To Show Meaningful Solidarity with Cuba, Americans Need to Fundamentally Change Their Own Society

During an audience with Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, Tariq Ali asked what Western radicals and student activists could do to best support the Vietnamese resistance against U.S. forces. Ho replied: “Make your own revolution.”

7 June 2026

By Stephen Gowans

When it comes to Cuba, the accustomed practice of the establishment press is to document in detail the measures Washington has taken to sabotage the country’s economy, and then to relegate these measures to third place, behind mismanagement and corruption, as the causes of the socialist state’s economic crisis. Here’s how The Wall Street Journal puts it:

While the press regularly documents in detail the numerous measures the US has taken to sabotage the Cuban economy, I have yet to see any reporting on mismanagement or corruption.

The most parsimonious explanation of why the Cuban economy is collapsing, and the only one with any empirical support, is:

1. The toll taken by over six decades of US economic warfare.

2. The fact that Cuba has no great power support to help it endure US pressure.

3. The US oil embargo.

4. The threat of new secondary sanctions that is precipitating a flight of foreign businesses from Cuba.

Over six decades of US economic warfare

Almost from the moment of the Cuban Revolution’s birth, Washington has acted “to weaken the economic life of Cuba” with the aim of bringing about “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the government.” From 1960 to today, not a moment has elapsed without Washington working in some way to pauperize Cubans. Unless we think Washington has been totally incompetent in engineering the unravelling of the Cuban economy, it is unreasonable to minimize the role played by US economic warfare in Cuba’s immiseration.

Cuba no longer has great power support

For three decades the Soviet Union provided Cuba with significant aid, both economic and military. This was sufficient to counteract some of the measures the United States introduced to undermine the Cuban economy.

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 plunged Cuba into crisis. Relying on its own limited resources, along with joint ventures with European, Canadian, and other non-US businesses, Cuba was able to keep the lights on, and more.

During this period, Washington’s foreign policy agenda was focused on efforts to maintain US unipolar dominance, and prevent the rise of hegemonic regional powers in West Asia, East Europe, and East Asia. Cuba flew under the radar. It was too small, too weak, too significant, and too caught up in its own desperate struggle to survive, to pose any threat to the United States.

Moreover, compared to the strategic significance of controlling Persian Gulf oil, the promise of profitable access to vast commodity, investment, and cheap labor markets in East Asia, and rivalry with Russia over East Europe, Cuba had little to offer the capitalist interests that shaped US foreign policy. Why bother with Cuba when there were much bigger fish to fry?

Another factor that inclined Washington to leave Cuba alone to struggle under the mountain of sanctions it had imposed, was the fact that the existence of the island country as an example of socialism was an important part of US anti-socialist propaganda. The poverty of Cubans (relative to the capitalist metropolis but not its periphery) could be pointed to as evidence of the failure of socialism and its inability to offer anything like the good life Americans enjoyed at home.

There were two problems with this narrative.

First, the expected consequence of decades of US economic warfare was poverty. Indeed, US foreign policy officials said in private that their goal was to make Cubans hungry and desperate by weakening the country’s economic life. US predation, not socialism, caused Cubans to struggle economically.

Second, there were scores of capitalist countries in the world that were as poor or poorer than Cuba. If turning its back on capitalism was making Cuba poor, why were there so many poor capitalist countries in the world? Indeed, the number of poor capitalist countries vastly exceeds the number of rich ones. And why was Cuba faring better in human development terms than countries of comparable income? What’s more, for a time, Cuba had a lower infant mortality rate than did the United States itself.

Hence, it seemed like there were more reasonable explanations for Cuba’s relative poverty than socialism. In fact, the evidence that socialism made Cuba poor was exactly zero. All the same, the narrative that pointed to “mismanagement” of the economy, i.e., socialism, was, and continues to be, universally accepted by establishment figures and media in the United States as the gospel truth, despite the narrative’s glaring deficiencies and absence of evidence.

With the Soviet Union gone, and Russia returning to great power status, and China returning to the ranks after a centuries-long absence, the possibility arose that these powers could backstop Cuba.

But the conditions weren’t right. At least two of the following things would need to be true for China or Russia to offer Cuba sufficient economic aid to enable the island country to survive a determined effort by the United States to finally bring about its economic collapse:

An ideological commitment to aiding the workers and peoples of the world to liberate themselves;
A sufficient economic surplus to cover both the great power’s strategic needs and substantial aid to Cuba;
The existence of some meaningful benefit the great power could derive from helping Cuba.

Neither of these conditions was true. The reality is that the benefits Cuba can offer China and Russia are miniscule compared to the costs of giving the socialist island sufficient aid to keep its economy afloat in the face of a resolute US effort to sink it.

The US oil embargo

While previous US administrations have been content to largely ignore Cuba as an immediate target for regime collapse, and to focus on larger opportunities, the Trump administration has set its sights on Cuba as an easy target. This is a project that appeals to Marco Rubio’s domestic base and the secretary of state’s presidential ambitions, and presents a vainglorious and egomaniacal Donald Trump with the prospect of being able to boast that he has accomplished something no other president before him was able to achieve.

Having eliminated Venezuela’s Maduro through abduction, and installed in his place a biddable Delcy Rodriquez as the country’s quisling acting-president, Washington has proceeded to halt Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba. It has also imposed an embargo on oil shipments from any country. With Cuba producing only 40 percent of its energy needs domestically, the consequences are devastating.

US secondary sanctions

Having greatly weakened Cuba by denying it oil imports, Washington has introduced what it hopes will be the coup de grace: threats of sanctions on any foreign company that does business with GAESA, the body that controls a substantial part of the Cuban economy. Canadian and European hotel operators are pulling out, and the future in Cuba of the Canadian mining giant Sherritt is in question. On top of that, Mastercard and Visa transactions have been suspended.

Socialism in One Country

The imminent collapse of the Cuban economy raises the question of whether socialism can survive in one country, especially a small one like Cuba.

Even Stalin thought that it couldn’t over the long term (not because there’s something inherently unworkable about socialism but because one socialist country in a world of many capitalist predators has little hope of survival.)

Here’s how Stalin put it. (I cite him only because he’s most strongly associated with the view that socialism can be built in one country.)

