Racism, Revolution, Reaction—1861-1877

By Peter Camejo

Pathfinder Press, 1976

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

Recently I wrote a review of Nikole Hannah-Jones book The 1619 Project – A new origin story. In that book Hannah-Jones and others argue that the persistence of racist discrimination began with the “original sin” of this country which was chattel slavery. Clearly, her book presents a considerable amount of evidence that supports this argument. However, I believe this question deserves a more detailed answer. 

In the following quotation that I used in my review of 1619, James Baldwin argued for another way of looking at the persistence of this problem.

“The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor.  They were indispensable to the economy.  In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were indeed animals and deserved to be treated like animals.  Therefore, it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history.  The reason is that this ‘animal,’ once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure.  This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place.  What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand.  It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh.  And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.”

In his book Racism, Revolution, Reaction—1861-1877 the late Peter Camejo gave the historical background to support Baldwin’s statement. Specifically, I believe Camejo would have taken issue with Hannah-Jones statement where she gave her opinion as to why the radical reconstruction governments established after the Civil War were overturned. Hannah-Jones argued, “Faced with this violent recalcitrance, the federal government once again settled on Black people as the problem and decided that for unity sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices.”

To begin to understand Camejo’s point of view, we need to look at the background to this history.

Today we are routinely barraged with the idea that the United States isn’t just a democracy, but that it is the freest nation in the world. Peter Camejo gave the evidence of how the first government of this country made sure that the majority of the population of the United States would be ruled by a tiny minority.

The system used to ensure this rule of the minority is called “checks and balances.” There are three branches of the federal government. These are the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. The legislative branch is made up of the congress and the senate. While representation in the congress is based on population, the representation in the senate is not. Only with the passage of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 was the Senate elected directly by the population of each state. Before that time the senate was elected by state legislatures. 

The President is elected by the electoral college. Supreme Court members are appointed to that position. Any of these three branches can veto decisions by the other branches. This system has ensured that the moneyed interests of this country maintain the power over the majority of the population.    

After the revolution of the thirteen colonies, the United States government was split into two factions. These were the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists supported the northern capitalist interests, while the anti-federalists supported the slave interests.

Initially, most northern capitalists who were composed of merchants and financial interests went along with slavery. Clearly there were many enterprises in the north that profited from slavery. In fact cotton, produced by slave labor, as well as the money invested in slaves, represented the most lucrative investments in this country before the Civil War. 

However, in 1830 this started to change largely because of the invention of the cotton gin. So, starting in 1830, merchants and bankers increased their investments in manufacturing enterprises. As a result, manufacturers became the dominant capitalist force in the North.

The manufacturers had different interests from the enslavers. The enslavers wanted an agrarian nation where slave agriculture would spread from coast to coast. Manufacturers wanted a nation that would be dominated by industry. 

To overcome the power of the slave interests, the northern manufacturers made alliances with the small farmers, workers, and the abolitionists who were opposed to slavery. This alliance took the form of the Republican Party.

The Republicans managed to elect Abraham Lincoln to be President. That election meant that the enslavers no longer dominated every branch of the government. This was the primary reason why the officials that dominated the southern state governments decided to secede from the Union. As a result, the Civil War erupted.

We might consider that in the highland areas in the southern states there was significant opposition to slavery. These were the areas where small farmers worked the land. Affluent slave owners controlled the most lucrative lands in the lowland areas. There is also a recent film titled The Free State of Jones that documented how there were white farmers in the south who favored abolition.

The role of Irish workers during the war

During the Civil War a rebellion broke out in New York City. Historians generally attribute this rebellion to racists of Irish descent who opposed the Union Army in the Civil War. Peter Camejo gave a different analysis of that rebellion.

During the Civil War about one-third of the working class of this country were immigrants. While Black people were the most exploited sector of the working class, Irish immigrants were the next most exploited sector.

Irish immigrants came to this country escaping the Irish Potato Famine. Because these immigrants had no resources, they settled for some of the worst jobs. Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on the conditions Irish workers faced. 

“We work the poor fellow very ill. To work from dark to dark for sixty or even fifty cents a day is but pitiful wages for a married man.”

