At this year’s State of the Union, Joe Biden had a narrative to sell the people of the U.S. Empire: According to Biden’s story, when he entered office, the economy was reeling, but now, under his tenure as President, the economy is on the mend, with millions of new jobs “created” in the last two years, and unemployment at historic lows — nevermind the ongoing housing and cost-of-living crisis, the continual depression of wages, a crisis of overproduction and waste, and an impending financial crash. According to Biden, the COVID-19 pandemic is over; in Biden’s story, COVID-19 isn’t still killing thousands of people every week, while the Biden regime stands by, condemning those thousands to death. According to Biden, “our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken” two years after Trump’s attempted coup d’état of January 6th, 2021 — nevermind that basic human, civil, and democratic rights for women, LGBT people, and Black people are under assault in courts and legislatures and police departments at every level of government across the U.S. Empire. According to Biden, his administration has “defended a stronger and safer Europe” by funneling billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine’s fascist Zelenskyy regime, to fuel the ongoing proxy-war between NATO and the Russian Federation.

As we will see, Biden’s narrative is a simple one: consolidation. Although the regime toyed with, for example, undermining the right-fascist capture of the Supreme Court by adding new, left-leaning justices through a planned expansion of the court by adding new, left-leaning justices, that plan was never really on the table. Biden allowed it to be leaked to the press, publicly announced he was considering it, and even went so far as to appoint a commission to study the subject. Instead, we have a morass of half-measures designed to stabilize the dangerously out-of-kilter economy and social environment into a new equilibrium, one that is substantially rightward of where it stood in January of 2016. That is the actual function and outcome of the Democratic strategy of “compromise.” Above all, this State of the Union Address is an effort to rally the fractious and divided masters of the country, to get them all on the same page, to restore the shaken stability of capitalist class-rule in the face of increased labor agitation and rising consciousness of governmental misdeeds.

And who does Biden look forward to compromising with? His State of the Union begins with an effusive congratulations to GOP Senator Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy was one of the most vocal defenders of the now-disgraced Trump regime. He voted to strip $500 million from abortion funding. He voted against the house resolution to condemn racism against Asians because he believed the COVID-19 virus was created by or in China. He was part of the planned legislative assault on LGBT people and supported the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to deny legal recognition to same-sex couples — indeed, went so far as to join in a legal brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of that heinous act. 

As Biden said: Congratulations, Mr. McCarthy! 

Already, media conglomerate Comcast, through one of its many media arms, MSNBC, has already begun casting the State of the Union as a triumph, and Biden’s recognition of shared class interest with his Republican siblings as “savvy” and “quick-witted.” Thus, should the GOP-fraction come to an agreement with the Democrat-fraction, Biden’s regime will be able to say that they engineered this unity. Should they fight, the words of unity will be cast either as sarcastic and biting or as a heartfelt plea that was snubbed by childish Republicans. Fundamentally, this introduction was an effort at bridge-building, at reminding the GOP (or at least its center and left wing) that the real interests of the ruling class are shared interests.

The new House Minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, delivered high praise by Biden during the speech is, of course, a member of the Clintonite New Democrat Coalition — a caucus within the Democratic Party that brought Bill Clinton to power in the 1990s and saw the wholesale dismantling of economic regulation in the private sector, the passage of anti-Black “anti-crime” bills during the Clinton period, of which Biden was himself a prominent partisan crusader in the Senate — and that collectively joined the GOP as a Democratic voting block just last week to pass the atrocious, a-historical, reactionary  resolution “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.”

The typical response from the professional mainstream media pundits and “analysts,” who turn public dissection of ruling-class discourse into a hobby and a sport, to this kind of in-club back-slapping and glad-handing is that  “compromise” is necessary for advancing any agenda in  the U.S. political arena. This obsession of the Democratic Party with unity between the center-left and the center-right serves as a convenient shield for ruling-class ambitions. This broader attitude is merely the wide application of that principle: the unity of the interest of the ruling class. Compromise is based on shared goals. It cannot be achieved by enemies unless they share interests; the interests shared by Biden and the Republicans (up to, but not including, the most extreme-right, which we will address further on) are the basic interests of the ruling class. All Republicans and Democrats share these interests in common, and Biden will carefully and specifically spell out those things they share throughout the course of this speech. This is ruling class language at its finest, even though Biden has barely said anything yet.

Throughout his entire speech, Biden referred to Americans as a nationality, as a “nation.” This is common in U.S. discourse, but why does that matter — in other words, why point that out? In actuality, the U.S. isn’t a single nation, nor is there any “American people.” The U.S. is a settler-colonial empire, a grand prison-house of nations, a vast expanse of stolen land, in which many Indigenous nations are subjugated, oppressed, and hyper-exploited, either as colonies or semi-colonies. 

This idea of the “melting pot” became a shibboleth after the First World War to encourage the complete assimilation of most European and some Asian immigrants (although not, at that time, the former slaves of New Africa, or this continent’s Indigenous peoples, or newer Black and brown migrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, or various “undesirables”) into the white Anglo-American “nation”. This “American” white nationalism was supported by no less prolific a fascist as Henry Ford, who founded the English School in 1914 for just this purpose — that is, to transform his immigrant workers into “true Americans.” Ford’s graduation ceremony saw his workers step off a symbolic immigrant ship, pass through a melting pot, discarding their “ethnic” clothing — the last vestiges of the lands, cultures, and languages they left behind, and end their “transformation” dressed in identical suits, waving American flags.

But why this lie? Why is this American melting pot imagery deployed here by Biden? Because the Democratic strategy relies on class-collaboration not only between the white working class, the white petit-bourgeoisie, and the ruling capitalists, but also between the nationally oppressed peoples. How often have we heard that, for instance, Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democrat? Here, in a few swift and well-calculated words, Black Americans — New Africans — are stripped of their nation and join the hundreds of Indigenous peoples, the subject and exploited Puerto Ricans, the captured Chicanx, and the many many refugees fleeing U.S. imperialist violence who were drawn to the stability at the eye of the world-wide storm of U.S. murder; and all of these groups are erased to become simply “Americans.”

The lie of a unified America stands in direct contrast to reality, to the actual, economic truth in the U.S. The different nations imprisoned within the U.S. Empire are subject to intense economic exploitation by the Anglo-American capitalists. Black property is stolen every day, Black lives destroyed for the benefit of white financiers, and the same goes for Latine and Indigenous lives and property. Pretending everyone living within the borders of the empire is part of the same nation is only one of many ways of saying that everyone living here is equal before the law — the biggest lie of all.

Much of Biden’s speech was occupied with hammering on the apparent achievements of his administration in triumphing over COVID, restoring the economy, etc. But COVID is not over, despite the pronouncements of regime propagandists and Biden himself. Even the opponents of the Biden administration pretend the disease has been “defeated” or was never that big of a problem to begin with. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thousands die each week from complications related to the pandemic. Many thousands more are permanently damaged or disabled by the disease. The virus continues to mutate and change so rapidly that the new variants are no longer named, merely given identifying combinations of letters and numbers. Because the capitalist state refuses to take the necessary measures to put an end to the pandemic, it not only continues on, but threatens to break out anew in ever-more deadly and virulent forms.

The capitalist economy is on anything but firm footing. It hasn’t recovered from COVID; in fact, it’s been demonstrably rotten since the 2008 financial crisis. Economists (who are themselves presently all combinations of capitalist propagandist and diviner in some degree or another) grew used to the prevailing post-2008 conditions of the financial markets, in particular a persistent near-0% federal funds rate. From 2008 to 2020, the federal funds rate was kept below 2.5% to make credit easy to come by, and to stimulate investment in risky business prospects. Prior to that 2008 crisis, the federal funds rate floated between 2% and 6% at any given time.

The COVID crisis, which necessitated the shutdown of most elements of the cycle of production to be even partially contained, has exposed the rot at the core of the U.S. financial markets. Only through massive quantitative easing (the buyback of government bonds using freely-extended credit from the Federal Reserve to pump new money, in the form of credit, into the bank and investment spheres), the removal of the overnight bank funding rate, the lifting of the bank reserve requirement (meaning they do not have to keep sufficient cash on hand to cover any given withdrawal), and the termination of most financial regulations kept the U.S. market afloat during the all-too-brief shutdown. The result is that, of all circulating U.S. currency today, 2/3rds of it was created within the last 2 years.

This massive increase to the money supply has gone entirely to the super-wealthy and their investment agencies like Blackrock. The result has been an inflationary spiral. More currency in circulation without a rise in the number of commodities also circulating means prices must go up.

We’ve seen efforts to contain this financial disaster in the sudden and precipitous raising of the federal funds rate by the Federal Reserve. This rate shows no sign of slowing down, and has been raised at every subsequent Federal Reserve meeting for the past year. The current rate is 4.5%, the highest it’s been since October 31, 2007.

The historical unity of the ruling class is realized in the state. Biden then moves on to celebrate shared victories achieved by a combination of Democrats and Republicans. So what issues are the Biden regime proud of “coming together” on? The first is the safety of Europe, or in other words, the nearly-decade long assault on the freedom and security of the Ukrainian and Russian people. Never to look a gift horse in the mouth, the Biden regime and its predecessors not only managed to install a Banderite-fascist government in Kiev, it has also attacked its own allies in Germany and France, forcing their peoples into ruinous de-industrialization by switching from Russian oil to good old U.S. liquified petroleum gas.

The other things of which he claimed to be proud are the Electoral Count Reform Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, and the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

The Electoral Count Reform Act is an update of an 1887 law that adds safeguards against elector fraud during the presidential election; it does nothing to address the growing threat of right-fascist capture of the executive office. It merely clarifies obscure procedural details and ensures the vice president has no say in the outcome of a presidential election. Having been secure in their power for over 200 years, the U.S. politician is a great believer in procedure. Procedural niceties make the politician comfortable, assure them that all is well, even when their settler-empire is collapsing around their ears. Never mind, no, never mind that the Electoral College itself is the embodiment of the white supremacist demands of slavers, and today embodies bourgeois class-supremacy. Never mind that! We only need to fix down the right procedure for making it fair.

The cowardly vacillation in the face of the impending court-driven crisis that threatens the marriages and the legal marriageability of millions of gay and lesbian couples as well as so-called inter-racial couples by the Democrats and Biden himself was resolved with the totally unsatisfactory Respect for Marriage Act. Rather than enshrining the legal right for all sexuality and nationally oppressed couples to marry in every state in the United States, the act merely ensures that if and when the Supreme Court overturns its landmark Obergefell case — which the court has signaled is only a matter of time — the majority of states that do not recognize gay and lesbian marriages will be required to recognize any that are contracted in states that do. 

The Violence Against Women Act, despite its progressive wording (although its name is curiously lacking any words indicating that it’s meant to stop violence) is actually a vehicle through which the Congress grants $225 million to police and courts to more stringently enforce existing laws. It should not be forgotten that the single demographic most likely to engage in domestic violence are the very police officers the act gives extra funding. The latest renewal of the act extends its “protections” into Indigenous communities that, under Biden’s watch, have had their sovereignty in law enforcement stripped from them by the right-fascist Supreme Court.

Above all, Biden sounded that old fascist drumbeat, the reveille of white-supremacist America. The threat of the “good jobs” going abroad to Asia leaving, as Biden and his fascist coreligionists frame it, a denuded and feeble economy of service jobs. But if there are two words that have always gone together in fascist jargon, they are nation and race. Biden does not here say the word race, but it can be read into the American nation; what is the American nation, in the eyes of the president of the United States? Not the men and women disproportionately jailed by the police, but the white businessmen and defense contractors, snug in their walled compounds of suburbia.

The “problem” with production in the U.S. Empire isn’t that the manufacturing jobs have moved abroad. The loss of intermediate manufacturing (that is, transforming raw materials not into finished products but into the commodities that themselves will be used to create the finished products) isn’t a flaw in the imperialist system. It is the outcome of a century of the profit motive grinding against the power of organized labor in the imperialist West.

No imperialist politician can afford to explain this connection, because it would immediately give the lie to all of their social safety net talk. We should be explicit! Intermediate and even some finished manufacturing jobs have moved overseas because the wages required to hire laborers in the U.S. are too high to maintain the rate of profit the capitalist owners have come to expect — to demand. In exchange for cheap commodities manufactured abroad, there has been a kind of unwritten agreement between the business leaders and white labor. You get cheap phones, cars, refrigerators, electricity, and the cushiest high-end technical jobs are reserved for you here in the U.S. Empire. In exchange, the capitalists get to reap the benefits of labor arbitrage between the low cost of labor in the imperialized periphery (one of the reasons the U.S. keeps bombing these countries is to keep the cost of living, and therefore wages, low).

All throughout the 1990s, the Democrats official position was that this process was actually good. They used coded terms like “technological jobs” and “technological advantage” and told the entire U.S. population that all we had to do was “learn to code” and the United States Empire would reign over the global economy as a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats. It’s only now that the network of exploitation underlying the imperialist lifestyle is showing its cracks, only now that the truth is indisputable, only now that we are remembering that even in a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats with all of its basic industry exported to the poorest sectors of the world, that there will still have to be a construction industry, a transport industry, a personal service industry, that the Democrats have desperately begun trying to recapture the loyalty of manufacturing workers.