Leninism teaches that ‘the final victory of Socialism, in the sense of full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations, is possible only on an international scale’. This means that the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the final victory of Socialism in one country cannot be solved.

Building socialism and defending it in a country like the Soviet Union—with its large population and vast continental territory that contained within it every natural resource needed to build an industrial economy—was of an order of magnitude easier than building socialism and defending it in Cuba, a small island, with a small population, and few resources. And even the Soviet Union, with its advantages, failed to withstand the incessant threats, sabotage, and pressure of the United States and its capitalist allies.

Can Cuba survive as an independent socialist state in the face of the US onslaught? Perhaps. But only as one reduced to abject poverty.

To use Stalin’s terminology, the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the survival of an independent socialist Cuba cannot be solved.

Inasmuch as it is the United States that is bent on erasing both Cuba’s independence and its socialism, whatever hope it has for existing as a socialist country in other than an economically unviable state depends, not only on the resilience and resolution of the Cuban people, but on the energy and determination of the American people to fundamentally change the nature of their own society. For it is their society that stands in the way of any prospect of even mild Leftism in the Western Hemisphere, and any endurable socialism outside it.

They Demonize Our Revolutionaries

20 April 2026

By Stephen Gowans

On April 14, Ezra Klein, the New York Times’ columnist and podcaster, sought a “reckoning with Israel’s ‘one-state reality’.” He organized a discussion with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, a pair of academics who had written a 15 July 2025 article in Foreign Affairs, The Promise and Peril of Recognizing Palestine. Their article asked whether “a two-state solution [could] emerge from a one-state reality?”

The discussion had two merits: First, it acknowledged that a Jewish supremacist state exists from the river to the sea. As Lynch and Telhami put it in their Foreign Affairs article:

Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.

Israel, in other words, is a democratic state for Jews, and a Jewish state for Palestinians, on whose country, land, and homes, Israel has been built. The philosopher Domenico Losurdo called it a Herrenvolk democracy—a democracy for (and only for) a master people. Others call it, correctly, an apartheid state. The three descriptions are congruent.

The second merit was Telhami, who offered a number of important insights. I’ll cite but one.

Israeli strategy from Day 1 has been to have what they call escalation dominance. It is a one-sided deterrence; it is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand. In effect, you’re saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East. That’s half a billion people. And you are a country of 10 million. That is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons

The last sentence, perhaps, requires some elaboration. Consider this: On April 18, New York Times’ reporters Mark Mazzetti, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes began a report on the US-Israeli war on Iran with the following: “The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.”

Note that the reporters didn’t say the two aggressors attacked Iran because it had threatened either country or any of their allies, or because they were motivated by human rights considerations. Instead, they wrote that the United States and Israel launched their war to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear arms that would provide Tehran a means to deter future US and Israeli aggression. These arms would, in Telhami’s words, check US and Israeli escalation dominance. Were Iran to achieve this objective, it would deny the two aggressor states strategic dominance over “half a billion people” and “every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East.” Thus, it is not a nuclear threat to the physical safety of Americans and Israelis that Washington and Tel Aviv seek to deter, but a threat to their ability to dominate West Asia and its hundreds of millions of people.

Klein, a man who acknowledges that he does not count himself among those who want to see Israel cease to exist (though the idea that anyone should want an apartheid state to continue exist is troubling), offered his own commentary, some of which had merit.

He argued that “the one-state reality” [which is to say, Israeli apartheid, is] not accidental. It was, and is, not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land — in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes.”
He noted that “More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the previous two decades combined.”
He lamented that “Israel has allowed — has protected — a terrifying rise in settler and military violence toward the Palestinians who live” in the West Bank, adding that “There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank — and it is not the P.A.”
He pointed to how “Israel has used the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people, adding that “it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes.”
He acknowledged that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians a state of their own.

Sadly, Klein’s merits are outweighed by his egregious faults. Significantly, he fails to explain how Israel’s resolve to deny the Palestinians a state of their own has left the Palestinians bereft of any option but violence to redress a fundamental wrong; and that this, by itself, explains the outbreak of Palestinian violence on 7 October 2023.

Palestinian rebellion was met on the Israeli side by Tel Aviv stepping up its decades-long efforts to erase the Palestinians as a people. These efforts have been evinced, to use the language of the Genocide Convention, in the:

Killing of Palestinians in large numbers;
Inflicting on them serious bodily and mental harm; and
Imposing on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their demise.

Klein excuses these genocidal acts as “what any state and any people would do.” That’s doubtful. What any state and people might have done, and certainly could have done, is begin to redress the historical injustices that produced the rebellion. As Marx observed about the 1857 Indian Rebellion against the country’s British colonizers: “There is something in human history like retribution.” (The Indian Revolt, 16 September 1857) Or, to borrow from Marx again, with appropriate alterations of language for time and place: “However infamous the conduct of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023, it was only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of Israel’s own conduct”. Any serious effort to prevent future Palestinian violence, would address the root of the violence, not try, by escalation dominance, to suppress it, so that the fruits of the injustice Zionists have visited upon their victims — the theft of their land, homes, property, and country — can continue to be enjoyed by Israeli Jews into the future. That is what is meant when one says Israel’s response to the Palestinian rebellion is justified because it is what any state or people would do.

Genocide is built into settler colonialism. Settlers seek the land of indigenous peoples for the exclusive use of their own ethnic group. European settlers did so in North America, Australia, and New Zealand; German settlers did so in southwest Africa; and the Nazis tried to do so in eastern Europe, where Slavs, Jews, and Roma–the occupants of the land Hitler coveted for Lebensraum and German settlement–paid a terrible price. Jewish settlers have done the same to the natives of Palestine. In all cases, the result has been genocide. Settlers drive indigenous peoples off land they covet by expulsion, extermination, or both. Settler colonialism rests on the logic of the elimination of the natives.

Settler colonial states of the past have acted just as Israel, a settler colonial state of the present, has. But that’s hardly a justification for genocide. The Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen shot 34,000 Soviet Jews and dumped then in the Babi Yar ravine in September 1941 in retaliation for Soviet agents detonating mines in occupied Kiev which killed as many a three-hundred German soldiers. This was an instance of settler colonial forces undertaking harsh reprisals against the violent rebellion of the natives, in this case, against an ethnic group, Jews, viewed by the Nazis as being intimately linked to the political leadership of the resistance, or terrorists, as the Nazis called them. According to Klein’s logic, the Nazi reprisal killings were justified as “what any state and any people would do.”

