilling to make that radical leap, at least for now.]

Story:
The political left and trade unions in Canada are nowhere on Covid. That’s a big problem, by Judy Rebick and Corvin Russell, Rabble.ca, Feb 4, 2022

[This is a very necessary and valuable commentary. But it is disappointing that China’s highly successful effort to limit and curb the coronavirus pandemic is left out of the picture. China’s total, per capita rate of Covid-19 illnesses is one tenth that of Taiwan and a tiny fraction of that of New Zealand. Its per capita rate of death from Covid-19 is one twelfth that of Taiwan and one quarter that of New Zealand. Hong Kong’sper capita case rate is app. one half that of New Zealand; its death rate is three times that of NZ and three quarters that of Taiwan. (All figures from Worldometer).

[China’s stellar record should be made known far and wide, not only to counter the pandemic but also to stop the unconscionable economic sanctions and military threats being waged against China by the Western cabal of countries. The Western countries are waging these threats to deflect attention from their own, disastrous Covid-19 responses and also, importantly, to deflect attention from their expansionist economic policies causing global warming and threatening the Earth’s ecological balance and civilization itself.]

Story:
Associated Press reporter confronts White House spokesperson over empty Russia allegations. Seven-minute video exchange  broadcast on C-Span, Feb 3, 2022

[This exchange captured on video between the White House spokesperson and a mainstream news reporter on February 3 is a glimpse into the massive loss of credibility which corporate and state-run media in the West are now undergoing as a result of endlessly and shamelessly propagating the NATO-manufactured conspiracy theories of a looming Russian invasion of Ukraine. This media has made itself into a laughing stock, and that is bad news for the credibility of its future ‘work’ on behalf of its masters.]

Story:
Anti-Russia statement by Trotskyists in Europe masquerades as antiwar statement

[A statement of the ‘Fourth International Bureau’ (Europe) dated Feb 1, 2022 is headlined ‘Against NATO and Russian military escalation in Eastern Europe’. That sums up well the statement viewpoint which is founded on the idea that ‘two imperialist blocs’ (the U.S. and NATO, on one hand, and the Russian Federation, on the other hand) are fighting it out over domination of Ukraine and placement of advanced weaponry on its territory. The statement creates the illusion of antiwar sentiment when it writes, “An international mobilization is urgently needed to lay the foundations for a global anti-militarist and anti-nuclear offensive.” But the perceptive reader might recall that this is exactly what the constituents of the fractured Trotskyist movement have failed to do for decades now. That’s because their false and prejudicial view of the world describing Russia (and China) as ‘imperialist’ countries is precisely a recipe for confusion and therefore doing nothing to oppose the real imperialist militarism and war–fomented by the NATO countries and their partners in crime, and directed against Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela and many other countries and peoples.

[Let us note, as well, that the Fourth International statement posits the longstanding dream of most contemporary Trotskyist groups for ‘regime change’ in Russia. It writes that building ‘antiwar’ protests offers a “chance to develop a democratic and popular opposition capable of fracturing the fragile alliance between post-Stalinist bureaucracy and mafia oligarchy [in Russia] that forms the basis of the authoritarian regime embodied by Putin.” Here, then, is revealed the goal of all the ‘antiwar’ wording in the statement, namely, the violent overthrow of the Russian government. How is this language and outlook any different from the ambitions of the real imperialists, which are the U.S.-led NATO and its allies in Australasia?

[An authentic antiwar and anti-nuclear statement in today’s would explore and map out a strategy for building a global, anti-imperialist movement. It would map out a path for uniting with the peoples of Russia and China and with their governments under attack by imperialism–the real imperialism, that is, not the make-believe one.]

Story:
Hong Kong debates its ‘zero Covid’ policy that has kept new infections in the dozens, South China Morning Post, Jan 31, 2022

[Hong Kong, population 7.5 million, set a daily record on January  27 of… 174 new Covid-19 cases. This ‘outbreak’ has been quickly quelled. By comparison on the same date, the Canadian province of Quebec [pop. 8.5 million] recorded 8,106 new cases while the U.S. state of Michigan [pop. 10 million] recorded 35,000. Despite these contrasting numbers, the media in Canada and the U.S. is now waging a ceaseless propaganda drive criticizing China’s highly successful ‘zero Covid’ coronavirus policy. There are three reasons for this propaganda drive and media spectacle: 1. Anti-China racism by its journalists and editors. 2. Editorial decisions to divert attentention from the criminally negligent coronavirus policy of the Western imperialist countries. 3. Editorial decisions supporting the policies of economic sanctions and war threats being waged by these same imperialist countries.

[Note that contrary to the South China Morning Post news article headline, there is no serious debate among health officials in China to reverse its successful ‘zero Covid’ policy. In the West, meanwhile, governments are now ‘officially’ stating what has been the reality from the get-go of the pandemic, namely, ‘giving up’ on containing Covid-19 and instead ‘learning to live with it’. This means countless more lives around the world will be disrupted and lost, which shows, in turn, how little value that they and their state and corporate media place on human life. This media specializes in creating distracting and meaningless entertainment.

[A contrasting commentary in the SCMP by a pro-business ideologue in Hong Kong arguing against Covid safety measures is here.]

Story:
The U.S. is reaping what it sowed in Ukraine, by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies, Common Dreams, Jan 31, 2022

[This is the best analysis of the NATO-manufactured crisis over Ukraine. One reason for this is that it doesn’t bend to the pressures of Western media and governments who claim a ‘Russian annexation’ of Crimea in March 2014 and a ‘Russian invasion’ several months later of the Donbass region lying between Ukraine and Russia. These false, historical claims divert attention from the real aggression in and around Ukraine, which are twofold. One is the decades-long NATO expansion directed against Russia. Two is the ongoing terrorist war waged since 2014 by Ukrainian armed forces and extreme-right paramilitaries, backed by NATO, against the people of the Donbass region along the Ukraine-Russia border. Unfortuantley, the false claims over Crimea and Donbass are contained in most of the otherwise informative writings in alternative media, notably in Democracy Now (reprinted in Common Dreams) and The Nation, and by writer Aaron Mate.

[Benjamin and Davies explain in their new essay: ‘Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia’s 2014 reintegration of Crimea, and the decision by ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the U.S.-backed coup, in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Viktor Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, that should now be easier for Americans to understand.’ ]

Story:
A war that only America and Britain seem to want, by Joe Lauria, editor, Consortium News, Jan 28, 2022

[An in-depth essay on January 28, 2022 by Joe Lauria, editor of Consortium News, titled ‘Tangled tale of NATO expansion is at the heart of Ukraine crisis’ provides highly informative background to the NATO-manufactured ‘crisis’ over Ukraine-Russia relations. Not so for this essay headlined above by the same writer, on the same date. In it, he writes, “It is only Washington and London that have fully spun this story of war and are ready to bully anyone of consequence who challenges it.” This is factually wrong and also naïve. Canada has been fully engaged since 2014 with the U.S. and Britain in militarizing the Ukraine-Russia border. France is currently sending soldiers to neighbouring Romania. As for the German gov’t, Western media is goading it for not being aggressive enough against Russia. But that is a smokescreen. Germany is a member of NATO and has not uttered a whisper of disagreement with the alliance’s manufactured crisis directed at Russia. This was affirmed in a January 24 joint statement following a video conference among the leading members of NATO. The new German chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to meet the U.S. president in Washington on February 7.]

Story:
Eurasia’s ring of fire: The epic struggle over the epicenter of U.S. global power, by Alfred McCoy, first published in Tom Dispatch, Jan 16, 2022 (also appearing in Common Dreams, Daily KOS, LA Progressive)

[This is right-wing commentary dressed up to look like something critical of U.S. imperialism. The writer says Russia is “ready for a possible invasion” of Ukraine. ‘Possible invasion’? This is an adaptation to the language of permanent war threats by the U.S. government. Then we read that “80 Chinese jet fighters” have “swarmed” the “disputed island” of Taiwan and “a flotilla of 10 Chinese and Russian warships steamed aggressively across waters once virtually owned by the U.S. Seventh Fleet.”  Excuse me? On October 25, 1971, the UN General Assembly passed United Nations Resolution 2758 (XXVI) stating that the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government of China and replacing ‘The Republic of China’ (Taiwan) with the People’s Republic of China as a permanent member of the Security Council in the United Nations. Meanwhile, how is it that Chinese and Russian warships operating in or adjacent to their territorial waters are behaving ‘aggressively’ as the warships of the U.S., Britain, Canada and other FOREIGN powers steam around like they own the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean?

[The commentary reads as a lament to the fact that the U.S. Seventh Fleet no longer ‘owns’ the South China Sea. Perhaps most outrageously, we read, “an expanding fleet of Chinese icebreakers maneuvered with their Russian counterparts to open a ‘polar silk road,’ thereby possibly taking possession of the roof of the world.” Here we go again: first a ‘possible’ Russian invasion of Ukraine, now a ‘possible’ seizure of the Arctic by the evil Russia-China duo. How do countries mount ‘possible’ invasions and ‘possible’ seizures of Arctic territory? Send this writer back to English language school. Or better yet, please leave such right-wing commentary out of the pages of LA Progressive.

[Note that the outlets that have republished this article have altered the original headline contained in Tom Dispatch with its oddball sub-headline reading: ‘The epic struggle over the epicenter of U.S. global power’. Eurasia as an ‘epicenter’ of  U.S. power? What does that even mean? The revised headlines are all taken from the thematic headline of the Tom Dispatch publisher, which reads, ‘An epochal decline in American global power’.

[For the record, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China are each undertaking acts of national self-determination in responding to the military threats, encroachments and economic sanctions by U.S.-led imperialism.]

Story:
Pro-war hawks in U.S. media downplay threat of war against Russia and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi ties, by Gregory Shupak, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR.org), Jan 15, 2022

[In this otherwise very informative analysis, the writer bends to the pro-war propaganda of Western governments when he writes, “Russia sent its armed forces into the [sic] Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.” These false claims were addressed in this article authored by Roger Annis and published on Dec 21, 2021: The self-determination struggle of Russian Crimea and the pro-autonomy struggle in Donbas (formerly eastern Ukraine). That article appeared in Dissident Voice and A Socialist In Canada.

[A new commentary in Dissident Voice by former co-editor Kim Petersen on January 16 poses a relevant question that the writer and the editors at FAIR.org should ponder. Writing about the March 2014 referendum vote in Crimea in which a large majority voted to secede from the new, extreme-right Ukraine and join Russia, Kim Petersen asks: “Why does this expression of the democratic will of the people of Crimea constitute an annexation?”]

Story:
France and its subordinates in Africa place sanctions on their erstwhile military ally in Mali, Al Jazeera, Jan 10, 2022

[In 2012, the Mali military staged a coup against an elected government that was seeking dialogue with disaffected ethnic populations in the north of the country. Less than one year later, France invaded and occupied the country. It’s been all downhill ever since for the country and its people as the Western powers have militarized the entire region of sub-Saharan Africa. Western media has distracted and deflected attention with stories of ‘terrorists’ threatening the country, hence the need for Western military intervention.

[Much of the international left at the time failed to condemn the 2012 coup in Mali. For example, the late, leftist intellectual Samir Amir of France-Egypt background, regularly featured by Monthly Review, supported the coup. He went on to support the military-fascist coup in Egypt in July 2013. The story of the 2012 coup in Mali and its aftermath is told here in A Socialist In Canada.]

Background:
*  U.S. military says it has a ‘light footprint’ in Africa, but these documents show a vast network of bases, by Nick Turse, The Intercept, Dec 1, 2018 At least 34 U.S. military bases are scattered across Africa, with high concentrations in the north, west, and Horn of Africa
* Militarized by the West, Mali suffers a coup d’etat, by Roger Annis, A Socialist In Canada, March 31, 2012

Story:
A critique of degrowth, by David Schwartzman, published in Climate and Capitalism, Jan 5, 2022

The Climate and Capitalism website has published a new and largely incoherent attack against the ‘degrowth’ strategy for combatting global warming, in the form of the above commentary by U.S. writer David Shwartzman. Among several outlandish claims in the article is this one: “Leading degrowthers advocate a global reduction in energy consumption, which is a prescription for mass death for most of humanity…” The article dismisses the idea that Cuba’s health care system is superior to that of the U.S. And here is the writer’s concluding paragraph: “An ecosocialist [Global Green New Deal] has the potential of facilitating a path to electrified solar communism in the 21st century, the Solarcommunicene. Foster and Clark [two leading writers and editors at Monthly Review] have named the post-Capitalinian (world dominated by capital reproduction) age the Communian.”