Many Irish workers lived in New York City. The Democratic Party dominated the politics of the city at that time. The Democratic Party also organized the system of slavery in the southern states.

Today Democratic Party politicians argue that they are the party that represents the interests of Black people. They attempt to back up this claim with the fact that Barrack Obama was the first Black person to be elected President.

However, Democratic Party President William Jefferson Clinton signed his Crime Bill that radically increased the prison population in this country. Black people are grossly over-represented in the dungeons of this country. So, here we see a profound contradiction in what Democratic Party politicians say and what they in fact do.

This hypocrisy of the Democratic Party was made clear in the years of the Civil War. Democratic Party politicians argued that there were British supporters of the abolitionist movement. Irish workers had justifiable reasons for their opposition to the British government. However, the British industrialists, in fact, supported the slave owners interests who exported cotton to the British textile mills.

So, because of the Democratic Party’s support of slavery, officials in that party argued that Black people were the enemy and that workers had nothing to gain by supporting the Union Army. As a result of this agitation, a rebellion broke out in New York City during the war. Workers who lived on the knife edge of survival were being asked to support a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. 

Because the trade union movement was in its infancy, many workers went along with this idea. A minority of those who engaged in the rebellion carried out a pogrom against Black workers, where scores of Blacks were murdered. However, we might keep in mind that in spite of this atmosphere, there were large numbers of Irish soldiers in the Union Army.  

The aftermath of the Civil War

After the Civil War, the former slave owners faced an economic disaster. They had compiled enormous debts before the war. During the war they invested in confederate war bonds that were now worthless. What they thought were their most valuable assets, slaves, were no longer slaves. So, these former enslavers found themselves at the mercy of northern capitalists.

Today, many people are not aware of the fact that the political party that organized the system of slavery was the Democratic Party. Because the main contributors to the Democratic Party were financially ruined, that party initially had very little influence after the war.

Andrew Johnson became President after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson claimed to represent farming interests but opposed equal rights for the former slaves. Johnson was also adamantly opposed to redistributing the large tracts of land that had been owned by the most affluent enslavers.

The radicals in the Republican Party opposed Johnson and almost forced his impeachment. However, with the failure to impeach Johnson, the idea of giving the former slaves 40 acres and a mule, died. 

Instead, the government adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments outlawed slavery, except in cases of penal servitude, gave everyone born in this country citizenship rights, and gave all men, excepting the confederate soldiers, the right to vote.

Republican Party politicians campaigned for office in this period by waving a “bloody shirt.” This symbolized all the Union soldiers who were injured or murdered by the confederate army in the Civil War. This sentiment appealed for the votes of Black people who had recently won the right to sell their own labor. 

While the Republican Party wanted the votes of Black people, most republican government officials, as well as capitalist interests, were opposed to giving these freed workers land. However, these same politicians had no problem in giving the owners of the railroads huge tracts of land to support their immensely profitable enterprises.

While the government refused to confiscate the land of the former slave owners, they had no problem with confiscating the land of Native Americans in Oklahoma. President Andrew Jackson signed a treaty with Native American nations where those nations were to have the land in Oklahoma “forever.”

The stolen land in Oklahoma was given away to settlers free of charge. However, Peter Camejo argued that most of the land given to settlers was eventually gobbled up by large landowners. 

However, saying this, we can also say that had the large tracts of land owned by the slave owners been parceled out to Black and white farmers, those farmers would have been in a much more advanced condition. However, the United States government was determined to advance the rule of the tiny minority consisting of the capitalist class.

In the year 1873 the United States experienced an economic depression. By 1877 railroad workers, driven by horrendous conditions, went on a national strike. The government ordered the military to murder striking workers, so the profits of Cornelius Vanderbilt would be protected.        

The Republican Party had very little competition within the government in the years after the war. As a result, Republican politicians cashed in, and took advantage of huge increases in government expenditures. These were the years when Ulysses S. Grant became president.

The reconstruction governments were the most democratic in the history of this country. For the first time they established an educational system for Blacks as well as whites. They championed the interests of all workers including women and Native Americans. In the following passage we see what the educational system looked like in the South during those years.

TEACHER: Now children, you don’t think white people are better than you because they have straight hair and white faces?

