COLD WAR IV: FIRST WILSON, THEN TRUMAN, CARTER, AND REAGAN, NOW THE HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONISTS

Harry Targ

The Cold War began in 1917 as Woodrow Wilson marshaled money and political allies at home and abroad to isolate, subvert, and finally send troops to overthrow the new Bolshevik Revolution. After 15 years of non-recognition and economic blockade and seven years looking the other way as the Nazi war machine grew and grew, the United States collaborated with the militarily powerful Soviet Union to defeat fascist armies in Europe and the Far East. 

After World War II, Cold War II started. The United States built a massive war machine, the biggest in world history, to challenge the global presence and influence of the Soviet Union. However, by the 1970s, with growing challenges to U.S. global power, the Nixon Administration launched a policy of “détente,” that is, warming of relations with its Cold War adversary. 

Detente did not last as President Carter resumed the Cold War in 1979, by sending funds to help anti- government religious fundamentalist guerrillas fight the central government of Afghanistan, at that time allied with the Soviet Union. President Reagan in 1981 returned full-force to the Cold War spending more on defense during his first term, than all that was spent on the military throughout U.S. history. The enormous military expenditures, domestic economic crises, and declining political legitimacy of Soviet Bloc countries led to their collapse. The former Soviet Union broke up in 1991.

Now the Cold War is being resumed with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The size and name of the enemy country has changed but the key foreign policy decision-makers in Washington have not. Some, the “neo-conservatives” who dominated the Bush foreign policy team, argue that as the most powerful country in the world, the United States must take the opportunity to construct a world order based on political regimes we prefer. If we have the power, they say, use it. 

And since the 1990s they have excoriated the other foreign policy faction, the “humanitarian interventionists” who dominated the Clinton presidency of the 1990s and seem to be influencing Obama foreign policy today. For the humanitarian interventionists U.S. foreign policy is not just about using American power. It is also about making the world a better place, at the point of a gun, through global propaganda, using the debt system to require countries receiving aid to change their economies, and sanctimoniously condemning others for not measuring up to U.S. standards of justice.

In the end, these foreign policy elite factions are two sides of a singular coin. They both advocate strong militaries. They both promote U.S. military institutions around the world. They both express criticisms of the shortcomings of others as to democracy, human rights, and so-called free markets and development.

Neither faction understands that the 21^st century international system is radically different than the one that existed during the height of the Cold War. The relative power of the United States militarily, economically, and ideologically is declining. New giants, China, India, and Brazil, for example, are encroaching on a once hegemonic international economic and political order. Countries of the Global South, in Latin America particularly, are coalescing around reformist agendas to transform their place in global society. Grassroots movements everywhere are rising up, not only against their own repressive regimes but the entire international system. And the newly emerging great powers, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have been meeting to discuss transforming global institutions and processes.

The Obama foreign policy team, largely humanitarian interventionists but egged on by neoconservatives in the executive branch and the Congress, believes the U.S. can still influence global policy by condemning competing powers. They claim they are motivated by the good; for example condemnation of Russia’s odious homophobic policies. But they really are trying to turn back the clock.

Liberal media support the humanitarian interventionists and frame the narrative of today’s U.S./Russian conflict as one between the altruistic former and the dictatorial latter. Putin is driven by his own quest for absolute power at home. As in the cases of prior Cold Wars, according to liberal commentators, Putin supports evil regimes in the world: Iran and Syria for example. In addition, he gleefully gives a home to whistleblower Edward Snowdon. And, while America institutionalizes a racist “new Jim Crow” system of criminal justice, commentators appropriately castigate the Russians for their horrific repression of gays and lesbians, and at the same time imply mistakenly that the United States is the standard for human rights.

In short, as in the old days of the Cold Wars from Wilson through Reagan, the renewed narrative, which seems to be moving toward a new Cold War, is about “good guys versus bad guys,” not one in which new powers, from the streets to the networks of countries from the Global South are saying “enough is enough” to  traditional imperial powers.

THE LARGER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DANIELS/ZINN CONTROVERSY

(Critics of the Israeli war on Gaza, particularly on college campuses, are being erroneously labeled as antisemitic. The campaigns in the media and by politicians such as former Indiana Governor and Purdue University President Mitch Daniels are designed to stifle dissent. The Fox News interview below and the attack on Howard Zinn's work a decade ago suggest the continuing threat to academic freedom in higher education. https://youtu.be/HkelVbykuUk?si=We7nSCA8qbBqWB3d )

Harry Targ

On July 17, 2013 an Associated Press story was published in several newspapers quoting from 2010 e-mails Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana wrote to “top state educational officials.” The e-mails encouraged the suppression of popular historian Howard Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States” in Indiana public education, including university level teacher training courses. Upon the death of popular historian Howard Zinn, Daniels e-mailed that “this terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”

When challenged on the seeming threats to academic freedom, Daniels claimed that his directives “only” referred to K through 12 instruction despite the fact that his e-mails made it clear he opposed instruction that used Zinn’s writings as tools for in-service training for teachers. 