This is what the Democrat pundits mean when they say that Biden is the most labor-friendly president since FDR: when bourgeois politicians say “labor friendly,” they don’t mean that they will vindicate labor agitation in the face of the owning class, they mean that they will help “stimulate” the economy such that more people will be hired. Biden hits this theme over and over again, and in reality it’s no different from the GOP rhetoric about “job creators.”

Biden made a laughable claim that inflation was “coming down.” Inflation, in fact, is not “coming down.” The Consumer Price Index, that is the price of a basket of common consumer items used to estimate overall inflation, has been climbing steadily since the economy reopened after the all-too-brief COVID shutdown in 2020. Perhaps what Biden’s speechwriters meant, in typical political-speak (read: lies) was that the speed of inflation was slowing. A car traveling at 100 miles-per-hour that gains 20 miles-per-hour in the first minute (to reach a speed of 120 mph), 10 miles-per-hour in the second minute (to reach a speed of 130 mph), and 5 miles-per-hour in the third minute (you guessed it, 135 mph) isn’t slowing down. It’s a fatal accident waiting to happen.

The administration is sensitive to the economic crisis that is building within both the financial markets and the consumer markets. That’s why Biden went on to tout his regime’s plan to strengthen the domestic technology economy with ludicrous statements about microchip and semiconductor manufacturing (although you wouldn’t be able to tell, listening to Professor Biden, that there was a difference between a microchip — an integrated circuit composed of semiconductors linked together — and a semiconductor — a material that has specific electrical properties and which makes up the components of a microchip).

Despite lying about the pace of inflation, the president then had to specifically identify the manufacturing crisis that’s leading to the inflation in the price of all commodities that make use of microchips. In the Western imperialist centers, and particularly in the U.S. Empire where excess is a way of life, everything contains microchips, because almost every commodity has a computer installed in it.

But Biden’s speechwriters were once again thinking of more than just the average worker when they wrote this passage. It’s also a message to Biden’s fellow Democratic warmongers and Western-based microchip manufacturers that the slowly boiling trade war with the People’s Republic of China is heating up. We can never let this happen again, Biden said — meaning, the rise in prices that resulted from trade sanctions against the People’s Republic microchip sector. For Biden, microchip manufacturing can be used to sound like he’s restoring the old Democratic contract with labor while also signaling his intent to pursue economic independence from the People’s Republic; together with  his other policies it’s clear why: the Democrats foresee increased economic warfare against China and the non-aligned bloc it represents.

Nevermind that semiconductor manufacturing threatens to collapse an already overburdened water supply system in the U.S. Nevermind that part of the rise in prices of semiconductors is directly attributable to the ill-planned visits of U.S. lawmakers to the island of Taiwan in violation of U.S. treaty obligations with the People’s Republic and subsequent sanctions from the People’s Republic in retaliation prohibiting the manufacturers on Taiwan from importing the all-important quartz sand necessary for their production.

And what role have Biden and the Democratic Party played in combating environmental degradation? More oil and gas drilling approvals than under Trump. Going ahead with the ConocoPhillips plan to drill in Alaska. In fact, far from “tackling the climate crisis,” the Inflation Reduction Act requires the federal government to lease 60 million acres of federal land for fossil fuel extraction every year, which will continue to expand the disastrous emission of greenhouse gasses. And, most horrifically and most recently, the Biden government has caused the worst-ever ecological crisis in United States history.

In the Biden government’s efforts to, one supposes, retain the image of most labor-friendly president since FDR, Biden himself crushed a rail strike last year. Many of the demands of the near-striking rail workers went directly to the safety of the country’s many trains: longer hours, no leave time, no sick time, fewer workers, and fewer safety precautions have resulted in the terrifying derailment of a train carrying vinyl chloride. As a result, Ohio is now filled with toxic phosgene gas and other fumes, the groundwater has been poisoned, and a noxious pillar of black smoke is now rising from the ruined train.

Part of the plan of stabilization and consolidation is the punishment of the most flagrant exploiters, those who are the most exposed in the eyes of the public for gouging the working masses. This was Biden’s next talking point. But, this selective punishment is not out of goodwill or empathetic concern for working people. It is a feature of any system of exploitation that, when its excesses become too egregious, fall too much outside of the accepted norms, that where even other exploiters take notice and wrinkle their noses, the system itself as the representative of the corporate, collective power of the ruling classes takes action to curb them. Too naked a pattern of exploitation, too obvious and flagrant a system of abuse, and it threatens to expose the injustices that are the basis upon which society is founded. That’s what Biden is expressing here, although he’s claiming that “capitalism without competition is not capitalism” as his cover.

In fact, the steady suppression of competition is one of the key features of capitalism. This process is called concentration of production and capital. It is the tendency of competition to drive smaller capitalists out of business, to have their factories, shopfronts, and what-not bought up by the bigger capitalists. As technological breakthroughs in more and more efficient machines mean that any new capitalists have to put up more and more starting capital, small capitalists are barred from competing because they simply can’t scrape together enough money to buy the latest lathe or die-stamping tool.

Competition produces concentration, and in this way, destroys the conditions of competition themselves. Biden is talking like a capitalist of the 19th century — or, perhaps even more accurately, like a fascist of the early 20th century. Let’s look at another speech: “We no longer have the struggle for life, free competition, the selection of the fittest. We note the first symptoms of fatigue and deviation in the capitalistic world. The era of cartels, syndicates, combines, and trusts now begins….The end of free competition…. The very law of supply and demand is no longer a dogma, for cartels and trusts make it possible to influence both supply and demand.” That eerily similar sentiment comes not from our friend Mr. Biden, but from his early 20th-century counterpart, Mr. Mussolini.

There was another topic that he could not avoid: the increase of violence on the part of the U.S. capitalist police state. In one breath during his speech, Biden pretended to care about the rampant abuse and murder of his capitalist police, and then applauded more stringent laws that will enable the police to abuse and murder untold thousands. Gun control is the dialectical compliment of the settler police force, but a Democrat like Biden cannot or will not draw the connection.

In fact, in 1994 then-senator Biden worked with some of the most vile open segregationists remaining in the United States government to pass legislation eerily similar to the 1960s gun control legislation of California, passed to prevent Black Panthers from arming their cop-watch patrols. In fact, what Biden said then, in 1994, wasn’t that he was trying to find common-sense gun control. What he said was “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” That same year he compared himself to Richard Nixon. “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Lock the S.O.B.s up. That’s the true face of U.S. gun control policy, and the true face of Joseph Robinette Biden.

He also launched a plan to engage in a crusade against fentanyl. This isn’t even simple consolidation of the right-ward shift of the country, it is an intensification of the white terror. Biden’s fentanyl crusade is creating the very problem it pretends to be combatting. It’s well known that once the ban on the sale of alcohol was a fait accomplis in the early 20th century that many politicians in the U.S. prepared to reap the rewards by establishing what were in essence large criminal production networks. It will come as no surprise in 50 years when it is revealed that the politicians by and large responsible for the War on Drugs are shown to have been among its primary beneficiaries.

If you weren’t yet totally exhausted by Biden’s fascistic talking points, he followed this up with plans for closing the borders to “unwanted migration” from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, New border plans? What do they include? Biden himself tells us: more money for the fascist border patrols. These border police even went so far as to brutalize immigrants ahead of Biden’s own visit to El Paso, Texas, in order to make the president look better when he arrived. What words did the president and top Democrat just recently use toward those at the border? That’s right, “Do not show up here.”

What about the rest of this criminally negligent speech? The lies contained within it have mostly been addressed by points above, and are so self-evidently false that they require no reproduction by us to demonstrate it. More hot air about fentanyl and the drug war, false promises about curing cancer, and bloviating about the “peaceful” role of NATO in provoking the Russian-Ukraine war, followed by the same “we’re all in this together” pablum peddled by the addle-pated Biden at every campaign rally he’s ever been to, and interspersed throughout every speech he’s ever given.

The most important thing to listen to is the flag-waving surrounding what he cast as the defeat of the January 6th Movement — the petit-bourgeois putsch attempt that stormed the capitol building in Washington, D.C., and could have installed a second Trump administration if its organizers had any idea how successful it was going to be. Biden’s disdain for the putschists is a signal to the remainder of the GOP, and it tells us everything about what he plans to do domestically. His administration’s plan is a clumsy attempt to split the far-right fascists from the right fascists in the GOP and transform the center (straddling both sides of the aisle) into a bloc capable of resisting the right and the moderate left. In other words, Biden is attempting to shore up the crumbling status quo position at the center of government.

In foreign policy, the entire State of the Union is a declaration of war: war on the Russian Federation, which he intends to escalate (and indeed, in the week since giving the speech has already begun escalating) and war, eventually on the People’s Republic of China, which he signaled over and over again with his talk of the United States Empire standing on its own two feet and relying on no one.

So, we have our outline for the final period of the Biden presidency: war, on every front; with enemies foreign and domestic, and between the ruling class and the working classes but with a concomitant peace: peace between the fractious and rebellious groups within the bourgeois ruling class, so they can present a united front. Well, let him draw his sword. We are forging ours.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

Memphis is a city built on slavery. Black African slaves picked the cotton that was shipped up to the city wharfs. Black slaves worked the docks loading the cotton onto the steamboats. From its founding in 1819 until abolition, the buying and selling of slaves was one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. Nathan Bedford Forrest, city alderman, owned a slaving firm that charged between $800 and $1,000 for each individual person sold as chattel. In a good year, Forrest and his partner Byrd Hill sold more than 1,000 slaves, with a net profit of somewhere in the realm of $10,000-$30,000 1850 dollars — the equivalent buying power of $370,000-$1.1m in 2023 dollars.

The city fathers were uneasy — by 1860, there were 16,953 slaves within Shelby County and only 22,000 free whites. The danger to the white slave masters was obvious. None of the slavers nor the enslaved were likely to forget the fate (or the lesson) of Haiti; the enslaved looked to their Haitian brothers for inspiration, while the slavers looked on in horror. A law of 1848 created the office of city marshal. On March 27, 1850, a bill was passed by the government of Memphis that required 

State laws against slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal. 

Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of color. 

Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person. 

Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time.

This was the foundation of the Memphis police department. In 1852, a resolution was passed to furnish the “Day and Night police” with badges and uniforms. By 1857, the city marshal, the same one who was to enforce the anti-slave laws, was made chief of police and, on February 20, 1860, the marshal title was changed to just that: Chief of Police.

Slaves were property, Black men and women who were held and sold as any other piece of property was. The Memphis police force was founded, like every police department in the entire United States, to protect property. In Memphis, it served a double purpose: protecting the investments of property owners, and protecting property owners (slavers) from the rightful vengeance of their own property, the slaves. The legal end of human beings as property didn’t simply extinguish the legacy of slavery. Although the end of the Civil War saw a formal end to the enslavement of Black individuals, new property relations were quickly erected by the white-supremacist ruling classes. In the South, these were created by the Dixiecrats to protect their huge plantations and their monopoly on politics. In the North, these new property relations were primarily the work of industrialists keen to win over the allegiance of a mostly imported, white, European work force, often with the active collaboration of those workers themselves.

Mid 19th-century Memphis was home to a large number of poor Irish laborers, mostly confined to slums and excluded from city politics. City police records often described them as “Irishman; no account” and “low Irishman,” hounding them and dogging their tracks. However, by the late 1850s, Irish settlers coming into the country from New York and other East Coast ports established a foothold in the Memphis business community. In 1861 Ireland-born John Park, who had married a young Bourbon-Dixie widow and was a successful real estate speculator, was elected mayor. Irish settlers soon dominated the city government and were determined to stay in power no matter the cost. After the close of the Civil War, as thousands of Black refugees and soldiers from the embattled regions of the former secessionist states poured into Memphis, the Irish community of the city, conscious of its shaky hold on power when compared with the old Bourbon Dixiecrats, essentially went to war with the new Black community. Irish laborers tried to prevent Black workers from entering the skilled trades. By early 1866, the city was a powder keg.

In January of that year, Mayor Park and Shelby County sheriff T.M. Winters asked Major General George Stoneman to remove his federal troops from the city streets and turn them back over to the Memphis police. In late April, the army discharged the last of its Black  troops at nearby Fort Pickering. They came into South Memphis waiting for their pay vouchers. On May Day a crowd of one hundred or so former soldiers congregated on South Street where they celebrated and discharged their weapons in the air. In the middle of the May celebration, a white wagon driver turning onto South Street crashed into a Black wagon driver; the two men started arguing. The soldiers rushed to the Black driver’s defense, and the Irish police to the white driver’s. Gunfire was exchanged, and soon there was a full-on street battle between former federal soldiers from the Black Union regiments and the Memphis police. Local whites stiffened the police line, joining them with their own weapons as irregulars.

It was only when Maj. Gen. Stoneman’s federal soldiers arrived to separate the sides in the late afternoon that the fighting stopped. With peace more or less restored, two Black soldiers arrested, and the rest still waiting for their pay, the fall of night saw white Memphians swarm into South Memphis and slaughter every Black person they saw. A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

Large numbers of armed citizens repaired to the scene of the fight and commenced firing upon every negro who made himself visible. One negro upon South Street, a quiet, inoffensive laborer, was shot down almost in front of his own cabin, and after life was extinct, his body was fired into, cut and beat in a most horrible manner.

The Memphis police joined the white mob. For two days, white Memphis burned and massacred the Black community in South Memphis. Forty-six Black people had been killed. Two whites had died. Ninety-one Black homes, twelve Black schools, and four Black churches had been burned.