It might also be pointed out that if Israel did “what any state and any people would do,” then Hamas and Hezbollah have done what any colonized and oppressed people would do. Colonized people never allow the colonizer to despoil their country, land, homes, and property, without putting up a fight. We might call this an iron law of history. To borrow Marx’s language, the inevitable rebellion of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023 no more lends itself to moralizing – for or against – than does an earthquake in California or a snowstorm in Canada, both inevitable events. It’s what colonized and oppressed people have always done and will always do. So, if we can point to genocide as what any colonial settler state and settler people would do to the people it’s oppressing, we can also point to violent rebellion as what any colonized people would do to the people who are oppressing them.

Klein’s heart bleeds for Palestinians who have been denied a state of their own and for the Shia of south Lebanon who the Israelis have driven from their homes, perhaps never allowed to return. But in his view, Hamas and Hezbollah, the inevitable response to Zionist settler colonialism, are anathema. Israel’s “right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah,” he says, “is undeniable.” Sure, as much as the SS’s right to reprisal against Jews for the killing of three-hundred German soldiers at Kiev was undeniable. Zionists will object that you can’t compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But you can. As a settler colonial state, Israel shares much in common with its settler colonial cohorts: the United States, Canada; Australia; New Zealand; and Germany.

Klein must, in the words of the Syrian singer Siba, “demonize our revolutionaries,” as much as Israel must “eradicate our roots; demolish our homes; criminalize our existence; falsify our origins; separate our loved ones; and slaughter our children.”

Those who pity the oppressed but condemn their rebellion and demonize their revolutionaries are no friend of the oppressed. They aid the oppressor. But, then, I suspect Klein is alright with that.

Who Rules the US Revealed in Washington’s Cuba Demands

The idea that US foreign policy is driven by national security and human rights considerations is contradicted by the list of demands the US State Department issued to Havana last week. In reality, US foreign policy is driven by the interests of US businesses and investors, as the US demands make clear.

Cuba must:

o Transition to a market-based economy;

o Expand its private sector;

o Open its door to foreign-investment;

o Compensate U.S. citizens and corporations whose assets and properties were nationalized in the 1960s;

o Release political prisoners;

o Expand political freedoms.

Washington “signaled that the United States would not tolerate resistance to its demands.”

The New York Times’ headline that reported on this meeting said that US officials travelled to Havana to lay out proposals, when, in point of fact, as the text of the article indicated, the US delegation issued demands to which it said it “would not tolerate resistance.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Epstein Avant La Lettre

I have been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the first modern autobiography. I was shocked by one incident the eighteenth-century composer, novelist, and philosopher describes.

Rosseau writes of “a little girl of eleven or twelve,” named Anzoletta, who he and his friend, Carrio, bought from her mother with the aim of enjoying her “sensual pleasures,” that is, keeping her as a sex slave.

Carrio, who was a lady’s man, grew weary of always going to women who belonged to others and took it into his head to have one of his own; and as we were inseparable he suggested to me an arrangement which is not rare in Venice, that we should keep one between us. I agreed. The next question was to find a safe one. He made such thorough investigations that he unearthed a little girl of eleven or twelve, whom her wretched mother wanted to sell. We went to see her together…She was fair and gentle as a lamb. … We gave the mother some money, and made arrangements for the daughter’s keep. (The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Book Seven, Penguin, 1953, p. 302.)

Rousseau says that he developed a parental affection for the girl that prevented the relationship from developing into a sexual one. All the same, he and Carrio bought the girl with the intention of “being the corrupters of her innocence,” as Rousseau writes.

What is striking is that the theorist of liberalism passed over the incident without showing the faintest pang of conscience, though at other times he expressed great remorse for actions that by today’s standards pale in comparison with the intended sexual enslavement of a prepubescent girl.

Throughout his Confessions, Rousseau claims to tremble in outrage at wrongs and the exploitation of the weak, though clearly his aversion to injury inflicted on the weak was far from universal, and likely very much limited to inflictions upon people such as himself, and certainly not on little girls of poor families.

Weaponizing Covid-19: How Washington is Using the Pandemic to Help Destabilize Cuba

Are the protests in Cuba a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism?

July 13, 2021

Stephen Gowans

Readers of The Wall Street Journal might come to the conclusion that an uprising has erupted in Cuba against ‘authoritarianism’ and the Cuban Communist Party.

But a careful reading of the newspaper paints a more nuanced picture.

There is, according to the Journal, “a pattern of simmering tensions across swaths of the developing world, where people are largely unvaccinated, governments are unable to afford sustained stimulus measures and economies are falling further behind and struggling to rebound from last year’s record contraction.”

In South Africa, for example, the government has “deployed its army … to help quell violent protests” after “hundreds of angry residents ransacked shops and malls, torched cars and blocked major roads.” The police have “arrested nearly 500” protestors.

“At the end of March, 33% of South Africans were unemployed, a figure that rises to 43% when discouraged job seekers are included.” A “record wave of Covid-19 infections across the country….has overwhelmed hospitals and led to shortages of oxygen.”

In another part of the developing world, Cuba, simmering tensions have also spilled over into protests. There, hundreds of “Cubans took to the streets … protesting a lack of food and a shortage of Covid-19 vaccines.” Cubans are registering “their opposition to the economic fallout from Covid-19 … widespread shortages of food and medicine, and numerous daily blackouts from failing electric power.”

Unrest in Cuba matches unrest in South Africa, part of the simmering tension in the global south. The roots are the same.

Yet, despite Cuba’s pandemic-induced economic travails and consequent political distemper fitting a pattern across the global south—exacerbated in Cuba’s case by six decades of US economic strangulation—The Wall Street Journal cast “Cuba’s unrest” as framing the “world’s big struggle: dictators vs. democracies.”

Columnist Gerald F. Seib used the occasion of the Cuban protests to rail against authoritarian regimes, among which he includes Cuba’s government, despite the reality that Cuba has elections and assemblies. But in the US view, an electoral system is not truly democratic unless it bears a close resemblance to the United States’ own plural elite model, one of multiple parties representing the interests of business elites, which periodically vie for the votes of an electorate whose interests are largely ignored.

