The Rebel Road…

Although there are a multitude of liberation movements in the world, it is my opinion that limiting this presentation to some relevant movements in this regard is needed. It is interesting to note that the USSR was supporting (through funding and arms provision) almost all the major liberation movements at the time. The most important liberation movement was in Africa, i.e. against Apartheid (racial segregation). Notable leaders of this movement include such great individuals as Nelson Mandela who was imprisoned for 27 years for his political activism against Apartheid. Mandela himself makes numerous references to the ANC, which in turn was funded and supported by the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA as it was known at the time). Furthermore, it should be emphasised that of the people arrested with Nelson Mandela, a vast majority belonged to the CPSA.

“Our Party’s relationship with the ANC is based on mutual trust, reciprocity, comradeship in battle and a common strategy for national liberation. Our unity of aims and methods of struggle is a rare instance of positive alignment between the forces of class struggle and national liberation” (SACP, 1).

Another example of the USSR’s direct help for SACP and ANC members, who were fighting against Apartheid, was the manner in which academic and political education and training was imparted to them.

“From 1962 South African students began coming to the USSR for academic and political training. All in all about 200 ANC members completed training in Soviet tertiary institutions, mostly with Masters and some with PhD degrees (the official government figure is smaller, 145, but it does not include those South Africans who were registered as citizens of Lesotho, Zambia or other Southern African countries). On top of this about 200 ANC and SACP members studied at the Institute of Social Sciences (it was also known as the International Lenin School), on the Leningradsky Avenue in Moscow and at its campus outside the capital and dozens in trade union and youth schools” (Shubin, 6).

At the same time violent guerrilla action against state-supported Apartheid forces was going on. Other than the USSR, numerous comrades from Cuba were also waging this war on behalf of the oppressed people of Africa.

“South Africa secured the withdrawal of Cuban troops from neighbouring Angola where most of the Namibian independence war was fought. The Cubans went to Angola, to fight, on behalf of communism, against the Apartheid occupation of Namibia” (Waldmeir, 120).

Another extremely important liberation movement that is still ongoing is the movement headed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). The case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is not a new one; Jewish Zionists forcefully took the land of the settled Palestinian Arabs of this region and ejected them, on pain of death, towards the hinterlands that now constitute Palestine. Having their pleas fall on the deaf ears of the US (which was much more concerned with keeping friendly and open ties with Israel to ensure its own interests in the Middle East), the PLO turned to the USSR for help. The USSR took into account the correctness of the Palestinian cause and therefore supplied support to the PLO.

“They [read PLO] were offered [by the USSR] infantry weapons for 2,000 combatants (to be supplied through East European states) and training at Soviet military academies, as well as medical equipment and light industrial machinery for DFLP clinics and workshops” (Sayigh, 342).

The Soviet Union had always maintained that one must have a correct analysis of the situation in order to succeed. For this purpose the USSR also offered to help train the leadership of the PLO.

“The USSR meanwhile deepened political and military relations with Fateh and the PLO. Arafat was offered training and arms during a visit to Moscow in November 1973, but most important was the Soviet effort to persuade the Palestinian leadership of the value of diplomacy. The thrust of the argument, as Fateh central committee member Khalaf relayed to the home audience, was that ‘there is no revolution in the world that does not have a programme for each phase. You must phase your struggle’” (Sayigh, 342).

The USSR has supported many different liberation/decolonization movements in the past. Some of the other prominent movements include the liberation movements in Zimbabwe (Zanu-PF), Nicaragua, Guinea Bissau, Guatemala, Vietnam, Algeria, etc.

Ever since the fall of the USSR, the global political climate has become much more tense. The world superpower has a free hand to deal with any country as it deems fit, it has a free hand to utterly ignore UN conventions on any subject because it happens to be the primary financial supporter of the UN. The White House has subverted the role of the UN and turned Kofi Annan into a puppet at best. One must acknowledge that these are very trying times.