The Police as White Guard

Tyre Nichols was murdered by the Memphis police. The ruling class has been doing its best to try to confine the public dialogue to the five officers their lackeys have indicted. It shouldn’t escape us that these instant suspensions and indictments fell on five Black policemen. But they, the capitalists and their mouthpieces, desperately want (need) you to believe that the capitalist police are a good institution, a necessary institution. A permanent institution. The only way for them to do this is to perform the same sleight-of-hand game they always do. You remember the phrases: “a bad apple,” rogue cops, even whole rogue departments. 

But the young U.S. settler-republic didn’t build police departments. In the English colonies and the early republic, police simply did not exist. By the 1830s and ‘40s, every urban center in the new settler-republic faced crises in public order spurred on by the development of industrial capitalism. All of a sudden, between the 1840s and ‘80s, every major U.S. city built up a large police force. Why? Sam Mitrani answers this question precisely and elegantly in The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894: “The most basic answer is that the leading businessmen who dominated both urban economies and their politics pushed city governments to build powerful armed institutions that could defend their property and their interests from the new threats that accompanied the development of a wage labor economy.”

The police are the frontline, the shock troops, of the capitalist class. The Dixiecrat planters are gone; formal chattel slavery has been abolished. Legal enslavement is now permitted only through the criminal “justice” system and the state’s prisons, where prisoners, disproportionately Black, toil to produce commodities for private corporations. But though the legal framework of slavery is gone, the property relations of race remain, transformed and reconfigured, but no less poisonous. 

Although only 13% of the U.S. population is Black, 38% of all inmates in prison or jail are. Black citizens are disenfranchised by felony convictions at a rate of 5.3 times that of the white population. In the largest 50 metropolitan areas of the country, mortgage denial rates for Black applicants is twice that of the overall population. Black homeownership is lower across the board than white homeownership. Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmland has decreased (gone into foreclosure, been purchased away, etc.) by 90%. Black wage-earners earn 30% less than white wage-earners on average, and Black households have one-eighth the wealth of white households.

These facts of racial inequality are rooted in the property relations of white supremacy. Black-owned property can be seized by the state, by the banks, and by white capitalists and landlords by a variety of legal means much easier than white-owned property can. Who enforces this regime of property rights and relations? Why, the U.S. garrison-police. The hyper-exploited regions of the U.S., those places where Black and Indigenous peoples have been forced by white supremacist zoning, lending, and other laws, are treated as internal frontiers. In the Black Belt and the urban centers, the police don’t serve the local community; they are a foreign garrison, preventing rebellion. Today, nearly 25% of all police officers in the U.S. first serve in the military. The U.S. police force, no matter the state, no matter the municipality, no matter the national composition, is an occupying army. Killer cops aren’t the exception and they aren’t “the bad apple that spoils the bunch.” They are the intended outcome of the policy that unleashes stormtroopers in blue on the streets of every poor and majority-Black neighborhood in every city across the U.S. Empire. The capitalist relies on the law officer and their truncheon just as much as they rely on strikebreaker and the Pinkerton, the warden and the prison walls, and just as much as they rely on their lackeys in the Congress to pass their laws.

These killer cops are the front line of the struggle between capital and labor in the United States. The horrific murder of Tyre Nichols is not an aberration, but a byproduct of a system working as intended. Every day, Black people are tortured, terrorized, and slain by the U.S. police. While the police kill white persons too, they target Black, Indigenous, and Latinx persons at a disproportionately high rate; they swarm majority-minority neighborhoods, always on the lookout for racially oppressed people to brutalize. This is by design. Those groups form the internal colonies or semi-colonies of the U.S. and those nations oppressed by the white settler majority — and it is not stretching the meaning to call it what it is, the U.S. Empire. 

Tyre Nichols now joins the other names of the slain, including Elton Hayes, murdered in much the same fashion by the very same Memphis police, 52 years ago in 1971. But the legacy of murder and terror stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, and it will end only when property relations themselves are reformed. No reform to a capitalist police department can prevent it from being monstrous.

Great Britain drafted colonized subjects into the colonial police. It was the Indian gurkha armies that conquered the princedoms of the subcontinent. The Portuguese and Dutch merchant houses in Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon elevated local merchants to be their agents, their compradors. The same is true of the oppressed who reach a side-deal with the system that oppresses them here in the U.S. Empire. The Black policeman is a colonial turncoat. The Black Democrat mayors of cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis never even try to stand in the way of police militarization and expansion.

James Baldwin warned:

We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—”for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a white one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.

Imperialists always speak with forked tongues, even when they speak the truth. “The war in Ukraine,” the imperialists say, “is a war of Russian aggression. It began in February of 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded the Donbass.” But beware! The imperialist media has no reason to tell “objective” truths. Whether the people reporting on the war know it or not, they’re being used as tools to sell a story to the workers in the West. That story is one the imperialists want you to hear. They pick a point to start their telling: after their own provocations, but before a response. Then they rend their garments and tear their hair, crying about violence and aggression! But what of their responsibility? We never hear of it! Make no mistakes and no equivocations: the Russo-Ukrainian War is the result of a studied policy of aggression pursued by the White House. At every turn, the Euro-Atlantic alliance took steps to heighten tensions between Russia and Ukraine. At every turn, the U.S. imperialists pushed Russia closer to the brink. It was within their power to bring everyone back, to prevent war, to calm tensions; it was simply not within their interests.

If the war didn’t start in February of 2022, when did it begin? What were the provocations and tensions that made it inevitable? Although we could trace its origins back to the imperialist breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the most direct causes of the 2022 war fell into place eight years ago, during the Euromaidan coup that deposed the lawfully elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. In late 2013 and early 2014, the Russian-leaning government of Ukraine was forcibly ousted by CIA-backed Banderists. The economy of Ukraine was at that time oriented almost entirely eastward thanks to the Yanukovych government. 

By 2014, the Eurostates had already been trying to turn Ukraine westward for a decade. Before Yanukovych, President Viktor Yushchenko maneuvered for years to bring Ukraine into the European Union (EU). Yushchenko was aggressive in trying to “contain” the Russian Federation (RF), much to the delight of the Western imperialists. But Yushchenko’s government collapsed in fights with the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s single-house parliament, which scuttled the efforts of the Ukrainian capitalists to further integrate with the West. In 2010 Yushchenko lost the presidency to the RF-friendly Viktor Yanukovych. What kind of man was President Yushchenko, who wanted to bring Ukraine into harmony with the west? One of his final official acts was to award the dead murderer Stepan Bandera the title “Hero of the Ukraine,” celebrating the man who worked in collaboration with the German Nazis to purge the country of Poles and Jews.

In late 2013, the Yanukovych government in Kiev stalled on a trade agreement with the EU that would have gutted the Ukrainian economy and drawn its resources into the more-developed economies of Germany and France. (This kind of economic draining effect had already been seen in the so-called third tier economies of Italy, Spain, and Greece, as the leading EU economy of Germany fattened itself on that of the others.) In order to achieve this refusal, the RF put the squeeze on domestic prices inside Ukraine. Gas prices increased 79% as the Russian Federation applied pressure to prevent a new Euro-oriented trade deal from being ratified. This triggered waves of internal unrest and set the stage for the Euromaidan coup in early 2014.

Ultranationalist political and paramilitary groups like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, the National Corps, and Svoboda took control of the Euromaidan protests. From simple expressions of discontent, the demonstrations were rapidly transformed into a rightist coup. The elections held immediately after the coup were plagued with open corruption and office-purchasing. These are the kinds of “irregularities” a country usually finds itself accused of just prior to a U.S. invasion! Yet here, the elections were applauded by U.S. observers. Among other outrages committed by the new government were the renaming of monuments, streets, and awards in honor of and named after prominent Antisemites and Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, the man President Yushchenko celebrated as he left office. The new, post-coup, interim president, Poroshenko, who had been Yushchenko’s Prime Minister, immediately began attacking the use of the Russian language in Ukraine and supported the slow ethnic cleansing of Russians and Russian speakers taking place in the eastern and primarily Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. His government outlawed Communist symbols and parties in Ukraine and embraced Ukrainian ultranationalism as a credo. In the name of integration with the “liberal” west, the new Ukrainian government launched a crusade that conflated communism with Russian-ness, wielded its new state power like a great hammer that might crush them both. Banderite ultranationalists were placed into the top posts of the Ukrainian government.

Setting the Stage

The story of the Euromaidan and the Russo-Ukrainian war goes back all the way to 1985 with glasnost and perestroika, during which the agents of Western intelligence penetrated deeper and deeper into the ailing Soviet Union and made contact with the black market oligarchs they would use to destabilize and eventually destroy the Soviet states. The history of Western intelligence services interfering with the new “open” Soviet states is too long and complex to cover in this article. Suffice it to say that the crypto-Banderites, who had been lurking underground in Ukraine and waiting for their day, have been cultivated and encouraged for decades by Western intelligence. To clearly understand the course of events leading up to and following the Euromaidan coup, we should turn to 2010 and the relationship between post-Soviet Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the EU.

To fully explore the reasons for the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War, it’s important to understand not only the events of the Euromaidan of 2014, but the shifting position of Ukraine with regard to the EU, and the discovery of oil in the country. Further, we have to understand the deep-seated issue of fascism native to Ukraine and how it affects decision making today. The Ukrainian fascism of Stepan Bandera, Banderism, animates the decision-making of many of the reactionaries now in power.

The roots of many of today’s issues giving rise to the war can be traced back directly to the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko. Viktor Yushchenko was the third president of independent Ukraine. During the 2004-2005 election, Yushchenko’s opponent, Viktor Yanukovich, was initially reported as the winner. Foreign governments and media outlets reported election-rigging, likely as part of a Euro-American plan to shift the country rightward. Yanukovich, as we will see, had been a Soviet administrator who was attempting to develop a semi-independent Ukraine. Yushchenko, a right-wing candidate from the center-right party Our Ukraine, promised to pursue tighter relations with the West and to try to tie the country to the European Union and NATO. As a result of the reports of electoral fraud, massive civil resistance erupted in Kiev and across the country. The U.S. Empire engineered these riots and protests, which even the Guardian reported at the time. “The operation — engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience — is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.”

This has been widely called the “Orange Revolution” and we can see it as a trial-run for what will come when Yanukovich actually manages to win an election in the face of U.S. interference.

The Yukashenko presidency was, as promised to both the people of Ukraine and the ideologues in Washington, characterized by tighter relations with Western Europe, attempts to implement International Monetary Fund (IMF) policy to receive and continue receiving imperialist debt relief, opening agriculture to free market forces, seeking and obtaining NATO membership, membership in the EU, introducing a second house of the Rada to “bring stability” to the government (and we should note that a second parliamentary house, like that of the UK or U.S., is often used for the anti-democratic purpose of defeating popular legislation), the formation of a single Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and giving the status of war veterans to anti-Soviet partisans who fought on the side of the Nazis and Banderite fascists. In essence an unreformed proto-fascist, Yushchenko tried to make inroads during his presidency to hitch Ukraine to the western-imperialist bloc. His ideology appeared vacillating: now siding with the RF, now with the EU. The compass behind his policies, however, has never strayed from his true north: a powerful, sovereign, ethnically homogenous Ukraine.

The entire world economy was rocked by the Great Recession of 2008 as the U.S. housing market collapsed. Speculators preying on low-income members of the U.S. working class who were trying to buy homes brought down the entire financial infrastructure of the U.S. Empire and plunged the world into an enormous downturn.

In Ukraine, this meant lowered demand for steel, its second-largest industry, and subsequent defaults to the RF state gas company Gazprom. Gazprom cut off Ukraine’s gas supply as a result of these debts and Ukraine spiraled into a deep and serious financial crisis. Ukraine’s manufacturing industry shrank by 42% and its construction industry by an enormous 58%. Yushchenko pushed the country into an IMF loan for $16.5 billion USD. As with all IMF transactions, the bank forced the Ukrainian government to implement austerity measures and privatizations of public utilities as part of the loan repayment.

The EU entered into talks with the Yushchenko government to establish a free trade treaty, the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement. The EU desperately wanted to open a free trade corridor with Ukraine to help orient it toward the Eurobloc. Doing so would give Germany and France access to the considerable Ukrainian industrial base built by the Soviets, would completely open a market of 45 million people for German exports, and would contribute to the encirclement and isolation of an increasingly assertive Russian Federation. The talks were ongoing through the end of Yushchenko’s presidency, although they remained unconsummated at the time of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election.

Yushchenko, however, got into serious disagreements with the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. Yushchenko struggled with the Rada in 2007 and 2008, attempting twice to dissolve it. In 2008-2009 his government broke apart; a rift opened between his Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, and his office. These successive crises eroded his political legitimacy and the general attitude in Ukraine began to swing back toward the left-leaning Coalition of National Unity.

The Ukrainian Economy, Russia, and the CIS

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union by the imperialists and the defeat of Communist parties and organizations in the breakaway republics, the capitalists who took control of the new and turbulent states in 1991 established an anti-Communist treaty organization to replace the federation of the USSR: the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Ukraine was a founding signatory of the CIS treaty. This created the Commonwealth of Independent States Treaty Organization (CISTO). Beginning in 1991, the CISTO states began negotiations toward a free trade deal — the Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Area (CISFTA). These negotiations were concluded in 2012 and the free trade area established. 

