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Empire of Japan (1868–1947)

2023-04-20T04:30:56Z

SludgeyRevolution: Mode of production

{{Infobox country|name=Empire of Japan|native_name=大日本帝國|image_flag=Flag of Japan.svg|image_coat=Imperial Seal of Japan.svg|capital=Tokyo City|largest_city=Tokyo City|mode_of_production=[[Imperialism]]|year_start=1868|year_end=1947|image_map=Imperial Japan map.png|map_width=290|map_caption=Medium green: Colonies Light green: Puppet states and occupied territories|official_languages=Japanese|area_km2=7,400,000|area_footnote= (1942)|population_estimate=105,200,000|population_estimate_year=1940}}

The '''Empire of Japan''' was a country in [[East Asia]]. It existed from the [[Meiji Restoration]] in 1868 until the enactment of the post-[[Second World War|World War II]] 1947 constitution and subsequent formation of modern-day [[Japan]]. During the Second World War, Japan was a [[Fascism|fascist]] country and part of the Axis along with [[German Reich (1933–1945)|Nazi Germany]].

The memories of Japan's [[imperialism]] and [[colonialism]], exemplified by events such as the [[Nanjing massacre]], the sexual exploitation of [[comfort women]] in Korea and other countries, criminal medical experimentation, [[Slavery|slave labor]], human rights abuses in [[Unit 731|development unit 731]], and other such atrocities still affect Japan's relations with other [[Asia|Asian]] countries in the present day.<ref name=":1" />

== History ==

=== Meiji Restoration ===
Between 1867 and 1869, an alliance of lords and samurai overthrew the [[Feudalism|feudal]] [[Tokugawa Shogunate]] and made Emperor [[Meiji]] the ruler of the country. They introduced conscription and remodeled the military to be based on the [[German Empire (1871–1918)|German]] army and [[British]] navy. Japan began building railroads and factories and faced revolts from reactionary samurai as well as impoverished [[Peasantry|peasants]].<ref name=":0222">{{Citation|author=Neil Faulkner|year=2013|title=A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals|chapter=The Age of Blood and Iron|page=158–159|pdf=https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacedljwr5izotdclz23o3c5p4di4t3ero3ncbfytip55slhiz4otuls?filename=Neil%20Faulkner%20-%20A%20Marxist%20History%20of%20the%20World_%20From%20Neanderthals%20to%20Neoliberals-Pluto%20Press%20%282013%29.pdf|publisher=Pluto Press|isbn=9781849648639|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=91CA6C708BFE15444FE27899217FBA8E}}</ref>

=== Early expansion ===
[[File:Japanese Empire Building 1870-1942.png|thumb|Map depicting territory under the control of the Japanese Empire at different times, from 1870-1942.]]
Early in the Meiji period, the Japanese government consolidated its hold on the peripheral islands of the Japanese archipelago. In the territory inhabited by the [[Ainu]], the Meiji regime tried to wipe out markers of Ainu ethnicity (earrings and tattoos, for example) and prohibited the Ainu from practicing their religion or hunting in their ancestral hunting grounds. In 1899, the state enacted the "Law for the Protection of Former Hokkaidō Aborigines," which removed land from communal control, thereby forcing the Ainu to become petty farmers. Japanese assimilation policies not only dispossessed the Ainu, they destroyed nearly all indicators of Ainu cultural and ethnic identity. The Japanese government also embarked on a policy of cultural assimilation in [[Okinawa Prefecture|Okinawa]], paying particular attention to discouraging the use of the native Okinawan language and enforcing the use of standard Japanese among schoolchildren.

Eventually, leading Japanese intellectuals and government officials in the 1880s and 1890s began to support the idea of winning control over neighboring regions. Three factors were responsible for this drive: a nationalist desire for equality, desire for access to the raw materials and markets of East Asia (which could be lost if a Western power gained control of the regions first), and other strategic goals, and Japan eventually aimed to bring China and Korea under its control.<ref name=":0" />

In the nineteenth century, Western powers had saddled non-Western states with a variety of unequal arrangements, from fixed tariffs and extraterritoriality to formal colonization. In the case of Japan, a treaty was signed between Japan and the U.S., which Japanese nationalists protested as being disadvantageous to Japan. Leading their list of goals was the need to strengthen the military in order to withstand future Western impositions. They studied the organizations and techniques of Western governments and militaries, and they modeled their own institutions on them. Thus the Meiji government was born in an imperialistic milieu, and their primary models were the world's leading imperialistic states.<ref name=":0">Andrew Reed Hall. [https://www.japanpitt.pitt.edu/essays-and-articles/history/japanese-imperialism-and-colonialism “Japanese Imperialism and Colonialism | Japan Module.”] University of Pittsburgh. ‌</ref> According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "Achieving equality with the West was one of the primary goals of the Meiji leaders."<ref>[https://www.britannica.com/place/Japan/World-War-II-and-defeat "Japan: The emergence of imperial Japan"]. ''Encyclopedia Britannica''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220712060836/https://www.britannica.com/place/Japan/World-War-II-and-defeat Archived] from the original.</ref> According to Peter J. Seybolt of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Vermont, "In the 19th century, Britain, the United States and France, soon followed by Russia, Germany and other Western nations, forcefully 'opened' a reluctant East Asia to Western trade and religious proselytizing by imposing a series of 'unequal treaties'" and, after a period of internal turmoil, "the Japanese united as a nation determined to learn from the West techniques for 'strengthening the army and enriching the country.'"<ref name=":1">Peter J. Seybolt. [https://asiasociety.org/china-korea-and-japan-forgiveness-and-mourning "China, Korea and Japan: Forgiveness and Mourning"] Asia Society. [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://asiasociety.org/china-korea-and-japan-forgiveness-and-mourning Archived] from the original on 2022-08-14.</ref> According to Seybolt:<blockquote>Within a remarkably short time the Japanese had acquired the power to compete with the West on its own terms, whereupon they took the initiative to "open" Korea, the most conservative of the three East Asian nations, and join Western nations in imposing unequal treaties on it. In 1894-95 Japan defeated [[Qing dynasty (1636–1912)|China]] in a war to determine control of Korea, and a decade later it decisively defeated Russia in a war over exploitation rights in Korea and Manchuria in northeastern China. [...] Chinese historians estimate that more than 20 million of their compatriots died as a direct result of the war, and uncounted millions of others were injured. In the most notorious single incident of the war an estimated 150,000 to 350,000 Chinese men, women, and children were slaughtered in a frenzy of indiscriminate killing by Japanese troops when they entered Nanjing, then the capital of the [[Republic of China]]. The infamous [[Nanjing massacre]] was a calculated attempt by local Japanese commanders to terrorize the Chinese into capitulating. The effect was the opposite. Chinese resistance stiffened, and memories of the atrocity are still fresh.<ref name=":1" /></blockquote>During the [[Russian Civil War]], Japanese forces invaded parts of [[Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991)|Russia]] both to gain territory and to stop the spread of communism. The Japanese state persecuted [[Communism|communists]] and [[Anarchism|anarchists]] in the 1920s.<ref name=":2">{{Web citation|author=Tatiana Linkhoeva|newspaper=[[Jacobin]]|title=Imperial Japan and the Russian Revolution|date=2020-07-16|url=https://jacobin.com/2020/07/imperial-japan-russian-revolution|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220622184719/https://jacobin.com/2020/07/imperial-japan-russian-revolution|archive-date=2022-06-22|retrieved=2022-09-04}}</ref>

=== Colonization of Korea ===
Japan annexed and colonized [[Korea]] in 1910.

Between 1910 and 1945, Japan tried to wipe out Korean culture, language and history and took control over Korea's labor power and land.<ref>Erin Blakemore (July 28, 2020.). [https://www.history.com/news/japan-colonization-korea "How Japan Took Control of Korea"] ''History.com''.</ref> At the height of its power in 1942, the Japanese Empire controlled Korea, [[Empire of (Great) Manchuria|Manchuria]], and parts of China and [[Indonesia]].<ref>[https://marlboro.emerson.edu/plan/fragments-of-empire-effects-of-japanese-imperialism-in-korea-china-japan-and-vietnam/ “Fragments of Empire: Effects of Japanese Imperialism in Korea, China, Japan, and Vietnam – Marlboro College Archives.”] Emerson.edu.</ref>

=== Second World War ===
While fighting [[German Reich (1933–1945)|Germany]] in Europe, the [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland|UK]], [[France]], and the [[Kingdom of the Netherlands|Netherlands]] left their colonies largely undefended. Japan attacked [[United States of America|U.S.]] forces in [[Hawaii]], incapacitating the U.S. military in the Pacific for half a year. Japan seized several Statesian, British, and Dutch colonies including the [[Philippines]], [[Malaya]], [[Singapore]], the [[Dutch East Indies]], [[Borneo]], and [[New Guinea]], and exploited them for oil, rubber, and tin. The U.S. then blockaded Japan to prevent it from receiving imports from its colonies. In August of 1945, the [[Workers' and Peasants' Red Army|Red Army]] liberated Manchuria and Korea, causing Japan to surrender.<ref name=":12">{{Citation|author=Stephen Gowans|year=2018|title=Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom|chapter=The Patriot|page=70–72|pdf=https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4iiga4ngtxusr2civjxewbili5jne2sbpefbx2s3im2kphattzc?filename=Stephen%20Gowans%20-%20Patriots%2C%20Traitors%20and%20Empires_%20The%20Story%20of%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Struggle%20for%20Freedom-Baraka%20Books%20%282018%29.pdf|city=Montreal|publisher=Baraka Books|isbn=9781771861427|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8435F6FF91279531705764823FDC2A7F}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Fascist countries]]
<references />
[[Category:History of Japan]]

Tenzin Gyatso

2023-04-15T09:40:56Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added mention of him being a pedo,

{{Infobox person|name=Tenzin Gyatso|native_name=ལྷ་མོ་དོན་འགྲུབ།|birth_name=Lhamo Thondup|birth_date=1935 July 6|birth_place=Taktser, Amdo, [[Tibet]]|image=Dalai Lama.png|image_size=200}}

'''Tenzin Gyatso''' is the 14th Dalai Lama and leader of the [[Central Tibetan Administration]]. After the liberation of Tibet in 1951, he fled abroad. He was paid $180,000 a year by the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] to be involved in operations against [[People's Republic of China|China]]<ref>{{News citation|newspaper=Covert Geopolitics|title=Mainstream Media Confirm Dalai Lama is A CIA Asset|date=2016-12-19|url=https://geopolitics.co/2016/12/19/mainstream-media-confirm-dalai-lama-is-a-cia-asset/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220203170842/https://geopolitics.co/2016/12/19/mainstream-media-confirm-dalai-lama-is-a-cia-asset/|archive-date=2022-02-03|retrieved=2022-04-24}}</ref> and has been on the CIA's payroll since the 1950s.<ref>{{News citation|newspaper=[[Liberation School]]|title=China, Tibet and U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution|date=2008-04-01|url=https://www.liberationschool.org/08-04-01-china-tibet-ussponsored-coun-html/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210619132116/https://liberationschool.org/08-04-01-china-tibet-ussponsored-coun-html/|archive-date=2021-06-19|retrieved=2022-06-20}}</ref> In 1999, he urged the [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland|British]] government not to try former [[Republic of Chile|Chilean]] dictator [[Augusto Pinochet]] for [[crimes against humanity]].<ref>{{News citation|author=[[Michael Parenti]]|newspaper=[[Red Sails]]|title=Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth (2007)|date=2020-12-26|url=https://redsails.org/friendly-feudalism/|retrieved=2022-04-24}}</ref> In Februrary 2023, he sexually harassed and assaulted a young boy on video by asking him to suck on his tongue.<ref>{{News citation|author=Hannah Ellis-Petersen|newspaper=[[The Guardian]]|title=Dalai Lama apologises after kissing boy and asking him to ‘suck my tongue’|date=2023-04-10|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/dalai-lama-apologises-kissing-boy-suck-his-tongue-video/|retrieved=2023-04-15}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:People's Republic of China]]

Library:The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism

2023-04-14T00:34:55Z

SludgeyRevolution: Fixed link

{{changetitle|''The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism'', by Gabriel Rockhill}}
{{Library infobox work
| title = The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism
| subtitle =
| image =
| image_size =
| image_upright =
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| caption =
| author = Gabriel Rockhill
| written in =
| published_date = June 27th, 2022
| published_location = The Philosophical Salon
| type = Article
| source = [https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/ The Philosophical Salon]
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}}
==Foundations of the Global Theory Industry==
Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common source for so many of the trend-setting forms of theoretical critique that currently dominate the academic market in the capitalist world, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to queer theory, Afro-pessimism and beyond. The Frankfurt School’s political orientation has therefore had a foundational effect on the globalized Western intelligentsia.