STUDENTS: No, sir.

TEACHER: No, they are no better, but they are different, they possess great power, they formed this great government, they control this vast country.  .  .Now what makes them different from you?

STUDENTS: MONEY. (Unanimous shout)

TEACHER: Yes, but what enabled them to obtain it? How did they get the money?

STUDENTS: Got it off us, stole it off we all!

Well, here we can see how the northern capitalists who are determined to gouge out profits might not appreciate this atmosphere. So, the Republican Party spit and a Liberal wing formed its own faction apart from the radicals. This new liberal wing consisted of former supporters of abolition who now favored a consolidation of capitalist interests.

Those who supported capitalist interests in the South viewed this shift and went into action. Initially they formed the Ku Klux Klan that attempted to terrorize supporters of the reconstruction governments. 

The radicals in the federal government initially opposed this, and passed a law making the terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan illegal. So, several new racist and terrorist organizations emerged who had the same goals as the Klan. As a result, over 20,000 people were murdered by terrorists in the years of radical reconstruction.

The liberal wing of the Republican Party blamed these mass murders on Black people who were demanding their rights. The Union Army oftentimes took a neutral role in the face of these mass murders. Armed militias of Black workers were organized, but government officials worked to ensure those forces would be ineffective.

South Carolina was the state where Black people had a clear majority of the electorate. Peter Camejo quoted Martin W. Gary who was in charge of organizing the “election campaign” supporting the Democratic Party in South Carolina. That so called “election campaign” eventually overturned the reconstruction government. Heavily armed terrorists were determined ensure Democratic Party politicians took power. 

Gary demanded that “every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one Negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine, how best to accomplish it.”

Gary gave specific instructions as to what to do when these terrorists met resistance from Black people. 

“Never threaten a man individually. If he deserves to be threatened, the necessities of the times require that he should die.”

We might think about the fact that the Union Army, that lost close to 400,000 soldiers in the Civil War stood by and allowed these heavily armed terrorists murder and intimidate anyone who might be thinking of voting for the Republican Party. Politicians who in the past waved the bloody shirt memorializing those who died in the war stood by and allowed these terrorists to flagrantly violate the law.

In spite of this war aimed at taking power away from the Reconstructive government, the Republican party won the majority of the vote in South Carolina in the year 1876. However, because of the military advantage of the terrorists, they merely ignored the election and took power in the state.

Here we see how the government ordered the military to carry out genocidal war against Native Americans so capitalist interests would be advanced in the West. They also ordered the military to murder striking workers in the railroad strike of 1877. However, when it came to defending the rights of Black people, this same government sat back and allowed terrorists to overturn elected governments.

We also might consider the fact that during these years Chinese railroad workers were instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad. These Chinese workers built tunnels by doing the unimaginably difficult work of dynamiting through granite mountains.

Black people built the foundation of the economic system in this country by working as slaves picking cotton for decades. The government's reward for this horrendous work was Jim Crow segregation.

Chinese railroad workers transformed the economy of this country by opening up the west to development with the transcontinental railroad. The government rewarded them with the Chinese Exclusion Act that barred Chinese nationals from immigrating to this country

What does the word freedom mean?

Today historians routinely argue that the Civil War was responsible for freeing slaves. Karl Marx wrote about what it meant for workers to be free during the early years of capitalism in the first volume of his book Capital.

In those years, royal families and capitalists forced peasants off land their families had worked for centuries. Faced with starvation, those peasants became desperate for work wherever they could find it. Capitalists went on a determined drive to control every minute that workers were on the job. The government cooperated with capitalists by adopting laws pertaining to people who weren’t working and called them vagabonds.

If someone was caught not working, that person could be enslaved for a period of years. If this person repeated the crime of not working two other times, that person could be executed. 

For Marx, the idea of freedom meant that workers were free of commodities and were totally dependent on employers to survive. 

After the defeat of radical reconstruction black workers, because they didn’t have the means to support themselves, needed to adapt to the demands of racist employers. Black workers who were not working were in violation of vagrancy laws. While the British vagabonds became slaves, Black people who violated the vagrancy laws were sentenced to chain-gangs. Because the 13th Amendment to the Constitution allowed for slavery in penal servitude, a new system of slave-like conditions emerged with the defeat of radical reconstruction.               