In the meantime, the Russia and the CISTO states sought admission into NATO and the western imperialist alliance, but the RF was rebuffed again and again. Eventually, the RF recognized that the Western imperialists would not ally with them and began establishing their own regional hegemony. Ukraine never came to that conclusion. U.S. agents continued to lead Ukraine on, without any actual intention of allowing Ukraine to join the NATO alliance but rather merely to prevent the new Ukrainian government from closing ranks with the RF. This attempt to keep the RF isolated from its natural allies so it could be opened to Western imperialism again, and would not rise to the status of regional imperialist or even global imperialist power, is at the heart of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The economy of Ukraine grew by leaps and bounds between 2000 and 2008. It was reliant on exports of metals, metallurgy, engineering, chemicals, and food. In the early 2000s, prior to the Great Recession of 2008, the price of metals and chemicals continued to rise and brought a headwind into the Ukrainian economy. Foreign direct investment increased from half a billion dollars in 2000 to $7.81 billion USD just five years later.

President Yanukovych Victorious

In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, from the Coalition of National Unity, won the Ukrainian presidential elections. President Yushchenko’s disgraced reputation brought him only some 5% of the vote. His embattled Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, was defeated by a narrow margin. A former transport manager in Soviet state enterprises and former Prime Minister in the cabinet of the second president of independent Ukraine, Yanukovych, and his bloc, favored closer integration with the RF while walking a “Europragmatist” path. The Yanukovych government continued discussions with the EU, feeling out a path toward the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement.

The 2008 crisis had forced the government in Kiev to rely on Russian economic aid for recovery even as the ruling class sought to court the EU. Although Yushchenko’s prior government had received IMF loans, this was not enough to buoy up the country. Critically, the gas needed to power industry and heat homes came from the RF. Yanukovych’s election represented, in part, a concession of the ruling class of Ukraine; although members of that class clearly wanted closer relations with the EU, access to Russian markets to absorb Ukrainian goods and reduced gas prices were more critical for the development of Ukrainian industry. The Yanukovych government, aware of the geopolitical importance of Ukraine in the defense of the RF (see below), was able to strike a balance and obtain a closer, but not integrationist, trade policy with the RF.

In 2011, the Yanukovych government ratified its entry into a competing treaty organization: the above-mentioned Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Zone (CISFTA), which abolished trade barriers between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Armenia. CISTFA is one of the many treaties between the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which is composed of former Soviet republics. The establishment of this treaty meant that Ukrainian goods could travel without tariffs into Russia, and granted Ukraine access to all of the CIS markets. It also meant that gas prices from the RF would be reduced, both necessary terms for the continued development of Ukrainian industry.

The policies of the Yanukovych government represent in miniature the ongoing problem facing independent Ukraine: being battered between the world-imperialist EU and the RF, which has been seeking to fully integrate the markets of the CIS countries, and even to politically integrate the former Soviet regions.

Back-and-Forth: The Russia/EU Problem

Ukraine is located in a strategic chokepoint between the world-imperialist EU bloc (which is part of the reigning Euro-American Alliance that has divided up nearly the whole world), and the emerging imperialist power of the Russian Federation. The RF’s ability to project power is mostly limited to those states directly on its border and within its sphere of influence, but it has assiduously carved out a small zone of control over the former Soviet republics: the CIS.

Independent Ukraine has thus, since its formation in 1991, leaned first one way and then the other. It is a small state which must balance the predatory concerns of its larger neighbors. It has sought the protection of the RF and shelter in its markets when the ruling class needed to restore profitability, then the protection of the EU and its imperialist ambitions when the ruling class needed to exert its independence from the CIS and the RF. This see-sawing makes of Ukraine a dangerous flashpoint between the Euro-American imperialists and the RF. Its physical location at the mouth of the East European Plain makes it geostrategically critical for Moscow to maintain friendly relations and foreclose the entry of hostile troops into Ukraine; at the same time, it has been vigorously courted by the U.S. Empire in an effort to destabilize the RF and open up the vast raw material reserves of the former Soviet Union to renewed Western exploitation.

The European Union-Ukraine Association, the free trade treaty sought by Yushchenko and the EU, was still being negotiated under the Yanukovych government. Free trade within the EU benefits Germany and France; free trade between the EU and other states benefits the entire Eurobloc, but disparately such that the greatest benefits flow, again, to Germany and France. When trade barriers are lowered, technical experts will tend to move to the place with the highest wages (the imperial centers). Concentrations of technical experts ensure that secondary, high-paying, “finishing” industries (as opposed to primary industries) will follow. The peripheral countries will be reduced to selling raw materials or primary materials to the technically advanced economies, then buying back the completed products at a markup that permits the imperialist metropole to extract even more from the periphery.

Russian industry is focused on the production of primary goods and raw materials. Because Ukraine, under the Yanukovych government, entered into CISTFA, the CIS free trade zone, Ukrainian finished goods found markets within the RF. RF raw materials were exported to Ukrainian industry for secondary processing and completion. However, if trade barriers between Ukraine and the EU were lifted, both Ukraine’s economy and the Russian economy (because, recall, there are no trade barriers between the two at this time) would have been exposed to the market forces of the EU, and to great quantities of European finished goods entering Russia via Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine would have reduced to industrial backwaters while the very expensive finished goods of the EU were resold in a balance of trade for raw resources and primary goods. The RF made it clear throughout the early 2010s that should Ukraine enter into the convention with the EU, it would cut off free trade to its own markets. Ukraine was forced to choose between closer ties to the EU and potential membership in the Euro-American imperialist alliance and closer ties to the RF and some degree of domestic economic freedom. Had Ukraine entered into the EU-Ukraine Association while the Russian Federation’s free trade provisions of CISTFA were still in place, this would have undermined the very careful and public trade policy pursued by Russia. Essentially, without trade barriers between the RF and the EU, advanced production in the EU would destroy the less-profitable industries inside the Russian Federation and re-colonize or re-imperialize Russia, transforming it into a reserve for pumping out natural resources to the advanced economies of Western Europe and forcing it to rely on Western European finished goods.

In 2014, in response to the repeated RF warnings, the Yanukovych government stalled Ukraine’s entry into the EU treaty convention. The government in Kiev, reliant upon the Russian markets, appeared to be poised to enter into more friendly negotiations with the RF purely out of necessity in protecting its own industries from European domination and to retain access to Russian primary goods. Trade sanctions and market instability combined to drive prices of gas even higher in Ukraine; real discontent broke out on the streets. The U.S. Empire and its junior partners, smelling the blood in the water, moved in to replace the Ukrainian government with one that was more pliable and more Westward-oriented.

Discovery of Gas and Oil

In 2010, enormous reserves of oil shale and gas were discovered in the Donbass and off the coast of Crimea.. Data indicates somewhere in excess of 5 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves in Ukraine, and 390,000,000 barrels of oil. European, and especially German, dependence on Russian Oil and Gas has been one of the greatest weaknesses of the western imperialists, and, consequently, perhaps Russia’s greatest strength in its struggle with the Euro-Atlantic bloc. These newly discovered deposits represent enough oil and gas to make Europe entirely independent of Russia, if it could be exploited to the benefit of the EU states. 

In 2012, U.S. monopoly capital (in the form of the Shell and Exxon corporations) was granted exploration rights to the new Ukrainian oil and gas deposits. The Yanukovych government, like the governments before it, was hedging its bets, engaging on the one hand the RF and on the other the Euro-American imperialists.

As of 2021, the top Russian exports were crude and refined petroleum. The industrial sector of the RF is reliant almost entirely on the production and export of natural resources. Its largest companies are the state-owned Gazprom and Lukoil. In order to realize the profits (and thus drive its capitalist internal, domestic markets) in these corporations, it must export massive quantities of gas, oil, chemicals, and grain. It is the third largest oil-producing company in the world, behind only the U.S. Empire itself and Saudi Arabia, a U.S. satellite. It produces 10.5 million barrels of oil a day.

In 2021, 45% of the natural gas consumed in the states of the European Union came from the Russian Federation; almost all of the rest comes from within EU states. 90% of oil and natural gas imported into the European Union (EU) states came from Russia. The RF had been one of the largest suppliers of liquefied natural gas to the EU from 2017 on. The exploitation of Ukrainian oil and gas sources and the opening of Ukraine to drilling and export would have destroyed Russian state revenue. On the eve of the war, it was clear that the U.S. imperialists were pursuing a strategy designed to clip the wings of the RF by foreclosing the one economic strategy that had permitted it to retain some regional independence from the West.

Geopolitical Concerns

Lastly, we come to the military-strategic problem: the North European and East European Plains. These are regions of flat terrain, uninterrupted by substantial geographical barriers to troop movement. The North European Plain is very narrow in the north of Germany, but opens wider and wider the farther east you go, until it reaches the Urals. Because the East European Plain runs all the way to the Urals, Moscow lays exposed to rapid troop movements. It was this fact of geography (in part) that allowed the Wehrmacht to able to rapidly cross and occupy such great tracts of Soviet land, from the border all the way to the Moscow suburbs, eighty years ago and, 130 years before that, allowed Napoleonic France to accomplish a similar feat.

Ukraine sits at the point where the North European Plain joins the East European Plain. It’s at this juncture, on the eastern border of Ukraine, that the plain grows so wide that a general defense of the entire territory becomes untenable. The western border of Ukraine, however, is relatively narrow and forms a natural line of defense between Moscow and Europe. Little Belarus, a staunch ally of the RF and a member of the CSTO, projects outwards in an exposed salient, flanked to the north by NATO members Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Ukraine sits to the south of Belarus. Should Ukraine become hostile to the Russian-dominated CSTO, Belarus would be nearly enveloped, and the East European Plain would be held by enemy hands at nearly its widest extent, making land defense on a continuous front essentially impossible.

And so, in 2014, Ukraine was precariously positioned. The West wanted access to Ukrainian oil and to establish a friendly, NATO ally on the doorstep of the East European Plain. The Yanukovych government, much to the frustration of the Western imperialists, kept a cool distance from the EU. The stage was set for the Euromaidan and the events that would lead directly to the war. U.S. intelligence assets needed only one more part of the equation: connections with the Banderites.

Banderism

No understanding of modern Ukraine is complete without examining the subterranean force behind the right nationalists in that country: Ukraine’s own home-grown fascist ideology, Banderism. Western capital traditionally finds its strongest allies in the little fascists of the nations it wants to exploit. Ukraine is no different in that respect. Banderists, for their own reasons of “national regeneration,” despise Russia — and that is useful to the suits in Washington.

The Banderite Past

Before the 19th century, Ukraine was not considered ethnically or nationally distinct from Great Russia. The very name, Ukraine, means “border march.” The 19th century saw a number of major nation-building projects: from France and Italy to Ukraine, countries across Europe embarked on efforts to unify the people in their territory into a single “nation” with a shared history and ethnic identity. The territory of Ukraine was, in the 19th and early 20th century, divided between the Tsarist Empire to the east and the Austrian dominions in the west.

Nation-building began among the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the late 19th century, rooted in figures like Taras Shevchenko. Ukrainian nationalism and antisemitism were intimately linked. In 1905, amid the backdrop of the failed revolution in Russia that same year, a pogrom was carried out by monarchists and nationalists in Kiev that killed 100 Jews. During the First World War, the fragments of Ukraine controlled by Austria and the Tsars were themselves at war with one another. By the time of the Russian Civil War, both reactionary “White” (aristocratic, monarchist) armies and nationalist armies carried out pogroms. In 1919, for example, a series of brutal pogroms in and around Kiev were carried out by Ukrainian White volunteer army forces. It was not until the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923 that parts of Ukraine were at last able to exercise self-determination. In the west, Germany and Poland took over large swathes of territory and threatened the new Soviet republics in the former Russian Empire.

The parts of Ukraine in the Soviet Union were recognized as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the Polish-controlled regions, the Ukrainian language was suppressed. Members of the Eastern Orthodox Church and those who were recognized as being Ukrainian nationals or ethnically Ukrainian had fewer rights under the Polish Republic. This suppression led directly to the development of Banderism through the heightened nationalist movements that arose in reaction. In the early 1920s, inside Polish-occupied Ukraine, nationalists founded both the Ukrainian Military Organization and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). 

In the 1930s Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian far-right nationalist, rose to prominence inside the OUN. He was involved with several assassination attempts on Polish officials. He was tried by the Polish authorities and sentenced to death but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment before it was carried out. It was this trial that established him as a household name among Ukrainian nationalists and which marks the beginning of the formalization of the vicious Ukrainian form of fascism that we now call Banderism. Bandera was freed from prison during the partition of Poland and he moved to Nazi Germany where he started working directly with the Abwehr and Wehrmacht. By 1940 he was the head of a splinter faction of the OUN, founding the OUN-B or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — Banderite. By 1942, the term Banderite was widely associated with the murderous antisemitism and anti-Polish actions of the OUN-B.

Bandera was proclaimed providnyk (the equivalent to the German Führer and Italian duce) at the Second General Congress of the OUN. It was at that same congress that the fascist salute and the call-and-response “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine”), “Heroiam Salava!” (“Glory to the Heroes!”), so recently thundered from the pulpit of the United States Congress, were adopted. In October of 1942, the OUN-B, operating now in German-occupied Ukraine, formed its own army and death squads (the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Ukrayins’ka povstans’ka armiia, or UPA), carried out pogroms and massacres, and received nearly continuous material and political support from the German Nazi authorities. Banderism was embodied in the manifesto of the OUN-B, “Ukrainian National Revolution,” calling for the annihilation of “Ukrainian ethnic enemies.” The OUN-B stated that “When it comes to the Polish question, this is not a military but a minority question. We will solve it as Hitler solved the Jewish question.” This manifesto incorporated specific calls for ethnic violence against Jews, Poles, and Russians. “Kill the enemies among you — Jews and informers.”