Bernie Sanders recently referred to the US system as one that doesn’t respond to the needs of the people. Sanders told New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd, ‘It’s absolutely imperative if democracy is to survive that we do everything that we can to say, ‘Yes, we hear your pain and we are going to respond to your needs.’’’

The obvious question for Sanders is: how can a system that doesn’t respond to the people’s needs be called a democracy? And how can responding democratically save democracy. If responding to the people’s needs is a new initiative, then democracy is already dead. More accurately, in the US case, it has yet to be born.

Sanders would have hewed closer to the truth had he said, “It’s absolutely imperative if democracy is to be created for the first time that we not only do everything that we can to say, ‘Yes, we hear your pain and we are going to respond to your needs’ but that we also actually respond to their needs.”

Seib opens his storehouse of demons, condemning them for the crime of autocracy on the basis of how long they’ve been in power: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (32 years); Vladimir Putin (22); Xi Jinping (9). Harvard political scientist Graham Allison calls Xi’s government a “responsive authoritarianism”—which seems to be another of way of saying it’s the democracy that Bernie Sanders says the unresponsive US plural elite system is not.

This “seems a boom time for autocrats,” Seib writes. “Yet the seething unhappiness in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Hong Kong [but not South Africa, Haiti, Colombia, Brazil, and Lebanon] raises the question of how long the authoritarian run can last?”

Apparently, for quite some time, if the autocrats are US allies. The Hashemite monarchy of Jordan’s “U.S.-Backed King”, as the Journal describes him—and aptly, too, considering that US taxpayers pay him more than $1.5 billion yearly—has lasted 75 years. The Khalifa family, which allows the US Fifth Fleet to use Bahrain as its home base, has ruled over the Persian Gulf country for 255 years. The House of Saud, which rules US best friend Saudi Arabia, has clung to power with US assistance for more than three-quarters of a century. And we mustn’t forget Abdel Fatah el-Sissi, Egypt’s military ruler, whom Donald Trump once called his favorite dictator. Like the authoritarian government of Jordan’s autocrat King Abdullah, the government of autocrat President el-Sissi, also receives more than $1 billion yearly from an appreciative United States, for services rendered.

In US propaganda, autocrats are not condemned as autocrats so long as they render services to the beneficiaries of the US plural elite system, i.e., Wall Street, while governments that don’t genuflect to US plural elite needs, and choose instead to respond to their own citizens’ needs, are labelled autocrats, whether they are or not.

Owing to the US campaign of strangling the Cuban economy—a campaign now in its seventh decade—Cubans have lived with a lower standard of living than their socialist economy is capable of producing (which is the point of Washington blockading the island.)

Cuba has, nevertheless, done remarkably well in the face of US-imposed adversity. In 2019, the country’s GDP per capita was $9,100 (current $US), according to the World Bank, not far off China’s $10,217. Of course, neither country is anywhere near US GDP per capita, but, having been looted by great powers, they have steep hills to climb. US sanctions, and now the pandemic—which has slashed tourism by nearly 90 percent—makes the climb all the more difficult for Cuba.

“The truth is that if one wanted to help Cuba, the first thing that should be done is to suspend the blockade of Cuba,” Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, told reporters on Monday. “That would be a truly humanitarian gesture.”

Unfortunately, neither Wall Street nor the capitalist system at whose center it lies, are humanitarian.

Do Communist-Led States Protect Public Health Better Than Capitalism?

The Catastrophes of the Pandemic are the Catastrophes of Capitalism

Cuba’s Low Level of Internet Use: Not a Policy of Restricting the Flow of Information

If you want to find examples of governments restricting the flow of information on the internet for political purposes, look to the United States and its allies, and not to the low-level of internet use in Cuba, which, notwithstanding press reports to the contrary, is a consequence of Cuba’s comparatively low-level of economic development, not communist ‘totalitarianism.’

August 22, 2015

By Stephen Gowans

Part of the dogma of capitalist societies is that communist states are inherently restrictive and ‘totalitarian’, in contrast to liberal democracies, which are portrayed as beacons of liberty. Communist states, we’re told, suppress dissent, while capitalist states allow it to flourish. This, of course, is nonsense. All states, regardless of how they’re organized economically, suppress dissent under circumstances of grave threat, and relax repression as danger diminishes. Those that are the most free, are those that face the least danger. Highly restrictive societies are typically highly threatened. The restrictions in the Soviet Union from its birth in 1917 to its collapse in 1991 are pointed to as proof of the totalitarian nature of communism (or “Stalinism”), but the reality that the country was in a permanent state of crisis is ignored, and restrictive measures have long been recognized as legitimate and necessary under emergency conditions, including in liberal theory and practice. Wave after wave of aggression crashed against the Soviet Union from its birth until its collapse. These included the aggressions of Wilhelmine Germany, the intervention of the Entente powers in the Civil War, Japan’s harassment of Soviet borders in the 1930s, the invasion of Nazi Germany, the Cold War, and Reagan’s program of spending the Soviets into bankruptcy. The objective of each aggression was the total annihilation of the communist state.

Totalitarianism has not been a stranger to liberal democracies either. Despite being sheltered by two oceans, having no hostile powers on its borders, and facing no realistic threat of invasion, the US state in two world wars invested its executive with dictatorial powers. These were used to direct the country’s economy, control the flow of information, crackdown on dissent, and herd potential fifth columnists into concentration camps. Even today, despite facing the comparatively minor threat of potential blowback from the political Islamic forces it has long supported to disrupt secular Arab nationalism [1], the United States, Britain, France, Canada and Australia have invested the political policing functions of their respective states with growing powers of surveillance and disruption.

Philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo observes:

In reality, although protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific, every time it has rightly or wrongly felt itself imperilled, the North American republic has proceeded to a more or less drastic reinforcement of executive power and to more or less heavy restrictions on freedom of association of expression. This applies to the years immediately following the French Revolution (when its devotees on American soil were hit by the Alien and Sedition Acts), to the Civil War, the First Word War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War. Even in our day, the sequel of the attack of 11 September 2001 was the opening of a concentration camp at Guantanamo, where detainees have been imprisoned without trial, and without even being informed of a specific charge, regardless of age. However terrible, the threat of terrorism is minor compared with that of invasion and military occupation, not to mention nuclear destruction. [2]

The restrictive practices, or ‘totalitarianism’, of communist states are not inherent. They are, instead, defensive measures against external threat. Cuba and North Korea have been under a greater sustained threat of invasion and military occupation than any other country (and North Korea is additionally under the threat of nuclear destruction.) It is in these countries that the pressure for restrictive practices is most acutely felt. Nor are restrictions on civil and political liberties unique to communist states. They are also found in abundance in capitalist countries, as well.