Just as the politicians in the past supported the idea of abolition to remove slave owners from power, the new forces that favored capitalism supported what became Jim Crow segregation. The Jim Crow laws stripped Black people of citizenship rights in this country.

Isabel Wilkerson wrote a recently published book titled, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I haven’t read this book. However, when I first learned of its publication, I questioned the title. I believed that in capitalist world society is made up of classes and not castes. 

However, Peter Camejo, who was a Marxist, used the term caste to describe the status of Black people in this country after the defeat of radical reconstruction. So, I looked up the definition of the word caste and found that it can mean discrimination based on race. So, now I believe that after reconstruction Black people became a caste in this country.

Peter Camejo went into detail describing how literally all the power brokers in this country went along with the denial of citizenship rights to Black people. These institutions included the three branches of the federal government. In particular, the Supreme Court issued several decisions that clearly violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that is supposed to give everyone born in this country citizenship rights.

The news media, the universities, the publishing companies, and the film industry all fell in line attempting to rationalize why, in effect, Black people should be denied citizenship rights in this country.

During my years in public schools, I learned how the government falsified the history of reconstruction. Teachers taught me about how opportunist carpetbaggers took advantage of the people in the South. Some of the people those carpetbaggers took advantage of were the former slave owners who routinely tortured people they enslaved.

Most of the northerners who went to the South in reconstruction were teachers who established an educational system from scratch. My teachers never mentioned the fact that the reconstruction governments were the most democratic governments that ever existed in this country.

When we see the determination of people in power to deny Black people basic rights, we can also see why a tenacious struggle was required to achieve some of those rights in the years of the civil rights movement.

Today there is a national holiday celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement that forced the government to do away with the legal system of Jim Crow segregation.

However, today the world knows that police officer Derrick Chauvin felt that he had the right to murder George Floyd. Only because of a mass international movement that demanded justice for those who had been murdered by the police was Chauvin convicted of murder and sentenced to decades in prison. 

So, I believe we need to look at this history when we look at Nikole Hannah-Jones explanation for the defeat of radical reconstruction. “Faced with this violent recalcitrance, the federal government once again settled on Black people as the problem and decided that for unity sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices.” 

Northern capitalists did not abandon the reconstruction governments, “for unity sake.” Those governments were abandoned, as James Baldwin argued, “It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh.” 

Another lesson we can learn from the defeat of reconstruction is that the demand of unconditional liberation for Black people needs to be at the center of the demands of the entire working class. If we fail to heed this lesson, the alternative would be a repeat of the horrors of Jim Crow segregation.

Would-be home buyers may be forced to rent the American dream, rather than buy it

Narrated by Leslie Stahl for the 60 Minutes so-called news program

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

The other day I viewed a story reported by the so-called news program 60 Minutes. This was about the astronomical increases in household rents. The story began with an interview of a couple who live in Jacksonville, Florida.

The landlord of this couple raised their rent from around $1,000 per month to about $1,400 per month. After negotiating with the landlord, the rent was reduced to $1,300 per month. One way this couple has compensated for this huge increase is by purchasing less food.

Leslie Stahl reported that these increases are taking place in most of the rest of the country, especially where the weather is warmer.

Stahl then interviewed Gary Berman who is the CEO of Tricon Residential. Tricon is one of the corporations that is buying up homes and then renting them out at astronomical prices. These corporations are supported by the investment houses of Blackstone, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs.

This new relationship is making work a lot easier for many real estate agents. When a home goes up for sale, the agent will get on the phone with a representative of these rental corporations. The home is sold immediately, sight unseen. The home is then renovated and rented out at astronomical prices. 

Because young home buyers might have college and car debts, banks are not eager to give these young people mortgages. Since corporations are buying the available homes rapidly, this atmosphere makes it difficult for young people to purchase a home. So, the future generation will be more likely to rent, rather than buy a home. 

What does Leslie Stahl have to say about this problem? Nothing.