According to the Banderite plan, only an ethnically homogenous Ukraine could stand on its own. They planned for an “annihilation action” and a Ukrainian version of the Nazi Generalplan Ost: the “evacuation or annihilation” of all non-Ukrainians. As the Red Army withdrew from Ukraine in the face of the Nazi advance, pogroms were organized in the cities by OUN-B and the UPA. In L’viv the UPA, in participation with the Nazi units, killed 4,000 Jews. In all of Ukraine, the pogroms carried out by Bandera’s forces are estimated to have killed 35,000 Jews. The murder of Poles was even worse: between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles were murdered by the UPA during the war.

Modern Banderism

Banderism was suppressed during the Soviet period. Nazi collaborators went underground. The Soviet government engaged in what was called “de-nazification,” preventing former Nazis living in the East German Republic and the agents of their Eastern European collaborator regimes from holding political office. There were trials, even executions. Bandera himself, who had escaped to the West under the U.S. policy of patriating and adopting Nazis, was killed by KGB agents in 1956. 

What about the West? Banderites have a distinguished history working with modern U.S. intelligence agencies. The CIA recruited Mykola Lebed, a Gestapo-trained leader of an OUN group and overseer of the murder of the Jews of Krakow, to work in their West German intelligence services in 1947. He was then smuggled into the U.S., hired by the Pentagon, and worked in CIA fronts like the Prolog Research Corporation.

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, established in 1940 before the World War, still operates today. It is, as the journalist Russ Bellant wrote in “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republic Party,” an umbrella organization made up entirely of OUN-B fronts. U.S. President Reagan welcomed Jaroslav Stetsko, a Banderite ideologue who had helped Bandera compose the OUN-B Manifesto and who personally oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in L’viv, into the White House in 1983.

The U.S. courted these Banderites during the entirety of the Cold War, hoping to use them to overthrow or destabilize the Ukrainian SSR. Today, the stronghold of Banderism is the Western Ukrainian city of L’viv, but the ideology has adherents throughout the government. After the expulsion of Yanukovych by the Euromaidan, there was a sudden explosion in Nazi and Banderite monuments and dedications inside Ukraine. This is the tail end of a process that began as early as 1991 — with the collapse of the Soviet authority in Ukraine, the Banderites emerged from the shadows, particularly in the “European” western half of the country. For instance, in 1996 the journalist Ivan Matveychuk wrote that “For five years ultra-radical nationalist organizations are [sic] conducting a well-organized propaganda campaign against not only the left, but all Russians and Jews. B. Borovich, a mayor of Ivano-Frankovsk, recently told the schoolchildren of the city to ‘follow the true path of Stepan Bandera!’”

Efraim Zuroff of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that “Ukraine has more statues 4 killers of Jews than any other country”.

The Drums of War

Why do the imperialists sound their drums and trumpets for the fascists in Kiev? It’s not as simple as the common fascist ideology of the U.S. imperialist ruling class and the murders in Kiev. Yes, Senator John McCain met with an applauded Ukrainian fascist Oleh Tyanhybok. Yes, Senator Christopher Murphy, a Democrat and supposedly an opponent of gun violence, stood on the platform with the murderous Tyanhybok. Yes, the leaders of both parties gladly and warmly welcomed the Neo-Nazi Azov leadership in October of 2022, long after their ties were public.. But the criminal conspiracy of looters that rule in Washington doesn’t honor ideological alliances; it has no friends except those who, for the moment, can continue to serve its interests. No — the Russo-Ukraine war was promoted by the U.S., arranged by the U.S., and finally brought about by U.S. manipulations that had very little to do with the fascists in power in Kiev. Washington would not lift a finger to save its favorite white-supremacist fascist rulers unless its agents knew there would be some remuneration for the Empire.

You will hear the breathless protestations of the agents of capital — the paid agents and the unwitting ones — more and more in the coming year as they moan with faithless mutterings that Ukraine was unjustly attacked; that NATO is a peaceful alliance; that a ruthless and expansionist Russian Federation was merely seeking to claw a little more territory, a few hundred-thousand square miles, from Europe. You have already heard, no doubt, news anchors and U.S. politicians alike decry the “asiatic barbarians” and their Oriental despotism.

But no; the U.S. ruling class wanted this war. It sought this war. It manufactured this war. There is no surprise in the halls of Washington, or if there is, it is only that the Russian Federation would not let itself be manipulated forever, hedged forever, trimmed and attacked in small, cutting ways forever.

The U.S. acted along several lines to bring about the conditions for the Russo-Ukraine War: economic provocations, threats to Russian oil and gas industries, and finally the general strategic impossibility of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance.

Euromaidan

In 2014, Yanukovych stalled the trade talks with the EU. The Radka had already approved the agreement, but the RF was exerting ever more pressure to prevent Ukraine from entering into a free trade zone with the EU. The RF signaled its displeasure by interrupting trade with Ukraine and, on the eve of the ratification, it offered economic aid packages that exceeded what Ukraine would gain from the EU and a promise to reduce the price of natural gas. This was unacceptable to certain elements in the Ukrainian ruling class, including Yanukovych’s political opponent, billionaire (and the man who would, as a direct result of the Euromaidan, become president) Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko later said “I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel — Channel 5 — played a tremendously important role.”

The Maidan protests broke out in the West of Ukraine — in the traditionally Banderist cities. They lacked majoritarian support throughout the country and, in fact, most of the eastern portions of Ukraine didn’t participate in the protests. It is most likely that the initial irritation in Ukraine was organic. A real outpouring of working class anger at the now-this-way now-that-way policies of Kiev, frustration at the capitalist excess of the oligarchic ruling class that had captured the country in the years after 1991, the protests were nevertheless directed not at emergence of Banderists in the leading government posts of the west, but rather at Yanukovych for failing to bring Ukraine closer to Europe. Once the protests had begun, the Banderists wasted no time. The most active protesters in Kiev were members of the fascist-Banderist Svoboda. In L’viv, protesters captured the regional administration, declared a “people’s council” and proclaimed the Svoboda-staffed local councils as the only legitimate governing bodies. Right Sector led attacks on the police in Kiev. Nazi and founder of the Social-National Part of Ukraine Andriy Parubiy was declared the media’s “commander of Maidan.”

The protests in Kiev were strengthened by a hard backbone of fascists. “A sweet, ol’ grandmother is pouring Molotov cocktail in a nationalists’ bottles; and a manager of a large company is carrying ammunition to the student… For some, its ‘we need a couple of crates of AKs and grenades, we’ll sort things out here quickly,’” wrote Ilya Varlamov on his livejournal, during the protests. The city was cut apart by barricades: piles of burning tires in the streets, lit day and night by militants, blazed every night. The nationalists and the Banderists had control.

In Odessa, Communists built an anti-Maidan camp at the historical city center. Fascists, Banderists, and nationalists stormed the tent camp, forcing the Communists into the Trade Unions House nearby. The Banderists surrounded the building and, lobbing petrol bombs, set the Soviet-era structure ablaze. They killed 46 people in the Trade Unions House and injured some 200 others. Although there was an investigation, the Banderite government never formally tried or punished anyone.

The U.S. Empire got involved. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy met with Svoboda and applauded the fascists, giving their support to the protestors. A leaked phone call from Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state, to the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine reveals Washington’s hand in promoting and advancing the Euromaidan protests. On the call, the ambassador and Nuland banter over who should be in the post-Yanukovych cabinet — weeks before Yanukovych actually resigned.

On 22 February 2014, President Yanukovych fled Kiev for Belarus. The Banderites had ousted the president. They selected businessman Petro Poroshenko as their interim president. Poroshenko signed an integration treaty with the EU and began the long, brutal war of ethnic and ideological extermination in the Donbass.

As a result of the Euromaidan, Ukraine has become the world’s training ground for the far right. Since the Euromaidan coup, Banderite Ukraine has been making noises about joining the NATO alliance. If Ukraine did join NATO, it would be a strategic death knell for the Russian Federation. Indeed, it would so clearly provoke an unwinnable war that the public-facing leaders of NATO have been very firm in denying Ukraine’s continuous applications. And yet… U.S. imperialist diplomats and advisors have allowed and encouraged the Ukrainian hope that Ukraine would join NATO, have encouraged its Banderite government to crow about NATO applications, and have hoped to spook the leaders of the Russian Federation with this apparition.

The U.S. Empire has refused to permit the Russian Federation to apply to join NATO, forcing it to form CSTO as an alternative. U.S. imperialist agents visited Ukraine frequently, and the U.S. Empire extended the arms of its regime-change machinery in the guise of the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Freedom House, the Open Society Institute, and even the CIA.

The Cession of Crimea and the War in the Donbass

Immediately following the Euromaidan coup, the eastern regions of Ukraine erupted in pro-Russian protests. Russian speakers and their neighbors rightly saw the triumph of Banderists and proto-fascists like Poroshenko as a threat. As if to prove them right, the Banderists in charge of the new government set to work repealing the Ukrainian law that made Russian a protected minority language. Even the fascistic Hungarian government noted that repealing the protected status of Russian in Ukraine “could question the commitment of the new Ukrainian administration toward democracy.” Although the ultrarightists abandoned this plan, in 2017 they did pass an educational law requiring all classes in Ukraine from the fifth grade onward to be taught in Ukrainian — ending teaching in Russian and other languages of national minorities.

When Yanukovych fled, counter-protests exploded across the country. Crimea, far in the southeast of Ukraine and mostly ethnically Russian, joined in the pro-Yanukovych/anti-Banderist protests that erupted in Odessa and the Donbass. In Crimea, the protests specifically targeted the interim government. Formation of people’s militias and civil defense forces spread across the peninsula. The RF pledged support to the Crimean civil defense forces. A pro-Maidan rally of some 5,000 to 15,000 people demanded the resignation of the Crimean parliament. On 27 February, the parliament of Crimea held an emergency session while surrounded by what Western observers have called “masked and unmarked Russian soldiers” — “little green men.” At that session, the Crimean parliament appointed a caretaker government and deposed the Prime Minister of Crimea.

A 25 May 2014 referendum voted 95.5% to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. On 18 March 2014, the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol was recognized by the Russian Federation as an integral federal subject. This once again secured anchorage for the Russian Black Sea Fleet for the first time since 1991, brought the recently discovered gas deposits in the Black Sea under Russian control, and coincided with the beginning of the War in the Donbass. Two breakaway republics were founded in the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kimitaka Matsuzato, a professor of the Slavic Research Center at the University of Tokyo (and someone lacking in Western intelligence connections or grants) wrote that the republics legalized their local Communist parties. The republics joined together to form a united front to expel the Banderite fascists and defend against the coup in Kiev. Professor Matsuzato wrote in his article The First Four Years of the Donetsk People’s Republic,

As early as May 2014, several lawyers in the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] such as Elena Shishkina and Vitalii Galakhov, started to ascertain and record cases of destruction, death, injury, and torture and other war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Army and paramilitaries in the DPR territory.

Outrages by the fascist-infiltrated Ukrainian military have continued unceasingly since the Euromaidan. Banderite fascist parties and organizations inside Ukraine, including Right Sector and the Azov Movement, continue to hold high positions in the military, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Defense. The indiscriminate murder of civilians, the shelling of schools and residential blocks, vile live crucifixions, starvation of entire towns and cities, attacks on water supplies, and worse have been the normal every-day experience of the Ukrainians and Russians living in the Donbass.

These vicious, fascist Banderite forces have been earmarked $105.5 billion from the U.S. imperialist Congress since 2022 began. We have all seen the self-congratulatory photographs of militiamen and regular Ukrainian army soldiers (complete with Nazi Sonnenrads, Banderist Wolfsangels, and other fascist symbology on their clothes) receiving Stinger missiles. Smug, self-assured “social democrats” have smeared their social media with vile imagery of “Saint Raytheon” in Ukrainian colors. The imperialist press and the guerilla social media attachés from the U.S. State Department have been beating the drums of war loud enough to drown out the truth: that the government of Ukraine is in the thrall of detestable fascists.

The Provocation

Under Yanukovych, Ukraine had adopted a non-aligned status. The Rada codified a law preventing Ukraine from joining military alliances — a clear move of conciliation toward the RF, assuring Russia that Ukraine would not strategically endanger the CIS. One of the obvious motives in supporting the Euromaiden from the point of view of the West was the reversal of this non-aligned status, and indeed, Poroshenko did so. In June of 2017, the Rada passed legislation declaring NATO membership as a strategic foreign and security policy objective. There was a new presidential election in 2019 in which Poroshenko was ousted and the comedian-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was elected, likely with U.S. backing.

Zelenskyy sent out a clear message that Ukraine was interested in joining NATO. In September of 2020, Zelenskyy approved a national security strategy calling for eventual NATO membership. In June of 2021, the Secretary of State of the U.S. Empire Anthony Blinken said, point-blank, “We support Ukraine membership in NATO.”