Ninety Purdue University faculty (including this author) signed a letter to President Daniels objecting to his implied threat to academic freedom. In addition to defending the university as a place for debate among competing ideas, the faculty objected to the negative characterization of Zinn’s scholarship as an historian. They also objected to Daniels’ claim that although he was not interested in censoring scholarship and teaching at the university, when he was governor he had the responsibility to oversee school curricula from kindergarten through high school.

Faculty pointed out that restricting what was being taught to teachers pursuing advanced credits and restricting the right of teachers to use Zinn’s work in pre-college curricula violated academic freedom. Many Purdue faculty believed that extreme statements damning the substance of Zinn’s work cast a pall on the university and made serious reflection on American history in elementary and high schools more difficult for young people and their teachers.

It is important to note that the Daniels e-mails, and their threat to free discussion and debate in educational institutions in Indiana, reflect the deep struggles being waged in the American political system. Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university. Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others. The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education.  In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for  deciding on their own what interpretations of  subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted. 

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, “A People’s History of the United States,” which has been read by millions compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions. He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:”

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few. ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events have included Governors Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, John Kasich, and Mitch Daniels. ALEC legislative programs include lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation, has awarded $400 million over the last decade to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws and traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Two of the four recipients of the organizations 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” were Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, and Purdue President Mitch Daniels.

Associations which lobby for restricting academic freedom in higher education include David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS seeks to bring together scholars whose work opposes multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia. 

The NAS current president Peter Wood, contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, entitled “Why Mitch Daniels Was Right About Howard Zinn.” Wood wrote that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples History of the United States”  is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS do not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or the university.

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.  

A similar version of this essay appeared in the Fort Wayne, Journal Gazette, August 5, 2013.

http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130804/EDIT05/308049977/1144/EDIT05&template=printart

JULY, 2013: The Continuing Struggle for Economic and Social Justice

Harry Targ

I attended a national convention of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) in late July, 2013. About 100 participants, including representatives from other socialist organizations, came together for a three-day discussion of impediments to economic and political justice and how to create a better world, what activists from the Global South call “21^st century socialism.” They were young and old, Black and white, women and men, gay and straight with a variety of analyses of how to build a more humane future. Despite differences, participants saw capitalism as an obstacle to the survival of the human race and the creation of some form of democratic socialism as a necessary alternative to the drift toward destruction.

The opening plenary identified the devastating effects of reactionary policies of austerity, starving the many for the benefit of the few, as a central feature of contemporary politics. Workers, people of color, and women are its prime victims. Austerity was seen as parallel to the globalization of exploitation, war, and interventionism and inextricably connected to the destruction of nature. Capitalism was identified by panelists as a fundamental cause of inequality; controlling distant people and territories; and destroying land, sea, and air. Other workshops and plenaries explored the possibilities of building majorities to oppose austerity, war, and environmental devastation. Also the issue of how organizations from various left traditions in the United States could more effectively work together to turn the country around was explored. 

Attendees left the convention sobered by the analyses of the dire nature of the prospects of survivability but buoyed by the spirit of the meeting and the commitments to work together more effectively. Particularly, the diversity of the gathering gave participants hope about the future of progressive politics.

Sixty years earlier, on July 26, 1953, Cuban revolutionaries launched an assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago, Cuba. The revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, hoped that a successful attack on the military of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, would spark a revolution all across the island. The attack was crushed in less than 30 minutes by Batista’s armies. About two-thirds of the rebels were killed or captured and tortured. The rebel leader, Fidel Castro, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for his part. He was pardoned and released by Batista in 1955.

At his trial, Fidel Castro gave a speech that would speak across years to the Cuban people and the basic human needs that all progressives and revolutionaries pursue in their different political, economic, and cultural contexts. The speech, Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech, referred to those he felt would gain from a revolution, “the vast unredeemed masses, to whom all make promises and whom all deceive.”