To place this problem in perspective, we need to look at a bit of history. In the year 2008, the stock market collapsed. Banks had issued loans to home buyers who weren’t able to repay those loans. We might consider that the assets of banks are in its loans. So, when the stock market collapsed, the assets of banks vaporized. 

We might also say that commodities only have financial value when they are purchased in the market. When commodities aren’t being purchased, those commodities have no financial value. So, when the stock market collapsed in 2008, for a time, no one was purchasing homes. Therefore, the financial value of homes in this country, for a time, had the financial value of zero. 

Well, the supporters of capitalism in the government and in corporations didn’t like the fact that, all of a sudden, all their money had vanished. So, they went to work.

Henry Paulson was the Treasury Secretary in 2008. He came up with a three-page proposal to give $700 billion to the banks. The Congress initially saw the insanity of this proposal and voted it down. 

Then, the Presidential candidates John McCain and Barrack Obama interrupted the campaigns and went to Washington to beg congresspeople to support Paulson’s proposal. Eventually Congress gave Paulson what he wanted. 

After Barrack Obama became President, he continued to give banks trillions of dollars in what his administration called quantitative easing. President Trump followed the lead of Obama and during the pandemic continued to give corporations trillions of dollars.

As a result of these corporate giveaways, today the stock market is at about 30,000 and there are four individuals who own over $400 billion in assets. We see this while working people are facing astronomical prices and home ownership is becoming an impossibility for increasing numbers of people.

This is all happening while there is an entire television station, HGTV, dedicated to home-remodeling. Today, the most affluent ten percent of the population owns at least $1.2 million in assets. So, HGTV is dedicated to showing how that minority of the population can have a beautiful home. However, for the least affluent ninety percent of the population renting is becoming more of a necessity.  

So, now we might sit back, take a deep breath, and think about how things might be different. 

First, when banks lend money to people who are not paying on those loans, who is responsible for this? If massive numbers of people weren’t able to pay on their loans, clearly the banks made the mistake of issuing those loans in the first place. Therefore, the liability for the default on those loans needs to be with the banks and not the government. 

However, in this country, while the government pretends that we live in a democracy, this history clearly demonstrates that the government is nothing more than a support committee for financial interests.

So, if we had a workers government in this country, that government would say to the billionaires that, “You have gouged out tremendous profits from capitalism for many years, but now that system has collapsed. As a result, all of your money is gone.”

A worker’s government would then organize the economy in such a way as to work to eliminate poverty, guarantee that everyone has food to eat, clothes to wear, a decent home to live in, health care, and education. Clearly there are millions of workers who would be overjoyed to do this work and the material resources are there to make this happen. 

However, the people who have power in this country find this rational proposal inconceivable. This is why the answer to the problem of housing in this country and around the world can only be a worker’s government that makes human needs and not profits their top priority.

In order to move towards making this a reality, we need to view ourselves as workers who live in the world. Therefore, we need to be in solidarity with all workers who are struggling for human dignity. This includes those who demonstrate against police brutality, for women’s rights, in solidarity of those who struggle against colonialism, and against the national oppression in the Ukraine and Palestine.  

Windows on the World

Starring: Ryan Guzman Edward, & James Edward Olmos

Screenplay written by Robert Mailer Anderson, Zack Anderson, Glynn Turman

Reviewed by Steve Halpern 

The other evening, just by accident viewed the film Windows on the World. This was a unique story about the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The film is of a Mexican family affected by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Balthazar is the patriarch of this family. He worked carrying heavy loads of fish in Mexico. In order to improve the finances of his family, Balthazar traveled to the United States and eventually got a job in the kitchen of the restaurant the Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center. There is a moving scene at the beginning of the film where Balthazar says goodbye to his loving family knowing he will not be back for quite a while. 

Then, we see his family viewing a television broadcast of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Thinking about that scene, I thought about the news media coverage of the destruction of the World Trade Center. The media used those deaths and destruction as a pretext to go to war against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.   

However, this Mexican family wasn’t thinking about any of that. All they thought of was the idea that they might have lost a loving husband and father. Eventually Balthazar’s son Fernando decides to go to New York City to see if he can find his father. 

To get to New York City, Fernando needed to travel in a crowded stifling hot van with others attempting to come to this country. Then he needed to walk across the desert.