Today the White House can throw any country into its phantom ‘axis of evil’; today any person, you or I, can be termed a terrorist at whim; today almost all organisations that are working towards the cause of liberating their people have been labelled as ‘terrorist’ organisations. The rise of militant fundamentalism, of structural oppression, of enforced structural economic programmes by the World Bank and the IMF, of income disparity, of the marginalisation of nations such as the Palestinians and the Kashmiris, of unimpeded bonded labour, of the rising exploitation of the working class, of military dictatorships are a direct result of the format of policies followed by the White House. The list of their crimes is endless.

It is my assertion that in such a situation only a Marxist-Leninist approach can prove to be the solution for the masses; in such a world order if a superpower of USSR’s calibre existed, as long as revisionism was avoided, then, in the author’s humble opinion, many of the liberation movements would not have been thrown back decades; then some measure of resolution would have been attained to some of the conflicts, which constitute political fault-lines in the world today. The world, in short, would have been a better place to live in.

The last two decades have seen a dramatic rise in the US-led ‘pre-emptive’ strikes against enemy nations. The disdain with which the White House treats certain countries and the manner in which it marginalises and threatens them on a global scale is evident today. However, this was not the case when the USSR existed. One must, in all honesty, accept that the political scenario that pervades today is vastly different from the one that was present only three or four decades ago. It is my opinion that the objectives of liberation must include that the world has indeed failed to be decolonised, rather has moved into a new era of oppression: neo-colonialism. I will also attempt to show how the world order has changed in the last years and how this change is linked directly to the disintegration of the USSR. Furthermore, it will be shown that most of the nationalist liberation/decolonisation movements (many of which have been inappropriately and criminally dubbed “terrorist” movements by the world’s only superpower, i.e. the US) operating in the world today have suffered greatly from the transition to a unipolar world order. The author will, therefore, attempt to show that the world liberation movements have suffered terribly after the fall of USSR.

“They [the socialist bloc] undertook to consult together on all international questions involving their common interests, and to set up a unified military command, with its headquarters in Moscow. Two formal alliances – Nato and the Warsaw Pact – now confronted one another in Europe” (Bell, 122).

With the creation of the USSR and the subsequent rise of communist parties within the world at large and in Central and Eastern Europe in particular the world entered a new era in the early 20th century. With the creation of the Nato alliance in 1949 it became necessary to take steps by the socialist republics to consolidate their power. For this reason the Warsaw Pact was drafted and implemented in 1955. The member countries that later comprised part of the larger Socialist Bloc were:

1) The Soviet Union,
2) Albania,
3) Bulgaria,
4) Czechoslovakia,
5) East Germany,
6) Hungary,
7) Poland, and
Romania.

These countries were later reinforced with the inclusion of other important nations such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. It is an unfortunate fact, however, that due to many reasons the USSR started to decline. The author shall attempt to outline these reasons since they are of direct relevance to the subsequent world order.

Many critics have ostensibly alleged that the USSR broke down as a result of a breakdown in communist ideology. I shall use this opportunity to refute this argument. The USSR, by any stretch of the imagination, was not a communist country – it was a socialist country where the communist party was in power. There is a difference. Indeed there has never been any country on the face of the earth that has experienced communism. Socialism, therefore, defines a transitional stage from capitalism to communism. While it must be admitted that the communist party was in power in the USSR at the time of its disintegration, it must also be explained that the quality of the leadership in power at the time was extremely different (utterly opposite) to that at the time of the great success of the Soviet Union. Events after the 20th congress and the revisionist policies of Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin explain sufficiently. An account of how these individuals wanted to be called communists during their reign in spite of their revisionist policies is testament to their hypocrisy.

“Gorbachev cranked out a slew of slogans, including glasnost, perestroika and ‘new thinking’ in an effort to rescues socialism in the Soviet Union. Despite these shocking similarities of his policies to Khrushchev’s revisionism (Gorbachev was actually more revisionist than Khrushchev), Gorbachev was adamant in declaring himself to be a true Communist” (Shih & Shi, 89).