The luminaries of the first generation of the Institute for Social Research—particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who will be the focus of this essay—are towering figures in what is referred to as Western or cultural Marxism. For those familiar with Jürgen Habermas’s reorientation away from historical materialism in the second and then third generations of the Frankfurt School, this early work often represents a veritable golden age of critical theory, when it was still—though perhaps passive or pessimistic—dedicated in some capacity to radical politics. If there is a grain of truth in this assumption, it is only insofar as the early Frankfurt School is compared to later generations that refashioned critical theory as radical liberal—or even just blatantly liberal—ideology.<ref group="note">See my analysis of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser in “Critical and Revolutionary Theory.”</ref> However, this point of comparison is setting the bar much too low, as is the case whenever one reduces politics to academic politics. After all, the first generation of the Frankfurt School lived through some of the most cataclysmic clashes in global class struggle of the 20th century, when a veritable intellectual world war was being fought over the meaning and significance of communism.

In order to avoid being the dupes of history, or of the parochialism of the Western academy, it is therefore important to re-contextualize the Institute for Social Research’s work in relationship to international class struggle. One of the most significant features of this context was the desperate attempt, on the part of the capitalist ruling class, its state managers and ideologues, to redefine the Left—in the words of cold warrior CIA agent Thomas Braden—as the “compatible,” meaning non-communist, Left.<ref group="note">See, for instance, Thomas W. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’” Saturday Evening Post (May 20, 1967). Judging from the fact that W.W. Rostow shared, via CIA Director Richard Helms, Braden’s article with the President of the United States prior to its publication, it is most likely what the Agency calls a “limited hangout.” As former executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, Victor Marchetti, explained, a limited hangout is a public relations tactic used by clandestine professionals: “When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further” (“CIA to Admit Hunt Involvement in Kennedy Slaying,” The Spotlight, August 14, 1978: https://archive.org/details/marchetti-victor-cia-to-admit-hunt-involvement-in-kennedy-slaying-the-spotlight-aug.-14-1978/mode/2up).</ref> As Braden and others involved have explained in detail, one important facet of this struggle consisted in the use of foundation money and Agency front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to promote anti-communism and lure Leftists into taking positions against actually existing socialism.

Horkheimer participated in at least one junket organized by the CCF in Hamburg.<ref group="note">See Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History & the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 207-8 and Giles Scott-Smith, “The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the End of Ideology, and the Milan Conference of 1955: ‘Defining the Parameters of Discourse,’” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37 No. 3 (2002): 437-455. The Paris branch of the Institute for Social Research closely collaborated with Raymond Aron, who was in charge of overseeing which work was appropriate for a French audience (see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Correspondance: 1927-1969, Vol. I, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, trans. Didier Renault (Paris: Klincksieck: 2016), 146. I cite this French edition here and elsewhere because Adorno and Horkheimer’s complete correspondence is not available in English, as far as I know). In the postwar era, Aron became the philosophic figurehead of the CCF and an indefatigable anti-communist ideologue whose public visibility was immensely enhanced by CIA support.</ref> Adorno published in the CIA-funded journal Der Monat, the largest review of its kind in Europe and the model for many of the Agency’s other publications. His articles appeared, as well, in two other CIA magazines: Encounter and Tempo presente. He also hosted in his home, corresponded and collaborated with the CIA operative who was arguably the leading figure in the German anticommunist Kulturkampf: Melvin Lasky.<ref group="note">By “operative,” I mean that Lasky worked closely with the CIA—as well as other U.S. government agencies—in his expansive anti-communist propaganda efforts, not that he was himself a CIA “case officer” (which has not been confirmed, as far as I know). Lasky’s collaboration with the CIA and other agencies has been proven by numerous internal documents, as well as the work of researchers like Frances Stonor Saunders, Michael Hochgeschwender, Hugh Wilford and Peter Coleman, amongst others. Some of Lasky’s correspondence with Adorno is available in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Correspondance: 1927-1969, Vol. I-IV, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, trans. Didier Renault (Paris: Klincksieck: 2016).</ref> Founder and chief editor of Der Monat, as well as a member of the original steering committee for the CIA’s CCF, Lasky told Adorno that he was open to every form of collaboration with the Institute for Social Research, including publishing their articles and any other declaration as quickly as possible in his pages.<ref group="note">See Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. III, 291.</ref> Adorno took him up on the offer and sent him four unpublished manuscripts, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, in 1949.<ref group="note">See Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. III, 348.</ref>

Horkheimer’s lifelong collaborator was thus closely connected to the CCF networks in West Germany, and his name appears on a document, likely from 1958/59, that outlined plans for an all-German committee of the CCF.<ref group="note">See Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongreß für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 488.</ref> What is more, even after it was revealed in 1966 that this international propaganda organization was a CIA front, Adorno continued to be “included in the expansion plans of the Paris headquarters [of the CCF],” as it was “business as usual” in the part of Germany overseen by the U.S.<ref group="note">Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive?, 563.</ref> This is only the tip of the iceberg, as we shall see, and it is nowise surprising since Adorno and Horkheimer rose to global prominence within the elite networks of the anti-communist Left.
==A Dialectical Analysis of Theoretical Production==
The analysis that follows is based on a dialectical account of the social totality that situates the subjective theoretical practices of these two founding fathers of critical theory within the objective world of international class struggle. It does not accept the arbitrary dividing line that many petty-bourgeois academics desperately try to erect between intellectual production and the broader socioeconomic world, as if someone’s “thought” could—and should—be separated from their “life,” as well as from the material system of theoretical production, circulation and reception that I will here refer to as the intellectual apparatus. Such a non-dialectical assumption, after all, is little more than a symptom of an idealist approach to theoretical work, which presumes that there is a spiritual and conceptual realm that functions completely independently of material reality and the political economy of knowledge.

This presupposition perpetuates intellectual commodity fetishism, meaning the idolization of the sacred products of the theory industry that prohibits us from situating them within the overall social relations of production and class struggle. It also serves the interests of those who have or aspire to part of a particular franchise within the global theory industry, if it be “Frankfurt School critical theory” or any other, because it protects the brand image of the franchise itself (which remains unsullied by the actual social relations of production). Whereas intellectual commodity fetishism is a principal feature of consumption within the theory industry, brand image management is the hallmark of production.

For such a dialectical analysis, it is important to acknowledge that Adorno and Horkheimer did indeed mobilize their subjective agency in formulating significant critiques of capitalism, consumer society and the culture industry. Far from denying this, I would merely like to situate these criticisms within the objective social world, which entails asking a very simple and practical question that is rarely raised within academic circles: if capitalism is recognized as having negative effects, what is to be done about it? The deeper one mines down into their life and work, sifting through the deliberate obscurantism of their discourse, the more obvious their response becomes, and the easier it is to understand the primary social function of their shared intellectual project. For as critical as they sometimes are of capitalism, they regularly affirm that there is no alternative, and nothing can or should ultimately be done about it. What is more, as we shall see, their criticisms of capitalism pale in comparison to their uncompromising condemnation of socialism. Their brand of critical theory ultimately leads to an acceptance of the capitalist order since socialism is judged to be far worse. Not unlike most of the other fashionable discourses in the capitalist academy, they proffer a critical theory that we might call ABS Theory: Anything But Socialism.

It is not the least bit surprising, in this regard, that Adorno and Horkheimer have been so widely supported and promoted within the capitalist world. In order to shore up the compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism, what better tactic than to champion scholars like these as some of the most important, and even most radical, Marxist thinkers of the 20th century? “Marxism” can thereby be redefined as a kind of anti-communist critical theory that is not directly connected to class struggle from below but rather freely criticizes all forms of “domination,” and which ultimately sides with capitalist control societies over and against the purported “fascist” horrors of powerful socialist states.

Since benighted anti-communism has been so widely promoted within capitalist culture, this attempted redefinition of Marxism might not be immediately recognizable to some readers as reactionary and social chauvinist (in the sense that it ultimately elevates bourgeois society over any alternative). Unfortunately, major swaths of the population in the capitalist world have been inculcated into the knee-jerk response of uninformed calumny, rather than rigorous analysis, when it comes to actually existing socialism. Since the material history of these projects, with all of their ups and downs—rather than mythological horror stories propagandistically constructed around a communist bogeyman—will be essential to understanding the argument that follows, I take the liberty of referring the reader to the deep and rich work of rigorous historians like Annie Lacroix-Riz, Domenico Losurdo, Carlos Martinez, Michael Parenti, Albert Szymanski, Jacques Pauwels, and Walter Rodney, amongst others. I also encourage the reader to examine the important quantitative comparisons between capitalism and socialism undertaken by exacting analysts like Minqi Li, Vicente Navarro and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.<ref group="note">See, for instance, Minqi Li, “The 21st Century: Is There an Alternative (to Socialism)?” Science & Society 77:1 (January 2013): 10-43; Vicente Navarro, “Has Socialism Failed? An Analysis of Health Indicators under Capitalism and Socialism,” Science & Society 57:1 (spring 1993): 6-30. Tricontinental has provided numerous in-depth analyses of actually existing socialism and how it compares to actually existing capitalism: https://thetricontinental.org/.</ref> Such work is anathema to the dominant ideology, and for good reason: it scientifically examines the evidence, rather than relying on hoary tropes and uninformed ideological reflexes. It is the type of historical and materialist work, moreover, that has largely been overshadowed by the speculative forms of critical theory promoted by the global theory industry.
==Intellectuals in the Age of Revolution and Global Class War==
Although their early lives were marked by the world-historical events of the Russian Revolution and the attempted revolution in Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer were esthetes wary of the supposed morass of mass politics. While their interest in Marxism was piqued by these incidents, it was primarily of an intellectual nature. Horkheimer did become marginally involved in activities around the Munich council republic after WWI, particularly by providing support for some of those involved after the council had been brutally suppressed. However, he—the same is true a fortiori of Adorno—“continued to maintain his distance from the explosive political events of the time and to devote himself primarily to his own personal concerns.”<ref group="note">John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 42.</ref>

Their class standing was far from insignificant in this regard, for it positions them and their political outlook within the larger, objective world of the social relations of production. Both Frankfurt School theorists were from affluent families. Adorno’s father was a “wealthy wine merchant” and Horkheimer’s was a “millionaire” who “owned several textile factories.”<ref group="note">Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 24; Ingar Solty, “Max Horkheimer, a Teacher without a Class,” Jacobin (February 15, 2020): https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/max-horkheimer-frankfurt-school-adorno-working-class-marxism; Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 13.</ref> Adorno “had no personal ties at all to socialist political life” and maintained throughout his life “a deep aversion to formal membership of any party organization.”<ref group="note">Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1989), 33; Steven Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 94.</ref> Similarly, Horkheimer was never “an overt member of any working-class party.”<ref group="note">Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 33.</ref> The same is generally true of the other figures involved in the early years of the Frankfurt School: “none of those belonging to the Horkheimer circle was politically active; none of them had his origins either in the labor movement or in Marxism.”<ref group="note">Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995), 104.</ref>

In the words of John Abromeit, Horkheimer sought to preserve the supposed independence of theory and “rejected the position of Lenin, Lukács, and the Bolsheviks that critical theory must be ‘rooted’” in the working class, or more specifically working-class parties.<ref group="note">Abromeit, Max Horkheimer, 150. Any scant and circumspect hope that Horkheimer had placed in the Soviet Union dissipated in the early 1930s, and “after 1950, Horkheimer began defending the liberal-democratic political traditions of the West in a manner that was […] one-sided” (Abromeit, Max Horkheimer, 15, also see 181).</ref> He encouraged critical theorists to operate as intellectual free agents rather than grounding their research in the proletariat, which was a type of work that he disparaged as “totalitarian propaganda.”<ref group="note">“Critical theory,” Horkheimer claimed, “is neither ‘deeply rooted’ like totalitarian propaganda nor ‘detached’ like the liberalist intelligentsia” (Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 2002), 223-4).</ref> Adorno’s overall position, like Herbert Marcuse’s, was summarized by Marie-Josée Levallée in the following terms: “the Bolshevik party, which Lenin made the vanguard of the October Revolution, was a centralizing and repressive institution which would shape the Soviet State in its image and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into its own dictatorship.”<ref group="note">“Marie-Josée Levallée, “October and the Prospects for Revolution: The Views of Arendt, Adorno, and Marcuse,” The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice: Failures, Legacies, and the Future of Revolution, eds. Thomas Telios et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 173.</ref>