Here we didn’t just see the difficulty of this arduous journey. We also see the solidarity of these immigrants. At one point, while Fernando and his friend were exhausted in the desert, they carried children on their shoulders.

Then, when they reached the United States, a farmer and his wife stopped their pickup truck to see who the immigrants were. The farmer took a shotgun from his truck. However, this family didn’t report the immigrants to the authorities. Instead, they gave the group a ride to the nearest town.

In New York City, Fernando saw many memorials to those who died in the World Trade Center. He faced vicious racists who had hostile attitudes towards Latinos who happened to be homeless. He also needed to be wary of the police who could have arrested and deported him.

One evening Fernando looked into an art gallery that was having an exhibition. A manager of the gallery saw Fernando, viewed him as a kind of curiosity, and invited him inside. In the gallery, Fernando saw the opulence of those living in New York City who were swimming in money. While dirking champagne, he viewed extravagantly priced artwork that portrayed street scenes of working-class neighborhoods. That evening Fernando slept in a cardboard box on the street.  

Then, Fernando began to work for a Nigerian named Lou (Glynn Turman) washing windows. Initially Fernando told Lou that he had no papers. Lou responded: “Welcome to the club.” Eventually Lou gave Fernando a place to stay, sleeping on the floor of his apartment. 

One of his Nigerian coworkers joked that their window-washing business had gone international. In another scene Lou talked about the injustices of this country. One of his co-workers from Nigeria responded: “Who do you think you are, Nelson Mandela?

Fernando started a relationship with a woman who was U.S. citizen. She was the manager of a store that sold memorial candles to families of those who had passed away.

Towards the end of the movie, Fernando was in a bar with his lover. An older man started singing the song New York, New York that had been made famous by Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra. In the past when I listened to this song, I thought of it as a tribute to the city. 

However, listening to this song in the context of the film, I thought of it differently. New York City is a place that mourned the horror of September 11. It is also the home of immigrants from all over the world who manage to make lives for themselves doing some of the worst jobs.

At the end of the film Fernando needs to decide if he will return to Mexico or stay in New York City. Clearly staying in the city would expose him to extremely difficult problems. We get the sense that he decided to stay in New York, but not just to send money home to his family. Now he found a place, that with all its difficulties, had become his home. 

I liked this film because it gives us a glimpse of the unvarnished reality in the world today.             

Putin—Get Out of the Ukraine

 

By Steve Halpern

Today, the world is asking the question: Why would Vladimir Putin order the Russian armed forces to invade the Ukraine? As with all wars, the deaths, and destruction caused by this invasion appear to be senseless. So, in this blog I will go into the history of what I believe is at the core of this crisis.     

For me, before we look at the war in the Ukraine, I think it is useful to look at the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Then we can look at the history that led up to this disaster.

Labor and capital

The core of the political economic system of capitalism is the conflict between labor and capital. I am one of the billions of workers from around the world who go to work every day for an employer. At that job, I’m required to do what I’m told for every minute that I’m on the job. I receive a part of the wealth that I produce. The employer is the one who takes the lion’s share of that wealth. Yet employers add absolutely no value to the commodities workers create. 

This relationship has existed for literally every commodity that has ever been produced where there is capitalism. Politicians label this dictatorship of capital a “democracy.”

For these reasons, I do not label capitalist politicians like Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump as smart or stupid. For me, these politicians have chosen to live their lives in denial of the essence of what capitalism is. Today, we can also argue that in the past many educated people adopted themselves to the horrendous systems of slavery and feudalism for long periods of time.

This reality means that these politicians have no serious problem with the fact that there are four capitalists in the United States who each have over one-hundred billion dollars in assets, while about forty-two million people in this country don’t have enough food to eat.   

So, how is all this relevant to the invasion of the Ukraine?  I will start to answer this question with a short history of the Russian Revolution.

The Russian Revolution

Before the Russian Revolution, Russia was viewed as a prison-house of nations. The Ukraine was one of many nations where there was routine discrimination against the people of those nationalities.