Comparing this to the later interview given by Gorbachev after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in which in his own words he admits that it was his “ambition was to liquidate Communism”, clearly shows that Gorbachev (and by implication all revisionists before him) was working within the USSR to deter it from its original Marxist-Leninist path. How can one then, in all honesty, deny their role in the disintegration of this superpower?

The world, as it existed in the Cold War era, had attained a begrudging stability due to the existence of two opposing monoliths, i.e. the US and the USSR (and therefore Nato and Warsaw Pact countries). It is thus not without basis to say that both sides had to consider a far greater set of implications for pursuing their interests than is the case now. Let us consider two cases that occurred during the Cold War era and hold special significance: 1) the Cuban Missile crisis, and 2) the Afghan crisis.

In the Cuban Missile crisis the US did not send its forces directly into Cuba to initiate violent retaliation to the Soviet Union’s missile installations. This was due to the fact that the US was fully aware of the military might it would unleash upon itself and its allies should it pursue a foreign policy based on the disregard for Cuba’s sovereignty. In the Afghan crisis the US chose to wage an indirect war against the Soviet Union by training and arming local militias against the Soviet forces, rather than risk open conflict. This too can be attributed to the above mentioned rationale.

The transformation of the third world into the neo-colonial appendage of the US could only be intensified if the strongest anti-neo-liberal force was dismembered. Let us look at the case of the World Bank and the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes as they have been propagated after the Cold War. One would find that there is a great increase in the sheer number of cases of structural adjustment within the third world and as a consequence there has been a drastic rise in inequality within the same.

Let us now compare this to the recent foreign policy of the US which, openly and without consideration to the UN’s own resolutions, targets all sovereign states that constitute a potential threat to itself or its allies (especially Israel). One can clearly see that if the USSR was still present then at least the absurd ‘David and Goliath’ situation, as it exists within Iraq at this time, would not be so. Needless to say, the world as a whole and its constituting countries (particularly the third world) has lost a great equalising force with the dismembering of the USSR.

(to be continued…)

There is no doubt that the world is following the neoliberal ideology today, just as there is no doubt that the US is seen as the bastion of neoliberal progress. The 1980s marked the beginning of this trend, and the post-USSR 1990s saw an expansion of ‘globalisation’ and ‘world markets’ on an unprecedented level. However, this is not a story with a happy ending. I would like to present what I have learnt as a critique of the now (in)famous claims of neoliberals – the reality behind their boasts of the victory of global capitalism.

Claim number 1: “The percentage of people in developing countries living below US $ 1 (adjusted for inflation and purchasing power) per day has halved in only twenty years.”

It is an interesting statement, to say the least. However, it is just as ‘doctored’ as it is interesting. As Michel Chossudovsky explains in his article, ‘Global Falsehoods: How the World Bank and the UNDP Distort the Figures on Global Poverty’, the institutions of ‘development’ have a totally arbitrary method of selecting the thresholds that later define poverty. For example, the ‘$ 1 a day line’ has almost no relevance to most developing countries in that local conditions of the economy may produce a type of person who might be earning as much as $ 10 a day, but might still be defined as poor, whereas the same conditions may create a person who may be earning as little as 10 cents a day, but still would not fall within the defining criteria of ‘poor’. In other words, the fluidity of market mechanisms and the inherent conditions of a society, its political set up, its economic policies, etc., conspire to create different social and economic ‘niches’ for different individuals. For this reason the arbitrary nature of grouping individuals without recourse to such in-depth study of local conditions is not just incorrect, it is potentially disastrous.