To illustrate how the dogma in capitalist society conditions its mass media to portray communist countries as inherently restrictive, consider a recent Wall Street Journal article on the expansion of internet access in Cuba (“Cubans get a tantalizing taste of the internet,” August 19, 2015).

The article attributes the comparatively low level of internet use on the Caribbean island to a theorized desire of Cuban authorities to control the flow of information, rather than to a more likely explanation, namely Cuba’s low level of economic development. We would expect that more developed countries would have a higher level of internet use, and less developed countries a lower level. If the level of internet use in Cuba is on par with that of other countries at the same level of economic development, the country’s low level of internet use can be explained by economic development, not a desire to restrict access to the internet to control the flow of information.

The graph below uses World Bank data to show the relationship between internet use per 100 people and GDP per capita. If the Cuban government deliberately restricts internet use, we would expect Cuba to depart significantly to the right of the trend line. Instead, it falls close to it, meaning the level of internet use in Cuba is typical of countries at an equal level of economic development. We can dismiss, therefore, the view that the Caribbean island’s low level of internet use is due to the government deliberately restricting access to the Web. The Wall Street Journal’s explanation of the low level of internet use in Cuba is a political argument, intended to mislead and discredit, not illuminate.

At 30 users per 100 people in 2014, internet use in Cuba was on par with that of Egypt (32) and El Salvador (30) and greater than in Guatemala (23), Honduras (19), India (18), Nicaragua (18) and Haiti (11) (World Bank). The average for Central America, a region on which the United States has lavished much attention to keep it free from communist ‘totalitarianism’, was 29, virtually equal to that of Cuba. If Cuba’s low level of internet use is indicative of Havana deliberately restricting access to the internet to control the flow of information, then the governments of Central America, along with Egypt and India, must also be ‘totalitarian.’

More fertile ground for identifying governments that impede the flow of information for political purposes can be found in the US orbit, among such trusted US (and capitalist) allies as South Korea, Turkey, Britain, Canada and the United States itself.

The South Korean police state vigorously effaces online content it doesn’t want South Koreans to see. When a computer user in South Korea clicks on an item on the North Korean Twitter account, a government warning against illegal content pops up. In 2011, South Korean authorities blocked over 53,000 internet posts for infractions which included having a kind word to say about North Korea. In the same year, the South Korean police state deleted over 67,000 Web posts that were deemed favorable to North Korea or which criticized the US or South Korean government. Over 14,000 posts were deleted in 2009. [3]

In Turkey, “thousands of Web sites are blocked by the state, mostly without any publicized reason.” [4]

In Britain, government officials have met with representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry “to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest.” Free-speech advocates liken these policies to those the British government “has criticized in totalitarian and one-party states.” [5]

The Canadian government recently passed legislation that would give its spy agency, CSIS, authority to disrupt “radical websites” and remove “terrorist propaganda” from the Internet—that is, restrict the flow of information on the Web. [6]

As for the United States, in 2009 “the U.S. Treasury Department ordered the closure of more than eighty websites related to Cuba that promoted trade and thus violated U.S. legislation on economic sanctions.” [7]

If the United States, South Korea, Turkey, Britain and Canada restrict the flow of information on the Internet for political reasons, how is it that Cuba is totalitarian, but these states are beacons of liberty?

Two further points.

First, the United States has waged a campaign of economic warfare against Cuba for over five decades. It’s impossible to say how large the Cuban economy would be today had it been allowed to develop unimpeded, but some estimates put the cost to Cuba of US economic aggression at $750 to $975 billion. [8] One analyst estimates that “Without the blockade, the Cuban standard of living today might well be equal to that of Western Europe.” [9] If so, internet use in Cuba would likely resemble European levels of 76 per 100 people, rather than today’s 30.

Second, the US propaganda system can’t mention internet access in Cuba without making reference to blogger Yoani Sanchez, whose online newspaper 14ymedio “is blocked in Cuba,” according to The Wall Street Journal. [10] There is a good reason for this. Sanchez’s web site appears to be a hostile project of the United States, a country in a virtual state of war with Cuba. Despite her status as a grassroots dissident, Sanchez’s web site is miraculously “available in no less than 18 languages….No other site in the world, including those of major international institutions such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, OECD, and the European Union, has as many language versions available. Not even the U.S. State Department web site or the CIA has such a variety.” [11]

Moreover,

The site hosting the blog of Sanchez has a bandwidth 60 times higher than Cuba has for all its Internet users! Other questions inevitably arise about it: Who manages these pages in 18 languages? Who pays the administrators? How much? Who pays for the translators who work daily on Sanchez’s site? How much? Furthermore, the management of a flow of more than 14 million visitors monthly is extremely expensive. Who pays for that? [12]

Jose Luis Martinez, a spokesman for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, attributes the blocking of 14ymedio to the Cuban government’s desire “to have some type of control” and of being “a totalitarian regime trying to operate in the 21st century.” [13] US client state Egypt has locked up nearly 500 of Sanchez’s fellow political bloggers [14], while Washington’s strategic partner and major arms buyer Saudi Arabia has sentenced one blogger to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for his dissident views [15], yet Havana, the ‘totalitarian regime’ that insists on ‘some type of control’, has spared Sanchez a similar fate. By Martinez’s reasoning, Egypt—which receives $1.3 billion annually in military aid from the United States, second only to Israel [16]—must be a totalitarian state on steroids. And yet it suffers none of the denigration Western news media heap on Cuba.