British capitalists took advantage of this discrimination and invested to manufacture steel in eastern Ukraine known as Donetsk. This took place in the late 1700s when capitalism was first establishing itself. Today the Donetsk region of the Ukraine continues to be the most populous region of the country. British capitalists also profited from the discrimination against Irish people in the industrialized north of Ireland.

Just as the people of the Ukraine experienced routine discrimination, Jews experienced racist terror. The Black Hundreds were a terrorist outfit similar to the Ku Klux Klan of the United States. The czar openly supported the Black Hundreds who raided Jewish neighborhoods and murdered thousands. 

In the year 1905, the Russian people had enough of this madness and demonstrated in the capital, Saint Petersburg, demanding fundamental changes. The armed forces of the country attacked that demonstration and murdered hundreds of protesters. 

However, the czar agreed to allow a Provisional Government known as the Duma to be established. The problem was that when the czar decided that he didn’t like the Duma, he simply ordered it to be closed. 

Then, the czar ordered Russian soldiers to join in the international holocaust known as the First World War. Britain was losing its position as the super-power of the world, and other advanced capitalist nations went to war to decide what nation would replace Britain. That effort would require two world wars that cost the lives of about 80 million people.

This war proved to be an unmitigated disaster for the Russian people. Millions of Russian soldiers lost their lives in the war. Those soldiers lacked sufficient ammunition, food, clothing, or boots and lived in rat-infested fox holes. Aside from these unimaginable horrors, the Russian people experienced famine. Infants died of starvation because their mothers didn’t have the food that would give them breast milk.

These conditions convinced Russian workers to remove the czar from his throne in February of 1917. The conditions became so bad that the armed forces refused to repress the revolution. As a result, the Duma replaced the czar. However, this parliamentary government supported capitalist relations, and like all capitalist governments, refused to deal with the basic problems workers faced.

So, after the February Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returned to Russia. Lenin saw that the workers also had established their own councils known as the Soviets. Since the Duma was ineffective in advancing the demands of workers, the Soviets organized to demand concessions from employers as well as the czar. 

Lenin looked at this relationship of forces and convinced his organization known as the Bolsheviks to demand, “All Power to the Soviets.” To prepare Russian workers and peasants for the struggle ahead, Lenin wrote several pamphlets.

One of those pamphlets was “State and Revolution.” In this pamphlet Lenin quoted Frederick Engels, one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto. Lenin and Engels argued that the state, as we know it, was created by capitalism as a “special instrument of repression.” 

This argument cuts through the illusion that parliamentary democracy has anything to do with genuine democracy. Just as employers require workers to do as we are told, the state works consistently to advance the drive of maximize profits for corporations. 

Then Lenin wrote his pamphlet, “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Here, Lenin argued that the First World War was about which capitalist cartels would control the entire world. For Lenin, the reality of imperialism didn’t happen because of mistakes made by individuals. No, imperialism was the ultimate stage of where capitalism needs to go.

Today, Vladimir Putin rejects the politics of Lenin. Putin sees the armed force of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) expanding. He asked the member nations of NATO not to expand in the Ukraine. If Putin understood what Lenin had to say about imperialism, he would know that NATO is indifferent to his pleas to leave the Ukraine alone. As Lenin argued, “imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.”

Lenin also wrote about how the Bolsheviks needed to support all the oppressed nationalities of czarist Russia. That support would entail opposition to all forms of discrimination those nationalities experienced for hundreds of years. This support also entailed the right of self-determination for all those nationalities. If those nationalities chose to secede from the Soviet Union, they would have the right to do so. Given the horrors of the past, most of those nationalities found the politics of the new Soviet government something they wanted to be a part of.

After the Russian Revolution, the capitalist governments of the world found the new Soviet government to be intolerable. Those governments were not interested in establishing relations with this government. They wanted a government that would be obedient to the international interests of capitalism. The czarist government of the past served those interests. So, the armed forces of fourteen nations joined with former supporters of the czar to overthrow the new revolutionary Soviet government.                       

Leon Trotsky became the commander of the revolutionary Red Army that defended the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Trotsky had no military experience. He was Jewish and was raised in the Ukraine. 

At that time, the Red Army faced many difficulties. The armed forces of Russia had just been decisively defeated by Germany in the First World War. The Russian people were experiencing famine. Russia happens to be the largest nation in the world with borders that stretch from Eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean. 