A small but growing number of writers and theoreticians are wrestling with key strategic questions in the fight to combat the global warming emergency. These include Don Fitz (U.S.), Jason Hickel (UK) and Giorgis Kallis (Spain). They are wrestling with such questions as:

• • Can the capitalist order be modified to meet the ecological challenge, for example through vast increases in the production of non-fossil fueled energy and a switchover in transportation to ‘green’ modes of transport such as electrics vehicles?
  • What are the transitional, incremental measures needed to commence a sweeping reduction in all the productivist expansionism inherent to the capitalist economic order?
  • What are the new and novel forms of class alliances and governments needed to carry out sweeping societal changes needed in order to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Sadly, these vital questions and many more like them continue to be largely ignored in the pages of Climate and Capitalism and its allied sponsor, Monthly Review. Instead, we are offered bizarre puzzles such as the ‘Solarcommunicene’ and the ‘Capitalinian’ as the path to the future.

Story:
PEN America’s betrayal of Julian Assange, commentary by Chris Hedges, originally published in ScheerPost, Dec 27, 2021 (widely re-published in other outlets)

[In his hard-hitting commentary on the persecution of Julian Assange (by Western imperialist governments, let us note), Chris Hedges inexplicably closes with a slur against the people and government of China. With only the slightest, previous mention of China in his commentary (‘Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China’), his conclusion reads, “There is no lesser evil in this fight. It is all evil. Left unchecked, it will result in an American species of China’s totalitarian capitalism.” China, let us recall, has set an example for the world in vanquishing the coronavirus pandemic and, in recent years, eliminating extreme poverty. This is ‘totalitarianism’?

[A very informative, related story is here: For a third year in a row, the New York-based ‘Committee To Protect Journalists’ excludes Julian Assange from its index of jailed journalists, by Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, Dec 20, 2021.]

Story:
Media forget the plight of Afghan people as U.S. sanctions drive mass famine risk, by Julie Hollar, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, Dec 21, 2021

[This analysis in FAIR.org explains: As the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan in August 2021, television news focused on the plight of the country’s citizens, highlighting what it called “the horror awaiting women and girls” and using that claim to argue against withdrawal. Four months later, as those same citizens have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis due in no small part to U.S. sanctions, where is the outrage? [end citation]

[Hard to believe, but there are ‘left-wing’ voices in the West who are arguing in support of the killer U.S. economic blockade against the Afghan people. The Trotksyist magazines International Viewpoint (Europe) and New Politics (U.S.) published an interview in mid-December titled ‘Help Afghan women. Do not recognize the Taliban government’. The interviewee is a representative of ‘The Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women’. She says, “If given access to frozen Afghan government funds, the Taliban would most likely help the families of their own suicide bombers.” The interviewee recommends, instead, that aid to Afghanistan be directed through foregin agencies–the World Health Organization, UNICEF or The Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women.

[These same publications have been agitating for the overthrow of the governments in Nicaragua and Venezuela (and here), which they call ‘dictatorships’. They are silent over the war threats and economic sanctions being waged by the imperialist countries against the peoples of Russia and China. Thusly continues the sharp evolution to the political right by the constellation of fractured groups of the political current of Trotksyism.]

Story:
Climate change has destabilized the Earth’s poles, putting the rest of the planet in peril, Washington Post, Dec 14, 2021

[Here is distressing news of the continued disintegration of the ice sheets of Antarctica and accelerated melting of Arctic ice cover. You can find a dossier on the subject at the top of the ‘Ecology news’ page of A Socialist In Canada website, on December 15. The dossier comes in the form of headlines and weblinks.

 [The accelerated destabilization of the Earth’s poles underlines the urgency of combatting the global warming emergency. So what are the leading imperialist governments of the world doing about it? More public relations to ‘delay and deflect’ the required response. Or in the immortal words of Greta Thunberg, they are issuing yet more ‘blah, blah, blah’. Worse, the militarization drive of the imperialists is taking the world in EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION to what is needed.

[The global warming emergency makes degrowth an urgent imperative. Or call it ‘drawdown’, the title of the highly informative 2017 book of the same name. But contemporary left-wing political theory, including Marxism, largely IGNORES this imperative. Instead, it spouts rhetoric calling for ‘revolution’ or ‘socialism’. What is needed is transitional economic measures for a speedy drawdown, based on the broadest political and social (multi-class) unity possible. This must run side-by-side with building the broadest antiwar and anti-imperialist movements globally. The two go hand in hand. A crucial part of this is to deepen the fight for nuclear weapons abolition (and here).

[The foundations of Marxist thought remain solid. But false and failed INTERPRETATIONS passed along from the 20th century must go. Marxist and other left-wing theorists must understand and integrate the fight against global warming and the fight against imperialist militarism and war. A solid theoretical foundation will aid left-wing parties to quickly gain many, many new supporters and exponents.]

Story:
‘Craven International Olympic Committee a doormat to Chinese Communist Party’

[The above headline appears in the ‘liberal’ Toronto Star on December 10, 2021. The Star is Canada’s largest circulation newspaper chain. It prides itself on ‘liberal’ values. The headline leads a column by the newspaper’s ‘crack’ political columnist, who also happens to double as a hockey commentator in the newspaper. The headline and column are part of the effort by Star editors to ‘catch up’ to the Globe and Mail and National Post dailies. Those two have for several years now waged a brutal and relentless propaganda campaign against the Chinese people and government.

[The anti-China campaign echoes the equally vicious and dangerous propaganda drive by Western media and governments against Russia, which was sparked by the successful self-determination struggle of the people of Crimea and the ongoing self-determination struggle in the Donbass region between Russia and Ukraine. In March 2014, the people of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine following the extreme-right coup in Kyiv in February 2014. Several months later, the people of Donbass took up arms to defend themselves from an invasion of their homeland by the extreme-right paramilitaries from western Ukraine, who were and remain backed by NATO. The Russian government defended the Crimea referendum decision and it continues to advocate a political settlement in Donbass in the form of the ‘Minsk 2’ accord of February 2015. That accord provided for political autonomy for Donbass, but the Ukrainian government and NATO have sabotaged it. NATO and the West decided that the conduct of the Russian government throughout is ‘unacceptable’ and warrants punishment by economic sanctions and threats of war.

[The anti-China campaign has stepped up following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. That’s not a coincidence–Canada and its imperialist allies in NATO are guilty of a negligent and murderous response to the pandemic, including ‘vaccine apartheid’ against the countries of the less developed world. China, on the other hand, has had an exceptionally successful domestic response. What’s more, China is providing massive assistance to the less developed world with vaccines and vaccine manufacturing technology. This stands, again, in contrast to the West. All this means there is a compelling need for the imperialists to divert the attention of Canadians and the world from the social disaster of their coronavirus response and to fabricate-by-propaganda a case for war against China and Russia. Incredibly, this is taking place while the world is literally on fire due to the global warming emergency, caused by capitalism and its growth and expansion imperatives.

[The rulers in the West are unfit to rule. Moreover, they should be facing criminal charges for their pandemic negligence and other human rights crimes. But the populations of the imperialist countries are too divided and too stripped of historical memory to effect meaningful political and social change at this time. With luck, this may all change in the coming few years as the younger generations rise in protest against militarism and human-caused global warming. The need for protest and governmental change is compelling; otherwise, it will be game over for the human race.]

Story:
Ecosocialists are slowly, ever so slowly, acknowledging the imperative of degrowth in response to the global warming emergency.

[A Trotskyist (right-socialist) publication in the U.S. has published one of the first ‘ecosocialist’ analyses accepting the imperative of degrowth. Against The Current, published by a loose Trotskyist network in the U.S. called ‘Solidarity’, has published a statement by the group’s ‘ecosocialist working group’ condemning what it calls “the dogma of growth”. The analysis outlines measures in response to global warming that are predicated on the two, great principles of degrowth theory: radical reduction in capitalism’s pillaging of the Earth’s natural and human resources, and social equality.

[It’s been a long haul. For years, advocates of ‘ecosocialism’ have rejected and condemned degrowth theory. But Against The Current is but one small voice amidst the ecosocialist constellation. The main voice of ecosocialism in the English language–Monthly Review–remains silent. Despite the new analysis, confusion over degrowth appears to remain among the editors of Against The Current. A list of ‘recommended readings’ accompanies the statement and consists of writings by leading ‘left-wing’ opponents of degrowth, namely Daniel Tanuro, Michael Löwy, Robert Pollin and John Bellamy Foster.

[Here are two excellent readings on degrowth theory, by U.S. writer Don Fitz. both were republished in A Socialist In Canada:
*   Path to extinction, or path to a livable future?, book review by Don Fitz, Nov 1, 2021
*  Debating degrowth: ‘Be careful with the alternative energies you wish for’, exchange between Don Fitz and Robert Pollin, September 2021

Story:
Who is fighting who in Ukraine?, commentary by Glenn Diesen, published in RT, Dec 5, 2021  (Glenn Diesen is a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and an editor at the journal Russia in Global Affairs.)  …The dishonest attempts to frame Russia-Ukraine tensions as solely a conflict between the two countries is merely an effort to unravel the 2015 Minsk agreement, to cleanse Ukraine of eastern Ukrainian influence and purge Europe of Russian influence…

[Western governments and their corporate media accomplices have devised a new and novel means to frighten and lie to their populations with their fabricated stories of Russian military ‘threats’ against Ukraine. In addition to their standard stories of a Russian ‘annexation ‘ of Crimea in 2014 and an ongoing Russian ‘occupation’ of the Donbass region (the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk that lie between the two countries), now we have unproven and unprovable accusations of an imminent Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine. The new accusations are especially valuable because the projected ‘invasion’ is still months away, according to those fabricating the story, meaning the predicted ‘date’ can easily be shifted around, depending on the prevailing policy imperatives in the NATO aggressor countries.

[The Washington Post published a story on December 3 titled, ‘Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns’. It opens, “U.S. intelligence has found the Kremlin is planning a multi-front offensive as soon as early next year involving up to 175,000 troops, according to U.S. officials and an intelligence document obtained by The Washington Post.” The story cites anonymous U.S. officials for its source.

[The Post‘s war-mongering media partner, the New York Times, publishes an article the following day citing as source… the aforementioned Washington Post article! The Times adds this paragraph by way of ‘reliable sources’: Speaking to reporters in Stockholm, Sweden on December 2, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken referred to “evidence that Russia has made plans for significant aggressive moves against Ukraine.” Speaking to reporters on his official plane later that day, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to “warnings from an intelligence standpoint,” saying “there’s enough out there now to cause a lot of concern.” [end citation] Then on December 6, the Times published the article here below by a reporter embedded with the far-right militias in eastern Ukraine. Since 2014, the militias have been shelling and killing the residents of the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, thannks in part to the arms and military training provided by the U.S., Britain and Canada. Note how the prediction of a ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukraine is presented by the Times as inevitable, even in the headline: On Ukrainian front, grinding war and weary anticipation of invasion, New York Times, Dec 6, 2021. Associated Press adds to the hype with this article on December 7, widely reprinted in the world’s corporate media: Biden to warn Putin of economic pain if he invades Ukraine. The faux-liberal Guardian gives the foreign minister of Latvia first rank in its scaremongering reporting here in an article by the newspaper’s ‘political editor’. The country of less than two million is a NATO member and has taken a series of measures in recent years to ban the Russian language, quite possibly the most-spoken language in the country.

[Over at the Washington Post, a December 6 article inadvertently but accurately presents the true story: NATO’s drive to establish its military presence right on the Russia-Ukraine border by way of  direct membership of Ukraine in NATO. This threat is the real source of the rising tensions by the U.S. and NATO against Russia. Here is an informative, related reading: Russia’s ‘plan to invade Ukraine’ exists only in the U.S. and NATO imagination, commentary by Scott Ritter, RT, Dec 5, 2021.]

Story:
Opposition parties in Ottawa join gov’t and media campaign to delegitimize upcoming Winter Olympics in China. Report by Alex Ballingall, in Toronto Star, Dec 1, 2021

[This Toronto Star article itself is part of the imperialist propaganda drive against the government and people of China. Concerning Canada’s anti-China political parties in Parliament, the article writes:  All three official opposition parties are pressuring the Liberal government to diminish Canada’s presence at the upcoming Beijing Olympics, as Ottawa talks behind the scenes with other countries about how to participate in the Winter Games hosted by an economic superpower with an abysmal human rights record. The Bloc Québécois is taking the hardest line… The New Democrats also want Canada to stage a diplomatic boycott, though party Leader Jagmeet Singh said on December 1 that his top concern is the safety of athletes in an authoritarian country where two Canadians were recently imprisoned for more than three years in an act Ottawa denounced as “hostage” diplomacy. [end citation] The two MPs of the Green Party have also long called to disrupt the Games and ‘relocate’ them elsewhere. In a statement issued ten months ago, they went so far as to suggest relocating the Games to… Canada! Good choice–as First Nations people in Canada can well testify, Canada is a global champion of human rights and combatting poverty. Ok, maybe not! Here is a related news story: Womens Tennis Association suspends all its sponsored tournaments in China over fabricated charges of Peng Shuai being silenced by Chinese gov’t. Report by Associated Press, Dec 2, 2021 ]

Story:
Will Canada heed calls to join a diplomatic boycott of Beijing’s Winter Games?, by Jeremy Nutall, Toronto Star, Nov 27, 2021

[The Toronto Star prides itself on its liberal (and Liberal) political leanings. But when it comes to the new cold war against China, the newspaper is as anti-China as the rest of corporate and state media in Canada. The Sunday, Nov 28 edition of the newspaper has published the above article, repeating the worst of the current lies against China and taunting the Canadian gov’t to lead a ‘diplomatic’ boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games to open in Beijing on February 4. (‘Diplomatic’ boycott means ‘We can’t convince athletes, corporate sponsors or the Canadian public of a ‘full’ boycott, so we’ll go for second best.’)