When Horkheimer took over the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, his stewardship was characterized by speculative concerns with culture and authority rather than rigorous historical materialist analyses of capitalism, class struggle and imperialism. In the words of Gillian Rose, “instead of politicizing academia,” the Institute under Horkheimer “academized politics.”<ref group="note"> Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 2.</ref> This was perhaps seen nowhere more clearly than in “the constant policy of the Institute under Horkheimer’s direction,” which “continued to be abstinence, not only from every activity which was even remotely political, but also from any collective or organized effort to publicize the situation in Germany or to support émigrés.”<ref group="note">Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 133. Also see Solty, “Max Horkheimer, a Teacher without a Class” and Rose, The Melancholy Science, 2.</ref> With the rise of Nazism, Adorno attempted to go into hibernation, assuming that the regime would only target “the orthodox pro-Soviet Bolshevists and communists who had drawn attention to themselves politically” (they would indeed be the first to be put in the concentration camps).<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 181.
</ref> He “refrained from public criticism of any kind of the Nazis and their ‘great power’ policies.”<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 181. “Even in his private letters,” Müller-Doohm writes, “until well into the mid-1930s, we find no more than rather generalized, pessimistic mood-pictures, and no unambiguous statements on the political situation” (181).</ref>
==Critical Theory American Style==
This refusal to overtly participate in progressive politics was intensified when the leaders of the Institute moved it to the United States in the early 1930s. The Frankfurt School adapted itself “to the local bourgeois order, censoring its own past and present work to suit local academic or corporate susceptibilities.”<ref group="note">Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 33. Thomas Wheatland explains that the Horkheimer Circle in New York chose to “remain silent about the major political questions of the day and […concealed] its Marxism almost completely. […] Horkheimer remained unwilling to risk the possible repercussions of political activism or even political engagement with the major topics of the era” (The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 99).</ref> Horkheimer had words like Marxism, revolution and communism expunged from its publications in order to avoid offending its U.S. sponsors.<ref group="note">See Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2017), 72 and 197.</ref> Furthermore, any type of political activity was strictly forbidden, as Herbert Marcuse later explained.<ref group="note">See Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 72 (also see 141).</ref> Horkheimer put his energy into securing corporate and state funding for the Institute, and he even hired a public relations firm to promote its work in the U.S. Another émigré from Germany, Bertolt Brecht, was thus not fully unjustified when he critically described the Frankfurt scholars as—in the words of Stuart Jeffries—“prostitutes in their quest for foundation support during their American exile, selling their skills and opinions as commodities in order to support the dominant ideology of oppressive U.S. society.”<ref group="note">Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 136. Brecht maintained that “the Frankfurt School perpetrated a bourgeois sleight of hand by posturing as a Marxist institute while at the same time insisting that revolution could no longer depend on insurrection by the working class, and declining to take part in the overthrow of capitalism” (Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 77).</ref> They were indeed intellectual free agents unrestrained by any working-class organizations in their pursuit of corporate and state sponsorship for their brand of market-savvy critical theory.

Brecht’s close friend, Walter Benjamin, was one of the Frankfurt scholars’ most important Marxist interlocutors at the time. He was not able to join them in the United States because he tragically committed suicide in 1940 at the border between France and Spain, the night before he faced near certain apprehension by the Nazis. According to Adorno, he “killed himself after he had already been saved” because he had “been made a permanent member of the Institute and knew it.”<ref group="note">Cited in Ulrich Fries, “Ende der Legende: Hintergründe zu Walter Benjamins Tod,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 96:4 (2021), 421, 422. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Helmut-Harry Loewen, who drew my attention to this important article and shared his partial translation of it with me.</ref> He was “flush with funds” for his trip, in the words of the famous philosopher, and knew “that he could rely completely on us materially.”<ref group="note">Cited in Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 422, 422.</ref> This version of history, which presents Benjamin’s suicide as an incomprehensible personal decision given the circumstances, was an exercise in mendacity for the sake of personal and institutional exoneration, according to a detailed analysis recently published by Ulrich Fries. Not only were the leading figures of the Frankfurt School unwilling to assist Benjamin financially for his flight from the Nazis, Fries argues, but they also ran an extensive cover-up campaign to disingenuously present themselves as his benevolent benefactors.

Prior to his suicide, Benjamin was financially dependent on the Institute for a monthly stipend. However, the Frankfurt scholars despised the influence of Brecht and revolutionary Marxism on his work. Adorno had no compunction about describing Brecht with the anticommunist epithet “savage” when explaining to Horkheimer that Benjamin needed to be “definitively” liberated from his influence.<ref group="note">See Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer on January 26, 1936, published in Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. I, 110.</ref> It is not surprising, then, that Benjamin feared losing his stipend due, in part, to Adorno’s critiques of his work and refusal to publish a section of his Baudelaire study in 1938.<ref group="note">See the epistolary exchange between them in Ronald Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 100-141.</ref> Horkheimer explicitly told Benjamin around the same time, as fascist forces were closing in around him, that he should prepare for the discontinuation of his sole source of income since 1934. He claimed, moreover, that his hands were “unfortunately tied” when he refused to fund Benjamin’s journey to safety by paying for a steamship ticket to the U.S. that would have cost under $200.<ref group="note">Cited in Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 409.</ref> This was literally “a month after transferring an extra $50,000 to an account at his exclusive disposal,” which was the “second time in eight months” that he had secured an additional $50,000 (the equivalent of just over 1 million dollars in 2022).<ref group="note">Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 409, 424.
</ref> In July 1939, Friedrich Pollock also obtained an additional $130,000 for the Institute from Felix Weil, the wealthy son of a capitalist millionaire whose profits from a grain enterprise in Argentina, property speculation and meat trading funded the Frankfurt School.

It was political will, not money, that was lacking. Indeed, Fries concurs with Rolf Wiggershaus that Horkheimer’s cruel decision to abandon Benjamin was part of a broader pattern according to which the directors “systematically placed the realization of their private life goals above the interests of everyone else,” while propagating the false appearance of “outstanding commitment to those persecuted by the Nazi regime.”<ref group="note">Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 414.</ref> As if to put the last nail in Benjamin’s coffin, his literary estate was later purged of its more explicit Marxist elements according to Helmut Heißenbüttel: “In everything Adorno did for Benjamin’s work, the Marxist-materialist side remains erased. […] The work appears in a reinterpretation in which the surviving controversial correspondent imposes his view.”<ref group="note">Cited in Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 410.</ref>

Todd Cronan has argued that there was a palpable shift in the Frankfurt School’s overall political orientation around 1940—the year Pollock wrote “State Capitalism”—as it increasingly turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity. “It often seems to me,” Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that year, “that everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 2014), 59-60.
</ref> According to Cronan, Adorno and Horkheimer “opened up the possibility from within Marxism of seeing class as a matter of power, of domination, rather than economics (the Jews were not a category defined by economic exploitation). And once that possibility was raised, it became the dominant mode of analysis on the left at large.”<ref group="note">Todd Cronan, Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021), 132.</ref> In other words, the Frankfurt theorists helped set the stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics, which would become consolidated in the neoliberal era.

It is highly revealing in this regard that the Institute undertook a massive study of “Anti-Semitism in American Labor” in 1944-45, under Pollock’s stewardship. Fascism had risen to power with extensive financial backing by the capitalist ruling class, and it was still on the war path around the world. Yet, the Frankfurt scholars were hired to focus on the purported anti-Semitism of U.S. workers rather than on the capitalist funders of fascism or the actual Nazis who were fighting a war against the Soviets. They reached the remarkable conclusion that the “communist-run” unions were the worst of all, and that they thus had “fascist” tendencies: “The members of these unions are less communist than fascist-minded.”<ref group="note">Cited in Cronan, Red Aesthetics, 151.</ref> The study in question was commissioned by the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). One of the JLC’s leaders, David Dubinsky, had numerous ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and was involved, along with the likes of CIA operatives Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, in the Company’s expansive campaign to take over organized labor and purge it of communists.<ref group="note"> On the JLC’s leadership, see Catherine Collomp, “‘Anti-Semitism among American Labor’: A Study by the Refugee Scholars of the Frankfurt School of Sociology at the End of World War II,” Labor History 52:4 (November 2011): 417-439. On Dubinsky’s work with the CIA, see the documents available on the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room (https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/home), as well as Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008) and Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999).</ref> By identifying the communist unions as the most anti-Semitic, and even “fascist,” the Frankfurt School appears to have provided some of the ideological justification for destroying the communist labor movement.

Some might consider the Institute for Social Research’s collaboration with U.S. authorities and self-censorship justified due to the anti-communist, and sometimes philofascist, attitudes of the U.S. power elite, not to mention the enemy alien acts and decrees.<ref group="note">See David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 181-2.</ref> Indeed, based on a detailed overview of the Institute’s history and activities on January 21, 1944, the Federal Bureau of Investigation mobilized numerous stool pigeons to spy on the scholars for about ten years due to the concern that the Institute might be serving as a communist front.<ref group="note">See Adorno’s FBI file: https://vault.fbi.gov/theodor-adorno/theodor-adorno-part-01-of-01/view</ref> The informants included close associates of the Institute like Karl Wittfogel, other professional colleagues and even neighbors. The Bureau found little to no evidence of suspicious behavior, however, and its officers appear to have been reassured when some of their snitches, who were personally close to the Frankfurt scholars, explained to them that the critical theorists “believe there is no difference between Hitler and Stalin as to purpose and tactics.”<ref group="note">See Adorno’s FBI file: https://vault.fbi.gov/theodor-adorno/theodor-adorno-part-01-of-01/view</ref> Indeed, as we will see below, they would claim as much in some of their writings, including when they had settled in West Germany and were no longer under the direct threat of FBI surveillance and potential detainment or deportation.
==Malign the East, Defend—While in the Pay of—the West==
In 1949-50, the intellectual front men of the Frankfurt School moved the Institute back to West Germany, one of the epicenters for the intellectual world war against communism. “In this milieu,” writes Perry Anderson, “in which the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] was to be banned and the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] formally abandoned any connection with Marxism, the depoliticization of the Institute was completed.”<ref group="note">Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 34.</ref> No less than Jürgen Habermas—who occasionally outflanked Adorno and Horkheimer to the left in the early years—accused the latter of “opportunist conformity which was at odds with the critical tradition.”<ref group="note">Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 297. Habermas himself, we should recall, was a member of the Hitler Youth and would later support the Persian Gulf War and NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia.</ref> Indeed, Horkheimer had continued his censorship of the Institute’s work, refusing to publish two articles by Habermas that were critical of liberal democracy and spoke of “revolution,” daring to suggest the possibility of an emancipation from “the shackles of bourgeois society.”<ref group="note">See Horkheimer’s jeremiad against Habermas and Marxism in his letter to Adorno on September 27, 1958 in Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. IV, 386-399.</ref> In his private correspondence, Horkheimer candidly submitted to Adorno that “it is simply not possible to have admissions of this sort in the research report of an Institute that exists on the public funds of this shackling society.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 554.</ref> This appears to be a forthright admission that the economic base of the Frankfurt School was the driving force behind its ideology, or at least its public discourse.

It is important to recall, in this regard, that five of the eight members of the Horkheimer circle had worked as analysts and propagandists for the U.S. government and national security state, which “had a vested interest in the continuing loyalty of the Frankfurt School because a number of its members were working on sensitive government research projects.”<ref group="note">Jenemann, Adorno in America, 182.</ref> While Horkheimer and Adorno were not amongst them, since they received more support from the Institute, the latter of the two originally emigrated to the United States to work for Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research, one of the “de facto adjuncts of government psychological warfare programs.”<ref group="note">Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.</ref> This center for communication studies received a substantial grant of $67,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and worked very closely with the U.S. national security state (government money made up over 75 percent of its annual budget). The Rockefeller Foundation also funded Horkheimer’s first return to Germany in April 1948, when he took up a guest professorship at Frankfurt University.

Lest we forget, the Rockefellers are one of the greatest gangster families in the history of U.S. capitalism, and they use their foundation as a tax shelter that allows them to mobilize a portion of their stolen wealth “in the corruption of intellectual activity and culture.”<ref group="note">Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 397.</ref> They were, moreover, directly involved in the national security state during the time of the Frankfurt School’s sponsorship. After serving as the director of the Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (a federal propaganda agency whose work resembled that of the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA), Nelson Rockefeller became, in 1954, the “‘super-coordinator’ for clandestine intelligence operations, with the title of Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Strategy.”<ref group="note">John Loftus, America’s Nazi Secret (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, LLC, 2011), 228.</ref> He also allowed the Rockefeller Fund to be used as a conduit for CIA money, very much like a large number of other capitalist foundations that have an extensive history of working hand-in-glove with the Company (as revealed by the Church Committee report and other sources).