However, Leon Trotsky and the Bolsheviks understood that the Red Army had an advantage that the invaders of the Soviet Union didn’t have. The Russian people had experienced unimaginable horrors. However, now they had a government that was doing literally everything in its power to bring peace, bread, and land to all the people. So, despite all their disadvantages, the Red Army decisively defeated the fourteen nations who invaded their homeland. 

This history demonstrates that the only way workers and farmers can defend themselves from imperialist war, is with a mass mobilization of workers and farmers. Vladimir Putin lives in denial of this history. He would rather beg NATO to stop advancing in the Ukraine. When they refuse to do this, what does Putin do? He orders the Russian armed forces to invade the Ukraine. That invasion only further isolates Putin’s government in the world.

Vietnam

We also need to look at the history of the rest of the world to see how the only way to defend against imperialist expansion is with mass movements of workers and farmers. We saw this in the U.S. war against Vietnam. 

President Eisenhower acknowledged that if elections had been held in Vietnam in the 1950s, Ho Chi Minh would have won 90% of the vote. Eisenhower and other U.S. presidents ignored that reality and installed puppet regimes that served U.S. capitalist interests.

However, the Vietnamese people had been resisting foreign invasions for literally hundreds of years. These included invasions by China, France, and Japan. So, when the United States armed forces invaded their country, the overwhelming majority of the nation mobilized to stop that invasion. This resistance of the Vietnamese won support from all over the world. As a result, the Vietnamese forces decisively defeated the U.S. invasion of their homeland.

Martin Luther King spoke out against the war in Vietnam one year before an assassin took his life. He argued that the United States government was the “greatest purveyor of violence” in the world. He also argued that the U.S. armed forces would appear to be “strange liberators” to the Vietnamese.

Malcolm X also spoke out against the war in Vietnam before assassins took his life in 1965. Malcolm didn’t just oppose the U.S. participation in this war, he was also inspired by the determined resistance of the Vietnamese. He argued that while the United States had all the sophisticated weapons of war, the Vietnamese soldier might only have tennis shoes, a rifle, and a bowl of rice. Yet, when the sun went down, Malcolm believed that the struggle was “even Steven.” 

Malcolm concluded from this reality that the United States armed forces would never win another war on the ground. The history of the past 57 years has proven that Malcolm’s prediction proved to be correct. 

Cuba

The Cuban Revolution erupted because the Cuban people supported the goals of those who dedicated themselves to overthrowing the hated regime of Fulgencio Batista. Batista was, in effect, a puppet of the United States government.

After the Revolution the Cuban government went on a literacy drive to teach every Cuban how to read. People who never had access to health care before, now had access to health care centers in their neighborhoods. 

Today Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other nation in the world. Cuban doctors treat patients in some of the poorest nations. Thousands of medical students come to Cuba to learn how to become doctors.

All of this happened because the Cuban people understand that while the U.S. embargo has caused hardships on the island, they know that the Cuban government is doing everything in its power to support the interests of every Cuban.

In the United States many people argue that there needs to be more controls on those who purchase guns. In Cuba, the government encourages every Cuban to own a gun, so the nation will be effective in defending itself from another U.S. invasion.    

Conclusion

Today when we listen to the capitalist politicians in Russia, the United States, and Europe, we see clearly that none of these politicians have any interest in the welfare of the people of the Ukraine or Russia. In fact, all of those politicians are only interested in the drive to maximize corporate profits. 

In Europe the construction of the pipeline supplying Europe with Russian gas has stopped. This will mean higher prices for workers who need to purchase that gas.

In the United States, we see gas prices that are higher than they have ever been. Yet no one in government argues that capitalists, who are sitting on more money than they could ever use, that they give up some of their wealth to drive down prices. 

Since the election of Joe Biden as President, we have seen no basic changes from those years when Donald Trump lived in the White House. However, when we look at the history I outlined, we see that the only way for the interests of workers to advance will be with mass movements. 

So, just as workers from around the world demonstrated against the Israeli bombing of Palestinians, today we need to demonstrate for the Russian armed forces to get out of the Ukraine.