[Until now, the conservative Globe and Mail daily has been leading the charge among corporate and state media outlets in Canada against the people and government of China. But the Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper, shows it is no slouch when it comes to anti-China prejudice and warmongering. The article’s theme is set in its headline, above, taunting the Canadian government to take an ever-tougher stand against the Chinese people. It writes of “aggression toward democratic countries and growing accusations of a genocide of the Uyghur people in its western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”. The bulk of the article is given over to the pro-boycott views of the foreign affairs critic of the Conservative Party in Canada’s Parliament. His father happened to be born in Hong Kong and moved to Canada in 1952. Then there is this: none other than New Democrat foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson is cited as favoring a ‘diplomatic’ boycott. In February 2021, NDP member of Parliament Jenny Kwan (Vancouver) and Green Party MP Elizabeth May were among the signatories of an open letter calling for a ‘relocation’ of the Winter Games. The letter says the government of China is perpetrating “the worst possible crimes against humanity against its own people”. Whew!

[The Winter Olympic Games will take place in China from February 4 to 20, 2022. Cheuk Kwan of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China compares these upcoming games to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany. “We are confronting a very similar situation,” he told a Canadian Press report published on CBC on Feb 3, 2021. “In hindsight, we should have (boycotted the Berlin Games). It really emboldened Hitler to to go on and attack Poland and start World War II. So, this is where we are right now from a moral standpoint.” And you thought the anti-China rhetoric in Canada is maybe not so overblown?]

Story:
Is Russia going to invade Ukraine?, essay and commentary by Paul Robinson (U. of Ottawa), published in RT, Nov 24, 2021

[This essay by Paul Robinson explodes the latest Western media and government propaganda campaign against the Russian government and people. The Western powers are alleging that Russia is preparing to ‘invade’ Ukraine. Robinson is a professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa and a frequent writer on Russia-Ukraine relations. This latest article by him is published in RT and will no doubt soon appear on his website ‘Irrussianality‘. (Apart from occasional, informative news and analysis of Russia such as this essay, the  the once respected RT has evolved editorially towards right-wing populism, beginning during the time of the 2016 U.S. election.)

[Of note in Robinson’s analysis is that the Russian government is, indeed, deepening its economic relations with the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. They were oblasts (provinces) of Ukraine prior to 2014 and comprise the historic region of Donbas lying between Russia and Ukraine. The two republics came under military attack by extreme-right paramilitary forces from Ukraine beginning in May 2014 for demanding measures of political autonomy following the extreme-right coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected president and legislature in February 2014. The autonomy demands also stemmed from longstanding grievances by residents with their subordinate status in Ukraine. Crimea’s referendum vote in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine served as inspiration. Altogether, the peoples of Donetsk and Lugansk have been waging a struggle for political self-determination par excellence since 2014. But this is little recognized in the Western countries, including among self declared leftists.

[Robinson’s essay reports on the November 15 decree by Russian president Vladimir Putin titled ‘On rendering humanitarian assistance to the population of separate districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine’. The decree stipulates equal access of Donbas goods to Russia’s state procurement tenders and removes quotas on the movement of goods across the Russia/Donbas customs border. Robinson explains further, “The 2015 ‘Minsk 2’ agreement (text here) is meant to provide a mechanism for ending the conflict in Donbas. It proposes the ‘full restoration of socio-economic relations’ between Ukraine and the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Ukraine, however, has moved in the opposite direction, subjecting the two autonomous republics to a tight economic blockade, in the apparent hope that life there will become so miserable that the locals will long to return to the relative prosperity of their former home.”

[Why have the U.S. and its NATO allies chosen this moment to escalate tensions with Russia over Ukraine? Only the flies on the walls of the Pentagon and NATO headquarters in Brussels know for sure. The anti-Russia provocations over Ukraine parallel rising military threats and economic measures against China. No doubt, both initiatives are prompted by the need for distraction from the ongoing Covid-19 calamity in the NATO countries and from the West’s ’emperor has no clothes’ performance at the recent COP 26 conference on global warming. Sadly for the world, the U.S. and NATO are a failed and dying empire that shows no sign of exiting quietly from the global stage.]

Story:
Failure to vaccinate poor countries fans fears of uncontrolled outbreak, Politico, Nov 23, 2021

[This article in Politico self-censors news of how vaccine production in China, Russia and Cuba is reaching far more people in the less developed countries compared to the West’s Big Pharma. An unofficial Western boycott is being waged against Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine as the world Health Organization and drug approval agencies in the U.S., Canada and Europe withhold approval of the vaccine. This after The Lancet reported in February 2021 that vaccine trials showed a 92 per cent effectiveness rate for the vaccine. WHO did give ’emergency’ approval in June for two vaccines developed in China. Politico reports none of this. (Let us now see if Politico and other, similar right-wing news outlets report this latest news, which happens to shed yet more light on the selected, Western media censoring of ‘unfavorable’ vaccination news: China to donate 600 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to Africa, Associated Press, Nov 30, 2021.

[Western news outlets such as Politico as well as none other than the president of the United States are misleading the world in claiming that ‘the U.S. has the highest rate of vaccine donations in the world’. This claim refers only to donations to the WHO’s COVAX initiative. Russia, China and Cuba do not participate in COVAX for reasons of safeguarding national sovereignty and the growing propensity of the U.S. and its Western allies to wage economic warfare and military threats against declared ‘enemies’. (Despite its decision, China has nevertheless pledged 100 million vaccine donations to COVAX.) Together, Russia, China and Cuba have donated far more vaccines than has COVAX. Scores of countries have approved their vaccines for use.

[The seven vaccines approved by WHO for emergency use are: Sinovac-CoronaVac and Sinopharm (China), Moderna, Pfizer–BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, Oxford/AstraZeneca and Covishield (a version of Oxford/AstraZeneca produced by the Serum Institute of India).]

Story:
Jumping to China-bashing conclusions over tennis star Peng Shuai, by Kim Petersen, former co-editor, Dissident Voice, Nov 22, 2021

[Corporate and state media in the West are agitating to discredit China’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics. Many are calling for a formal boycott. The Games are scheduled to take place from February 4 to 22. Presently, the propaganda drive accompanying the boycott call is centered on a concocted story that the Chinese government and sports officials are punishing Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai for making an accusation on social media of sexual assault in 2018 against a Chinese government official. An NBC News story on November 21 blows up the concocted story. It reports that Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, spoke to Peng by video link on November 21. A press release issued by the IOC following the call explained that Peng assured the body “she is safe and well, living at her home in Beijing, but would like to have her privacy respected at this time.”

[The editors of the New York Times typified the mis-steps of corporate media when it reported the following on November 22, just hours before the Peng-IOC call: “The only thing missing from the recent flurry of [news coverage in China over her case] was her own voice, one once strong enough to force the authorities to bend to her steely determination to control her own destiny.”

[IOC Athletes’ Commission chair Emma Terho and Chinese IOC member Li Lingwei were also on the November 21 call. Terho stated, “I was relieved to see that Peng Shuai was doing fine, which was our main concern,” Also on November 22, videos and photos posted on social media showed Peng at a youth tennis tournament in Beijing.

[News of the IOC call has dampened but not ended the propaganda drive. An Associated Press story on November 22 complained that the IOC’s press release following the November 21 call with Peng “offered few details and no follow up”. Thus do the editors at AP and elsewhere show they don’t give a damn about Peng’s situation and wishes. Instead, they are using it for the purposes of their new cold war against China.

[Sadly, The Nation couldn’t resist showing off some anti-China credentials over the concocted story of Peng Shuai. The venerable liberal magazine in the U.S. published an article on November 20 taunting the IOC for supposedly failing to protect female athletes. The article is headlined, ‘Where is Peng Shuai? And what is the IOC going to do about it?’ The article concludes with a veiled threat of boycott of the 2022 Games: “The fear is that the athletes will not be safe in Beijing.”]

Story:
‘China’s Great Road’: Lessons for Marxist theory and socialist practices, essay and book review by Roger Keeran (State University of New York), published in Marxism-Leninism Today, Nov 7, 2021   Reviewing: China’s Great Road: Lesson for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices, by John Ross, Praxis Press, 2021, 251 pp

[This essay and book review is informative. But like the book it reviews, it suffers from a glaring absence. That is the following. China is the largest experience in mixed economy strategy in world history. The strategy was launched during the late 1970s in response to the chaos, disruption and poor social development indices during the years of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ waged by leaders of China from 1966 until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

[‘Mixed economy’ is the strategy for economic and social development in which state-planned and directed economic planning encourages private, capitalist investment but retains overall direction of the national economy in question. The second largest experience in mixed economy was the New Economic Policy of the early Soviet Union, from 1921 until its forcible and premature ending in 1928 by the rising Stalin-led government. This was an enormously important historical experience. It determined, for good or for bad, the tragic history that followed in the Soviet Union: years of tremendous sacrifice and hardship in the Soviet Union during the 1930s ‘forced march’ industrialization and collectivization of agricultural, followed by the calamitous invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi, imperialist Germany beginning in June 1941. Yet most regrettably, the book review and the book under review itself make no reference to the New Economic Policy.

[Why the reluctance to analyze NEP and bring it into the mainstream of contemporary Marxist thinking? Only the writers know for sure. But the widespread pattern of writing NEP out of history is explained, in part, in story/comment entry immediately below.]

Story:
Russiagate has no rock bottom, by Aaron Maté, published on his Substack media outlet, Nov 7, 2021  The ‘Steele Dossier was the collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories funded by the 2016 election campaign of Hillary Clinton and hyped by the U.S. media establishment and tapped by the FBI for surveillance and investigative leads. It did not seem possible for it to get more embarrassing for all of those involved. But the indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Steele’s key source, Igor Danchenko, offers 39 pages of new evidence that Russiagate — after five years of failed innuendo, debunked ‘bombshells’ and humiliating revelations — has no rock bottom…
Related:
*  Analyst who aided Democratic Party’s dossier alleging Trump-Russia collusion in 2016-17 charged with lying, Associated Press, Nov 5, 2021
*  Indicted Clinton lawyer hired CrowdStrike, firm behind dubious Russian hacking claim, by Aaron Maté, published on his Substack media outlet, Oct 19, 2021
*  The rise and fall of the ‘Steele Dossier’: A case study in mass hysteria and media credulity over ‘Russiagate’, by Aaron Maté, The Nation, Jan 11, 2021

[Left aside in the above reports (it is beyond the scope of the reports) is the glaring question of why much of the political left in the Western countries, including those sections claiming to be Marxist, swallowed the outrageous ‘Russiagate’ allegations alleging that the Russian government sought to aid the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Their views were indistinguishable from the lies being propagated by Western media, notably the NBC‘s media ‘star’ Rachel Maddow. Otherwise, much of this ‘left’ media opted for silence. Even Glenn Greenwald, who today claims to have consistently spoken out against the false ‘Russiagate’ allegations, said for several years in his reporting that ‘maybe’ there was something behind the allegations, ‘we just haven’t seen the proof’.

[The answers as to why this political left in the West so acted, are complex. They lie in the ultraleft origins of this political left (notably the political current that became Trotskyism) in the years and then decades following the Russian REvolution of 1917. This original ultraleftism came to reject Lenin’s prescription of a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ as key to the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath, including by the various ‘permanent revolution’ theories of Trotskyist groups. It came to reject the continued relevance and necessity of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was forcibly and prematurely ended in 1928 by the rising Stalin-led regime in the Soviet Union. Over the years and decades, this ultraleftism degenerated into new forms of right-wing socialism.

[The New Economic Policy was debated among Russian revolutionaries as the imperialist military intervention against the Russian Revolution (inaccurately described as a ‘civil war’ by many left-wing analysts) was defeated during 1920/21. As the military intervention was defeated, the harsh economic blockade accompanying the military intervention was continued and intensified agaisnt the revolutionary republics of 1917. (These republics formally coalesced in 1922 to found the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) NEP was created as a ‘mixed economy’ strategy for economic development, notably in permitting and developing private ownership of land and agricultural production among small and middle peasants.