With all of these ties to the capitalist ruling class and the U.S. empire, it is nowise surprising that the U.S. government supported the Institute’s move back to West Germany with a very significant grant in 1950 of 435,000 DM ($103,695, or the equivalent of $1,195,926 dollars in 2022).<ref group="note">See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 434.</ref> These funds were administered by John McCloy, the US High Commissioner of Germany. McCloy was a core member of the U.S. power elite, who had worked as a jurist and banker for big oil and IG Farben, and who granted extensive pardons and commutations to Nazi war criminals. After having served as one of the architects of the US national security state during WWII, he—in a career move indicative of the intimate relationship between the deep state and the capitalist ruling class—went on to become the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, of the Council of Foreign Relations, and of the Ford Foundation. In addition to the funds provided by McCloy, the Institute also received support from private donors, the Society of Social Research, and the city of Frankfurt. In 1954, it even signed a research contract with the Mannesmann corporation, which “had been a founding member of the Anti-Bolshevik League and had financed the Nazi Party.”<ref group="note">Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 479.</ref> During WWII, Mannesmann used slave labor, and its Chairman of the Board was the Nazi Wilhelm Zangen, the War Economy Leader of the Third Reich.<ref group="note">See Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge, 2001), 281.</ref> The Frankfurt School’s postwar contract with this company was for a sociological study of worker’s opinions, with the implicit implication that such a study would help management stall or prevent socialist organizing.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of why capitalist governments and the corporatocracy would support the Institute for Social Research is to be found in the words of Shepard Stone. The latter, we should note, had a background in journalism and military intelligence before going on to serve as the Director of International Affairs at the Ford Foundation, where he worked closely with the CIA in funding cultural projects around the world (Stone even became the President of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, which was the new name given to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in a rebranding effort after its CIA origins had been revealed). When Stone was the director of public affairs for the High Commission for Occupied Germany in the 1940s, he sent a personal note to the U.S. State Department to encourage it to extend Adorno’s passport: “The Institute of Frankfurt is helping to train German leaders who will know something of democratic techniques. I believe it is important for our over-all democratic objectives in Germany that such men as Professor Adorno have an opportunity to work in that country.”<ref group="note">Cited in Jenemann, Adorno in America, 184. Adorno said as much himself in his affidavit: “The Institute of Social Research at Frankfort [sic] University was founded with the support of HICOG and largely supported by American means. It is the aim of this Institution to develop an integration of American and German research methods and to help in the education of German students in the spirit of American democracy” (Jenemann, Adorno in America, 184).</ref> The Institute was doing the kind of ideological work that the U.S. state and capitalist ruling class wanted to—and did—support.

Meeting, and even surpassing, the dictates of ideological conformity to the “shackling society” that funded the Institute, Horkheimer openly expressed his fulsome support for the U.S.’s anti-communist puppet government in West Germany, whose intelligence services had been stocked with former Nazis, as well as its imperial project in Vietnam (which he judged necessary to stop the Chinese).<ref group="note">According to Wiggershaus: “Horkheimer did not, like Paul Tillich, defend socialism or, like Hugo Sinzheimer or Hermann Heller, belong to the committed democrats and declared opponents of Nazism” (The Frankfurt School, 112). On Adenauer, see Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory,” as well as Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (New York: Dorset Press, 1978).</ref> Speaking at one of the Amerika-Häuser in Germany, which were propaganda outposts in the anti-communist Kulturkampf, he solemnly declared in May 1967 that “In America, when it is necessary to conduct a war, – and now listen to me […] it is not so much a question of the defense of the homeland, but it is essentially a matter of the defense of the constitution, the defense of the rights of man.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995, Vol. I: Chronik (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard GmbH & Co. Verlags KG, 1998), 252-3.</ref> The high priest of critical theory is here describing a country that was founded as a settler colony, whose genocidal elimination of the indigenous population seamlessly merged with a project of imperialist expansion that has arguably left the bloodiest footprint—as MLK Jr. argued in April 1967—on the history of the modern world (including some 37 military and CIA interventions between the end of WWII and 1967, when Horkheimer broadcast this ignominious claim via a U.S. propaganda platform).<ref group="note">See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2014).</ref>

Although Adorno often indulged in the petty-bourgeois politics of complicit passivity, avoiding public pronouncements on major political events, the few statements he did make were strikingly reactionary. For instance, in 1956, he co-authored an article with Horkheimer in defense of the imperialist invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France, which aimed at seizing the Suez Canal and overthrowing Nasser (an action condemned by the United Nations). Referring to Nasser, one of the prominent anti-colonial leaders of the non-aligned movement, as “a fascist chieftain […] who conspires with Moscow,” they exclaimed: “No one even ventures to point out that these Arab robber states have been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to fall upon Israel and to slaughter the Jews who have found refuge there.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 297.
</ref> According to this pseudo-dialectical inversion, it is the Arab states that are “robbers,” not the settler colony working with core imperialist countries to infringe upon the self-determination of Arabs. We would be well served to recall Lenin’s trenchant rejection of such sophistry, which is characteristic of much of what counts for “dialectics” in the global theory industry: “Not infrequently have dialectics served […] as a bridge to sophistry. But we remain dialecticians and we combat sophistry not by denying the possibility of all transformations in general, but by analyzing the given phenomenon in its concrete setting and development.”<ref group="note">V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 309.</ref> Such concrete, materialist analysis is precisely what is lacking in idealist inversions à la Adorno and Horkheimer.

The front men of the Frankfurt School published one of their most overtly political texts the same year. Rather than supporting the global movement for anticolonial liberation and the building of a socialist world, they celebrate—with only a few minor exceptions—the superiority of the West, while repeatedly disparaging the Soviet Union and China. Invoking stock racist descriptions of the “barbarians” in the East, whom they describe using the overtly sub-humanizing vocabulary of “beasts” and “hordes,” they flatly proclaim that they are “fascists” who have chosen “slavery.”<ref group="note">The racialization of communists has been an important part of anti-communist ideology, as Domenico Losurdo explained in War and Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2015).</ref> Adorno even chastises Germans who mistakenly think that “the Russians stand for socialism,” reminding them that the Russians are actually “fascists,” adding that the “industrialists and bankers”—with whom he here identifies—already know this.<ref group="note">Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” New Left Review 65 (September-October 2019), 49.</ref>

“Everything the Russians write slips into ideology, into crude, stupid twaddle,” Adorno brazenly asserts in this text, as if he had read everything they wrote, even though, per usual, he does not cite a single source (nor did he even read Russian, as far as I know).<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 59.</ref> Claiming that there is “an element of re-barbarization” in their thinking, which is also to be found in Marx and Engels according to him, he unabashedly asserts that it is “more reified than in the most advanced bourgeois thought.”<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 59.</ref> As if this was not enough disingenuous grandstanding, Adorno has the chutzpah to describe this writing project with Horkheimer as a “strictly Leninist manifesto.”<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 57</ref> This is in a discussion in which they affirm that they “are not calling on anyone to take action,” and Adorno explicitly elevates bourgeois thought and what he refers to as “culture at its most advanced” above the supposed barbarism of socialist thinking.<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 57, 59.</ref> Moreover, it is in this context that Horkheimer doubled down on their social chauvinism by averring, in a world-historical conclusion that provoked no rebuttal on the part of his “Leninist” collaborator: “I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of these gains.”<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 41. Horkheimer expressed similar pro-capitalist, anti-communist views on numerous occasions. For instance, in a long letter to Adorno dated September 27, 1958, he claimed that “revolution really means the passage to terror” and asserted that what must be defended is “the remainder of bourgeois civilization where the idea of individual freedom and authentic society still has its place” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance: 1927-1969, Vol. IV, 395). In 1968, to cite another example, he quite explicitly described his position as counter-revolutionary: “An open declaration that even a dubious democracy, for all its defects, is always better than the dictatorship which would inevitably result from a revolution today, seems to me necessary for the sake of truth” (Horkheimer, Critical Theory, viii). After recalling Horkheimer’s condemnation of the “savage barbarism of the East,” Stefan Müller-Doohm writes in his 700-page biography of Adorno that “Adorno and Horkheimer were in agreement in their assessment of the so-called Eastern bloc, i.e. the Soviet Union, but also communist China” (415). Regarding colonialism, Horkheimer wrote to Adorno that although “the European dream of permanent superiority in the colonial era” was “abominable,” it nevertheless had “its good sides” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. IV, 466).</ref> This was in 1956, when the U.S. was still largely racially segregated, was involved in anti-communist witch hunts and destabilization campaigns around the world, and had recently extended its imperial reach by overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), while the European powers were waging violent struggles to hold onto their colonies or convert them into neo-colonies.
==“Fascism and Communism Are the Same”==
One of the most consistent political claims advanced by Adorno and Horkheimer is that there is a “totalitarian” equivalence between fascism and communism, if it manifests itself in socialist state-building projects, anticolonial movements of the “Third World,” or even New Left mobilizations in the Western world. In all three cases, those who think they are breaking out of the “shackling society,” are only making things worse. The patent fact that Western capitalist countries offered no significant bulwark against fascism, which arose within the capitalist world, and that it was precisely the Soviet Union that ultimately defeated it, does not seem to have caused them to reflect on the viability of this benighted and simplistic thesis (which is to say nothing of the importance of socialism to anti-colonial movements and the uprisings of the 1960s). In fact, for all of his moral opining on the horrors of Auschwitz, Adorno appears to have forgotten who actually liberated the infamous concentration camp (the Red Army).

Horkheimer had formulated his version of horseshoe theory with particular clarity in a limited circulation pamphlet published in 1942, which broke with the Aesopian language of many of the Institute’s other publications. Directly accusing Friedrich Engels of utopianism, he averred that the socialization of the means of production had led to an increase in repression, and ultimately to an authoritarian state. “The bourgeoisie earlier held the government in check through its property,” according to this millionaire’s son, whereas in new societies socialism simply “did not function,” except to produce the mistaken belief that one was—through the party, honored leader, or the supposed march of history—“acting in the name of something greater than oneself.”<ref group="note">Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” Telos 15 (spring 1973): 16.</ref> Horkheimer’s position in this piece is perfectly in line with anarcho-anti-communism, which is a very widespread ideology within the Western Left: a “classless democracy” is supposed to emerge spontaneously from the people through “free agreement,” without the supposedly pernicious influence of parties or states. As Domenico Losurdo has insightfully pointed out, the Nazi war machine was ravaging the USSR in the early 1940s, and Horkheimer’s call for socialists to abandon the state and party centralization therefore amounted to nothing less than a demand that they capitulate before the Nazis’s genocidal rampage.<ref group="note">See Domenico Losurdo, El Marxismo occidental: Cómo nació, cómo murió y cómo puede resucitar, trans. Alejandro García Mayo (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2019). This book, originally written in Italian, is being translated into English by Steven Colatrella for 1804 Books.</ref>

Whereas there are vague suggestions at the end of Horkheimer’s 1942 pamphlet that there might be something desirable in socialism, later texts would bring into full relief their unequivocal rejection of it. For instance, when Adorno and Horkheimer were considering making a public statement on their relationship to the Soviet Union, the former sent the following draft of a planned co-authored piece to the latter: “Our philosophy, as a dialectical critique of the overall social tendency of the age, stands in the sharpest opposition to the politics and doctrine that emanates from the Soviet Union. We are unable to see anything in the practice of the military dictatorships disguised as people’s democracies other than a new form of repression.”<ref group="note">Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Vol. 18 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 73. Also see Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 334. Adorno went so far as to explicitly endorse the position of the militant anti-communist and CIA collaborator Arthur Koestler, writing that “communism has become a ‘rightwing party’ (which Koestler highlighted) and […] it has completely identified itself with Russian imperialism” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. IV, 655).</ref> It is worth noting in this regard, given the overwhelming lack of materialist analysis of actually existing socialism on the part of Adorno and Horkheimer, that even the CIA recognized that the Soviet Union was not a dictatorship. In a report dated March 2, 1955, the Agency clearly stated: “Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure.”<ref group="note">See this document in the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80-00810a006000360009-0 I would like to express my gratitude to Colin Bodayle for drawing my attention to this document.</ref>

In 1959, Adorno published a text entitled “The Meaning of Working through the Past” in which he recycled the “shameful truth” of “philistine wisdom” referenced in this earlier draft, namely that—in complete conformity with the dominant Cold War ideology in the West—fascism and communism are the same because they are two forms of “totalitarianism.” Openly rejecting the vantage point of “political-economic ideology,” which obviously distinguishes these two warring camps, Adorno claimed to have privileged access to a deeper social-psychological dynamic that unites them.<ref group="note">Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 94.</ref> As “authoritarian personalities,” he asserted ex cathedra, fascists and communists “possess weak egos” and compensate by identifying themselves with “real-existing power” and “great collectives.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 94.</ref> The very notion of an “authoritarian personality” is thus a deceitful crotchet aimed at synthesizing opposites via psychologizing pseudo-dialectics. It begs the question, moreover, of why psychology and particular ways of thinking appear, at least here, to be more central to historical explanation than material forces and class struggle.

In spite of this attempt to psychologically identify fascists and communists, Adorno nonetheless suggested, in the same text, that the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union could be retrospectively justified due to the fact that the Bolsheviks were—like Hitler himself had said—a menace to Western civilization. “The threat that the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious,” Adorno claimed, “and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 94.</ref> The analogy is revealing because, in this case, it would mean appeasing the “fascist” communists if one did not directly fight against them. In other words, as obscure and convoluted as his phraseology is, this appears to be a clarion call for military opposition to the spread of communism (which is perfectly in line with Horkheimer’s support for the U.S.’s imperialist war in Vietnam).