Thomas Pogge and Sanjay G. Reddy of the Department of Political Sciences, Columbia University state the following in the abstract to their paper:

“The estimates of the extent, distribution and trend of global income poverty provided in the World Bank’s World Development Reports for 1990 and 2000/01 are neither meaningful nor reliable. The Bank uses an arbitrary international poverty line unrelated to any clear conception of what poverty is. It employs a misleading and inaccurate measure of purchasing power ‘equivalence’ that vitiates international and intertemporal comparisons of income poverty. It extrapolates incorrectly from limited data and thereby creates an appearance of precision that masks the high probable error of its estimates. The systematic distortion introduced by these three flaws likely leads to a large understatement of the extent of global income poverty and to an incorrect inference that it has declined.”

Claim number 2: “Life expectancy has almost doubled in the developing world since WW II and is starting to close the gap to the developed world where the improvement has been smaller. Infant mortality has decreased in every developing region of the world.”

According to the proponents of globalisation the general rise in life expectancy is only attributable to globalisation. Furthermore, the decrease in infant mortality is also a product of neoliberal reforms. In this regard, it is interesting to mention a country that is not only not neoliberal, but utterly anti-capitalist – a country called Cuba. Cuba’s contention with the US is not a new one – nor is the inherent ideological contention between the two states.

There are genuine and proven reports of US interference in the country’s internal matters and many attempts to derail the state-working of the country through covert operations or assasination attempts on Fidel Castro – attempts that numbered at least 638 at last count!!

What is interesting, however, is that Cuba – at best a developing third world country – has a better medical and educational system than most first world states. According to the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) rankings of 2007-2008, Cuba has a ranking of 51 – compared to China’s ranking of 81, Sri Lanka at 99, Indonesia at 107, South Africa at 121, India at 128 and Pakistan coming in at 136. Clearly, Cuba has better human development indicators than most countries that are considered the economic power houses of the world today. This is a rather formidable slap in the face of any economist or neoliberal who would say that ‘globalisation is the only way to achieve universal suffrage’.

Claim number 3: “Democracy has increased dramatically from almost no nation with universal suffrage in 1900 to 62.5 percent of all nations in 2000.”

According to neoliberal analysts, democracy is a by-product of globalisation. However, let us look at the case of Pakistan. Considering that globalisation was initiated in the 1980s within the world – and that Pakistan was being ruled by a military dictator at the time – it is interesting that the US (aforementioned bastion of neoliberalism) chose to shake hands and support a military dictatorship at the time. Apparently, globalisation has no problem accepting and supporting a military dictator as long as globalisation gets to grow – apparently globalisation has, on occasion, grown at the expense of democracy, at the expense of the developing world. What a ‘great’ heritage for a policy that advocates universal suffrage.

Furthermore, it is interesting that these very advocates of globalisation have no trouble violating the sanctity of sovereign states when it comes to bringing countries within the fold of the ‘globalisers’; case in point – Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea, etc.

Claim number 4: “Income inequality for the world as a whole is diminishing.”

A very interesting statement made by the proponents of neoliberal globalisation, this aims to present the fact that globalisation, which as mentioned before follows a neoliberal framework, works to lessen income inequality. The question that needs to be asked is, if this is so, then why is the country with the most neoliberal reforms suffering from income inequality of epidemic proportions?

I am talking about the US. A recent report compiled by the Census Bureau of the US says, “Since 1968, however, this trend has reversed. Income inequality for families, measured by the Gini coefficient, increased between 1968 and 1998. The net effect over the entire 1947-1998 period is an increase in family income inequality.”

As is evident, globalisation could not deliver on any of its claims. It can be clearly and demonstrably proved that globalisation, as a world economic imperative, seeks to diminish the economic vitality of developing nations rather than bring them up on par with the developed nations of the world. Clearly this is a policy of neo-colonialism – a policy enforced (read: shoved down our throats) by the world’s leading imperial powers. The question that now becomes relevant is: are we, as a people, so naïve and so blind that we would trust our future to any such phenomena which exist and work through smoke and mirrors?

I hope not.