[Here are three reports explaining the origins and necessaity of NEP (as listed in the ‘Books and essays’ page of A Socialist In Canada website:
*  Report on the New Economic Policy to the 7th Moscow Gubernia Conference of the Russian Communist Party, by V.I. Lenin, Oct 29, 1921 (here)
*  Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution, report by V.I. Lenin to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, November 13, 1922 (here)
*  The New Economic Policy of Soviet Russia and the Perspectives of the World Revolution, report by Leon Trotsky delivered to the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International, session of Nov 14, 1922. (Attached here as pdf: Report by Leon Trotsky on New Economic Policy to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922.docx)

[A comprehensive and highly recommended history of the New Economic Policy and the early years of the Soviet Union is here:
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938, by Stephen Cohen; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc, 1973; Vintage paperback, 1975, ISBN 0-394-71261-7

[The lessons of NEP are highly relevant but almost nowhere discussed in today’s world. China is, by far, the world’s largest experiment in NEP-style, mixed economy strategy. It turned to this strategy following the disastrous years of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of 1966-76 and the earlier, failed ‘China-only’ plan for economic development that preceded it. Today, Venezuela, Nicaragua and even Cuba have been obliged to turn to mixed economy strategies due to the harsh, U.S.-led imperialist economic blockades against them. For this, the leaders of these countries are facing harsh criticism by many of the aforementioned, degenerated Western leftists.]

Story:  COP-out 26, by Michael Roberts, published on his website, Oct 28, 2021

[The writer provides an informative overview of the global warming emergency and its causes. But he falls far short in sketching an alternative course to the capitalist pillaging he documents in his essay. There is no mention in the essay that the current state of production and consumption in the world capitalist economy is grossly excessive and must be reduced through ‘de-growth’. Instead, we read familiar, liberal environmentalist arguments such as: “Decarbonizing the world economy is technically and financially feasible. It would require committing approximately 2.5 percent of global GDP per year to investment spending in areas designed to improve energy efficiency standards across the board (buildings, automobiles, transportation systems, industrial production processes) and to massively expand the availability of clean energy sources for zero emissions to be realized by 2050…” (end citation). ‘Improve energy efficiency’ of automobiles? But automobile use must be radically reduced to all but emergency needs and (perhaps) vacation travel quotas is entirely inadequate. ‘Clean energy?’ But every source of energy production requires energy and material inputs. World electricity production and consumption is already warming the earth beyond species survival, including the humans; it cannot be extended and intensified through ‘alternative energies’ without further threatening survival. And so on…]

Story:  Why it’s hard for the New Democratic Party and the government it leads in British Columbia to be greener, by Robert Hackett, The Tyee, Oct 19, 2021  (Robert Hackett is Professor Emeritus of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver BC.)

[The New Democratic Party in Canada has proven itself in government to be a loyal member and foot soldier of the fossil fuel death cult which rules over Canada. The party has at various times governed in six of Canada’s ten provinces; its ‘ecological’ policies differ little from the Liberal or Conservative governments that preceded the NDP or came after it. The above essay published in The Tyee offers a superficial view of why the party has failed while in office to challenge Canada’s record of pillage of the natural environment. The essay offers anecdotal evidence of the record of NDP government in British Columbia, first returned to office in a 2017 election then re-elected in 2021. Surprisingly, the essay says nothing about how the 2021 election was crafted by NDP leaers specifically to hobble if not destroy the Green Party. A related news item is here: BC changes its Oil and Gas Activities Act to allow oil and gas companies to delay well cleanups, The Tyee, Oct 22, 2021

[The large questions are not asked in The Tyee essay. How can the economy in Canada, so steeped in ecological destruction, be re-oriented towards programs of ecological enhancement and social justice? What are the new and novel forms of class alliances and governments that are needed to begin such a process? What are the new political parties that are needed in Canada, considering that the NDP and the Green Party are deeply wedded to the capitalist system of ecological destruction? (Green Party leaders demonstrated in the September 20, 2021 national election that they would prefer to destroy their party rather than permit left-wing leaders and policies to prevail.) Can trade unions as presently constituted be part of truly progressive social and environmental change or are they hopelessly corrupted and conservative? How can the NDP and Green parties be pressured to sever their loyalties to the corporate and fossil fuel death cult governing Canada?]

Story:  Protests greet debut of Italy’s workplace Covid pass rule, the toughest in Europe, Associated Press, Oct 15, 2021  and: Italy begins enforcing one of the world’s strictest workplace vaccine mandates, risking blowback, Washington Post, Oct 15, 2021

[Large governments in many of the the imperialist countries and certain other capitalist countries are legislating new Covid safety measures, notably universal vaccinations in workplaces and health care insitutions along with stricter safety protocols in homes and insitutions for the elderly. They are doing so reluctantly and under social pressure, having delayed such measures for more than one year, since the safety and effectiveness of vaccines became confirmed. A large reason for the delay in action has been the decline in scientific awareness that has accompanied the decline of working class consciousness and struggle during the rise of globalized capitalism since the 1970s. Government have escaped pressure to act. Most pressure on governments to act on vaccination policy and other safety measures has come from doctors, nurses and health care professionals. The trade unions have played secondary roles, if any. Indeed, many union leaders have stumbled over vaccination requirements in workplaces or outright opposed them.

[Capitalist (imperialist) governments have been forced to act in the public interest on a vast scale in response to the pandemic, albeit reluctantly and without mass advocacy pressure in the streets. This is a rare and unique phenomenon. Yet, there has been no left-wing analysis of it. Do Covid safety measures act to strengthen the cohesion and will of the working classes and their institutions such as trade unions? If so, how and to what degree? What may we expect as the working classes emerge from the trauma and betrayals of the Covid responses of the large governments of the world. What about China’s stellar example in keeping the pandemic at bay? How will this affect the drive of the imperialist governments to threaten China and diminish its role in internatinoal politics? These and similar questions remain unexplored by left-wing analysts, many of whom are cowed and silenced by the imperialist propaganda campaign against China and by their own political confusion. Marxism and other forms of left-wing analysis have been in decline since the onset of globalized capitalism during the late 1970s. and early 1980s.]

Story:  U.S.-China cooperation: The only way to save the world from climate Armageddon, by Michael Klare, Tom Dispatch, Oct 14, 2021 (and widely re-published in other alterntive media outlets)

[This essay by liberal writer Michael Klare voices a worthy goal in its headline. But the essay itself consists of wishful thinking and misleading analysis. It terms U.S. and other Western imperialist aggression against China as a ‘U.S.-China rivalry’. It considers imperialist aggression against China (and Russia, it must be said) as something ‘optional’ for Western countries, which they could end once they come to their ‘good senses’ and realize they should, instead, be tackling global warming. In reality, imperialist aggression, just like global warming vandalism, is a product of the growth and expansion imperative of capitalism. The two can only be ended by a transitonal political/social/economic revolution that replaces the capitalist growth imperative with economic planning founded on principles of social and national justice.]

Full text of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s keynote speech to the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China, published by CGTN, Oct 12, 2021

[In his speech, Chinese President Xi Jinping sounds the call by the government he leads to build an ‘ecological civilization’. It’s a difficult path for the Chinese people, considering the centuries of environmental destruction ‘bequeathed’ to the Chinese people and the world by colonialism and imperialism. China has paid a high environmental price for its industrialization drive in recent decades. Western media blames the Chinese government itself for this and ignore the environmental responsibilities of the Western capitalist interests that have invested in operations in China. ‘Ecological civilization’ is a different and far superior aspirational goal compared to the rhetoric of the environmental death cults which govern in the imperialist countries. Environmentalists should assist the Chinese government in its aspirational goals and should condemn the militarism of Western imperialism that wants to return China to a fully subordinate status in the world economy.]

Story:  China must lead the new industrial revolution, by Justin Yifu Lin, Asia Times, October 15, 2021 (Justin Yifu Lin is a former chief economist and senior vice-president at World Bank.)

[This commentary in Asia Times makes the unproven assertion that China is well placed to lead the world in a fourth, industrial revolution. According to the writer, this revolution can be waged by capitalist interests and should be done according to capitalist rules of the game. The commentary takes no account of the global warming emergency and how this must shape the world’s economic and social development. It makes no reference to the history of capitalist imperialism and how this death-cult system will fight to the death, literally, to maintain its position of military and economic dominance. The commentary is welcomed here in the website of ‘Friends of Socialist China’, a self-proclaimed source of Marxist analysis.]

Story:  ‘It’s not sustainable’: What America’s port crisis looks like up close, New York Times, Oct 11, 2021  An enduring traffic jam at the Port of Savannah, the third largest port in the U.S., reveals why the chaos in global shipping is likely to persist 

[‘Port crisis’, shipping crisis’, ‘shortage of truck drivers’–these and other terms used to describe the supply chain gridlock in the global capitalist system are signs of the runaway production and consumption excesses of globalized capitalism (nonsensically termed ‘neoliberalism’ by most left-wing writers). The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic has upended the previously ‘smooth’ flows of capital and commodities in the global, capitalist production chain and now serves to highlight the inherent instability and threat to humanity of the global capitalist system. Degrowth (or call it ‘drawdown’) is an imperative if the world is to avoid the catastrophic consequences of global warming and rising imperialist war–both of which are inevitable outcomes of globalized capitalism run amok. But few left-wing and environmental writers accept the imperative of degrowth; most are lost in the sands as they search for a mythical ‘green new deal’ whereby capitalism may unleash its expansion imperative on new, ‘green’ forms of capitalist excess and overproduction and thereby bring renewed ‘prosperity’ to all (er, to the few).]

Story:  Climbdown by U.S. and Canadian governments in their judicial pursuit of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou: She is free to leave Canada after U.S. officials offer ‘deferred prosecution agreement’. Report by Canada’s state broadcaster CBC News, Sep 24, 2021  and read: report by Associated Press, Sep 24, 2021

[The New York Times reports grudgingly and succinctly: “Meng Wanzhou agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement, which will ultimately lead to dropping all the charges against her.” (end citation) The U.S. government will continue its fraudulent prosecution against Huawei for alleged ‘fraud’, but irreparable damage to its fraudulent case has been done. Meanwhile, Western media is left whining and exposed for its anti-China hatred and hysteria. That can be expected to intensify because Western governments and media are hell bent on their racist new cold war crusade.

[The contrast between the negligent and murderous responses of Western imperialist countries to the coronoavirus pandemic and China’s highly successful response highlights the moral bankruptcy of the Western cabal of countries. They sought to persecute Meng Wanzhou and railroad her into the U.S. prison gulag in part to defect attention away from their pandemic disasters, their disastrous handling of the global warming emergency, and so many other, similar failings. And yes, they have hobbled Huawei’s ability to compete in the so-called free markets of the West by using economic sanctions and judicial assaults. But their moral standing continues its downward slide.

[In related news: Leaders of U.S., Japan, India and Australia meet in Washington to discuss their war threats against China. Report in Al Jazeera, Sep 24, 2021 (The official statement of the four anti-China governments that met in Washington DC on Sep 24, 2021 is here.]

Story:  Presidents of China and the U.S. announce separate steps to the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in the name of combating global warming , Associated Press, Sep 22, 2021

[According to news reports, details of China’s announcement are lacking. The report by Xinhua news agency consists of two sentences. Associated Press reports that China is building new coal-burning power plants more or less equal in output to what the government now says it will not finance abroad. A key test for China’s policies on global warming is the degree to which they open the road to a transitional, ‘degrowth’ path that is so needed in the world. This will, in turn, be a key tests of the country’s proclaimed socialist path.

[Here is an important, related reading: The anti-colonial politics of degrowth, by Jason Hickel, published in Political Geography, June 2021.]

Story:  New Zealand and the new, imperialist war alliance against China

[New Zealand has been on tiptoes during the recent years of imperialist warmongering. It didn’t join the Lima Group and has continued to recognize the government of Venezuela. It didn’t sign onto one of the ‘Five Eyes’ anti-China statements and it withdrew a ‘genocide against the Uyghurs’ allegation from a recent parliamentary criticism of China. The government now says it was not even informed of the creation of the new military alliance of Australia/ Britian/U.S. directed against China. (The Canadian government also says it wasn’t informed, a highly dubious assertion considering how closely the government is working with the U.S. in seeking to railroad (extradite) Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou into the U.S. prison gulag.)