In January of 2021, on the eve of the invasion, Vladimir Putin delivered a long speech setting out the Russian position. “[I]n December 2021, we nevertheless once again made an attempt to agree with the United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything is in vain. The U.S. position does not change. They do not consider it necessary to negotiate with Russia on this key issue for us, pursuing their own goals, they neglect our interests.”

Clown Prince Zelenskyy

Enter the actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, cap in hand, begging for a handout from the men and women who put his country up on the frontlines to be ground into hamburger. Prior to his election to the presidency of the Banderite Ukrainian government, Zelenskyy was a stand-up comedian and television actor. He was backed by former employees of the international management firm McKinsey & Company, pro-NATO Ukrainian generals, and the second-richest man in Ukraine, Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

Zelenskyy’s political campaign was utterly devoid of meaningful policy. He ran on a simple platform of national regeneration and “at least I’m not Poroshenko” (the outgoing Banderite president who was rocked by scandals). He did not hold one rally, but rather ran troll farms online, did online events, and used the publicity of his Ukrainian-language television show, Servant of the People (which he also named his political party) in which he portrays a school teacher who is unexpectedly elected to the presidency and proceeds to “clean house” by machine-gunning corrupt members of the Ukrainian parliament.

There was a substantial push from Western imperialists like Howard Buffett (the son of Warren Buffett), the lobbying firm Signal Group (paid through a mysterious agent who appears to be a self-employed lawyer in the U.S.), Christina Pushaw (press secretary for U.S. criminal and governor Ron DeSantis, and former employee of Mikheil Saakashvili), and others.

But who is Zelenskyy? He is an actor, hired to play a role. His job is to give a public face to a corrupt and venal dictatorship of Banderites and ultranationalists. As early as February of 2019, the European Union was investigating the open proclamation of numerous Ukrainian police officers to be Banderites. We must now assume that Zelenskyy was elected with the tacit compliance of the U.S. Empire and the Banderite forces inside Ukraine. The Banderites and ultranationalists have long been an arm of the U.S. foreign intelligence services. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, worked closely with a former Banderite in the 1950s, Mykola Lebed, to destabilize the Ukrainian Republic. Andwhere have we seen the Clown? In no less than the U.S. magazine Vogue, on U.S. television, dressed in a tactical turtleneck and playing the embattled president on news shows and through broadcasts, asking the United States to engage in a nuclear war with the Russian Federation. All along, the right warmongers in the U.S. have been encouraging and even cheering for “NATO no-fly zones,” the invocation of NATO Article 5, sending U.S. soldiers through Poland, and other provocations that would inevitably escalate to nuclear warfare. Zelenskyy is the voice of this warmongering movement. Although he is directly the puppet of the Banderite regime in Ukraine, that regime would not exist, could not have continued to exist, without the support of the imperialists in Washington. Imperialist policy from Washington has magnified the fascist threat within Ukraine, has trained it, has helped elect its “softer” face.

U.S. Empire against the Euro-Alliance

On its face, the conflict now raging inside Ukraine is a war between the Russian Federation and the state of Ukraine. On another level, this is a war between NATO and the Russian Federation, addressed above. On yet a third level, this is a war between the U.S. Empire and its junior partners, the Euro-Alliance.

Although the states in the EU have their own interests that are mutually opposed or exclusive, the EU bloc continues to maintain its cohesion. As its military and economic centers, France and Germany control the general direction of the Union. Together, the member states of the EU are capable of exerting imperialist pressure on the world stage, engaging in imperialist war, etc. In the 30 years following the destruction of the Soviet Union, however, the EU has acted only when and where the U.S. Empire granted sanction. It has been, essentially since the end of the Second World War, a junior partner to the U.S. imperialists, forced to follow the lead of U.S. capital because of its relatively weaker position on the world stage.

As a result of the changing status quo in Europe, the discovery of the Ukrainian gas reserves, and the general decay of the U.S. Empire, the long-term strategy of the ruling class in the United States has shifted to ensure the continued subservience of the Eurostates. The EU’s own representative for foreign affairs (chief diplomat), Josep Borrell, said in October of 2022: “Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia…. [a]nd access to the big China market, for exports and imports, for technological transfers, for investments, for having cheap goods. I think that the Chinese workers with their low salaries have done much better and much more to contain inflation than all the Central Banks together. So, our prosperity was based on China and Russia — energy and market…. On the other hand, we delegated our security to the United States…. You – the United States – take care of our security. You – China and Russia – provided the basis of our prosperity. This is a world that is no longer there.”

European capital doesn’t want to serve the U.S. Empire. It has been forced to by the last great inter-imperialist crisis of the late 1940s. Capitalism in Europe crumbled and its chief beneficiary was the U.S. settler-republic which really, for the first time, was able to fully step onto the world stage as the leading imperialist power of the West. Since 2018 at the earliest, the U.S. Empire has been clipping the wings of the EU. The 2019 sanctions on Nordstream 2 are a perfect example of this trend. As the war approached, thinking in the U.S. Empire changed, spurred on by the deepening threat of general capitalist crisis. Now, the U.S. Empire must reduce the EU and the NATO member states to economic dependencies if it is to survive the contraction of the capitalist economy that will follow this latest crisis. The EU has been content to be a partner of the U.S. Empire — but ultimately, empire brooks no partners, only subjects.

The proxy war in Ukraine between the Russian Federation and NATO is going quite well according to the scoreboard kept by the United States. Russia has been forced to spend countless lives and untold treasure in war machinery while the EU has been decoupled from Russian gas and forced to buy U.S. product. Even better from their eyes, the EU is suffering brutal de-industrialization as the gas prices necessary to perform certain industrial and chemical operations make them no longer feasible.

The U.S. gets two things it wants: a pliable and open Russia which it can exploit, and the European Union put on a leash. But let us not bandy words about: the mere fact that the Russian Federation is a target of NATO aggression cannot transform it into anything other than it is. When a war between two capitalist states is the result of competition over domination — in this instance, the “regional security” and economic control of the Russian Federation over Ukraine on the one hand and the world-spanning imperialist system of the Euro-American alliance threatening to reduce Russia to a client state rather than a competing power on the other — this war does not, by virtue of its inevitability, become something to be celebrated. Indeed, both powers, the Russian Federation no less than the Euro-American NATO alliance, are acting in the interest of capital. In the case of NATO, this is the capital of the U.S. Empire and its Western European toadies. In the case of the RF, this is the capital of the huge state monopolies and the post-Soviet civil service class of robber-princes that command them.

On 21 December 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the comedian-president of Ukraine, was flown on a U.S. Air Force jet out of his war-devastated country to beg for alms from his American masters in front of the U.S. Congress. Zelenskyy is the representative of the fascist-infiltrated government in Kiev and serves at the pleasure of a loose coalition of Banderite leaders — men who profess loyalty to the vision of the ultranationalist, antisemite, and murderer Stepan Bandera who organized mass executions during World War II. Before his televised debut, Zelenskyy stopped over at the White House to receive assurances from the decaying Joe Biden that the Banderite government of Kiev would continue to receive U.S. support. The U.S. imperialists, through their gerontocrat mouthpiece Biden, announced that they would not abandon the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Indeed, the mobile corpse at the head of the U.S. executive said that he had “never seen NATO or the EU more united about anything at all.”

With these promises in hand, Zelenskyy delivered his speech to the U.S. ruling  classes with a bald-faced recognition of the truth — ”Americans won this victory.” Despite the fact that Ukraine is even now being reduced to a smoldering ruin, despite the fact that millions and billions of dollars in war machinery and materiel is being destroyed, Zelenskyy began by recognizing the power of the U.S. propaganda machine. He praised that the “victory” Ukraine has already won is, in Zelenskyy’s own words, a “hearts and minds” victory, a triumph of propaganda and intelligence. He thanked, in essence, the most powerful media presence in the world. With the U.S. imperialist war-lobbying machine at his side, how can he lose? In fact, by June of 2022, Ukraine had already lost 50% of its military equipment. On June 13 one of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that Ukraine needed at least 1,000 howitzers, 300 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles, and 1,000 additional drones.

An estimate of Western-donated totals indicates somewhere around 200 howitzers, 51 MLRS, 250 tanks, and 700 armored vehicles have made it into Ukraine.
Zelenskyy went on to use the language of decolonization to describe Ukraine: Yet we have to do whatever it takes to ensure that countries of the Global South also gain such victory.” He hasn’t lost his gift for comedy! The “Global South” is dominated and colonized by the very U.S. Empire that Zelenskyy serves. The largest, most powerful empire in the world can’t “decolonize” anything!

This battle is not only for territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

Here, Zelenskyy appeared to be auditioning for yet another role — the battered president standing up against fascists, painting the Russian Federation with the same brush as Nazi Germany. This kind of rhetoric harkens to the world-shattering conflicts of World War I and II and, in good European style, Zelenskyy casts this war as one between democracy and destruction, between a free way of life and a dictatorship. But, like everything else in his presidency, for Zelenskyy this is nothing more than an act; this is no war between democracy and totalitarianism. Zelenskyy’s own government is shot through with fascists, and this big man of democracy role is merely a kind of sleight of hand. The real script is being written by the heirs of Stepan Bandera. Only a comedian could, with a straight face, defend the erection of statues to the antisemite and murderer of Poles Bandera, whose paramilitary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists killed 35,000 Ukrainian Jews and between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles.  A fine deflection from his own Banderite government!

It’s of no small moment that Zelenskyy stood before the U.S. Congress to make this impassioned but bankrupt plea. It was the U.S. Empire and its machinations that put Ukraine on the frontlines. It is the insatiable drive of the U.S. imperialists for the natural resources of the Russian Federation, the pathological refusal of the U.S. ruling class to integrate Russia into the world-imperialist machine, and the bloody-minded desire of U.S. Cold Warriors who were sad to see the war end in their favor that put Ukraine on the path to war. For thirty years, the U.S. Empire has manipulated little Ukraine. The president of that embattled country must come to the U.S. and nowhere else to hold out his cap and beg for bullets, guns, bombs, even nuclear war. After all, Zelenskyy merely asked the U.S. to hold up the bargain its agents have been whispering in his ear since he took office. Make us like you, he says. Make us part of the imperialist West. And if his countrymen down to the last must die to fulfill the Banderite ambition? So what!

Zelenskyy went on to describe the Russian onslaught. “Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour. Trenches in the Donbass change hands several times a day in fierce combat, and even hand fighting.” But who, oh President Zelenskyy, invited that war? Who was it that loudly courted NATO, that loudly asked for the U.S. Empire to involve itself in the affairs of Ukraine? Whose government was it that waged a war of ethnic cleansing in the Donbass for the past three years? Oh, well, of course, Mr. Zelenskyy has nothing to say on those subjects.

But he admits that the Russian forces “have a significant advantage in artillery. They have an advantage in ammunition. They have much more missiles and planes than we have ever had.” The unspoken corollary: the U.S. must make up the deficit. You got us into this, Zelenskyy says without saying, now it’s up to you to get us out.

Of course, Zelenskyy couldn’t help but accuse the Russian Federation of what Ukraine itself has done. As early as February, Zelenskyy was releasing the prisoners in Ukraine to form penal battalions to fight the Russians. Yet, the comedian-president said to the Congress that “They [the Russians] sent convicts to the war.” And again, he cannot resist the comparison of Russian president Vladimr Putin to the Nazis: “[J]ust like the brave American soldiers which held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944… [b]rave Ukrainian soldiers are doing the same to Putin’s forces this Christmas.”

But President Zelenskyy reminded Congress that the $68 billion USD sent by the Congress up to November 2022 is not enough money to win the war. “Financial assistance is also critically important.” The gross domestic product of Ukraine is only $200 billion USD; Zelenskyy warns that the entire output of the country is insufficient to win the war.

And what does winning look like, to this comedian president? “Ukraine has already offered proposals which I have just discussed with President Biden,” he said. Peace to President Zelenskyy looks like the Russian Federation voluntarily cutting the price of its gas and oil, guaranteeing food exports from Ukraine, releasing all of its prisoners, delivering over the sovereign regions of Donetsk and Luhansk back to Ukrainian war criminals and Banderite fascists, withdrawing all troops, submitting to an internal war crimes tribunal, and signing a peace treaty. Victory, in other words, is the complete capitulation of the Russian Federation and the return of the Banderite militias to the Donbass where they will continue to murder unopposed.

Zelenskyy, who once told a reporter that the fact that he was Jewish “barely makes 20 in [his] long list of faults,” under whose administration statues of the notorious antisemite and killer Stepan Bandera have multiplied, whose administration is staffed by open far-right fascists, demands that the U.S. help his government reconquer the Donbass so those same fascists can return to their ethnic cleansing. So much for the vaunted democracy and freedom! He then went on to say “We’ll celebrate Christmas. Celebrate Christmas even if there’s no electricity.” Throughout his speech he said the word Christmas no less than nine times.

At a time when the decrepit Biden White House has proved its value to the U.S. capitalist class by crushing the railroad workers movement, at a time when the consumer price index in the U.S. is soaring and inflation is spiraling out of control, at a time when student debt relief was dangled only to be canceled, at a time when the domestic population of the U.S. Empire desperately needs some kind of monetary relief, Biden and the other cronies of the big capitalists have chosen to spend over $60 billion in war machinery, ammunition, and supplies for the Ukrainian army rather than to give any relief to the U.S. working classes. Zelenskyy is their reasoning. The rugged face of the handsome actor-president serves as a stand-in for argumentation. It now merely needs to flash his photograph in the news or mention his name on the radio for standing ovations and tearful protestations of loyalty to Ukraine to spill from the lips of regular U.S. citizens (nearly always in the form of the fascist phrase Slava Ukraini).