Losurdo observes that if Cuba’s measures for repressing some political dissent are totalitarianism, then West Germany, which did not shrink from repressing communists, and which, like Hitler, banned the Communist Party, would also have to be regarded as totalitarian. [17] The same could be said of South Korea, whose infamous National Security Law continues to be used to lock up leftists. The South Korea police state recently disbanded one left-wing party, stripping its legislators of their parliamentary seats, and jailing a handful of its members, including the lawmaker Lee Seok-ki. [18]

Decades of low-intensity warfare against Cuba carried out by the United States, including a blockade, unremitting military threat, sabotage, support for fifth columnists, and occasional terrorism, has created a de facto state of war. Nevertheless, Cuba has reacted to this situation with measures no more drastic than those implemented in the United States during two world wars, [19] and no more drastic than those once implemented in West Germany and currently practiced with vigor in South Korea.

It’s not ‘totalitarian’ Cuban government policy that has limited internet use in Cuba. Internet use in Cuba has been limited by the comparatively low level of development of the Cuban economy and the US economic aggression which has stifled it. What restrictions Cuba has implemented are warranted defensive measures against the predations of its hyper-aggressive neighbor to the north. This, however, would be news to those who follow the mass media in capitalist societies. The sole interest of these media when it comes to Cuba and North Korea is to discredit ideological competitors through the propagation of dogma which treats the warts of all societies as uniquely present in those of communism and absent in those of capitalism.

1. See Robert Dreyfus, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Holt Paperbacks, 2005 and Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, Serpent’s Tail, 2010.

2. Domenico Losurdo. War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century. Verso. 2015. p 58.

3. Stephen Gowans, “South Korea’s Police State Wages War on Proponents of Democracy,” what’s left, January 27, 2015.

4. Sebnem Arsu, “Internet filters set off protests around Turkey”, The New York Times, May 15, 2011.

5. Ravi Somaiya, “In Britain, a meeting on limiting social media”, The New York Times, August 25, 2011.

6. “Tell Parliament-defeat police state bill C-51!”, People’s Voice, February 5, 2015.

7. Salim Lamrani, “The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez,” MRZine, December 11, 2009.

8. Aida Calviac Mora, “With Obama in the White House, the blockade hasn’t changed at all”, Granma International, September 16, 2010; Thomas Kenny, “Interview with Thomas Kenny co-author of Socialism of ‘Betrayed Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991,” PoliticalEconomy.ie, March 16, 2015.

9. Kenny.

10. Ryan Dube, “Cubans get a tantalizing taste of the internet,” The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2015.

11. Lamrani.

12. Lamrani.

13. Dube.

14. Jeffrey Fleishman, “In Egypt, a blogger tries to spread ‘culture of disobedience’ among youths,” The Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2009.

15. Jay Solomon and Felicia Schwartz, “U.S. rebukes Saudis for sentencing blogger to 1,000 lashes,” The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2014.

16. Carol E. Lee and Gordon Lubold, “U.S. seeks to allay concerns of allies on Iran nuclear deal,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2015.

17. Losurdo, p. 312.

18. Gowans.

19. Losurdo, p. 312.

Promoting Plutocracy: U.S.-Led Regime Change Operations and the Assault on Democracy

January 11, 2015

PROMOTING PLUTOCRACY
By Stephen Gowans

Chapter 1. What the West’s Position on Iran Reveals about its Foreign Policy
Chapter 2. Democracy
Chapter 3. Foreign Policy and Profits
Chapter 4. The State in Capitalist Society
Chapter 5. Concealing the Influence of the Corporate Elite on Foreign Policy
Chapter 6. Syria: Eradicating an Ideological Fixation on Socialism
Chapter 7. Ukraine: Improving the Investment Climate
Chapter 8. Kosovo: Privatizing the Economy
Chapter 9. Afghanistan: Investment Opportunities in Pipelines and Natural Resources
Chapter 10. The Military-Industrial Complex, Foreign Aid and Marionettes
Chapter 11. How Foreign Policy Hurts Workers
o Divide and Rule
o Socializing the Costs, Privatizing the Benefits
o The Assault on Substantive Democracy in Korea
o The Terrorism of the Weak
o Bulking Up the Police State
o Obviating the Terrorism of the Weak
Chapter 12. The West’s Foreign Policy Priorities

Cuba: Still Making It Tough To Screw Others

By Stephen Gowans

New York Times reporter Damien Cave has written an article about changes that will allow Cubans to buy and sell their homes.

Cave seems to criticize the plans because they’ll likely outlaw real-estate-related social parasitism, limit “opportunities for profits and loans,” and prohibit foreign ownership.

“The plan outlined by the state media,” he writes, “would suppress the market by limiting Cubans to one home or apartment and requiring full-time residency.”

Gasp!

Cave seems ruefully pessimistic that budding entrepreneurs—both Cuban and foreign—will have much chance to get rich flipping Cuban properties. “Some Cubans expect rules forcing buyers to hold properties for five or 10 years,” he writes.

“Others say the government will make it hard to take profits off the island, through exorbitant taxes or limits on currency exchange.”

And Cave points to one Cuban who “cannot imagine a real open market,” anticipating, instead, that the government will set a per square foot price.

Finally, there’s a “thorny” issue that threatens to dampen the zeal of even the most ambitious social parasite: Evictions are outlawed.

How’s anyone to get rich on the backs of others under this plan?

A failed system’s failed promises

By Stephen Gowans

With Communism’s demise, and the return of Warsaw Pact countries to the capitalist fold, the world was promised a new age of peace and prosperity. The shadow of war would lift. Military expenditures would be cut back, and troops would be brought home from Cold War postings. There would be more money for new wars — on poverty and homelessness, this time. And capitalism, the single sustainable model of success (it had, after all, emerged triumphant in a decades-long battle with Communism) would deliver the poor from poverty, and bless the world with a bonanza of consumer goods.

Talk about failed predictions.

In place of peace, we got the lone remaining superpower waging war to sweep up the few remaining stragglers that continued to resist integration into the US dominated global economy. Iraq was conquered, at the expense of countless dead, homeless, mangled and ruined; campaigns of intrigue and bombing in the former Yugoslavia pushed the region into the US orbit; and a war on Afghanistan continues to blast away thousands of peasants but cements a US military presence in a Central Asia pregnant with the promise of oil and gas wealth. Wars on Iran and north Korea are real possibilities.