[It has been a joint policy of both National Party and Labour Party-led governments in New Zealand to avoid publicly poking China in the nose. This remains their policy. But as the drums of imperialist war against China beat more and more loudly, the participation of New Zealand is to be expected. The NZ navy joined the recent UK armada directed against China and the navy is officially part of an alliance most New Zealanders have forgotten existed–the Five-Power Defence Arrangements. It  dates back to 1971 and involves NZ, Australia, UK, Singapore and Malaysia. (Wikipedia)

[Antiwar protests in Australia are urgently needed, including in light of the Labour Party’s support for the ‘AUKUS’ outrage. How about this for a theme: ‘Not one penny for nuclear submarines! No to threats against China! Yes to massive investment to eliminate poverty and fight the global warming emergency!’]

Story:  China and common prosperity, by Michael Roberts (Marxist economist in Britain), published on his website, Sep 11, 2021

[This informative analysis concludes with the worn Trotskyist refrain that “China’s leadership is not accountable to its working people; there are no organs of worker democracy, there is no democratic planning. Only the 100 million CP members have a say in China’s economic future, and that is really only among the top…” This refrain fails to explain how it is that China can somehow be waging the most successful social campaign in world history to lessen poverty and inequality while simultaneously lacking any meaningful democracy. Such an explanation strips the word ‘democracy’ of any meaning or utility.

[In reality, the radical lessening of poverty underway in China for some time now is the most democratic measure imaginable for China and for any other country in the contemporary world. The formal trappings of  bourgeois ‘democracy’ should be considered and compared in such a context as that, not by abstract musings coming from Britain, one of the seats of the imperialist ‘democracy’ that has done so much in the past century to ruin the world.]

Story:  The pandemic has made us all so full of rage. What happens if we never get over it?, by Edward Keenan, Washington bureau chief, Toronto Star, Sep 4, 2021

[This commentary in the Toronto Star addresses the troubling rise of anti-vaccination protest and conspiracy theory in the U.S. and Canada. But like similar commentaries, it fails to locate the reason and source for the right-wing protests and beliefs. This failure is understandble, because the protests illustrate three ‘uncomfortable’ realities about the state of the capitalist world some 45 years following the rise of globalized capitalism (nonsensically termed ‘neoliberalism’ by academics). Those three realities are:
1. The negligence characterisitic of the pandemic response by the governments and public health authorities in the wealthiest (imperialist) countries of the world (in contrast to China’s highly successful pandemic response). That negligence includes the widely-reported ‘vaccine apartheid’ that is denying vaccine access to most of the poorer countreis of the world.
2. The decline of scientific practice and understanding characteristic of globalized capitalism. This spills over into regressive social policy and practice by capitalist governments, for example, the erosion if not direct attacks on public health care services and practice. Of special note are the rising attacks against the right of women in the U.S. to access abortion services.
3. The rise of fascism and other far-right ideologies in the imperialist countries of the world (also in in countries subordinate to imperialism such as Brazil and India).

[Opposition to vaccine science is the official position of the Republican Party, of one half of the governing-party duo in the United States. The Canadian government happens to be tightly allied with this governing duo in efforts to strangle, starve and violently overthrow governments in China, Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere that are successfully combating the coronavirus pandemic.

[Postscript: And here is another liberal columnist in the Toronto Star, Bruce Arthur, offering his explanation on September 14 of the origins of the right-wing anti-vaccination protests taking place in Canada. Once again, there is a failure to locate the protests within the context of rising far-right ideologies and the official decline of science as a guide to economic and social policies. The fossil fuel death cult that rules in Canada’s federal and provincial governments supports far-right and fascist movements in such countries as Ukraine, India and Brazil. The cult will be the death of us all if its hold on power is not broken. By way of rounding out the show on September 14, the Star publishes an op-ed commentary by the ‘president and CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies’, a fanatical, pro-Israel (that is, extreme-right) entity, complaining about the use of swastikas as graffiti in Canada’s September 20 election campaign.]

Story:  Australian socialist writes on pandemic crisis but says nothing on vaccinations or China’s successful Covid-19 mitigation.

[An August 25 article appearing in Green Left Weekly is titled ‘Right-wing anti-lockdown protests a symptom of gov’t failures‘. The article is written in the context of the rise in new, Covid-19 cases in Australia, related lockdown mitigation measures, and recent, large protests in the country by right-wing anti-vaccination ideologues. The article writer is the national convenor of the Socialist Alliance, which publishes the newspaper.

[Oddly, the article makes no mention of what role that vaccinations and mandatory vaccination policy might play in mitigating and eventually overcoming the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. It cites one sole example, Taiwan, as a country that has successfully mitigated the pandemic spread. But that’s an odd choice because Australia’s closest neighbour, New Zealand, has a highly publicized and successful ‘zero Covid’ strategy (notwithstanding the recent appearances of Delta variant cases concentrated in Auckland). Taiwan is recording 668 total Covid-19 cases per million population compared to 645 in New Zealand. Much more significant in the article is the absence of mention of China; that country’s per capita, total case count is one tenth (!) that of Taiwan and New Zealand. This is doubly impressive considering that China is not an island country and it has massive, trade and transportation connections with the world that have continued to hum along despite the pandemic.]

Story:  Nonsensical, ultraleft polemic against degrowth theory by Australian Trotskyist group

[The Socialist Alternative group in Australia published an article on August 11 titled ‘The end of growth? The capitalist economy and the ecological crisis’. The article sub-title explains: “The question of economic growth and its relation to the climate crisis is a subject of increasing discussion. Here we offer a Marxist view on this critical issue for the environmental movement.” [end citation]. The article is a sharp critique of the theory of ‘degrowth’ as a strategy for fighting the global warming emergency. Here is the article’s key argument: “…Many ecologists, activists and academics argue that an obsession with economic growth is the cause of our current ecological crisis and a commitment to “degrowing” the economy is the solution. Too often, however, this discussion lacks a sufficient class or anti-capitalist content and workers are blamed for our supposedly destructive ‘consumption patterns’. Instead, socialists should be clear that the cause of the climate crisis is the capitalist system and its incessant drive to accumulate profits, and that the only way to solve the crisis is to struggle for a socialist world where human need, including a sustainable relation to nature, comes before private greed… This means that without a planned transition to a sustainable means of life the tendency will be for ever increasing emissions. So the debate about growth and degrowth is useless unless linked to the need to bring an end to the chaos of the capitalist market.” [end citation]

[The premise of this citation is false. Marxists and other advocates of degrowth believe that the growth imperative of capitalism is much more than an “obsession”, it is an imperative, meaning it is fundamental to how the capitalist system operates. Understanding how the captialist growth imperative operates is key to understanding the global wrming emergency itself. The article authors err in writing, “the cause of the climate crisis is the capitalist system and its incessant drive to accumulate profits”. This is a simplification and caricature of Marxism. It is not simply the search for profits which drives the capitalist system. Rather, it is the class struggle between the wealthy capitalists and the laboring classes (workers, farmers, independent producers, etc). The natural inclinations of the working classes are to resist the capitalist search for the lowest wages and lowest-cost natural resource inputs. They are inclined by their material conditions of life to resist the capitalists by joining in common struggle for a better world. Competition between the capitalists and the search for maximium profits shape how this class struggle takes place and how society is organized. But the reasons for that competition are rooted in what Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels described in the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Note, Marx and Engles DID NOT write, ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the capitalists’ drive to accumulate profits.’ Herein lie the differences between genuine Marxism and its various caricatures.]

Story:  International Committee of the Democratic Socialist of America issues statement condemning the decades-long imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, calling for immediate and unconditional support of Afghan refugees, statement issued on Aug 18, 2021

[The statement by the Democratic Socialists Of America condemns the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the lasting damage it has done to the political, social and economic fabric of the country and its people, all to the good. But it is similar to the statement by the U.S.-based  ‘Afghans For A Better Tomorrow’,issued on August 20, insofar as both are focused on the plight of ‘refugees’ seeking to flee the country. The DSA writes, “The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) International Committee stands firmly in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan, in particular with the women and ethnic minorities sure to face persecution under the Taliban. All Afghans who desire it should be granted asylum in the United States or another country of their choosing, with a waiver of all application hurdles and provision of all necessary support.”

[Neither statement says a word about the right of the Afghan people to determine their own government and their own political/economic/social course for the country. That said, the DSA statement differs from the ‘Afghans For A Better Tomorrow’ statement by voicing no support for the continued occupation of the Kabul airport by the Western powers (in the name of protecting ‘refugees’ wishing to flee the country).

[The new governing authorities in Afghanistan have stated there will be no mass retribution against Afghans who collaborated with the occupying powers during the past 20 years. This can be contrasted with the tidal wave of government and media propaganda in the West predicting that such violence is inevitable and (in the absence of evidence) is already taking place. This propaganda is unfortunately being reflected in left-wing writing on the subject.

[Writer and author Vijay Prashad is writing differently. All along, he has stressed the need for a political settlement in Afghanistan in the form of a national reconstruction government. His most recent article, dated August 19, continues to sound these themes. This should be the focus of serious writing on Afghanistan: how can people and popular organizations in the West aid the Afghan people in overcoming the horrible legacy of the war waged by the U.S. and its NATO allies? A starting point is opposition to all forms of embargo or blockade against the Afghan people and government. That includes the need for diplomatic recognition by Western powers and other countries of whatever government is constituted. It includes the need for statements and protest actions calling for massive aid for the reconstruction of the country, including reparations from the Western powers that conducted a violent and murderous occupation during the past 20 years. Large-scale aid is more likely to come from China, along the lines of its Belt and Road project, and from Russia. But the outlines of this are not yet clear.]

Story:  Left-wing academics in Canada distance themselves from the Cuban Revolution and defending its gains.

[The Bullet is a website publication of the Socialist Project, a network of left-wing academics and activists based in Toronto. The latest commentary published on the website is authored by an academic in Spain and is innocuously titled ‘Cuban dilemmas, socialist debates‘ (Aug 17, 2021). The author says that the few thousand Cubans’ who protested in the streets and committed acts of vandalism on July 11, 2021 represent a considerable section of the Cuban population as a whole. “No doubt the imperialist blockade and right-wing conspiracies were factors in the Cuban protests. But they were dipping into a larger tide, and it would be stupid to think otherwise,” he writes.

[The writer argues there is a “dearth of socialist freedoms” in Cuba. He says the Communist Party of Cuba adheres to a “monopolistic conception of power” that is “more reminiscent of Stalinism than of Che Guevara, who Cuban leaders continue to claim as their own.” He continues, “Neither in Marx nor in Lenin nor in 26th of July Movement-era Castro can we find any strategic theorization whereby socialism should be built over the long term solely and exclusively under the leadership of a single party monopolizing political power… The best safeguard for partial gains and progress toward socialism is an organized people that neither depends upon the state nor is yet another of its many tributaries…”

[A commentary in The Bullet on July 27 (also published in Canadian Dimension) by a Cuban academic living abroad argues that the Cuban state is “broken”. Another recently translated commentary by a Cuban academic is published on August 9 by a Trotskyist outlet in Europe, International Viewpoint, and by the Life On The Left writer’s website in Canada. It is titled, ‘The single party system faced with the crisis’ and describes Cuba as a “one-party model of bureaucratic socialism”. The writer argues, “The bureaucracy has become a ‘class for itself’ within society and hinders changes and reforms…”

[Similar distancing from defending the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the independent government of Nicaragua under President Daniel Ortega is taking place by many Canadian leftists of past generations. The Bullet as well as its associated member listserve gives voice to this disaffection.]

Story:  How the pandemic now ends, by Ed Yong, The Atlantic, Aug 12, 2021  …America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded it off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated…

[The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic exploded in the U.S. in 2020 due to the negligence and reckless self-interest of the capitalist interests that control the country. This was also true for the leading, imperialist allies of the U.S. Nine of the top-15 countries for total coronavirus cases are members of the NATO military alliance. That said, why has their fall-back reliance on vaccines to vanquish the pandemic also failed? The answer, again, lies in negligence over safety protocols.

[But a large additional factor now comes into play–the degrading of working class consciousness and political action during the decades of globalized capitalism (beginning in the late 1970s). This has caused weak working class responses to the pandemic. The social solidarity needed to achieve herd immunity–through vaccinations together with appropriate safety practices–is absent. Large numbers of people hold anti-scientific view on vaccination, or are confused, and the political left is doing little to systematically educate on the subject, for example in campaigning for mandatory vaccinations. It is young people who are leading the charge to break through the lack of social solidarity. Students and teachers are fighting for safe schools through mandatory vaccinations and safety protocols; health care and service industry workers are fighting for similar measures, allied with doctors and health care researchers who are speaking out; international campaigns are demanding equal vaccine access to the peoples of the less-developed countries; etc. The international working class made historic achievements in the 20th century (well documented in A Socialist In Canada)–the Russian, Chinese and Cuban Revolutions of 1917, 1949 and 1959, resp.; the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam; the vast, positive changes in working class consciousness; the recovery of Russia from the disastrous years following the ending of the Soviet Union. But the overall balance sheet of the 20th century is marked by the defeats, retreats and co-optations of the working classes in the developed imperialist countries. This, in turn, casts a pall over the entire world. Recognition of this reality is a pre-condition for efforts for overcoming it.]