This is a war against Russia; this is a war against the Empire’s European partners; but this is also a war against the working class. It is a war against the working class in Russia, which suffers. It is a war against the working class in Ukraine, which chafes under the fascist yoke. It is a war against the working class in the U.S. Empire, which must make sacrifices so the U.S. government can enact its capitalist masters’ bloody will in Eastern Europe and remake the map of the world.

We must not be duped by Washington or Kiev. When they send in the clowns, we must be prepared with the real facts that led to this conflict. When they cry crocodile tears about human rights abuses, we must remind them who created the abuses, who funded the murderous fascists that perpetuate them, who even now send money and materiel to them so they can continue their depravities. We are not fooled by the funny man from Ukraine.

Washington, we see your hand in the shadows.

On Tuesday, November 15, a wayward Ukrainian missile hit the village of Przewodowe in eastern Poland, just a few miles from the Poland–Ukraine border, killing two civilians.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the Associated Press, citing an anonymous (and, in all likelihood, nonexistent) U.S. official, falsely reported that the missile was fired by Russian Federation forces into Poland. This false claim was disseminated throughout the Western capitalist press.

Naturally, the Russian Federation government immediately and repeatedly denied responsibility for the strike. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on Wednesday, November 16, which read:

[T]he Russian Federation immediately provided comprehensive clarification on Russia’s armed forces not being involved in this incident.

Despite this … the media [in NATO countries], without looking into the situation, scrambled as one to spread absolutely fake and unfounded allegations about Russia potentially being responsible… We see this mayhem as a deliberate effort made as part of a systematic anti-Russia campaign conducted by the West around Ukraine. At the same time, the speed with which accusations against Russia were made by the Kiev regime is notable. Kiev [takes] every opportunity to … consolidate Western support as the Zelensky regime appears to have tired its patrons.

We are confident that an impartial investigation and publication of the results will expose the facts of this provocation.

Remarkably, despite the ongoing inter-imperialist conflict between the Russian Federation and NATO, the two sides actually seem to be in unanimous agreement on this fact: The missile that struck Poland was decidedly not fired by the RF military, and was, in fact, most likely launched by the Ukrainian Air Force. This agreement on the facts is perhaps a first in the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict’s eight-year history.

Already by the night of November 15, President Biden stated to reporters, “It is unlikely [given] the trajectory that [the missile] was fired from Russia.” Biden’s statement followed an “emergency” meeting of the G-7 imperialists (the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Britain, plus the European Union) and NATO.NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, of Norway, in an address on Wednesday, November 16, following an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NATO’s top executive body) stated the following:

We have no indication that this was the result of a deliberate attack. And we have no indication that Russia is preparing offensive military actions against NATO [i.e., Poland and other NATO member-states]. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the incident was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile, fired to defend Ukrainian territory against Russian cruise missile attacks.

Stoltenberg, in customary NATO fashion, then proceeded to lay “ultimate blame” for the Ukrainian misfire on the Russian Federation.

For its part, the Polish government immediately forgave Ukraine.

On Wednesday, November 16, President Andrzej Duda of Poland stated in an address, “It is unfortunately highly probable that one of the missiles fired by the Ukrainian air defenses fell in our territory.” He added that the missile appeared to be an old Soviet-era model, and acknowledged that “There is no evidence, at the moment, that it was launched by the Russian side. It is highly probable that it was fired by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense.”

Later, speaking to reporters, Duda, whose government has been focused on “calming down” the Polish public, emphatically insisted, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, indicates that this was an intentional attack on Poland.” 

Meanwhile, the United States, which leads NATO and the whole Western imperialist axis, both politically and economically, immediately acknowledged the findings of NATO’s “preliminary analysis.” Multiple U.S. military officials have conceded that the missile was almost certainly Ukrainian, not Russian, in origin.

Following President Duda’s remarks, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that the U.S. government concurs that “this explosion was most likely the result of a Ukrainian air defense missile that unfortunately landed in Poland.” Austin also echoed, however, that the Russian Federation bears “ultimate responsibility” for Ukraine’s misfire.

Citing “Western diplomats,” Reuters reported, that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has been coaching foreign diplomats from NATO member-states and other U.S.-aligned countries, “asking them to adopt a cautious approach and to be ‘measured’ while the United States worked out how it would respond.” On Wednesday, November 16, the day after the incident, the Associated Press, along with the numerous outlets that had repeated its false report as fact, were forced by NATO’s consensus to issue a correction to its initial report:

In … a story published November 15, 2022, [the AP] reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made [in fact, the missiles were manufactured in the Soviet Union, and were thus not simply “Russian-made” — a common misconception that has been repeated by many Western media outlets] and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.

By the time this correction was issued, however, the damage had been done. The AP’s false report reignited the fervorous jingoism that the Western pro-imperialist press has worked so tirelessly to instill in the North American and European public, with yet another tale of Russian war crimes. Every time public support for NATO’s proxy-war with the Russian Federation wanes, or gives way to the fear of a potential escalation to world war, even by an inch, the Western pro-imperialist press applies another dose of — typically false — pro-war agitation. This formula hasn’t changed in decades; it’s been reapplied to each subsequent American imperialist war of aggression, whether against Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam and Cambodia, Korea, Yugoslavia, Haiti, or the greater part of Latin America. The Associated Press wasn’t concerned about their report’s truth. The point, after all, was its effect. 

Despite this remarkable international consensus, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the CIA-installed, NATO-backed, puppet-dictator of Ukraine, has continued to insist that the missile was fired by Russian, not Ukrainian, forces.

In a video uploaded on November 16, Zelenskyy stated, “Today happened what we warned of a long time ago… Terror is not limited to our national borders… [T]oday, Russian missiles hit Poland… How many times has Ukraine said that the terrorist state will not be limited to our country?”

Zelenskyy went on to say that “This is a Russian missile attack on [NATO’s] collective security. This is a significant escalation. We must act.”

Zeleneskyy implored the Polish government to invoke Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows a NATO member to invoke the principle that “an attack against one is an attack against all,” and thus compel NATO to consider collective military action. Poland, alongside fellow NATO member-states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, already invoked Article Four of the treaty in February, shortly after the Russian Federation launched its invasion of Ukraine; the fourth article may be invoked when a member-state perceives a military threat, but has not been directly attacked, in order to procure military reinforcements from its NATO allies. This has resulted in a build-up of several thousands of NATO troops along NATO’s “eastern flank.” Now, in no uncertain terms, Zeleneskyy was imploring Poland, as a NATO member-state, to initiate a world war between NATO and Russia — a world war between nuclear-armed powers.

Zelenskyy’s blustering has been repeated by other Ukrainian government officials.

On November 15, Ukraine’s Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov tweeted an especially bizarre statement: “Poland. This is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the reality we’ve been warning about. We were asking to close the sky, because [the] sky has no borders. Not for [Russia’s] uncontrolled missiles. Not for the threat they carry for our [EU and NATO] neighbors. Gloves are off. Time to win.”

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba similarly tweeted on November 15, “Russia now promotes a conspiracy theory that it was allegedly a [Ukrainian missile] that fell on [Poland]. Which is not true. No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages.” Kuleba’s claim of a “Russian conspiracy theory” was made despite the fact that, by that point, NATO, including Poland itself, had already acknowledged that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces.

In response to the Ukrainian government’s continued false assertions, the Russian Ministry of Defense reiterated in a statement its assertion that “The statements of various Ukrainian sources and foreign officials on the fall of alleged ‘Russian rockets’ in Przewodów are a deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation.” The statement also claimed that “All [destruction] in the residential quarters of [Kiev]” were caused not by Russian missiles, but by “self-destruction of the air defense missiles launched by Ukrainian forces from the foreign-manufactured air defense systems deployed within the [Kiev] city limits.”

At a November 16 meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the “maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine,” the Russian Federation’s Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya spoke of “the attempts by Ukraine and Poland to provoke a clash between Russia and NATO. The completely irresponsible statements made by the leaders of these two countries cannot be interpreted any other way,” he said.

Citing Zelenskyy’s false statements (the same statements we quoted above), Nebenzya said, “This is not just an intentional attempt at disinformation, but a conscious attempt to involve NATO, which is conducting a proxy-war with Russia in Ukraine — to [draw NATO] into a direct conflict with our country.”

Nebenzya proceeded to say that, “The Russophobic authorities of Poland … unequivocally stated that they were the target of Russian attacks… And this is in spite of the fact that photos published … leave no doubt that Ukrainian air-defense missiles had crossed into Poland. And now this has been confirmed even by NATO.”

Nebenzya added, “If not for that [evidence], all these facts would be concealed from the [Western] public, in order to promote the [narrative] of Russian guilt.” He cited other instances in which Ukrainian missile misfires have been blamed on the RF military, and reminded the Security Council that the Ukrainian government has imposed laws banning civilians from publishing photo and video evidence of Ukrainian war crimes on social media.

Finally, responding to the claim that the RF bears “ultimate responsibility” for the Ukrainian misfire, Nebenzya said that “We would not find ourselves in this situation if not for the fact that, in 2014 … with the direct participation of a number of Western states, a bloody anti-constitutional coup had not taken place.”

The RF permanent representative referred to the CIA-manufactured Euromaidan coup, which overthrew the previous Ukrainian government. The coup ousted an internationally neutral president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installed a pro-NATO, pro-European Union regime, led by the Zelenskyy government since 2019.

While the leaders of the Western imperialist axis will, of course, not subscribe to the overarching narrative of the Russian Federation government, and while NATO continues to cast “ultimate blame” on the RF for the Ukrainian misfire on Poland, the facts of the incident are now established beyond dispute.

In fact, President Biden has now directly countered Zelenskyy’s claim that the missile was fired by Russian forces.

On Thursday, November 17, when asked by a reporter for his “reaction to President Zelenskyy saying that the missiles that landed in Poland were not Ukrainian,” Biden simply replied, “That’s not the evidence,” before waving and walking away.

Why have NATO and the Russian Federation agreed on the facts?

Why has even the President of the United States, the central, foremost, unrivaled leader and figurehead of the Western imperialist axis, acknowledged the fact that NATO’s great rival, the Russian Federation, did not strike Poland?

For all their imperialist machinations and ambitions, neither the Western imperialist axis nor the Russian Federation stand to benefit from nuclear war. The only possible outcome of such a world war is, as it always has been, mutually assured destruction. Even the most bloodthirsty imperialist is forced to the table of diplomacy by this fact. Both “sides” of the proxy-war in Ukraine have thus taken great pains to ensure that, whatever happens — no matter which “side” gains and loses more, and no matter how much destruction Ukraine suffers in the process — the inter-imperialist conflict remains a proxy-war, that it remains within its prescribed bounds, and that it does not escalate to a world war. 

Only President Zelenskyy and the deranged leaders of his military-dictatorship regime have departed from this international consensus. As the war in Ukraine rages on, the Zelenskyy regime grows increasingly desperate for a direct war between NATO and the Russian Federation — no matter the toll. If the war does not end soon, we may well see the Zelenskyy regime resort to even more drastic measures to provoke a world war, and we may well live to see the unimaginably violent collapse of the existing world order.

The Western imperialist axis created and unleashed this monster. Now, the common people of Ukraine, of Russia, and of Europe, especially the working classes and the poor, are suffering for it. If this monster cannot be contained or destroyed, then the rest of the world, the rest of humanity, may lose everything.

This publication was launched on 22 August 2022, the two-hundred-thirty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Haitian Revolution on the island of Saint-Domingue. In an article for our launch of the Red Clarion, we covered the history of that revolution in some detail. Since the day the revolution broke out across the island, Haiti has been the subject of vicious imperialist attack. From Napoleon to Jefferson, and from Jefferson to Biden, the Western powers have tried to bring the rich lands of Saint-Domingue back under the direct political control or indirect financial control of Western, Euro-American capital.

Haiti was forced to pay enormous war indemnities by the international capitalist order for the “theft” of property from France — the “theft” of the bodies of freed Black slaves and the land stolen from the Taino people by the European invaders. The U.S. Empire has considered Haiti a U.S. protectorate since its early days as a settler-republic, dictating terms to the Haitian government and repeatedly invading the island-nation whenever it takes a step toward independence.

From 1915 to 1934, the United States Empire ruled Haiti directly through an invasion force of U.S. Marines that seized the island by order of then-president Woodrow Wilson. The invasion of 1915 was engineered by U.S. capital. The National City Bank of New York, for instance,  funded rebels to destabilize the government on the island. After invading, the U.S. installed pliant puppet regimes and created a police force, called the gendarmerie, to protect the property and interests of American capital on the island. With U.S. direction, the gendarmerie and Marines put down rebellions, tortured thousands, murdered thousands more in summary executions, and built infrastructure on the island through forced slave-labor.

In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president of Haiti. He was a former priest and a liberation theologist, and he worked to normalize Afro-Caribbean culture in Haiti. He took office in February of that year and by September he was removed by a right wing coup regime that immediately began a campaign of terror against Aristide’s supporters. We now have evidence that one of the junta’s members and the leader of the right-wing death squads, Emmanual Constant, was paid by the CIA.