He described “the masses” in the Cuban context. They included 700,000 unemployed Cubans and 500,000 farm laborers who worked only four months a year and lived in hovels with no land for personal cultivation. Also he referred to 400,000 industrial laborers and stevedores who had their retirement funds embezzled by bosses and politicians, 100,000 small farmers working on tiny parcels of rented land, teachers and other professionals who could not find attractive work, and small business persons weighed down with debt. Most important he identified the critical issues faced by all the strata of Cuban society, except foreign and local capitalists: “The problems concerning land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education, and the problem of health of the people, these are the six problems we would take immediate steps to resolve, along with the restoration of public liberties and political democracy.”

Castro elaborated on the depths of each of the problems and offered a platform for their solution. A new government would give landless peasants land encouraging the formation of agricultural cooperatives. Technical assistance, equipment, and other needs would be provided to small farmers. Rents for all would be cut in half and hovels would be torn down and replaced with multiple-dwelling units. Electricity would be made accessible to all. With the redistribution of land and the dramatic increase in housing construction, the problem of unemployment would be eliminated. Finally, Castro envisioned a new government that provided for the educational needs of the entire population.

Castro claimed that a new society that met the needs of the people was possible; that “there is no excuse for the abject poverty of a single one of its present inhabitants… This is not an inconceivable thought. What is inconceivable is that anyone should go to bed hungry, that children should die for lack of medical attention; what is inconceivable is that 30 percent of our farm people cannot write their names and 99 percent of them know nothing of Cuba’s history.”  He declared that when tyrannies violated the principles of constitutional government the people had the right to rebel to reestablish legitimate political institutions that were based upon a social contract between rulers and the ruled. To this analysis Fidel Castro declared “History Will Absolve Me.”

As I was driving home from the CCDS convention I thought about the speech Fidel Castro gave 60 years ago and all the analyses and exhortations at the meeting I had recently attended. Sure the times, history, politics, geography, and economic conditions of Cuba in 1953 and the United States in 2013 were radically different. But what struck me about the comparisons were the remarkable similarities. First, the basic forms of human suffering were the same: lack of economic justice, inequality, and the stifling of democracy. Second, the vision of an alternative to pain and suffering articulated by Fidel Castro in 1953 and the convention participants in 2013 were remarkably similar: more equitable distribution of societal resources, access to adequate nutrition, health care, education, housing, and jobs. The passion for economic and social justice transcends time and place and the struggle continues.

CHALLENGING PARADIGMS, AN ESSAY ON HOWARD ZINN: JANUARY, 2010

Harry Targ

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, suggesting that the development of scientific research was grounded in social structures. A set of scientific ideas, what he called a “paradigm,” become established in disciplines-chemistry, physics, biology- and this set of ideas, if they explain significant features of the field, become dominant. Most chemists, physicists, or biologists do scientific research from the standpoint of the fundamental ideas of the paradigm.

Kuhn said that then newer generations of researchers and educators work from within the paradigm. They do what he labeled “normal science.” Their publications, their theories, maintenance of their jobs depend on them doing science from within the framework of the paradigm.

Kuhn then suggested that occasionally the dominant paradigm raises so many questions that it gets challenged. There is a “revolution” in the science and a new paradigm begins to dominate the discipline.

To me this view of science was fascinating. Studying any discipline, Kuhn seemed to be saying, involved the institutionalization of a way of thinking about a subject, making sure that way of thinking becomes part of the “power structure” of the discipline and only gets changed by “revolutions” in the field. The development of ideas, he implied, parallels domination and subordination in societies and stability challenged by radical change.

Some scholar/activists in the 1960s and beyond began to look at other fields, such as in the social sciences and humanities, through the lens of Kuhn, whether or not it was his intention. These scholar/activists began to see that in virtually every field of study dominant paradigms were created that enshrined certain ideas including in economics, history, politics, and culture. For the most part, these paradigms celebrated capitalism, the United States in the world, American democratic institutions, and artistic works that ignored social problems and concentrated on the personal. However, increasing numbers of a new generation began to argue that key ideas were left out of these paradigms. Prominent among these suggestions was that understanding the United States and the world required considering the roles of class, race, and gender.

As a result of the turmoil on and off campuses in the 1960s, these scholar/activists were emboldened to critically revisit the dominant paradigms in their fields. They began to do research that looked at the underside of capitalism; the U.S. role in the world from an anti-imperialist lens; the connection between class, race, and U.S. political institutions; and the one-sidedness of excluding certain writers and artists for their political subjects from the study of literature and the visual arts.