Story:  Built for mild summers, the Pacific Northwest is scorching yet again, New York Times, Aug 11, 2021  …During the earlier heat wave in June, about 600 more people died in Washington and Oregon than would have been typical… [British Columbia, Canada reported 570 ‘sudden deaths’ directly caused by the same ‘heat dome’ event, which lasted six days.]

[The above report in the New York Times fails to examine why residents of North American cities are so vulnerable to heat waves. The reason is that the real estate/construction/automobile/tourism industry nexus that built North American cities and continues to oversee urban expansion (sprawl) exists in order to maximize profits, not provide human comfort and welfare. Scientists have warned for decades of rising global temperatures due to rising greenhouse gas emissions to reach lethal levels. And what has been the response of industry and government? To delay and deflect degrowth solutions. They believe there is more money to be made in continuing the status quo.]

Story:  Is climate change the fault of ‘humanity’?, by Michael Roberts, published on his website, Aug 12, 2021

[Michael Robert is a widely read and respected Marxist economist in the UK. His analyses of the global warming emergency, as in this essay, are very insightful. But he stubbornly refuses to consider ‘degrowth’ as the social, economic and scientific path out of the emergency and into an entirely new stage of human development, which all agree needs to be socialism–a planned, social economy in which human needs and ecological balance govern societal decision-making. Instead, he posits green capitalist solutions, such as massive ‘green energy’ transition away from fossil fuels and massive public expenditure to develop ‘carbon capture and storage’ technology. In other words, there is no questioning in his writings of the vast excess in the relentless capitalist plunder of the Earth, and how to end that.

[Michael Roberts’ analysis of why capitalist plunder takes place and is unceasing is limited to the false, pseudo-Marxist view that competition between capitalists is what drives the incessant expansionism of the capitalist system. But it is a different form of competition which drives this expansionism. It is the competition between capitalists and the working classes over the social surplus produced by society. The capitalists seek maximum return on their capital, come hell or high water (literally). They constantly seek to cut wages and social benefits, and they shift their investments around the globe seeking the lowest costs for wage labour and natural resources. On the other hand, the working classes, due to their very conditions of life, are compelled to wage class struggle in common cause for the future of the planet and its inhabitants.

[The utopian ecosocialists fail to accurately and scientifically explain why it is that capitalism cannot resolve the global warming emergency. That’s because they do not understand the source of capitalism’s expansionist dynamic. Their explanations are reduced to crude interpretations of the role of competition between the capitalists. Here is how two ecosocialists in Australia mistakenly put it in a recent article arguing against degrowth: The competition between companies and even different capitalist powers for markets and resources means that this drive for profit is relentless and expansive. Therefore, capitalism also involves a continuous quest for economic growth. (end citation) Their belief that economic expansionism can be contained and controlled by ‘green capitalist’ measures leads them to reject the path of degrowth. Instead, they typically issue vague calls for capitalist governmens to ‘do something’. And if the governments fail to do so, then the working class will ‘scale up its response’, whatever that means. Is it merely a coincidence that leading ecosocialist writers live and write in the illusory conditions of abundance in the Western imperialist countries? Their analyses are evidently influenced by subtle or not-so-subtle wishes that material abundance such as they experience daily may continue whatever the consequences for society and the ecology of the planet.]

Story: Jacobin magazine’s superficial analysis of politics in Canada

[An August 7 article in Jacobin by writer Luke Savage is titled ‘Canada’s social democrats could make big gains in a snap election‘. The article is a superficial political analysis that is all too common among left-wing political writing in Canada. Canada’s social-democratic New Democratic Party, the third largest party in Canada’s Parliament, has formerly voted to prop up the Liberal Party government of Justin Trudeau since the 2019 election that produced a minority government, Current seats in Parliament are: 155 Liberal, 119 Conservative, 32 Bloc québécois, 24 NDP, two Green, five independent).

[The NDP supports Canada’s military participation in the U.S.-led New Cold War against China and Russia and hasn’t formally raised a peep against the U.S./Canada-led sanctions against the people of Venezuela. (Importantly, a few ‘maverick’ NDP MPs have spoken out against the Venezuela embargo.) The left-wing credentials of the NDP are a far cry, even, from the limited standard of the Labour Party of Britain during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

[The NDP stakes its claim to left-wing credentials on its verbal, though not active, support for such social measures as expanded pensions, a national ‘pharmacare’ program, and small increases in taxation of the wealthiest. In government, as in British Columbia since 2015 and in Alberta from 2015 to 2019, the NDP provides some softening of the harshest social edges of globalized capitalism, but it simultaneously pursues the ‘big ticket’ items of Canada’s capitalist class: expanded natural resource plunder, including oil, gas and tar sands extraction and massive hydro-electric dam expansion; crushing the poorest of the poor with starvation wages in service industries, starvation welfare rates and promoting rampant house price inflation side-by-side with negligence in failing to build adequate social housing; avoiding the strict public health measures needed to contain the coronavirus pandemic; and on and on.

[The political left in Canada has for decades failed to build a broad, left-wing party to represent the working class, including the First Nations component of the working class. The Jacobin writer expresses the characterist politics of this political left when he writes, “The NDP must champion its social-democratic agenda loudly and unapologetically.” But that is precisely what the NDP is doing: championing its pro-capitalist agenda. Instead of building an alternative to this dead end, the political left tails along for the ride.

[A more left-wing sounding analysis than that of the Jacobin writer was published in Canadian Dimension on July 17. There, two academics present their views of what it would take to breathe some life into a moribund NDP. Theirs is a static and vacuous analysis. Imagining a potential, future NDP, they write, “It is going to require the hard graft of going into working class communities and making connections on the basis of a shared identity, one that inspires trust and a two way commitment to get out to vote and then deliver progressive policies in office.” There is not a hint that perhaps what is needed is a genuine party of socialism to contest for power. Such a party would pressure the NDP and its constituent bodies to join in united action in opposing the three great capitalist evils of our times: imperialist militarism, environmental destruction and rising social inequities.

[Postscript:  Writer Luke Savage has doubled down on his hopes for the NDP to somehow transform itself into a party representing the working class. A new article by him in Jacobin on August 18 looks hopefully to the Canadian election to take place on September 20. The article is titled, ‘The NDP has a chance to radically reshape the coming Canadian election’. Coincidentally, an interview with British filmmaker Ken Loach, also published in Jacobin, provides insight into the efforts in recent years to transform the British Labour Party into something left wing, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Roach reflects on the party in light of his recent expulsion for the ‘crime’ of associating with left-wing members of that party. He calls the new, right-wing and autocratic leader of the party, Keir Starmer, ‘Mr Bean trying to act like Stalin’.]

Story:  New stage opens in Vancouver courtroom in the attempted railroading into U.S. prison gulag of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. Report by CBC News, Aug 4, 2021

Meng Wanzhou leaving her Vancouver ‘mansion’ to attend trial in Jan. 2021. Note the ankle bracelet she is obliged to wear at all times.

[A news report in the Globe and Mail daily on August 4 shows the lengths to which corporate newspaper editors and journalists in Canada are prepared to join the U.S. and Canadian governments in their efforts to hobble Chinese technology companies such as Huawei. The report was written one day before the new stage of Meng Wanzhou’s judicial (extradition) railroading opened in a Vancouver courtroom on August 4. The Globe report censors out the information revealed last month showing that the main plank in the U.S. legal case against Meng Wanzhou–that Huawei deliberately hid its relationship with a technology entity conducting business in Iran–is a lie. (The judge in the case nevertheless refused to dismiss the U.S./Canada case!) The Globe report also makes several gratuitous slurs against the Huawei CFO. One, it falsely reports that she lives “free on bail” in Vancouver. That’s a lie; see the details about the conditions of her house arrest in the above CBC News report. Two, it says that her and her husband’s house in Vancouver where she is living while under house arrest (for the past 32 months!) is a “mansion”. See the attached photo of the house and decide for yourself. The house is worth millions, but this is typical of hundreds of thousands of houses in the hyper-inflated real estate market in metropolitan Vancouver. The average price of a detached house in Vancouver city is $1.7 million. The Washington Post echoes the Globe‘s distortions in a report dated August 4. A Globe article by the same writer on August 5 does report the U.S. fabrication against her. It goes on to explain: “Canadian lawyers with experience in extradition cases say it is very difficult to challenge the evidence against an individual because they cannot present defences or attack the credibility of the evidence from the requesting state – in this case, the United States. Hence the focus on allegations that the U.S. abused the Canadian judicial process.”]

Story:  The five characteristics of neo-imperialism: Building on Lenin’s theory of imperialism in the 21st century, by Cheng Unfu and Lu Baolin, feature essay in Monthly Review, May 2021  (Cheng Enfu is a professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Lu Baolin is a professor at the School of Economics, Qufu Normal University in China.)

[This essay by two Chinese researchers builds upon other, recent writings on imperialism by Marxist and other left-wing writers. Notable among those is John Smith, British author of the 2016 book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, excerpt  here, review here). This recent essay and the 2016 book are extremely valuable for understanding and responding to the rising imperialist threats and intervention against the peoples of China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela, and the resistance to that intervention. The two writings also document the political decline of certain left-wing and Marxist currents in the West (including Trotskyism), caused in great measure by their abandonment of the Marxist analysis of imperialism.

[Of note, however, is that neither text constitute global analyses of China and its place in the world. That’s because they do not analyze the specific social and economic characteristics of the two large countries that are successfully resisting imperialist diktats–socialist China and state capitalist Russia. Including the complex interplay in China between state economic planning and the operation of the capitalist law of value by the country’s privately-owned industry and finance. (In this regard, read: China confronts the three mountains—profitability, productivity and the West’s trade war, by Michael Roberts (Marxist economist in UK), published on his website, Aug 8, 2021) They also do not analyze the ‘mixed economy’ (socialist state planning together with private, capitalist investment) experiences of China, Cuba and Venezuela, among other countries. How do these compare with the mixed economy ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP) of the early Soviet Union led by Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky et al? NEP was a successful set of economic policies that guided the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics beginning in 1921. [The USSR was founded around the same time that NEP was undertaken by its constitutent republics.] NEP was ended prematurely in 1928/29 by the post-Lenin government that came to be led by Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union under Stalin embarked on a forced-march industrialization and collectivization of agriculture in 1929 that eventually scored important social and economic achievements; they also allowed the extraordinary military defense of the Soviet Union following the invasion by Nazi Germany in June 1941. But the social/human cost of abandoning NEP was harsh and extraordinary.

[The largest challenge of all for China’s future social and economic course is its response to the global warming emergency. The Chinese government correctly points out to the world that the Western imperialist countries are the primary culprits in creating this emergency. But all countries of the world have a responsibility to join in bringing about a ‘degrowth’ in the rampant, expansionist economies that have been created by capitalism or which seek to co-exist with it. This challenge facing the Chinese people and government is not addressed at all in the above essay or in the 2016 book.]

Story: ‘China is very much an imperialist power in the making’ says ideologue in address to conference of Trotskyist ‘Counterfire’ group in London, 25-minute video presentation by Dragan Plavšic, published on the website of Counterfire, July 29, 2021
[Counterfire is the latest in a long line of Trotskyist groups and intellectuals declaring China to be an ‘imperialist’ power or ‘an imperialist power in the making’. In his talk to the Counterfire conference, Dragan Plavšic uses both terms. His evidence for the claim is as scant as the claims made by others of his ideological outlook.]

Story:  Canada should reflect on its past and present struggles with racism, by Yuezhi Zhao , China Daily, July 29, 2021  (Yuezhi Zhao is a professor and Canada Research Chair in political economy of global communication at the School of Communication of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver BC.)

[The anti-China Globe and Mail daily in Canada has jumped on the appearance of the above published commentary written by Chinese-Canada academic Yuezhi Zhao. A red-baiting style commentary is published in the Globe on July 29 by a seasoned  Globe columnist.

[The columnist seeks to denigrate the commentary by writing that it appears in a “state-run” media outlet, as though state-run media outlets such as the CBC in Canada, BBC in Britain and Deutsche Welle in Germany are not omnipresent in Western imperialist countries, serving as faithful transmitters of government propaganda. He writes of “repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in the northwestern province of Xinjiang” as fact, even though the accusation is a Western media and government construct. He writes, “Chinese officials have acknowledged that the birth rate across Xinjiang fell by nearly a third in 2018”, but any ‘change’ in birth rates of the Uyghur population occur in a context of a steadily rising Uyghur population, exposing the Western lie of a ‘genocide’ by the Chinese government against the Uyghurs.