Adorno’s fierce rejection of actually existing socialism was also on full display in his exchange with Alfred Sohn-Rethel. The latter asked him if Negative Dialectics had anything to say about changing the world, and if the Chinese Cultural Revolution was part of the ‘affirmative tradition’ he condemned. Adorno replied that he rejected the “moral pressure” from “official Marxism” to put philosophy into practice.<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 438.</ref> “Nothing but despair can save us,” he asserted with his signature panache of petty-bourgeois melancholia.<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 438.</ref> Adding, for good measure, that the events in communist China were no cause for hope, he explained with memorable insistence that his entire thinking life had been resolutely pitted against this form—and presumably others—of socialism: “I would have to deny everything I have thought my whole life long if I were to admit to feeling anything but horror at the sight of it.”<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 438.</ref> Adorno’s open indulgence in despair and simultaneous abhorrence of actually existing socialism are not simply idiosyncratic, personal reactions but are affects arising from a class position. “The representatives of the modern labor movement,” Lenin wrote in 1910, “find that they have plenty to protest against but nothing to despair about.”<ref group="note">V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 332.</ref> In a description that anticipated Adorno’s petty-bourgeois gloom, the leader of the world’s first successful socialist revolution then proceeded to explain that “despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”<ref group="note"> Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16, 332.</ref>

Adorno also pursued this line of thinking, or rather feeling, in his criticisms of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist student activism of the 1960s. He agreed with Habermas—who had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the “Nazi philosopher” (his description of Heidegger)—that this activism amounted to “Left fascism.” He defended West Germany as a functioning democracy rather than a “fascist” state, as some of the students argued.<ref group="note">As I have argued in “Critical and Revolutionary Theory,” this assessment on the part of the students was fully justified.</ref> At the same time, he quarreled with Marcuse over what he judged to be the latter’s misguided support for the students and the antiwar movement, explicitly claiming that the answer to the question ‘what is to be done?’, for good dialecticians, is nothing at all: “the goal of real praxis would be its own abolition.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 267. Adorno’s faux dialectical praise of inaction as the best form of action is reiterated in his correspondence with Marcuse regarding the student protests: “We withstood in our time, you no less than me, a much more dreadful situation—that of the murder of the Jews, without proceeding to praxis; simply because it was blocked to us. […] To put it bluntly: I think that you are deluding yourself in being unable to go on without participating in the student stunts, because of what is occurring in Vietnam or Biafra. If that really is your reaction, then you should not only protest against the horror of napalm bombs but also against the unspeakable Chinese-style tortures that the Vietcong carry out permanently” (Adorno and Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233 (January-February 1999), 127). He makes similar statements elsewhere, such as in his 1969 text on “Resignation” where he celebrates the “utopian moment in thinking” over and against any form of action: “The uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in. […] Thinking is actually the force of resistance” (Adorno, Critical Models, 293).</ref> He thereby inverted, through dialectical sophistry, one of the central tenets of Marxism, notably the primacy of practice. It is in this context of turning Marx on his head that he repeated, once again, the ideological mantra of the capitalist world: “fascism and communism are the same.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 268.</ref> Even though he referred to this slogan as a “petit bourgeois truism,” apparently acknowledging its ideological status, he unabashedly embraced it.<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 268.</ref>

Idealism is the hallmark of Adorno and Horkheimer’s reflections on actually existing socialism and, more generally, progressive social movements. Rather than studying the projects that they denigrate with any of the rigor and earnestness with which they sometimes approach other topics, they rely on stock representations and anti-communist canards devoid of concrete analysis (although they occasionally reference a few of the anti-communist publications, like those by the rabid cold warrior Arthur Koestler, that were amply funded and supported by imperialist states and their intelligence services).<ref group="note">Koestler was a major figure in the networks of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom and MI6’s Information Research Department.</ref> This is particularly true in the case of their vilification of socialist state building projects. Their writings on the topic are not only remarkably devoid of references to any rigorous scholarship on the matter, but they proceed as if such serious engagement was not even necessary. These texts genuflect to the dominant ideology, stalwartly insisting on the anti-Stalinist bona fides of their authors, without being concerned with any of the details, nuances or complexities.

One cannot help but wonder, then, if the students were not correct when, in the late 1960s, they circulated leaflets asserting that these Frankfurt scholars were “left idiots of the authoritarian state” who were “critical in theory, conformist in practice.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Esther Leslie, “Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233 (January-February 1999), 119 and Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung, Vol. 1, 374.</ref> Hans-Jürgen Krahl, one of Theodor Adorno’s doctoral students, went so far as to publicly besmirch his mentor and the other Frankfurt professors as “Scheißkritische Theoretiker [shit-critical theorists].”<ref group="note"> Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentbewegung, Vol. 1, 398. Krahl was the only activist not released from jail the same night, and Adorno decided to press charges against him, like he had in 1964 against the student group Subversive Aktion, in spite of pressure to drop the charges.</ref> He voiced this lapidary critique of these stalwart defenders of ABS Theory when he was being arrested, at the behest of Adorno, for a university occupation related to his involvement in the Socialist German Students’ League. The fact that the author of Negative Dialectics called the police to have his own students arrested is a standard reference point amongst his political critics. As we have seen, however, it is only the very tip of the iceberg. Far from being a bizarre anomaly, it is consistent with his politics, his social function within the intellectual apparatus, his class standing, and his overall orientation within global class struggle.
==The Tuis of Western “Marxism”==
Brecht proposed the neologism “Tuis” to refer to intellectuals (Intellektuellen) who, as subjects of a commodified culture, get everything backwards (hence Tellekt-uellen-in). He had shared his ideas for a Tui-Novel with Benjamin in the 1930s, and he later wrote a play that emerged out of his earlier notes, entitled Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress. Having returned to the German Democratic Republic after WWII to contribute to the socialist state building project, unlike the Frankfurt scholars who settled in West Germany with funding from the capitalist ruling class, Turandot was in part written as a satirical critique of these Western “Marxists.”

In the play, the Tuis are presented as professional whitewashers who receive a handsome salary for making things appear the opposite of what they are. “The whole country is governed by injustice,” Sen states in Turandot, before providing a concise summary of ABS Theory: “and in the Tui Academy all you get to learn is why it has to be that way.”<ref group="note">Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays: Six, eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Random House, 1998), 189.</ref> Tui training, like the work of the Institute for Social Research, teaches us that there is no alternative to the dominant order, and it thereby forecloses the possibility of system change. In one of the most striking scenes, the Tuis are shown preparing for the whitewashers’ congress. Nu Shan, one of the teachers in the Academy, operates a pulley system that can raise or lower a basket of bread in front of the speaker’s face. In training a young man named Shi Me to become a Tui, he tells him to speak on the topic “Why Kai Ho’s position is false” (Kai Ho is a revolutionary resembling Mao Zedong). Nu Shan explains that he will raise the bread basket above his head when Shi Me says something wrong and lower it in front of his face when it’s correct. After much raising and lowering in relation to Shi Me’s ability to conform to the dominant ideology, his arguments crescendo to the point of shrill anti-communist slander devoid of rational argumentation: “Kai Ho isn’t a philosopher at all, but just a loudmouth – the basket sinks – a troublemaker, a power-hungry good-for-nothing, an irresponsible gambler, a muckraker, a rapist, an unbeliever, a bandit and a criminal. The basket is hovering just in front of the speaker’s mouth. A tyrant!”<ref group="note">Brecht, Collected Plays: Six, 145.</ref> This scene presents, in microcosm, the relationship between professional intellectuals and their financial backers within class societies: the former earn their bread as academic free agents by providing the best possible ideology for the latter. It is a matter of food for thought.

What the Frankfurt School had to offer the bread givers of “the shackling society” was nowise insignificant. Mobilizing pseudo-dialectical sophistry, they defended in highfalutin academic language the State Department line that communism is indistinguishable from fascism, even though 27 million Soviets had given their lives to defeat the Nazi war machine in WWII (to mention but one of the most blatant forms of opposition between communism and fascism, although there are of course many others since they are mortal enemies). Moreover, by displacing class struggle in favor of an idealist critical theory severed from practical political engagements, they shifted the very foundations of analysis away from historical materialism toward a generalized theoretical critique of domination, power, and identity thinking.

Adorno and Horkheimer thus ultimately played the role of radical recuperators. Cultivating an appearance of radicality, they recuperated the very activity of critique within a pro-Western, anti-communist ideology. Like other members of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in Europe and the United States, which formed the basis of Western Marxism, they publicly expressed their social-chauvinistic disgust with what they described as the savage barbarians in the East, who dared to take up the weapon of Marxist theory à la Lenin and use it to act on the principle that they could rule themselves. From the relative comforts of their capitalist-funded professorial citadel in the West, they defended the superiority of the Euro-American world that promoted them against what they referred to as the levelling project of the bolshevized barbarians in the uncivilized periphery.

Furthermore, their generalized critique of domination is part of a larger embrace of an anti-party and anti-state ideology, which ultimately leaves the Left bereft of the tools of disciplined organization necessary to wage successful struggles against the well-funded political, military and cultural apparatus of the capitalist ruling class. This is perfectly in line with their overall politics of defeat, which Adorno explicitly embraced through his anti-Marxist defense of inaction as the highest form of praxis. The leaders of the Tui Academy in Frankfurt, amply funded and supported by the capitalist ruling class and imperialist states, including the U.S. national security state, were thus ultimately global spokesmen for an anti-communist politics of capitalist accommodation. Wringing their hands at the infelicities of consumer society, which they sometimes described in remarkable detail, they nonetheless refused to do anything practical about them because of the bedrock assumption that the socialist cure to such misfortunes is much worse than the disease itself.

* This article draws on and further develops a detailed analysis whose extensive references further support the claims advanced here: Gabriel Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory” in Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique, Ed. Daniel Benson (London: Roman & Littlefield International, 2021). I am deeply grateful to the friends and colleagues who provided crucial feedback on earlier drafts of this article, including those who expressed reservations about some of the arguments (for which I accept full responsibility): Larry Busk, Helmut-Harry Loewen, Jennifer Ponce de León, Salvador Rangel, and Yves Winter.
==Notes:==
<references group="note"/>
[[Category:Library]]

Library:Foucault: The Faux Radical

2023-04-14T00:33:20Z

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{{changetitle|''Foucault: The Faux Radical'', by Gabriel Rockhill}}
{{Library infobox work
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| author = Gabriel Rockhill
| written in =
| published_date = October 12nd, 2020
| published_location = The Philosophical Salon
| type = Article
| source = [https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/foucault-the-faux-radical/ The Philosophical Salon]
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==The Radical Recuperator==
Ptolemy constructed an inordinately complex model of the universe in order to make all of the empirical data conform to a central, organizing false assumption, namely, that the earth was at the center. Michel Foucault, as we shall see, made a similar contribution to contemporary social science.

After decades of working on and out of the Foucauldian heritage, which originally attracted me—like so many others—due to its apparent materialist rigor, ostensible radical historicism, and purported political trenchancy, it has become increasingly clear to me over the years that the entire organizing framework of his histories is fundamentally flawed.<ref group="note">I have elsewhere demonstrated in detail some of the fundamental problems in Foucault’s work, particularly in his purportedly materialist histories, and I have done much the same for other writings in the Foucauldian tradition, such as those of Jacques Rancière. Regarding Foucault, see for instance Gabriel Rockhill, “Foucault, Genealogy, Counter-History,” Theory & Event 23:1 (January 2020): 85-119; Gabriel Rockhill, “Comment penser le temps présent? De l’ontologie de l’actualité à l’ontologie sans l’être,” Rue Descartes 75 (2012/3): 114-126; Gabriel Rockhill, Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Gabriel Rockhill, Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2010). For my critiques of Rancière, see Interventions in Contemporary Thought and Radical History & the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). For recent criticisms of Judith Butler, whose work and political position emerges out of the Foucauldian—as well as the Derridian-Lévinasian—heritage, see Jared Ijams, “Judith Butler’s Impotent Politics of Nonviolence,” Cosmonaut (May 26, 2020): <https://bit.ly/3h58TVz> and Ben Norton, “Postmodern Philosopher Judith Butler Repeatedly Donated to ‘Top Cop’ Kamela Harris” (December 18, 2019): <https://bit.ly/2ClYHsq>.</ref> He has, like Ptolemy, constructed a complex orrery, with many intricate and beautifully detailed parts that function in terms of an impressive internal logic, but whose very purpose is to develop a model of the world by excluding in advance, or significantly downplaying, its most fundamental feature: global capitalism, with all of its component parts, including imperialism, colonialism, class struggle, ecological destruction, the gendered division of labor and domestic slavery, racialized exploitation and oppression, and so forth.

By rejecting the Copernican revolution undertaken by Marxism, which demonstrated through materialist analysis that capitalism is a totalizing system and a central driving force behind the organization of the modern world, Foucault put himself in the position of not being able to adequately explain, in materialist terms, why exactly the systems he attempted to describe had come into existence, what their precise function was within the social totality, or how they could be transformed. Attached as he was to a worldview hostile to the explanatory and transformative power of historical materialism, he could only, at best, add additional orbits or objects to his orrery, in the hopes that the cult of complexification would both lure and confuse intellectuals, thereby distracting them from the profound lack of what Michael Parenti calls a radical analysis.

One of the reasons for this is that, like many of his fellow French theorists, Foucault was animated by an intense drive to differentiate his work from that of prior forms of knowledge, as well as from the research of his competitors on the so-called marketplace of ideas. His scholarly writings thus place a very high priority on idiosyncratic explanations, conceptual novelties, and neologisms. Rather than drawing on and contributing to the further development of collective traditions of knowledge production, brand Foucault puts forth novel histories that are unique to his individual vision of the past and marketable as such.