Today, the United States is asserting its military might over the face of the globe more audaciously than ever. There are 368,000 US troops deployed in nearly 130 countries around the world. (1) US citizens think their military protects their interests abroad and defends host countries from threats. They rarely pause to wonder whether what’s called “their” interests are really their own personal interests or those of people who live in bigger houses and get bigger tax breaks and have sizeable investment portfolios. Nor do they make a habit of wondering how it is that with the US exercising a virtual military monopoly over the world, host countries could be under a threat so imminent they would require a US force presence. Exactly which of the tiny collection of countries not hosting US troops are threatening the remaining 130?

Could it be that US troops gird the globe to enforce the access of US firms and investors to the land, labor, markets and resources of others? Do “our” interests equate to Iraq’s oil, Indochina’s tin, Central Asia’s natural gas, Kosovo’s mines, the Balkan’s pipeline routes, Africa’s treasure trove of minerals and oil, and Indonesia’s sweatshops? “A lot of people forget,” remarked Alexander Haig, former Supreme Commander of NATO and Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, that the presence of US troops in Europe is “the bona fide of our economic success…it keeps European markets open to us. If those troops weren’t there, those markets would probably be more difficult to access.” (2) A lot of people forget, because they were told something quite different: That US troops were stationed in Europe to deter a Soviet invasion, not to put a gun to the head of Europeans to keep their markets invitingly open to US firms and investors. The obvious question, With the threat of a Soviet invasion long passed, why are US troops still there?, is rarely asked. So it doesn’t really matter that we’ve forgotten. The most blatant of Washington’s latest exercises in imperialism run amok has a similar character. It was said that the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein was hiding banned weapons. None were found. But US forces stay in Iraq anyway, to ensure the conquered country remains the refashioned paragon of free markets and free trade Washington’s policy makers have turned it into.

Which is to say, the emergence of US capitalism triumphant hasn’t given us peace, as promised; it has given us a bold US military prepared to wage war. And it seems to be waging war to facilitate US capital settling everywhere, nestling everywhere and establishing connections everywhere, to paraphrase a shockingly topical passage from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a document whose irrelevance was said to have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt when the Berlin Wall was razed to the ground. Yet, today, it seems to be more relevant than ever; certainly more relevant than when a competing ideology forced the stewards of capitalism to tidy up the image of their vaunted system lest the rabble get it into their heads that they could do better. It’s said in newspapers and on TV that Washington’s wars have to do with fighting terrorism, but the documents which define the US national security strategy are long on paeans to free markets and free trade and capitalism and short on concrete measures to protect the lives of US citizens from attacks by radicalized West Asians bearing legitimate grievances against the United states. On the contrary, the strategy is a recipe for provoking terrorist attacks.

images — Marx and Engels: While the irrelevance of Communist Manifesto was said to have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt when the Berlin Wall was razed to the ground, today it seems to be more relevant than ever

Bourgeois society,” to use Marx’s and Engels’ phrase, hasn’t given us prosperity either, unless by “us,” you mean the people who own and control the economy. For the bulk of humanity things are a lot worst materially than they were when communists, socialists, and nationalists kept upsetting the capitalist apple cart by bringing vast tracks of national economies under public control, and putting the public welfare ahead of the profit interests of bondholders and investors.

According to the United Nations, 54 countries are poorer today than they were in 1990, about the time Communism was declared failed, and capitalism lionized as the single sustainable model of success. More children under the age of five are dying in 14 countries, and enrollment in primary schools is down in 12. Extreme poverty remains the fate of over one billion people. And in former Soviet republics — cradle to what has been dismissed as a failed system — poverty had tripled one decade into their liberation from Communism. Seventeen countries in Eastern Europe and the countries that made up the former Soviet Union have hardly become dynamos of prosperity, which should leave anyone with an ounce of gray matter wondering by what standard success is measured; surely not by the majority’s well-being. (3)

After having been demonized for decades by a capitalist establishment bent on making Communism radioactive (along with anyone so cavalier about their standing in polite society to utter a kind word about it) it’s sometimes forgotten, if ever apprehended in the first place, how impressive Communism’s economic achievements were…and still are, considering the barren and poisoned ground in which the lone holdouts have been forced to eke out precarious existences.

Let’s start with the most reviled of the hold-outs: north Korea. The idea that north Korea is a threat to the United States is about as believable as the idea that a colony of ants is a threat to the elephant whose foot hovers three inches over its hill. North Korea hasn’t a single solider stationed outside its borders. Washington, on the other hand, has 37,000 troops deployed, on, or near, the north Korean border, 65,000 troops stationed in nearby Japan, the Seventh Fleet lurking in nearby waters, and bombers within striking distance. It has dismissed Pyongyang’s pleas to sign a nonaggression treaty, declaring bizarrely that it will not succumb to blackmail. And what has north Korea done to threaten the United States (or to blackmail the country)? It has fired up a mothballed nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons grade material, and withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but only after Washington reneged on an agreement to build light water reactors and provide fuel oil shipments. And only after Washington issued a virtual declaration of war, designating north Korea part of “an axis of evil.”

Could a north Korea with one or two crude nuclear bombs pose much of a threat to the United States poised to strike with overwhelming force? Quite the other way around. Indeed, north Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons can be said to be a rational response to an overwhelming US threat. And there have been plenty of signs the threat is real.

“This is just the beginning,” a Bush administration official told the New York Times, after US and British troops marched on Baghdad. “I would not rule out the same sequence of events for Iran and north Korea as for Iraq.” (4) The Pak Tribune cited CIA sources that revealed a “list of countries where replacement of government has been declared essential.” (5) The list included north Korea. US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton, warned Pyongyang to “draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.” (6) It has. “The DPRK (north Korea) would have already met the same miserable fate as Iraq’s had it compromised its revolutionary principle and accepted the demand raised by the imperialists and its followers for ‘nuclear inspection’ and disarmament,” declared the official daily of the ruling Korean Workers Party, Rodong Sinmun. (7) Later, the government issued this statement: “The Iraqi war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent.” (8)

Washington ultra-hawk, Paul Wolfowitz, anticipating similar words US Secretary of state Hilary Clinton would utter seven years later, warned, “north Korea is headed down a blind alley. Its pursuit of nuclear weapons will not protect it from the real threat to its security, which is the (internal) implosion brought about by the total failure of its system. Indeed the diversion of scarce resources to nuclear weapons and other military programs can only exacerbate the weakness of the (government).” (9) So what’s the choice? Head down a blind alley, or turn over the country to Washington, and the multinational corporations it represents? Who’s the blackmailer?