[The Globe writer carefully avoids using the term ‘genocide’ in his litanny of accusations against the Chinese people and government even though no less than Canada’s Parliament endorsed the lying claim in a unanimous vote on February 22, 2021. He concludes his columnar tour de force with citations from several anti-China academics and former government officials in Canada.]

Story:  Trotskyist publications blow hard on Cuba protests, echoing their pro-regime change arguments on Venezuela and Nicaragua.

[Two Trotskyist publications—the U.S. New Politics (and here) and the Australian Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal are loading up their pages with variants of the argument that Cuba’s ‘bureaucratic socialist’ system has failed and is causing masses of Cuban people to go into the streets demanding ‘change’. A contrasting view is explained here below by Helen Yaffe, an outstanding British scholar who documents the achivements and continuing challenges facing the Cuban people in a world of intensifying imperialist threats and war. Yaffe explains that relatively few numbers of Cubans took part in recent protests and that the purpose of the harsh and unrelenting imperialist embargo against Cuba is intended, precisely, to stir domestic protest that blames the Cuban government, not the U.S. government, for the country’s social and economic difficulties:
What’s actually going on in Cuba?, by Helen Yaffe, Novara Media, July 20, 2021 Helen Yaffe is a senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of We Are Cuba: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World and Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution.

Further news and analysis:
*  Shifting from campaign promises, Biden announces new Cuba sanctions after protest crackdown [sic], USA Today, July 22 ].
*  400-plus former heads of state, politicians, artists, and intellectuals call on U.S. president Biden to ‘Let Cuba Live’, People’s Dispatch, July 22, 2021
* Cuba’s mass protests are driven by the misery of COVID and economic sanctions, by Emily Morris, Institute of the Americas (University College London), The Conversation, July 16, 2021

Story: Washington chooses Ariel Henry for prime minister of Haiti as more details about the assassination of the country’s presumptive president by Colombian mercenaries, by Kim Ives, weekly column in Haiti Liberté, July 21, 2021

[Corporate news coverage of Haiti, in Canada at least, has reverted entirely, remarkably, to racist stereotypes so typical of the period leading up to the U.S.-led 2004 coup against the country’s the-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Haiti is depicted as a violent, ungovernable quandary in which the Haitian people are unable to govern themselves. The problem is endemic to the people themselves, they strongly imply. One can only imagine how bad is the news reporting in the racist homeland and former overlord of Haiti, imperialist France.

Story: Trotskyist publication ‘Left Voice’ calls for overthrow of Cuba’s socialist government. Commentary published in Left Voice, July 12, 2021

[The Trotskyist publication Left Voice, a publication of the ‘Trotskyist Faction-Fourth International’ (Wikipedia), argues that Cuba has been on the road to “capitalist restoration” for some years already and the leadership of the Cuban Revolution is taking the country further down that road. It calls the Cuban government a “one-party bureaucracy” and concludes the above, published commentary with the following: “The present crisis can only be solved through a new revolutionary intervention of the masses that puts a brake on the restorationist course, throws out the bureaucracy, and puts an end to its one-party regime — and its prohibition on any organization outside the Communist Party.” This appeal for a reckless and counter-revolutionary ‘uprising’ in Cuba echoes the longstanding calls by most Trotskyist sects in the world for the overthrow of the worker and peasant governments in power in Venezuela and Nicaragua.]

Story:  The Nation magazine publishes fact-less diatribe arguing that China is an ‘imperialist state’ and is conducting ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang autonomous region. Essay published in The Nation, July 6, 2021, titled ‘Xinjiang denialists are only aiding imperialism’.

[This essay is worth reading as an example of how the ‘genocide in Xinjiang’ construct is infecting left-wing discourse in Western imperialist countries and is doing so without a shred of evidence to back it.

[The ‘evidence’ in the construct presented in The Nation consists of nothing more than acquiescence to that well-known purveyor of news and facts–governments as well as corporate and state media in the imperialist countries. Rather than assemble facts, the left-wing purveyors of ‘genocide’ accusations bluster. Here is the opening sentence of the essay: “Opposing American empire should never justify supporting perpetrators of atrocities, and yet that’s exactly what some anti-imperialists are doing with their analysis of events in China’s Xinjiang region.” The essay terms the arguments of those who defend the Chinese people and government against imperialism’s economic embargos and war threats as “narcissistic parochialism”.

[Read this commentary (pdf format) on the Nation essay, posted on Facebook on July 7, 2021: Facebook commentary on ‘genocide’ against Uyghurs in China. And read the comments which accompany the article; here is one of them: “I sure hope Guttenplan [editor of The Nation] et al have the good sense to keep this screed, rant or whatever you wish to call it out of the print edition. Hey, I’ve only been a Nation reader since ’86, but I can’t recall ever reading in its pages or on its website such a lame piece of pseudo-journalism posing as respectable commentary. The only way to actually counter the so-called denialism Mr. Roche decries is to cite it and counter with better data, yet this gutless wonder of a contributor ducks for cover and declines to cite sources or counter a single supposed non-fact. As it stands, Mr. Roche skipped entirely the necessary discussion brought about by the work of Max Blumenthal, Gareth Porter and others, as Pierre Guerlain mentions below. His failure to honestly and openly engage with that material and answer the valid questions they’ve raised renders this a fairly worthless waste of time. Who is ‘aiding imperialism’ here? It seems Mr. Roche is the one reiterating talking points inherited from Mike Pompeo.”]

Story: The new cold war against China, by John Bellamy Foster, editor, Monthly Review, July 1, 2021

[The new issue of Monthly Review (July-August 2021) is devoted to analysis of present day China; the above essay by editor John Bellamy Foster serves as an introduction to the issue. In a recent commentary, the editor of A Socialist In Canada wrote: “What is the class character and direction of development of the People’s Republic of China, and how may a socialist path of development for the Chinese people be furthered? How can the struggling peoples of the world unite in an anti-imperialist alliance to defend the Chinese people and government from the threats and sanctions of imperialism’s new cold war? Such an alliance is needed to combat the three great threats to human civilization in the era of globalized capitalism, namely, the global warming emergency, rising imperialist militarism and war, and rising social and national inequities in the world.” (end citation) The essay by John Bellamy Foster provides much material addressing the first set of questions and should be considered as essential reading for left-wing and progressive thinkers. Regarding the second question, there is very little to be found in Foster’s essay.

[A new cold war against Russia was launched by the imperialist countries in 2014, coinciding with the right-wing coup in Ukraine in February of that year and the referendum vote of the people of Crimea one month later to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. The international left has been paralyzed ever since, reluctant to defend the Russian people and government or, in many cases, downright opposed to doing so. One large reason for this reluctance is the ultraleft legacy of Marxism in the Western countries which dates back to the early years of the Russian Revolution following 1917. Specifically, Western Marxism, led by its Trotskyist variant, came to forget or marginalize the mixed economy strategy of the leaders of the 1917 Revolution. The ‘New Economic Policy’ was introduced in 1921 to overcome the legacy of economic underdevelopment of Russia and the harsh economic embargo being waged by world imperialism against the new Soviet republic. The policy was forcibly and prematurely ended in 1928-29 by the Soviet government, led by Joseph Stalin, that became entrenched following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924.

[Leon Trotsky himself described the ending of NEP as an “inopportune liquidation” and “administrative suppression” in a 1932 essay.  But his 1937 book The Revolution Betrayed, which was a comprehesnive assessment of the 1917 Revolution, barely mentioned the policy and its ending.] —Roger Annis

Story:  Recent readings on China, posted to the ‘World news’ page of A Socialist In Canada website:
*  China and the lure of global capitalism, book review by Macabe Keliher, in Boston Review, July 1, 2021  Markets have played a central role in China’s explosive development since the 1980s. But as GDP rose, inequality has soared—a stark turn away from earlier socialist ideals.  Reviewing: How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, by Isabella M. Weber, Routledge, 2021, 358pp
*  Full text of speech by China’s president Xi Jinping at July 1 ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Party of China, Xinhua, July 1, 2021
*  100 years of the Chinese Communist Party, by Steve Smith, Jacobin Magazine (New York), July 1, 2021  (Steve Smith is a professor in the history faculty of Oxford University. He has authored several books on the history of the Chinese Revolution of 1949, including Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (2008).)
*  Chinese Communist Party: a party of workers or capitalists?, by Michael Roberts (Marxist economist in UK), published on his website, July 1, 2021
*  China declared officially malaria-free by World Health Organization, CNN, July 1, 2020
*  Walden Bello’s skewed and misleading history of China.  [In an essay on China published on June 30, 2021 in Foreign Policy in Focus, Philippine intellectual Walden Bello fails to ask the two sets of questions that should preoccupy any left-wing or Marxist analysis of present-day China, namely: 1: ‘What is the class character and direction of development of the People’s Republic of China, and how may a socialist path of development for the Chinese people be furthered?’ And, 2: ‘How can the struggling peoples of the world unite in an anti-imperialist alliance to defend the Chinese people and government from the threats and sanctions of imperialism’s new cold war? Such an alliance is needed to combat the three great threats to human civilization in the era of globalized capitalism, namely, the global warming emergency, rising imperialist militarism and war, and rising social and national inequities in the world.’ Bello answers the first question with an unsubstantiated claim that China has become “capitalist”. The second question is not even broached. Instead, Bello’s essay is an eclectically worded wish to see ‘left-wing regime change’ in China. Bello laments in his essay, “Though protests are widespread on the ground — and often tolerated instead of repressed — and alienation from the authorities is widely expressed on the internet, there is no systemic challenge to the Chinese Communist Party.”]

Story: A ‘right-wing turn’ of the Venezuela government?
[An interview published in the Australian Green Left Weekly on June 24, 2021 claims that the Venezuelan government under President Nicolas Maduro has carried out a definitive turn to the political right. The newspaper headlines the interview: ‘Turning right, repressing left’. The interview has been widely re-published in other left-wing publications in the West, including in MR Online.
[The main evidence for the headline’s claim, according to the interview, is the mixed economy policy of the government. But as with so many critical accusations against the Maduro-led government, there is next to no explanation provided to explain the government’s actual course, be it good or bad. Instead, the interview is filled with examples of negative consequences of the government’s course, including the inevitable corruption and favoritism that economic openings to the capitalist class in any country would create. Significantly, there are no examples offered to explain the continued socialist course of the government, including its important successes in combatting the coronavirus pandemic. The interview fails to make a compelling case that the GOV has made a definitive turn to the political right. Instead, we are left with the assertion that the government’s course is dictated by its desire to coddle and please capitalist interests for ideological reasons (and maybe for reasons of personal gain on the part of gov’t officials?).
[The published interview is the most formal pronouncement to date of the political break of the publisher of Green Left Weekly, the Australian Socialist Alliance (Trotskyist), from support to the government of Venezuela. There have been lots of such indicators in the publication during the past several years. Now it has become more definitive.
[The Western left, including its Marxist variant, is deeply entrenched in an ultraleft interpretation of the world since the Earth-shaking Russian Revolution of 1917 and Chinese Revolution of 1949. One of the reasons for this is dismissal of the eight-year New Economic Policy (NEP) which guided the early Soviet Union from 1922 until its premature and forceful ending by the Stalin-led regime in 1928/29. The Left Opposition of the time, led by Leon Trotsky, acquiesced to this abrupt and disastrous change. It labelled the proponents of a continued NEP, notably its leading theoretician Nicolai Bukharin, as “right-socialists”. For the story of the New Economic Policy, see Stephen Cohen’s 1973 biography Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938.]

Story: Forensic report by Canadian gov’t on the crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 (PS752) over Tehran on Jan 8, 2020 finds no evidence the aircraft’s destruction was ‘premeditated’, CBC News, June 23, 2021  [For the past 18 months, the Canadian government has kept up a stready drumbeat of conspiratorial accusations against the government of Iran, saying it was responsible for shooting down Flight PS752. Not a word, not a peep, is offered by Ottawa or Canada’s compliant media about the years-long military threats by the U.S. and its allies against the Iranian people that has obliged the Iranian military to maintain a hair-trigger state of military preparedness. The unrelenting threats by the U.S. and its NATO allies against the Iranian government and people are the ultimate reason for the aircraft tragedy.]

Story: Vaccine imperialism at work: U.S. sends Taiwan 2.5 million vaccine doses, tripling previous pledge, Associated Press, June 20, 2021  [Vaccine imperialism is the possession and wielding of Covid-19 vaccines as instruments of imperialist domination of the world’s peoples. It explains why the imperialist countries are resisting the sharing of vaccine manufacturing know-how and it is why they purchased vaccine doses from Big Pharma in numbers many times higher than their respective populations.].
Related analysis:  Vaccine donations aren’t enough, by Chelsea Clinton and Achal Prabhala, The Atlantic, June 20, 2021  The pandemic won’t be over until it’s under control around the world.