While it is certainly true that these include various elements from material history, and that he has borrowed and adapted many of his most profound insights from the Marxist tradition, these are always combined into unique conceptual configurations that bear his singular imprimatur. An episteme, for instance, is presented as a much more refined, i.e. idealist, way of discussing ideology. Power is introduced as a more urbane—because nebulous and unmoored from class struggle—way of describing what Louis Althusser called the materialist conception of ideology. Archeology and genealogy seek to contest the territory occupied by historical materialism, in part by reducing the complex histories of Marxism to a crass caricature.<ref group="note">Nicos Poulantzas has provided one of the best critical accounts of Foucault’s reductive caricatures of the Marxist tradition in State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2014).</ref> The discursive practice of critique grandstands as a petty-bourgeois moral authority uniquely capable of saving us from the thoughtless plunge into revolutionary theory and practice.

If it were widely recognized that Foucault was an instrumentalized intellectual whose capitalist theoretical practice seamlessly coalesced with the needs of the global theory industry, at a moment when a premium was placed on promoting French theorists who turned their backs on the Red Menace, then much of this article would be redundant. However, Foucault is often understood to be a radical for having purportedly questioned the very foundations of Western civilization and challenged its dominant historical myths regarding the development of reason, truth, science, medicine, punishment, sexuality, and so forth. What is more, those who present themselves as Foucauldian, at least within an academic setting, are sometimes perceived to be not only radical but much more radical than many, if not all, of their predecessors (which is due, in no small part, to their criticisms of a strawman they call “Marx”).

This, then, is the contradiction that I would like to elucidate, which is by no means unique to Foucault. It is the contradiction of the radical recuperator, meaning the intellectual who appears radical in certain circles but whose primary social function is to recuperate truly radical critique within the extant system, thereby policing the left border of critique. What interests me first and foremost, then, is how Foucault’s work—like that of other French theorists, but often with more political panache and historical flair than Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, and co.<ref group="note">Given Foucault’s apparent dedication to materialist history and political activism, particularly when compared to other French theorists, it is arguable that he is more dangerous because he is, in many ways, the most radical of the recuperators.</ref>—has played an important role in a much larger historical reconfiguration: the great ideological realignment of the Western intelligentsia, which took a gradual but decisive step to the right by distancing itself from anti-capitalist revolutionary politics. In order to see how this process unfolded in the case of Foucault, which of course involved myriad forces and was nowise due to him alone, it will be helpful to lay out and contextualize the evolution of his mercurial politics. This will allow us to bring to the fore a clear pattern and identify the man behind the many masks.
==Aristocratic Radicalism==
In his early years, when most of the French intelligentsia was Marxist, Foucault earned the reputation of being a “violent anti-communist” according to his biographer Didier Eribon.<ref group="note">Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 237. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.</ref> This was in the wake of WWII when the Soviet Union had defeated Nazism, and communism enjoyed extremely wide support in France. His immediate historical context was thus one in which the Right had been overwhelmingly discredited due to its Nazi collaboration, and the anti-capitalist Left was at a highpoint because of the success of its world-historical battle against fascism. It is true that in his student years Foucault, who had grown up in a somewhat conservative upper middle-class family, was briefly swept up in this postwar leftist wave. He even adhered for a few months, under the influence of Althusser, to the French Communist Party. However, his involvement, according to another of his biographers, David Macey, was widely recognized as non-committal and noted for its lack of seriousness. Foucault himself later described his political position at the time with the oxymoronic expression of ‘Nietzschean Marxism.’ Nietzsche was ferociously anti-Marxist, of course, and he repeatedly defended the natural superiority of the master race, while maligning those who sought to overcome social and economic inequalities.

Although some of Foucault’s early work bears the imprint of his hesitant and circumspect engagement with Marxism, and particularly the influence of Althusser, through the course of the 1960s he came out very strongly against the Marxist tradition. Prior to 1968, according to Bernard Gendron, “he had the reputation of being condescendingly apolitical, a ferocious critic of the French Communist Party […], a Gaullist technocrat, and a denier of the power of human agency.”<ref group="note">Bernard Gendron, “Foucault’s 1968,” in The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives, eds. Daniel J. Sherman, Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder, A. Aneesh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 23.</ref> In The Order of Things (1966), which catapulted him into the limelight, he proclaimed that Marxism, far from introducing any real rupture in history or proposing a radical reversal, emerged seamlessly within—and was the result of—the same epistemological configuration as bourgeois economics. Their apparent opposition, from a materialist point of view, was only a surface illusion for Foucault. In a classic idealist inversion, historical materialism was thereby integrated into a system of ideas that was given the status of prime mover. Moreover, Foucault added, in an ex-cathedra pronouncement devoid of any material evidence, that Marxism was like a fish in water in the 19th century, but everywhere else “it stops breathing.”<ref group="note">Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966), 276.</ref> In short, Marxism was a living theory that died as soon as it succeeded in materially changing the world through the anti-capitalist revolutions of the 20th century. The point, it seems, was to interpret the world, not to change it, and the flight into praxis required a recall to intellectual order.

It is not surprising that Foucault’s reactionary and idealist position provoked a major public debate with two of the most visible Marxist intellectuals in France at the time: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The author of The Order of Things flatly declared that Sartre, as a Marxist, was a man of the 19th century whose attempt—like a fish out of water—to think the 20th century was “magnificent and pathetic.”<ref group="note">Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits I: 1954-1969 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 542.</ref> Indulging in one of his signature oracular pronouncements, he went so far as to label him “the last Marxist.”<ref group="note">Ibid. 542.</ref> Sartre and Beauvoir returned fire, explaining that Foucault was the last barrier that the bourgeoisie could erect against Marxism: unable to refute its materialist account of history after numerous attempts, it resorted—through the figure of Foucault—to simply eliminating it by peremptorily consigning it to the dustbin of history.

Whereas Marxist intellectuals like Sartre and Beauvoir were internationalist and invested in anticolonial struggles, Foucault blissfully ignored the revolutionary independence movements that were raging at his doorstep, and he took little or no interest in the global history of imperialism (although he unwaveringly supported Israel).<ref group="note">According to David Macey, Foucault’s “pro-Israeli sentiments were as unswerving as his dislike for the PCF” (David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography. London: Verso, 2019, 40).</ref> Instead, he maintained, nearly without exception, a Eurocentric framework of analysis. “Ignoring the imperial context of his own theories,” Edward Said appropriately noted, “Foucault seems actually to represent an irresistible colonizing movement that paradoxically fortifies the prestige of both the lonely individual scholar and the system that contains him.”<ref group="note">Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 278.
</ref>

To take what is perhaps the most flagrant example, Foucault ‘missed’ one of the major events of his generation because he did not throw his support behind the struggle for Algerian independence..”<ref group="note">See Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits IV: 1980-1988 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 58-59.</ref> Although he claimed in at least one interview that this was because he was abroad at the time (as if this would preclude someone from supporting a movement), he actually returned to France in 1960, whereas the war did not come to an end until 1962. This tendency to retroactively and opportunistically depict his political sympathies as having been in line with struggles that he did not openly support at the time comes up more than once in his biographies, and it was characteristic of his post-1968 repositioning as we will see. During the French state’s terrorist repression of the Algerian liberation movement, Foucault had actually, in the words of Macey, taken “a broadly positive view of the general’s [de Gaulle] handling of the Algerian situation and of the subsequent process of decolonization.”<ref group="note">Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 84.</ref>

Given Foucault’s general dismissal of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles, as well as his reputation, according to Eribon and others, of supporting de Gaulle and being an elite operator within the power networks of France’s most prestigious institutions, it might seem somewhat surprising that he later came to be identified as a militant leftist. In fact, Francine Pariente, Foucault’s assistant from 1962 to 1966, is on record as saying she never managed to believe his sudden shift to the Left.<ref group="note">See Eribon, Michel Foucault, 132.</ref> Historically speaking, much of this had to do with 1968 and the false analogy established in its wake between the most prominent thinkers of the 1960s and the events that rocked their generation. While it is true that Foucault’s work was highly visible in the years leading up to 1968, there is of course no evidence that it positively contributed to the uprising in any significant way. Cornelius Castoriadis flatly proclaimed that “Foucault did not hide from his reactionary positions until 1968.”<ref group="note">Cornelius Castoriadis, La Montée de l’insignifiance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 35.</ref> As a matter of fact, Foucault had served on the governmental commission that wrote the Gaullist university reforms, which were widely recognized as one of the principal sparks for the student revolt. He wrote several of the preparatory reports for the commission and showed no clear sign of opposition to the reforms he helped formulate.<ref group="note">In addition to his biography of Foucault, see the interview with Didier Eribon on the television show “Apostrophes”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLA2Xklj1kU&t=362s>.</ref> The fact that he did not get involved in the movement or acts of solidarity (since he was mainly abroad), or even express his public support for it at the time, should thus come as no surprise: if Foucault was on any side of the barricades in 1968, it was on the side fortified by the Gaullist state that he dutifully served.

It is true, however, that the late 1960s had a radicalizing effect on the author of The Order of Things, beginning with the Tunisian student movement in 1967, and that this partially explains his public image as a leftist. As he himself would later claim on numerous occasions, this moment was his political wake-up call, and he was impressed by the vibrant Marxism of the Tunisian students, whom he discretely supported.<ref group="note">See, for instance, Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 78-81.</ref> When he returned to France in the wake of the 1968 revolt, he showed signs of being generally sympathetic to the Maoists, “without sharing their belief in cultural revolution.”<ref group="note">Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 263.</ref> As he moved swiftly to the left to adapt to the new political climate, he came to participate in university occupations and public mobilizations, in part in order to quickly secure the requisite street credentials according to his biographers.

In the early 1970s, Foucault co-founded and spearheaded the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), which aimed at exposing the conditions of prisons by gathering and disseminating information from those directly involved with them (rather than speaking in their place). It functioned, in the words of member Gilles Deleuze, “as a group that tried to combat the resurgence of Marxism,” but it was not otherwise characterized by a specific ideology or political line (members included Christians, Maoists and ‘nonaligned’ individuals).<ref group="note">Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 289.</ref> Although the GIP expressed its support for George Jackson, Field Marshall of the Black Panther Party, by publishing an important pamphlet in 1971 on his assassination in prison, Foucault had curiously extolled the BPP in his private correspondence for having developed “a strategic analysis freed from the Marxist theory of society” (the BPP was, however, Marxist).<ref group="note">Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits I: 1954-1975 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 44. Since this claim is from October 1968, it is possible that Foucault was exposed to some of the BPP’s early work that was less explicitly Marxist. However, when he visited Attica in 1972, in the wake of the prison rebellion and subsequent violent repression, he oddly chastised communists for being so beholden to the bourgeois ideology of criminality that they refused to organize the incarcerated unless they were ‘political prisoners’ (“Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview,” Telos 19 (1974): 154-161). Jackson, whose assassination was seen as a spark for the Attica revolt, was a communist who had been doing the exact opposite of what Foucault claimed. These types of misrepresentations are, unfortunately, rather frequent in Foucault’s work. I have carefully documented his egregious misinterpretations of Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche in the works cited in note 1. Brady Thomas Heiner has provided an analysis of Foucault’s relationship to the BPP that, while misrecognizing or downplaying the profound gap between the French intellectual and Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, does provide some helpful information: “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City 11:3 (December 2007): 313-356.</ref> Joy James and Angela Davis have both pointedly taken Foucault to task for his lack of understanding of the U.S. prison system, as well as his Eurocentrism and his erasure of racial and gendered violence, torture, and terror in the modern prison.<ref group="note">See Joy James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 1998) and Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996).</ref>

Foucault would conceptualize his work at the time as being that of a specific intellectual who mobilized his particular expertise for local power struggles in the field of knowledge and discourse, rather than a universal intellectual—like Sartre and other Marxists—who purported to be able to have access to truth and a systemic account of reality. The latter orientation, he regularly suggested, abiding by one of the most widespread and unproven idealist analogies of the time, was a totalizing intellectual project that was somehow akin to the practice of ‘totalitarianism.’ For idealists, the very act of thinking the social totality is itself a practice of totalizing, and hence ‘totalitarian,’ because ideas are the prime movers of history (and you can use them to free associate between words that sound similar).

To avoid this supposedly bad way of thinking, Foucault openly embraced academic specialization, the intellectual Taylorism that is integral to institutionalized knowledge production under capital. He also encouraged intellectuals to focus on the anonymous, decentralized ‘microphysics of power’ in their local contexts and thereby abandon the project of elucidating and fighting against the macrophysics of power operative in global class struggle. In this way, and with remarkably few exceptions, he gave carte blanche to the major imperial projects of his lifetime. One need only compare his so-called ‘history of the present’ to the ones written by anti-imperialist intellectuals like William Blum, Michael Parenti or Walter Rodney to clearly see this.