Perhaps no paradigm was more enduring and institutionally self-serving than the consensus view of United States history. Students from K-12, college, and graduate school were educated to believe that American history was driven by the quest for assimilation, democratization, economic growth, and global leadership. That historic evolution was shaped by wise elites who were white, male, and wealthy; educated at the finest institutions of higher learning; and inspired by various humane religious faiths. It was a history of the rise to the top of expertise, compassion, wisdom and the perfectibility of a people.

In Kuhn’s terms, young scholar/activists began to reflect more on the “anomalies” in the paradigm. Millions of indigenous people who had established vibrant and stable societies were massacred as Europeans and their descendents moved across the North American continent. The development of modern capitalism was based on hundreds of years of the accumulation of wealth produced by peoples kidnapped from Africa. After slavery, racism continued to influence political and economic life through out the United States. And, despite traditional claims, reforms in the work process, guarantees of health and welfare, and political rights resulted not from the benevolence of elites but through class struggle.

As the discovery of anomalies in all the social sciences and humanities were uncovered, activists, students, young scholars, and even some older scholars realized that all knowledge reflects economic and political interests. There is no such thing as “academic objectivity.” They discovered that the dominant ideas that were disseminated in elementary and high schools, college, graduate programs, and media punditry reflected the paradigms that served the interests of the United States, particularly in the context of a struggle against ideas, movements, and nations that represented different paradigms and interests. Those coming to newer perspectives also realized that the development of knowledge required not a distancing of the “scholar” from the people but the embedding of the research in political activity. Many realized that “theory and practice” were intimately connected.

Why all this discussion? Well Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions. He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

WAR, MILITARISM, AND RESISTANCE: REVISITING CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

Harry Targ

Imperialism

I still find compelling the main points about modern imperialism articulated by Lenin in his famous essay on the subject. Reflecting on the transformations of capitalism from its early manufacturing days until the twentieth century he argued that economic concentration had replaced a multiplicity of semi-independent economic actors, manufacturing capital had merged with financial institutions creating a system of monopoly finance capital, and as a consequence the export of capital--what we would call today foreign investment, financial speculation, and the debt system--would replace the export of commodities as the dominant form of economic exchange on a global basis. During some periods capitalist states would divide up the world each extracting wealth of all kinds from its own sphere of influence and during other periods they would engage in competition and even war to pursue profits. Lenin could not foresee a time, from the mid-20^th century until now, when resistance would come not only from competing and militarized capitalist states but from masses of people in colonized, neocolonial, and dependent societies.

The Cold War and Post-Cold War International Systems 

The latest phase of the system Lenin described was constructed at the end of World War II. The United States emerged from the war as the most powerful nation and used military, economic, political, and cultural tools to enshrine its dominance. This meant building a system to crush the emerging Socialist Bloc, controlling the drive toward independence of former colonies, and shaping the politics of lesser but significant capitalist states. To achieve these difficult goals, the United States began to construct a “permanent war economy.”

By the 1960s, the United States capacity to control the economic and military destiny of the world was severely challenged. The Tet Offensive of January, 1968 represented a metaphoric great divide as U.S. presumptions of hegemony were sorely challenged by a poor but passionate Vietnamese people’s army. From the late 1960s onward the U.S. was challenged not only on the battlefield but in the global economy. Rates of profit of U.S. corporations declined. Industrialization had led to overproduction. Working classes in the United States and other capitalist countries had gained more rights and privileges. Socialist countries were experiencing significant growth spurts. Countries of the Global South began to demand a New International Economic Order that regulated the way global capitalism worked. In addition, inter-capitalist rivalry grew. On top of all this the price of oil increased markedly.

The response of the global capitalist powers (the G7 countries) to the crisis of capitalism was a dramatic shift in the pursuit of profit from the production of goods and services to what became known as financialization, or financial speculation. The banks Lenin talked about became instrumental. With rising oil prices, oil rich countries awash in new profits, and banks swelling with petrodollars, nations were enticed and forced to borrow to pay for the oil that cost many times more than it had in the recent past. The global debt system was launched. When the United States freed the dollar from the gold standard, currencies themselves became a source of speculation. 

The debt system gave international financial institutions and banks the power to impose demands on countries that required loans. Thus, the IMF, the World Bank, regional international banks, and private institutions demanded that the world’s countries open their doors to foreign investors, cut their government programs, privatize their economies, and shift to exporting commodities to earn the cash to pay back the bankers. The era of neoliberalism was advanced by globalization, the scientific, technological, and cultural capacity to traverse the globe. No geographic space could maintain autonomy from global capitalism. So a Cold War that was launched by creating a permanent war economy was transformed by financialization, neoliberalism, and globalization. With the shift of work from higher wage capitalist centers to low wage peripheries, deindustrialization became a common feature of the economic landscape.