Nevertheless, opinion turned against the counter-revolutionary regime both on the world stage and in the U.S. After all, the USSR had been forcibly dissolved and the specter of Communism was supposedly on the wane. Enthusiasm for Cold War-era policies was at a low ebb. Aristide had strong support among the Congressional Black Caucus and the emigree communities of the U.S. and, as a former priest and liberation theologian, also had the implicit blessing of Pope John Paul II. On September 19, 1994, 25,000 U.S. military personnel were once again on the island and marching into Haiti. President Aristide was restored to his democratically-elected office. 

In 2004, fed up with Aristide’s pro-Caribbean policies and leftward leanings, the U.S. once again intervened and funded right-wing paramilitaries, removing Aristide from his position for a second time. Aristide’s replacement, René Garcia Préval, launched a series of privatizations of the Haitian public sector. One of the coup plotters, Michael Joseph Martelly, would go on to sit as Haiti’s president from 2011 to 2016 with the support of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Martelly reconstituted the most dangerous elements of the Haitian military and created a government council of businessmen and bankers (which counted Bill Clinton among its members) to “manage” the Haitian economy. Haiti’s most recent president, Jovenel Moïse, presided over further instability; he was assassinated in 2021 by gunmen who have been publicly associated by the New York Times with the CIA — for trying to curb narcotics trafficking on the island.

Today, the United States Empire once again stands poised to launch an invasion with the blessing of the United Nations and warmongering liberals the world over. Acting president Ariel Henry, suspected of “masterminding” the assassination of his predecessor Moïse, has refused to step down in compliance with the many and various Haitian government organs and agencies that have declared his retention of power long after the assassination illegal. He has been in power since 20 July 2021, but no vote has ever been held to confirm him in office, despite his promise that “his administration will be a brief stage in a series of transitions to genuine democracy.”

Current Haitian Political Economy

In 1957 François Duvalier (known in Western culture as “Papa Doc”) became President of Haiti and would remain President for the rest of his life. The U.S. Empire viewed him as a counterbalance to Cuba and Castro, and thus helped him suppress the traditional Haitian mercantile elite through the creation of a paramilitary police force (the Tonton Makout). Under the presidency of his son Jean-Claude, clergy and local leaders began to organize the country’s poor communities into self-help organizations and peasant organizations. As the power of the repressed classes grew through organization, Jean-Claude slowly lost control of the country and, in 1986, he fled.

President Aristide was elected on 7 February 1991 as a result of this growing peasant power. Although the U.S. had acquiesced to his presidency as a matter of fact, Aristide’s attempts to reform the corrupt Haitian army and suppress the power of traditional Haitian business and mercantile elites in the led to the coup of September 1991. Aristide said of the coup, “The bourgeoisie should have been able to understand that its own interest demanded some concessions. We had recreated 1789. Did they want, by their passive resistance, to push the hungry to demand more radical measures? Pep la wonfle jodi-a li kapab gwonde demen! [‘the people who are snoring today may roar tomorrow!’]” .

By 2018, the ruling class in Haiti had consolidated its power and established a new, loyal, Haitian army. A handful of extremely rich and powerful families and individuals have a monopoly on the distribution of staple commodities. Gregory Brandt, president of the French-Haitian Chamber of Commerce controls soap and oil production. Clifford Apaid owns textile factories employing nearly 10,000 Haitians and subcontracts for U.S. garment production — his family controls 1/3rd of all Haitian the textile industry. Marc-Antoine Acra and his family are Haiti’s biggest importers or rice and sugar, and control the sheet metal, paper, and plastics industries of Haiti. Rueven Bigio runs GB Group, which is the dominant financier of the country.

Before the murder of President Moïse, Haiti operated as a semi-presidential republic, with a President, who is head of state, elected by popular vote to a five-year term and a Prime Minister, who is head of government, appointed by the president and selected from the members of the majority party in the National Assembly.

As one might expect from an imperialized colony, the Haitian state is essentially absent. Ordinary Haitians refer to the apparatus as the “phantom state.” NGOs provide around 50% of all health services and 80% of primary and secondary schools. Since the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, parasitic capitalist enterprises in the guise of NGOs and “aid” have spread through the Haitian economy. The World Bank runs the Haitian Reconstruction Fund and other NGOs and capitalist aid programs essentially run their “services” directly.

Mass Outrage and Imperialist Interference

In an economy dominated by foreign capital leeching resources to the U.S. and Europe, and in a political environment in which the last elected president was assassinated and usurped by his own Prime Minister — who now sits in his dead predecessors office, refusing to hold elections or submit to the authority of popular assemblies, a stand-off between the poorest segments of the population and the military terror-regime supporting the ruling class is threatening to descend into open civil war. The capitalist media, of course, casts the poor and laboring classes as “gangs” and the unrest as “political instability,” but knowing the history of Haiti and its current political crisis, we can see through this flimsy claim.

After decades of illegitimate government by the ruling classes, plundering of the public wealth, and the installation of U.S.-backed terror regimes, the criminal un-elected “Interim” President Henry has called for U.S. intervention. Rising energy prices (fallout from the Russo-Ukraine war), an outbreak of cholera, acute famine conditions, and the failure of the Haitian government to take any steps toward alleviating the multiple crises, have devastated the country. Opposition groups, many with substantial bases in the peasantry and poor working classes, are demanding that President Henry step down. Rather than relinquishing his grip on the country’s political system, President Henry announced the end of all fuel subsidies from the government in September.

Overnight, petroleum fuel prices doubled. The already-soaring cost of living threatened the lives of many of the country’s impoverished working class. Protests broke out in Port-au-Prince on 11 September, 2022, the day Henry announced the end of the subsidies. On 12 September, the so-called “G9 Family and Allies,” a paramilitary organization led by an ex-police officer that worked to keep the peace for President Moïse, dug a trench around the largest oil terminal in Haiti. This trench now encircles a critical depot of Port-au-Prince, in which 70% of the country’s oil reserve is held.

The demands published by the G9 and its ex-cop leader are that Henry immediately resign and that the government take steps to reduce prices of fuel and basic staple goods required to survive. On 11 October, Henry begged the U.S. capitalists to prop up his government. On 15 October, the U.S. Empire and its junior partner, Canada, sent the first armored cars and military equipment while their puppet-secretary in the U.N. called for “armed action” to remove the fuel blockade. On 17 October, the U.S. Empire and Mexico called for a non-UN force to occupy the island. On 21 October, the UN Security Council froze Haiti’s assets, instated travel bans, and imposed an arms embargo. Most foreign embassies in Haiti have closed.

As the people battle their corrupt government for economic relief, the imperialists prepare their invasion forces as they have so many times in the past. Despite the words of the Haitian anti-corruption organization Nou Pap Domi (“Historically, no U.S. or U.N. intervention has really addressed Haiti’s problem,” which is the “social and economic apartheid”), the U.S. capitalists continue to drum up energy for a direct attack. In Washington, the Biden government salivates over the potential this crisis will have on the November midterm elections in the U.S. and stalwart “progressives” like Elizabeth Warren have been sounding the trumpet for invasion. 

No to Intervention!

It is the duty of Communists within the imperialist West — the U.S. Empire and its junior partners — to oppose intervention in Haiti either through direct means or through a client state like Brazil. The problems of Haiti’s economy and politics come from the U.S. and Europe; its internal structure has been rearranged and reorganized for the benefit of international capital and the local Haitian ruling class since Jean-Jacques Dessalines helped free the island.

To the extent that the ruling powers of the U.S. Empire sit up and take note, we must make it politically untenable for them to launch their invasion. If they do launch it, we must combat it at home by increasing war friction and fatigue, through ceaseless agitation, and through the support of the Haitians and their self-determination in international solidarity.

The “crimes” against property committed in the Port-au-Prince uprising of 11 September and the unrest across the country are merely the crimes of the empire coming to fruition; they were grown from the seed of U.S. deposition or acquiescence to the deposition of the popular President Aristide, from CIA intervention and drug-smuggling, and from the support of the U.S. Empire for the comprador ruling class of Haiti, which ruthlessly exploits its people on behalf of the World Bank and U.S. monopoly capital.

Last week the Federalist (a right-fascist magazine) published a new fascist manifesto. This boldness follows the capture of the United States Supreme Court by the similarly named Federalist Society and lays out the future these so-called “Federalists” imagine for their movement. The manifesto isn’t aimed at the left-fascist Democrats, but rather at other, recalcitrant members of their own right-fascist clique: the “Grand Old Party” (GOP). They stand ascendent in the most reactionary institution of a reactionary government and are poised to sweep the statehouses and legislatures of the country, to be followed by the United States Congress next month. The political content of their message is clear. To other Republicans, they say: Fall in line now with the right-fascist program, or you will be treated like more of the same left fascists that we despise.

Who are the Federalists?

More fully the “Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies,” this lawyer’s guild was founded in 1982 by a collection of students from Yale, Harvard, and University of Chicago Law. These were the dialectical opposite of the Students for a New Democratic Society, the reaction to the left-wing movements of the 1960s and 70s, and the self-professed vanguard of the right reaction. Although it began with the typical right-wing objectives of “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty, and interpreting the constitution to its original meaning,” these slogans have only ever been an obfuscation, kind sounding words to mask their real aims and interests. The Federalists are nothing more than the tip of a spear of counter-revolution that has been wielded against the working classes for decades.

Six of the nine sitting members of the Supreme Court are members or former members of the Federalist Society: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. Their presence is ubiquitous on the campus of every law school in the country. Their initial funding came from Olin Industries (an arms manufacturer and industrial chemical producer) and the Society is given donations by Google, Chevron, the Koch Brothers, the Scaifes and the Mercer family. It claims something in the order of $20 million in annual revenue. Federalist Society members have served in both the George W. Bush administration and the Trump administration.

This far-reaching organization is the sharpened spear tip of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois reactionary intelligentsia. They are the driving force behind the rightward lurch in the federal judiciary, and they have finally made their statements clear, open, and unambiguous: they are the violent and repressive wing of U.S. fascism, prepared to sweep the slate clean of their ineffectual forebears and ensure that the rising class-consciousness of the working people is defeated once and for all.

Although there are no official links between the Federalist Society and the Federalist, their membership has contributed writing to the Federalist (for instance, “I Thought I Could Be A Christian And Constitutionalist At Yale Law School. I Was Wrong”) and the magazine has been a loud supporter of Federalist judges and legal vision. They share a name, but more importantly, they share a movement between them.

The Fascist Vision

What kind of movement, asks fascist John Daniel Davidson, should the conservatives adopt? “For starters,” he answers, they must start thinking of themselves as “radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries.” Lest the message be missed, he is clear: “that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.”

Davidson rejects the small-government libertarianism of his movement as counter-productive. He argues that the right fascists must get “used to the idea of wielding power…. [b]ecause accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible.” He explicitly calls for counter-revolution, because “periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary.”

Along with the rejection of the libertarian right’s commitment to small government, Davidson rejects the “freedom of the market” and moans that it has allowed more popular but “anti-Western” ideas to flourish. This is the most troubling and dangerous part of the manifesto and comes close to being programmatic. The rough program he describes is one that:

• Uses anti-trust powers to break up Silicon Valley firms because they are petit-bourgeois strongholds, producing “woke” ideology;
• Cuts off all public funds to universities;
• Makes no-fault divorce illegal;
• Subsidizes families with children, with the clear fascist intent of “preserving the race”;
• Expands the criminal code to outlaw all abortion, everywhere, under every circumstance;
• Outlaws drag shows;
• Promises the arrest and prosecution of parents who take their children to drag shows;
• Outlaws gender-affirming care for both children and adults and makes it punishable by incarceration for the doctors performing it;
• Outlaws “teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material” — here, a coded whistle for the existence of gay and lesbian and gender-varient persons.

As the markets lurch from impending crisis to impending crisis and as the housing situation in the U.S. Empire becomes less and less tenable for more and more working people, voices like Davidson’s will only get louder. It is this very list of policies that differentiates left- and right-fascisms. Ultimately, it is the left fascists’ (like the Democrats) inability to hold an ever-vanishing center that has led and will continue to lead to the right fascist seizure of power. While Democrats and Republicans both agree on the continued liquidation and genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement and colonization of New Afrika, and support for the vast imperialist war-machine abroad, it is here where they, for the moment, diverge.

Until this point, fascism in the U.S. Empire has been content to ride quietly behind all politics, right or left, and suffuse all political decisions with its implications. It has been a secure fascism that has no need of intricate repressive machinery, because it has relied instead on an all-powerful control of the economy, on the renewing and regenerating powers of the settler-state to confront its crises by bringing new land under its control, by endless fascist war-mongering and the conquest of new markets, and so on. This has allowed the economic features of fascist organization to do most of the work and permitted the public face of the empire to wear any expression it desires. The publication of this manifesto is an important and dangerous step in the end of this self-delusion among right fascists. It represents a level of clarity and self-awareness so far lacking in modern U.S. politics; it sets out not only the fundamental ideological groundwork of fascism, exposing it to the public so it can be addressed and argued over, but also describes the basic methodology by which fascism will tighten its grip on the people of the U.S. Empire.

The day is soon coming when even the left-fascist Democratic Party will polarize and fracture into that vanishingly small group willing to stand for the liberties of the masses, and those who will ally with or become right fascists to preserve the dying order.