The period of the late 1960s and early 1970s nonetheless constituted the high-water mark for Foucault’s engagement. He was involved in numerous public actions, signed petitions, publicly or privately supported specific struggles, and so forth. Although he “never became a member of any established political organization,” and he did not stake out a clear and consistent political position in terms of the dominant ideologies on the Left, his desultory politics tended to gravitate toward the Maoist intellectual circles, which also had anarchist, liberal and libertarian elements.<ref group="note">Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 217.</ref> He did not, however, become a Marxist, and most of his concerns—very much like liberals—were with specific social issues, individual cases, and the morally ‘intolerable,’ rather than with a systemic critique that was embedded in an internationalist framework oriented toward collective social transformation.

Foucault generally ignored the ecological and feminist movements, which grew rapidly in the wake of 1968, as did the gay liberation movement. While he was sympathetic to the latter and supported it in various ways, he was suspicious of the militant young Front Homosexual d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), which aimed at subverting the bourgeois and hetero-patriarchal state. Foucault feared that FHAR’s activism could lead to new forms of ghettoization, and he expressed his support for the older ‘homophile’ organization, Arcadie, by accepting an invitation to speak at their congress in 1979. According to one of FHAR’s prominent members, Guy Hocquenghem, Arcadie was a fairly bourgeois establishment that was a members-only club and placed great emphasis on respectful discretion. Macey interprets Foucault’s decision to speak at their congress as a deliberate stance in favor of their more conservative approach and against FHAR’s militancy.

Through the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault’s mercurial political orientation moved further and further away from what had been a vaguely leftist center of gravity. His evolution was not dissimilar, in many ways, to that of André Glucksmann, who was one of his closest and most regular political collaborators during this period. After operating in elite conservative academic networks, and then becoming briefly enmeshed in or close to the Maoist intellectual circles of the late 1960s, they both came to embrace the ‘anti-totalitarian’ critique of communism and engaged in the pro-Western support of ‘dissident politics’ in the East. Glucksmann and other nouveaux philosophes drew heavily on Foucault’s work and lionized it as an anti-Marxist framework of analysis. Foucault vociferously praised them in return, writing in particular a panegyric to Glucksmann’s anti-communist screed, Les Maîtres penseurs, in which he expressed his support for the idea that Hitler and Stalin had jointly introduced a new form of holocaust (discretely omitting the Red Army’s world-historical defeat of the Nazi war machine).<ref group="note">On Foucault’s relationship to the nouveaux philosophes, see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Peter Dews, “The ‘New Philosophers’ and the End of Leftism,” in Radical Philosophy Reader, eds. Roy Edgley and Richard Osborne (London: Verso Books, 1985), 361-384; Peter Dews, “The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault,” Economy and Society 8:2 (May 1979): 127-171.</ref>

Glucksmann’s virulent anti-communism, much like Foucault’s, merged with an inchoate plebian populism and a metaphysics of the marginalized. International class struggle receded from consciousness and was replaced by an abstract battle between purportedly totalitarian forces of evil and the pristine moral excellence of what they both called ‘the pleb.’ The latter, Foucault openly admitted, did not correspond to any “sociological reality” but was rather a je ne sais quoi—also found within the bourgeoisie—that escapes power relations.<ref group="note">Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 421.</ref>

It should come as no surprise that the nouveaux philosophes were identified as important assets by the Central Intelligence Agency, and so was Foucault. <ref group="note"> See Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left,” Los Angeles Review of Books (February 28, 2017): <http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/>.</ref> On the one hand, they made a major contribution to the demolition of Marxism in France and undertook a massive propaganda war against actually existing socialism. In particular, they aggressively contributed to the media spectacles organized around so-called political dissidents from the East, who were celebrated and promoted by the U.S. national security state.<ref group="note">Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose rightwing critique of the U.S.S.R. served as the gold standard for Glucksmann and Foucault, was welcomed in the West by Hienrich Böll and the CIA networks he was involved with in Germany (see Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s 2006 documentary for ARTE, Quand la CIA infiltrait la culture: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58QTcf_mFag>).</ref> On the other hand, they directed nearly all of their critical energies against the supposed evils in the East and paid scant attention to—if they did not openly seek to justify them as ‘humanitarian interventions’—the activities of the major imperial power of the postwar era, the United States, as it went about attempting to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments. Both of these orientations were, of course, perfectly in line with the CIA’s world war on communism, which was directly responsible for the death of at least 6 million people in 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations between 1947 and 1987 (none of which, to my knowledge, were ever so much as mentioned by the most well-known theorist of power relations).<ref group="note">These numbers were calculated by the Association for Responsible Dissent, a group composed of 14 former CIA officers. John Stockwell, one of its founding members, discusses their findings here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD8OOyoavZM>. Also see his book The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1991).</ref>

By the late 1970s, the fickle Foucault had come out as a staunch opponent to all forms of actually existing socialism. In a telling interview in 1977, he provided a long list of socialist countries that, in his opinion, provided no glimmer of hope or sign of a useful orientation, including the USSR, Cuba, China and Vietnam. This led him to the grandiose and categorical conclusion that “the important tradition of socialism is to be fundamentally called into question, since everything that this socialist tradition has produced in history is to be condemned.”<ref group="note">Foucault, Dits et écrits III, 398 (my emphasis).</ref> The irony of this pontification on global history should not be lost on us: a self-proclaimed specific intellectual, who declared that scholars should only intervene in areas where they had actual expertise, had no problem announcing the death of socialism, even though none of his historical or philosophic work engaged in any serious way with any of this history or its relevant geographic regions. Perhaps he simply forgot to mention the colonial geography undergirding the idea of the specific intellectual: while the ‘history of the present’ in the West is infinitely intricate and requires expert knowledge, specific European intellectuals can make wild, categorical proclamations with no real knowledge base when it comes to the rest of the world.

It is particularly telling in this regard that Foucault’s desultory ‘radical’ politics found a new object of interest in yet another area, outside of Europe, where he had no expertise: Iran. He appeared, to some, to rally once again to the cause of revolutionary politics when he came out in strong support of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. However, the reason for his support was not that it began as an anti-imperialist struggle against a CIA puppet government. In fact, he does not even mention this in his voluminous writings on the subject. Instead, he was intrigued by what he refers to as a revolution that parted ways with two central tenets of the Marxist tradition (though he provided no materialist analysis of the Marxist forces on the ground in Iran): class struggle and the revolutionary vanguard. Drawing on François Furet, the rabidly anti-Marxist historian whom he regularly praised, and engaging in a not-so-subtle form of Orientalism, Foucault claimed that this ‘backward’ nation was giving birth to a spiritualist politics that had been part of Europe’s past, but without the birth pains of modernization. He was soundly criticized for his views and his general lack of knowledge of the situation, and he discretely stopped publishing journalistic exposés on contemporary politics.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault’s relatively brief infatuation with leftist politics had turned back into utter disgust and dismissal. Already in 1975, he retorted to a demonstrator who asked him if he would be willing to speak to their group about Marx: “Don’t talk to me about Marx any more. I never want to hear of that gentleman again… I’m completely through with Marx.”<ref group="note">Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 348-9.</ref> Like the increasingly reactionary Glucksmann, he came to be more and more fascinated with neoliberalism, which he revealingly described in his 1978-79 lectures as based on the clearly valuable—in his mind—idea of “a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated.”<ref group="note">Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 259-260. The best book on Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). Also see Daniel Zamora, “How Michel Foucault Got Neoliberalism So Wrong,” Jacobin (September 6, 2019): < https://bit.ly/3kEqSUN >.</ref> Unlike all of the rigorous Marxist research on neoliberalism, Foucault directs our attention primarily to its ideological elements, which he valorizes as a purportedly different way of thinking politics, and not to its imperialist and colonial character as a global project of super exploitation and intensified repression.

At the same time, he explicitly distanced himself from the student and worker movements, asserting that he was a non-active rebel invested in “silence” and “total abstention.”<ref group="note">Foucault, Dits et écrits III, 670.</ref> Like so many other intellectuals of his generation seduced by the ethical turn, Foucault moved away from concrete political struggles and toward a nebulous form of individualist, lifestyle anarchism, or even simple libertarianism, focused on the ‘care of self.’ He questioned the organization of liberation movements, like feminism and gay liberation, that were subordinated to “ideals and specific objectives.”<ref group="note">Ibid. 677.</ref> Describing these movements as forming private and exclusionary clubs, he drew the following conclusion: “True liberation means knowing oneself [La véritable libération signifie se connaître soi-même] and can often not be realized by the intermediary of a group, whichever one it may be.”<ref group="note">Ibid. 678.</ref> If individual enlightenment is the apotheosis of liberation, and collective action is foreclosed, then the armchair intellectual has succeeded in orchestrating a decisive discursive coup by defining their isolated petty-bourgeois activity as liberation itself. Vive la contre-révolution!

As if this wasn’t enough, Foucault would go on to join the chorus of anti-Marxist intellectuals like Furet and Hannah Arendt by indulging in the reductive and simplistic blackmail of the gulag, claiming that any attempt to radically transform the system of socioeconomic relations through collective political action would inevitably lead to the most horrific of consequences.<ref group="note"> It bears recalling that, according to a 2016 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 6.6 million people are under correctional supervision in the United States (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/cpus16pr.pdf). At the end of the Great Purges, the total incarcerated population in the gulag climbed to 2 million, but more than half of all inmates were freed when Stalin died in 1953. Soviet prisons, moreover, were not death camps, and most inmates returned to society, at a rate of 20 to 40 percent of the prison population each year according to archive records. Michael Parenti has provided one of the most rigorous historical accounts of the gulag, which is a welcome antidote to the insipid scare tactics commonly used to circumvent sober analysis, in Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism (San Francisco: City Lights Bookstore, 1997), 76-86.</ref> In one of his most widely read essays from 1984, he wrote:

{{LQuote|This historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global and radical. In fact, we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to provide overall programs for another society, another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has actually only led us to reproduce the most dangerous traditions.<ref group="note">Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 575.</ref>|}}

Eschewing the struggle for real, material social change, Foucault developed, instead, an individual, discursive practice of critique. He inscribed this in a Eurocentric tradition that he traced back to a defender of enlightened despotism (Kant), and that included an aristocratic enemy of the masses (Nietzsche) and an unrepentant Nazi (Heidegger), but excluded Marx. In the case of the progenitor of this tradition, the critical attitude of the Enlightenment, as Foucault understands it, amounted to ‘daring to know’ through reason and discourse, while always obeying the dictates of the social order as they were imposed by the monarch and his army. Nietzsche, who served in many ways as the paragon for Foucault’s preferred form of critique, was not only anti-Marxist, but he was also against socialism, democracy and any political project that sought to give power to the masses. As Domenico Losurdo has explained in detail, Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed ‘radical aristocrat’ whose identification of reason with domination—much like Foucault’s—served as a bulwark against the rational and scientific critique of class, racial, gender and sexual hierarchies.<ref group="note">See Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, trans. Gregor Benton (Leiden: Brill, 2019).</ref>
==The Man behind the Many Masks==
Foucault indulged throughout his career in the petty-bourgeois intellectual game of self-fictionalization, capriciously embracing and rejecting various labels and positions, as if they were so many masks to be worn or taken off, but with no identifiable face behind them. The subjective, at least in his case, or rather his mind, trumped the objective. Many of his commentators have celebrated this oxymoronic idea of a sui generis subject, acting as if their maestro—unlike his objects of analysis—could never really be pinned down because he was always outwitting the reductive intellectuals who thought that his whimsical tergiversations followed identifiable patterns that could be historically situated.

There is reason to believe though, as both of his major biographers point out in numerous instances, that the face behind the masks was one of a political opportunist and petty-bourgeois careerist. In reaction to the postwar communist surge, he briefly tried on a Marxist mask, but not before impishly drawing Nietzsche’s misplaced mustache on it. In the early years of the reactionary Fifth Republic, he was drawn into Gaullism and became overtly anticommunist as his academic career flourished and he collaborated with the government. However, in the wake of the insurgencies of the late 1960s, he quickly recognized that the stage set had been altered, and he appropriately undertook a hasty costume change. By the mid-1970s, when reactionary anti-communism returned with a vengeance in the guise most notably of the nouveaux philosophes, who became an incredible media sensation, Foucault the shape-shifter saw a new opportunity to reinvent himself as his career was taking off in the anti-communist American academy, which unsurprisingly put him on an enormous pedestal. This is not to suggest, of course, that he might not have had some of his own subjective reasons for changing his opinions on certain matters. However, there is a clear pattern behind the supposed playfulness. Like other French theorists, but with his own unique cachet, Foucault was a radical recuperator whose fame in the global theory industry is proportional to his chameleonic ability to appear radical while recuperating critical theory within the pro-capitalist camp.