History has not been kind to the tiny country. The mountainous north was once the center of the peninsula’s heavy industry, the south its breadbasket. The Korean War, which saw US bombers destroy every building in the north over one story, changed that. The north was reduced to rubble. But it rebuilt, and until the 1980s, outpaced the south economically. By 1961, it was self-sufficient in agriculture. North Korean children were better vaccinated than their counterparts in the United States, according to the World Health Organization and United Nations, who commended the country for its delivery of health care. And life expectancy was higher than in the capitalist south. (10)

Then disaster struck. The socialist trading bloc collapsed, depriving Pyongyang of its major trading partners. Oil subsidies from Russia ended. And if that weren’t enough, floods and droughts ravaged crops. Famine followed. But, for a time, the country had enjoyed impressive material gains, an affirmation of what can be achieved outside the capitalist system, even where resources are diverted to defense against an unrelenting foe than remains poised on your borders to strike. Imagine what the country could have achieved without the United States breathing fire down its neck.

Cuba, in many respects, fits the same mold: Astonishing social and economic gains under a communist government, the implacable and unrelenting hostility of the United States, and some backsliding after the collapse of its major trading partners. (The United States has maintained an economic blockade for half a century.) Still, despite these challenges, Cuba is a much kinder and egalitarian place today than it was before the revolution, under the rule of the US-backed Batista regime, when the country’s economy was an appendage of that of the United States. The United States fears Cuba, journalist Seamus Milne observes, not because it is a threat to the safety of US citizens, but because it’s an example of what can be accomplished outside the US dominated capitalist model. (11 )

In 1953, the illiteracy rate in Cuba exceeded 22 percent. Today it is under one percent. Three percent of those over the age of 10 had a secondary school education. Today, almost 60 percent do. Back then, at the height of the sugar harvest, when unemployment was lowest, eight percent were jobless. Today, the unemployment rate is three percent, making Cuba one of the few countries in the world to boast full employment.

Well over 80 percent own their own homes, and pay no taxes. The remainder pays a nominal rent.

No other country has as many teachers per capita. Education is free through university. The country also provides free university educations to 1,000 Third World students every year. And classroom sizes put those of Western industrialized countries to shame.

Health care is free. And while the United States has deployed over 300,000 troops in almost 130 countries to keep markets open to US investment, Cuba has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93 Third World countries to heal the sick. (12)

Infant mortality is lower than in any other Third World country and even some Western capitalist countries (it’s higher in Washington, DC.) Life expectancy is 76 years, and is expected to rise. (13) By comparison, the return of capitalism has pushed life expectancy down in former communist countries.

These gains, seldom mentioned in the United States, place the country head and shoulders above other Latin American countries firmly ensconced in the US orbit, for which Washington’s single sustainable model of success continues to deliver grinding poverty, misery, and gross inequality, but the profits necessary to keep the capitalist system afloat and the capitalist class awash in mansions, retinues of servants, stables of luxury cars, exclusive schools and private clubs.

There are elections, and, contrary to Washington’s anti-Cuba propaganda, Cubans do vote. But they don’t choose among two largely identical parties, as in the United States, where the parties, and their candidates, are almost invariably in thrall to, or are representatives of, the capitalist class. As for human rights, Cuba stands as a model of what can be achieved by way of economic and social rights, the basic rights to food, housing, clothing, health care, education and jobs, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but not recognized as human rights in the United States. (14) Washington, on the other hand, has made a fetish of civil and political liberties, which, in the case of its relations with Cuba, has everything to do with giving its agents in the country, mistakenly called “independent” journalists and “independent” librarians (they’re not independent of Washington, which bankrolls their activities), room to maneuver to organize destabilization, with the object of overthrowing the revolution and banishing economic and social rights in favor of investors’ rights. That Cuba, a poor country, has been able to guarantee the right to food, clothing, shelter, health care, education and jobs, despite trying economic circumstances and US hostility, can be seen as extraordinary, or simply what can be readily accomplished outside the strictures of capitalism. If a poor Third World country, harassed by a powerful neighbor, can deliver high quality health care and education for free, why can’t the world’s richest country do the same? The answer: Capitalism drives towards better profits, not better lives.

Ever since the US-dominated global economy has, with the collapse of Eastern Bloc Communism over 10 years ago, more boldly sought purchase everywhere, US military imperialism has run amok, wars of aggression have been started, and poor, and formerly communist, countries have become poorer. The leaders of the Western world declare capitalism to be the single sustainable model of success, but countries that rejected capitalism, and committed to egalitarianism, have done better in terms of guaranteeing economic and social rights than comparison countries, despite difficult circumstances. Meanwhile, those that have rejected egalitarianism in favor of a return to capitalism have regressed. The promises of peace and prosperity that attended Communism’s collapse were a fraud based in the self-interest of a narrow band of wealthy people in the world’s richest countries. That it is a fraud is richly evident in the failed promises and dismal record of the post-communist era.

1. “Where are the Legions? Global Deployments of US Forces,” GlobalSecurity.Org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/global-deployments.htm)
2. UPI, January 7, 2002.
3. “UN report says one billion suffer extreme poverty,” World Socialist Web Site, July 28, 2003.
4. “Pre-emption: Idea With a Lineage Whose Time Has Come,” The New York Times, March 23, 2003.
5. “Iran to be US next target: CIA report,” Pak Tribune (Online) March 24, 2003.
6. “U.S. Tells Iran, Syria, N. Korea ‘Learn from Iraq,” Reuters, April 9, 2003.
7. “North Korea vows to make no concessions,” Agence France-Presse, March 29, 2003.
8. “Administration Divided Over North Korea,” The New York Times, April 21, 2003.
9. “Wolfowitz Visits US Military Base In Korean Buffer Zone,” AFP, June 1, 2003.
10. “Peace, the real resolution to famine in North Korea, ZNet, July 23, 2003.
11. “Why the US fears Cuba,” The Guardian, July 31, 2003.
12. Ibid.
13. Speech by Fidel Castro on the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks, July 26, 2003.
14. Karen Lee Wald, “Democracy, Cuba-Style,” Canadian Dimension, July/August, 2003.

Originally written in August 2003, revised and updated May 2010.

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