Story: As Covid-19 crisis ebbs, some in U.S. seeking 9/11-style commission of inquiry, Associated Press, June 21, 2021  [Tremendous resistance can be expected in all of the large imperialist countries to meaningful inquiries into the negligence of their governments in responding to the dire threat of a global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. That’s because the negligence was universal, implicating not only the governments but also opposition political parties and public health officials. Each of the pandemic experiences in imperialist countries vary in intensity, but the negligence has been universal (exceptions being Australia and New Zealand).]

Story: Anti-China sentiment is becoming anti-Chinese prejudice in Canada, op-ed commentary by Paul Evans and Yuen Pau, The Globe and Mail, June 20, 2021  (Paul Evans is HSBC Chair in Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. Yuen Pau Woo is a senator for British Columbia in Canada’s unelected Senate.)  Read the commentary here in pdf format: Anti-China racism in Canada  [This is an otherwise unheard of commentary to appear in a mainstream media outlet in Canada, linking the widely reported rise in anti-Asian racism in Canada to the McCarthyite, anti-China outlook and policies of the Canadian government and ruling class. Even in this case, the two writers feel obliged to kowtow to the new McCarthyism by including a rote phrase at the outset of “a more assertive and repressive China”. How many Canadians see through the hypocrisy of the anti-China drive by a Canadian government and media whose past genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples have come newly to the fore following the recent discovery of 215 bodies of Indigenous children at one of Canada’s former ‘residential’ (genocidal) schools? No political analyst in Canada is exploring this question.].
Related news:  Ontario gov’t commits $10 million to commence the search for residential school burial sites, but critics say much, much more funding and attention will be needed. By Brendan Kenndy, social justice reporter, Toronto Star, June 20, 2021

Story: Nicaragua’s political opposition as organized crime, commentary by Stephen Sefton, in Telesur, June 15, 2021  (Stephen Sefton is the publisher of the Spanish-language website Tortilla con Sal.)
[The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper, has published a virulent attack against the Nicaraguan government in its edition of Saturday, June 12, 2021, authored by a ‘Carole Jerome’. This attack is mirrored in a new article by writer Dan La Botz published in two Trotskyist (right-socialist) publications in the United States–New Politics and Against The Current. The writer continues his longstanding ‘left-wing regime change for Nicaragua’ argument and that of the two publications where his article appears.].
Background:
*  The CIA is attempting coups in Nicaragua with tax dollars through U.S. agencies and corporate foundations, by Nan McCurdy, Dissident Voice, June 18, 2021  (Nan McCurdy is a United Methodist Missionary and 36 year resident of Nicaragua)
*  How billion-dollar foundations fund NGOs to manipulate U.S. foreign policy: A case study from Nicaragua, by Rick Sterling, Covert Action Magazine, June 8, 2021
*  Nicaragua’s green revolution, by Rohan Rice, People’s Dispatch, June 6, 2021  While large polluting countries have refused to take necessary measures to slow the climate crisis, Nicaragua, one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, has taken impressive steps to shift to more sustainable energy 

Story: Why the Green New Deal has failed, so far, by Matt Huber, Jacobin online magazine, May 5, 2021  [This essay is informative but of limited political and economic vision. The essay continues the author’s (and Jacobin‘s) refusal to embrace ‘degrowth’ as a fundamental guideline for political and social strategy in the face of the global warming emergency. This rejection is unfortunately common to the liberal environmental movement, including its ‘ecosocialist’ component. The essay has little to say about whether the imperialist Democratic Party machine can serve as an instrument for fundamental social and ecological change. (This recent commentary is the latest to argue a firm ‘no’ to that proposition.) If the Democratic Party is not such an instrument for change, then what new alignment of political as well as class forces can lead the fight against the exploitative and environmentally destructive policies of globalized capitalism? These policies endemic to globalized capitalism, so what is the systemic alternative? Such questions remain unexplored by critical environmental thinkers and advocates.]

Story: For the past three months, Ukraine has prevented the contact group on the conflict in Donbass from working, by Christelle Néant, founding editor, Donbass Insider, June 6, 2021  [The ‘Contact Group’ is the formal group charged with implementing the ‘Minsk 2’ ceasefire and peace agreement of February 2015. (The text of the Minsk 2 Agreement is here). The Ukrainian government was obliged to accept the agreement following its military defeat at the hands of pro-autonomy rebels in Donbass (the former Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk). The autonomous (‘peoples’) republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were founded in late 2014 following the extreme-right coup in Ukraine in February 2014 and following the refusal of the new coup government to negotiate political autonomy for Donbass. The two republics receive essential economic, political and diplomatic support from Russia. Minsk 2 was signed by the Russian and Ukrainian governments and representatives of Donetsk and Lugansk. It was endorsed by the governments of France and Germany as well as the UN Security Council. But the NATO-member countries, including France and Germany, have supported Ukraine in its ongoing sabotage of the agreement. Indeed, NATO-member countries continue to arm and train the Ukrainian armed forces, including their neo-Nazi paramilitary units. They continue to wage a ‘low intensity’ war against Donbass.]

Story:  Inside the fight to uncover the ‘lab leak’ origins of the coronavirus pandemic, report in Vanity Fair, June 3, 2021
[This is one of the larger articles published in corporate media examining the claim that a ‘leak’ in the security of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China caused the outbreak of the coronovirus pandemic in late 2019 and early 2020. As such, it is worth reading for what it inadvertently shows: the ‘theory’ is nothing more than a collection of innuendo and conjecture, strung together by experienced journalists in such a way as to make it ‘appear’ as reality.
[The prestigious Nature magazine, meanwhile, has published its own conjecture on the story on June 8, titled ‘The Covid lab-leak hypothesis: What scientists do and don’t know’. Though couched in language that ‘something’ must be going on, the first sub-headline of the article reads, ‘There’s not yet any substantial evidence for a lab leak. Why are scientists still considering it?’ In answer to that question, the article makes no mention of the anti-China new cold war by the Western imperialist powers that is driving the ‘coronavirus lab leak’ story. Later, the article examines the claim that the coronavirus was collected by researchers from bats in a working mine in China some ten years ago. It writes, “There’s no evidence of this, but it can’t be ruled out.”
[This important commentary by a columnist at the LA Times speaks to the factual inacccuracies contained in a May 2020 essay published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: ‘Lab leak’ theory for coronoavirus origins. That essay, in turn, is cited as an authoritative source by the June 3 Vanity Fair article.
[Seasoned readers of the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theories which have dominated state and corporate media in the West for some six years now will rather easily recognize in the ‘lab leak’ theories the telltale signs of a government and media campaign designed, first and foremost, to serve imperialist political objectives.]

Story: New ‘ecosocialist’ statement reveals how the doctrine is spinning its wheels and failing to rise to the challenge of the global warming emergency.  [A newly published Ecosocialist Alliance Statement on G7 Conference (June 5) offers another example of how ecosocialism is stuck in the political mire. The entire statement is framed in an unrealistic call, to put it mildly, to the leaders of the large industrialized (imperialist) countries leaders to carry out a transitional, revolutionary program of social and environmental change. Among the reasons for the global warming emergency, according to the statement, is the “failure of governmental and corporate responsibility”. But in trashing the ecology of planet Earth, capitalist governments and corporations are doing exactly what the logic and imperatives of their economic order (capitalism) compel them to do. By their own anti-human standards, their efforts are not ‘failures’ but successes. They can no more change their ways than a leopard can change its spots. That is why a program of planned, step-by-step transitional measures is needed to combat the worst ravages of global warming, and it must ultimately lead to a planned, socialist economy. This is the only hope for humanity. The statement differs little from what coherent thinkers in social democratic or ‘green capitalist’ (Green) parties would write and say. There is no probing of political strategy in the statement, including no suggestions of the novel class alliances that are required to forge new paths for human development amidst the triple threat facing humanity: global warming, rising social and national inequities, and rising imperialist militarism and war (including the rising menace of nuclear weapons). Most notable of all, there is no mention of the imperative of degrowth, by which is meant a planned, radical reduction in the pillaging of the natural resources of the world and simultaneous reduction of the vast disparities in wealth and living standards between the tiny minority of wealthy capitalists and the vast majority of the world’s population, particularly the populations of underdeveloped countries. Instead, we read worn phrases and slogans lacking a coherent whole. The statement is a spinning of the ‘ecosocialist’ wheels in which the vehicle becomes more deeply stuck in a mire of its own making.—Roger Annis ]

Story:  Argentina locks back down as coronavirus infections surge, Al Jazeera, May 21, 2021
[Venezuela is also battling a surge in Covid-19 cases, with an average of 1,100 new cases per day for the past two months. That’s a fraction of the numbers in other, large countries in Latin America. Total cases per million population are the following in the following selected countries: Argentina 77,000, Brazil 75,000, Chile 68,500, Colombia 62,500, Peru 57,500, Mexico 18,500, Cuba 11,500, Venezuela 8,000. Source Worldometer.].
And further:  Uruguay, once a coronavirus model, struggles against a deadly wave, Washington Post, May 13, 2021  [According to Worldometer, total per capita Covid-19 cases in Uruguay are 67,000. This compares to 72,000 in Brazil, 71,000 in Argentina, 66,000 in Chile, 60,000 in Colombia and 56,000 in Peru. The number in Venezuela is 7,500, to which the heartless rulers in Western imperialist governments respond “Bring on a violent coup in Venezuela.”

Story: Corporate media and governments in the West all but ignore the report on pandemic preparedness commissioned by WHO because the report criticizes the pandemic negligence by most of the world’s governments and it doesn’t regurgitate the West’s anti-China propaganda.
[Readers looking for news in mainstream media of the report of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, issued on May 12, 2021, will be hard pressed to find much. Few media outlets are reporting on panel’s findings. Here are three perfunctory reports: by the BBC,  Reuters  and NPR. The reason for the near-silence is clear: the report makes no mention of the drumbeat of claims by governments and media in the West that government and public health officials in China ‘suppressed’ news of the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic virus and ‘silenced’ health experts in China seeking to warn the world. Instead, the panel report focuses squarely on the negligence by most of the world’s governments and health officials after the WHO issued a formal warning on January 30, 2020 of the danger of a pandemic.
[For its part, the Washington Post provides this dismissal at the outset of its May 12 report on the panel’s finding: “On May 12, the 13-member group, known as the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, delivered a lengthy, significant, but ultimately evasive answer.” The Post writes further, “Here is our guide to what the panel says about what happened — and what is left unsaid.” The ‘guide’ provides this distorted and lying interpretation of the panel report: “In footnotes to the timeline [emphasis added], the panel cites Washington Post reporting about how officials silenced whistleblowers and encouraged residents to keep attending public events despite risks. It also cites an Associated Press series that suggested China’s top leaders, including President Xi Jinping, were involved in the response.” The sly wording implies that the expert panel gives credence to the false accusations made by the Post and Associated Press; this is a lie. The ‘timeline’ mentioned by the Post writer is not listed on the website of the panel and a search for same on website reveals no result!]

Story:  How Russian peacekeepers have prevented conflict between Syrian armed forces and the Kurdish movement in northeast Syria. Report by Al-Monitor, May 4, 2021  Under a Russian-sponsored agreement, the Syrian government-affiliated National Defense Forces retreated from the Tayy neighborhood in Qamishli, which is now under the control of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration 
[Al-Monitor is a rare source of news of the role of Russian peacekeepers in facilitating political autonomy for the Kurdish population of northern Syria and lessening tensions between the Kurdish movement and the Syrian government. Left-wing supporters in Western countries (anarchist, Trotskyist) of the pro-U.S.Kurdish movement in Syria never, ever report on Russia’s peacekeeping role in Syria. That is due to the leftists’ confused and anti-Russia outlook which distorts Russia’s role in Syria. It presents Russia as an aggressor alongside what they call the ‘Syrian regime’ or ‘Syrian dictatorship’, while skipping over any analysis of the frankly pro-U.S. orientation of Kurdish forces. See this March 5, 2021 report in the Australian Green Left Weekly as one example, or this report dated April 26 in the same publication. The April 5 report repeats the publication’s false claim that “Turkish troops have been in northern Syria since August 2016. Earlier Turkish military interventions were carried out following agreements between Russia (which backs Syria’s Bashar al-Assad dictatorship) and Turkey (which supports some anti-Assad rebel groups).” This statement distorts the political reality of the situation in Syria and implicitly argues the wildly reckless assertion (frequently cited in Green Left Weekly) that Russia’s failure to enter into war against NATO-member Turkey to halt Turkey’s (ie and NATO’s) interventions in northern Syria are proof of collaboration and cooperation between Russia and Turkey!].