By the 21^st century the system of neoliberal globalization was facilitated by new techniques of empire. Wars which traditionally had been fought between states were now fought within states. The United States established a military presence virtually all across the globe with an estimated 700 to 1,000 military installations in at least 40 countries. Major functions of the globalization of military operations had become privatized so massive U.S. corporations gained even more profits from war-making than they had during the days of the Cold War. The military—public and private—began to engage in assassinations and covert “humanitarian interventions.” And, aided by new technologies, the United States and other capitalist countries, using unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, could make war on enemies without “boots on the ground.” As we have learned, intelligence gathering, spying on people, has immeasurably advanced as well.

To put it succinctly, while imperialism remains generically as it has been throughout history today:

-Imperialism has become truly global.

-The military continues to be big business, sucking up at least half of the federal budget.

-The United States has developed the capacity to fight wars without soldiers on the ground.

-Empires, particularly the United States empire, kill with impunity.

-The connections between economic interest and militarism remain central.

-Ideologies defending 21^st century military interventions vary from those neoconservatives who argue that the United States must use its power to maximize our global position to the humanitarian interventionists who claim that the United States acts in the world for good.

Resistance

This narrative is not unfamiliar to us. What is less familiar is the idea that throughout history the forces of domination have been challenged by resistance, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. It is important to note that the drive for U.S. hegemony, for example, has been affected by resistance. A recent articulation of this narrative appears in the writings of Vijay Prashad, who has described the efforts of the newly independent nations of the Global South to achieve political and economic sovereignty. Many of these efforts from the 1950s to the 1970s faltered at the steps of the debt system and neoliberal globalization. But the struggle has continued. In addition, there have been examples of people such as the Cubans and the Vietnamese who, with much pain and suffering, were able to achieve some measure of economic sovereignty and political independence.

21^st century movements for change are varied and complicate the efforts of imperialism to achieve its goals. Resistance includes the following:

-Mercosur, a trade organization that includes Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and others waiting for admittance constitutes the third largest trading bloc in the world. 

-The development of collaborative relationships among powerful Global South nations. For example, representatives from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) recently met to chart an independent agenda in global affairs.

-The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) consists of ten Latin American/Caribbean countries which are launching a program of economic integration and political cooperation.

-The Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) is a new grouping of some 33 Western Hemisphere nations, minus the United States and Canada, which will seek to expand regional collaboration.

-Individual nations, based on their historic resistance to imperialism, such as Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Bolivia, continue to inspire activists.

-The United Nations system, considerably weakened from the days of the Cold War, still engages in global mobilizations through its conferences, support for some progressive NGOs, and projects involving education, development, and peacekeeping. Affiliated organized such as the International Labor Organization pursue goals that are sometimes independent of imperial agendas.

-Global anti-capitalist mobilizations, such as the World Social Forum, have brought together thousands of activists largely from the Global South to discuss the problems faced by workers, women, indigenous people, environmental activists, and others.

-Perhaps most important at this time is the grassroots mobilizations of millions of people all across the globe demanding economic justice, worker rights, gender equality, environmental justice,  and peace. Such mobilizations, while stimulated by local issues, are defined as part of a global movement such as “From Tahrir Square to Madison, Wisconsin.” People worldwide, particularly the young, workers, and women are seeing the common dimensions of struggle against imperialism.

Where Do Left and Progressive Forces Fit?

First, we on the left need to “bring imperialism back in;” that is socialist organizations can through education revisit and revise the theory of imperialism so that it is more serviceable for 21^st century socialist movements.

Second, progressives should link war/peace issues to environmental issues, to gender issues, to class issues, and race issues. As Martin Luther King declared in 1967: “I speak of the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

Third, every socialist and progressive organization should challenge the permanent war economy. Andrew Bacevich pointed out that the framers of the permanent war economy in the 1940s believed that the role of the citizenry was to remain quiescent, pliant, and supportive of the decisions made by the foreign policy establishment. That assumption must be resisted.

Fourth, local and national work should link economic justice, environmental preservation, and peace. These issues are inextricably connected.

Finally, left and progressive groups should respond to specific imperial transgressions by:

-working to cut military budgets

-opposing drone warfare

-saying no to US military aid to Syrian rebels

-supporting the just demands of the Palestinian people

-challenging the construction of military bases in Asia

-demanding an end to subversion in Latin America

-calling for the release of the Cuban 5

-insisting on the end of the Cuban blockade.

This essay will be presented to the national convention of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) on Friday, July 19, 2013, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.