In the end, if one has any doubts regarding the social function of Foucault’s work within his historical conjuncture, one only has to look at its material political consequences. Whereas the Marxist tradition has contributed to innumerable liberation struggles and revolutions, the Foucauldian heritage has not produced a single one. However, it has spawned a very powerful cottage industry of anti-communist academics intent on conserving the intricacies of their master’s orrery while cultivating an image of radicality in order to do away, once and for all, with revolutionary theory and practice.
==Notes:==
<references group="note"/>
[[Category:Library]]

Library:The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism

2023-04-13T23:29:51Z

SludgeyRevolution: Created article

{{changetitle|''The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism'', by Gabriel Rockhill}}
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| title = The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism
| subtitle =
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| author = Gabriel Rockhill
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| published_date = June 27th, 2022
| published_location = The Philosophical Salon
| type = Article
| source = [https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/ CounterPunch]
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==Foundations of the Global Theory Industry==
Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common source for so many of the trend-setting forms of theoretical critique that currently dominate the academic market in the capitalist world, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to queer theory, Afro-pessimism and beyond. The Frankfurt School’s political orientation has therefore had a foundational effect on the globalized Western intelligentsia.

The luminaries of the first generation of the Institute for Social Research—particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who will be the focus of this essay—are towering figures in what is referred to as Western or cultural Marxism. For those familiar with Jürgen Habermas’s reorientation away from historical materialism in the second and then third generations of the Frankfurt School, this early work often represents a veritable golden age of critical theory, when it was still—though perhaps passive or pessimistic—dedicated in some capacity to radical politics. If there is a grain of truth in this assumption, it is only insofar as the early Frankfurt School is compared to later generations that refashioned critical theory as radical liberal—or even just blatantly liberal—ideology.<ref group="note">See my analysis of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser in “Critical and Revolutionary Theory.”</ref> However, this point of comparison is setting the bar much too low, as is the case whenever one reduces politics to academic politics. After all, the first generation of the Frankfurt School lived through some of the most cataclysmic clashes in global class struggle of the 20th century, when a veritable intellectual world war was being fought over the meaning and significance of communism.

In order to avoid being the dupes of history, or of the parochialism of the Western academy, it is therefore important to re-contextualize the Institute for Social Research’s work in relationship to international class struggle. One of the most significant features of this context was the desperate attempt, on the part of the capitalist ruling class, its state managers and ideologues, to redefine the Left—in the words of cold warrior CIA agent Thomas Braden—as the “compatible,” meaning non-communist, Left.<ref group="note">See, for instance, Thomas W. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’” Saturday Evening Post (May 20, 1967). Judging from the fact that W.W. Rostow shared, via CIA Director Richard Helms, Braden’s article with the President of the United States prior to its publication, it is most likely what the Agency calls a “limited hangout.” As former executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, Victor Marchetti, explained, a limited hangout is a public relations tactic used by clandestine professionals: “When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further” (“CIA to Admit Hunt Involvement in Kennedy Slaying,” The Spotlight, August 14, 1978: https://archive.org/details/marchetti-victor-cia-to-admit-hunt-involvement-in-kennedy-slaying-the-spotlight-aug.-14-1978/mode/2up).</ref> As Braden and others involved have explained in detail, one important facet of this struggle consisted in the use of foundation money and Agency front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to promote anti-communism and lure Leftists into taking positions against actually existing socialism.

Horkheimer participated in at least one junket organized by the CCF in Hamburg.<ref group="note">See Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History & the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 207-8 and Giles Scott-Smith, “The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the End of Ideology, and the Milan Conference of 1955: ‘Defining the Parameters of Discourse,’” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37 No. 3 (2002): 437-455. The Paris branch of the Institute for Social Research closely collaborated with Raymond Aron, who was in charge of overseeing which work was appropriate for a French audience (see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Correspondance: 1927-1969, Vol. I, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, trans. Didier Renault (Paris: Klincksieck: 2016), 146. I cite this French edition here and elsewhere because Adorno and Horkheimer’s complete correspondence is not available in English, as far as I know). In the postwar era, Aron became the philosophic figurehead of the CCF and an indefatigable anti-communist ideologue whose public visibility was immensely enhanced by CIA support.</ref> Adorno published in the CIA-funded journal Der Monat, the largest review of its kind in Europe and the model for many of the Agency’s other publications. His articles appeared, as well, in two other CIA magazines: Encounter and Tempo presente. He also hosted in his home, corresponded and collaborated with the CIA operative who was arguably the leading figure in the German anticommunist Kulturkampf: Melvin Lasky.<ref group="note">By “operative,” I mean that Lasky worked closely with the CIA—as well as other U.S. government agencies—in his expansive anti-communist propaganda efforts, not that he was himself a CIA “case officer” (which has not been confirmed, as far as I know). Lasky’s collaboration with the CIA and other agencies has been proven by numerous internal documents, as well as the work of researchers like Frances Stonor Saunders, Michael Hochgeschwender, Hugh Wilford and Peter Coleman, amongst others. Some of Lasky’s correspondence with Adorno is available in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Correspondance: 1927-1969, Vol. I-IV, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, trans. Didier Renault (Paris: Klincksieck: 2016).</ref> Founder and chief editor of Der Monat, as well as a member of the original steering committee for the CIA’s CCF, Lasky told Adorno that he was open to every form of collaboration with the Institute for Social Research, including publishing their articles and any other declaration as quickly as possible in his pages.<ref group="note">See Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. III, 291.</ref> Adorno took him up on the offer and sent him four unpublished manuscripts, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, in 1949.<ref group="note">See Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. III, 348.</ref>

Horkheimer’s lifelong collaborator was thus closely connected to the CCF networks in West Germany, and his name appears on a document, likely from 1958/59, that outlined plans for an all-German committee of the CCF.<ref group="note">See Michael Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongreß für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 488.</ref> What is more, even after it was revealed in 1966 that this international propaganda organization was a CIA front, Adorno continued to be “included in the expansion plans of the Paris headquarters [of the CCF],” as it was “business as usual” in the part of Germany overseen by the U.S.<ref group="note">Hochgeschwender, Freiheit in der Offensive?, 563.</ref> This is only the tip of the iceberg, as we shall see, and it is nowise surprising since Adorno and Horkheimer rose to global prominence within the elite networks of the anti-communist Left.
==A Dialectical Analysis of Theoretical Production==
The analysis that follows is based on a dialectical account of the social totality that situates the subjective theoretical practices of these two founding fathers of critical theory within the objective world of international class struggle. It does not accept the arbitrary dividing line that many petty-bourgeois academics desperately try to erect between intellectual production and the broader socioeconomic world, as if someone’s “thought” could—and should—be separated from their “life,” as well as from the material system of theoretical production, circulation and reception that I will here refer to as the intellectual apparatus. Such a non-dialectical assumption, after all, is little more than a symptom of an idealist approach to theoretical work, which presumes that there is a spiritual and conceptual realm that functions completely independently of material reality and the political economy of knowledge.

This presupposition perpetuates intellectual commodity fetishism, meaning the idolization of the sacred products of the theory industry that prohibits us from situating them within the overall social relations of production and class struggle. It also serves the interests of those who have or aspire to part of a particular franchise within the global theory industry, if it be “Frankfurt School critical theory” or any other, because it protects the brand image of the franchise itself (which remains unsullied by the actual social relations of production). Whereas intellectual commodity fetishism is a principal feature of consumption within the theory industry, brand image management is the hallmark of production.

For such a dialectical analysis, it is important to acknowledge that Adorno and Horkheimer did indeed mobilize their subjective agency in formulating significant critiques of capitalism, consumer society and the culture industry. Far from denying this, I would merely like to situate these criticisms within the objective social world, which entails asking a very simple and practical question that is rarely raised within academic circles: if capitalism is recognized as having negative effects, what is to be done about it? The deeper one mines down into their life and work, sifting through the deliberate obscurantism of their discourse, the more obvious their response becomes, and the easier it is to understand the primary social function of their shared intellectual project. For as critical as they sometimes are of capitalism, they regularly affirm that there is no alternative, and nothing can or should ultimately be done about it. What is more, as we shall see, their criticisms of capitalism pale in comparison to their uncompromising condemnation of socialism. Their brand of critical theory ultimately leads to an acceptance of the capitalist order since socialism is judged to be far worse. Not unlike most of the other fashionable discourses in the capitalist academy, they proffer a critical theory that we might call ABS Theory: Anything But Socialism.

It is not the least bit surprising, in this regard, that Adorno and Horkheimer have been so widely supported and promoted within the capitalist world. In order to shore up the compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism, what better tactic than to champion scholars like these as some of the most important, and even most radical, Marxist thinkers of the 20th century? “Marxism” can thereby be redefined as a kind of anti-communist critical theory that is not directly connected to class struggle from below but rather freely criticizes all forms of “domination,” and which ultimately sides with capitalist control societies over and against the purported “fascist” horrors of powerful socialist states.

Since benighted anti-communism has been so widely promoted within capitalist culture, this attempted redefinition of Marxism might not be immediately recognizable to some readers as reactionary and social chauvinist (in the sense that it ultimately elevates bourgeois society over any alternative). Unfortunately, major swaths of the population in the capitalist world have been inculcated into the knee-jerk response of uninformed calumny, rather than rigorous analysis, when it comes to actually existing socialism. Since the material history of these projects, with all of their ups and downs—rather than mythological horror stories propagandistically constructed around a communist bogeyman—will be essential to understanding the argument that follows, I take the liberty of referring the reader to the deep and rich work of rigorous historians like Annie Lacroix-Riz, Domenico Losurdo, Carlos Martinez, Michael Parenti, Albert Szymanski, Jacques Pauwels, and Walter Rodney, amongst others. I also encourage the reader to examine the important quantitative comparisons between capitalism and socialism undertaken by exacting analysts like Minqi Li, Vicente Navarro and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.<ref group="note">See, for instance, Minqi Li, “The 21st Century: Is There an Alternative (to Socialism)?” Science & Society 77:1 (January 2013): 10-43; Vicente Navarro, “Has Socialism Failed? An Analysis of Health Indicators under Capitalism and Socialism,” Science & Society 57:1 (spring 1993): 6-30. Tricontinental has provided numerous in-depth analyses of actually existing socialism and how it compares to actually existing capitalism: https://thetricontinental.org/.</ref> Such work is anathema to the dominant ideology, and for good reason: it scientifically examines the evidence, rather than relying on hoary tropes and uninformed ideological reflexes. It is the type of historical and materialist work, moreover, that has largely been overshadowed by the speculative forms of critical theory promoted by the global theory industry.
==Intellectuals in the Age of Revolution and Global Class War==
Although their early lives were marked by the world-historical events of the Russian Revolution and the attempted revolution in Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer were esthetes wary of the supposed morass of mass politics. While their interest in Marxism was piqued by these incidents, it was primarily of an intellectual nature. Horkheimer did become marginally involved in activities around the Munich council republic after WWI, particularly by providing support for some of those involved after the council had been brutally suppressed. However, he—the same is true a fortiori of Adorno—“continued to maintain his distance from the explosive political events of the time and to devote himself primarily to his own personal concerns.”<ref group="note">John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 42.</ref>

Their class standing was far from insignificant in this regard, for it positions them and their political outlook within the larger, objective world of the social relations of production. Both Frankfurt School theorists were from affluent families. Adorno’s father was a “wealthy wine merchant” and Horkheimer’s was a “millionaire” who “owned several textile factories.”<ref group="note">Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 24; Ingar Solty, “Max Horkheimer, a Teacher without a Class,” Jacobin (February 15, 2020): https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/max-horkheimer-frankfurt-school-adorno-working-class-marxism; Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 13.</ref> Adorno “had no personal ties at all to socialist political life” and maintained throughout his life “a deep aversion to formal membership of any party organization.”<ref group="note">Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1989), 33; Steven Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 94.</ref> Similarly, Horkheimer was never “an overt member of any working-class party.”<ref group="note">Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 33.</ref> The same is generally true of the other figures involved in the early years of the Frankfurt School: “none of those belonging to the Horkheimer circle was politically active; none of them had his origins either in the labor movement or in Marxism.”<ref group="note">Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995), 104.</ref>

In the words of John Abromeit, Horkheimer sought to preserve the supposed independence of theory and “rejected the position of Lenin, Lukács, and the Bolsheviks that critical theory must be ‘rooted’” in the working class, or more specifically working-class parties.<ref group="note">Abromeit, Max Horkheimer, 150. Any scant and circumspect hope that Horkheimer had placed in the Soviet Union dissipated in the early 1930s, and “after 1950, Horkheimer began defending the liberal-democratic political traditions of the West in a manner that was […] one-sided” (Abromeit, Max Horkheimer, 15, also see 181).</ref> He encouraged critical theorists to operate as intellectual free agents rather than grounding their research in the proletariat, which was a type of work that he disparaged as “totalitarian propaganda.”<ref group="note">“Critical theory,” Horkheimer claimed, “is neither ‘deeply rooted’ like totalitarian propaganda nor ‘detached’ like the liberalist intelligentsia” (Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 2002), 223-4).</ref> Adorno’s overall position, like Herbert Marcuse’s, was summarized by Marie-Josée Levallée in the following terms: “the Bolshevik party, which Lenin made the vanguard of the October Revolution, was a centralizing and repressive institution which would shape the Soviet State in its image and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into its own dictatorship.”<ref group="note">“Marie-Josée Levallée, “October and the Prospects for Revolution: The Views of Arendt, Adorno, and Marcuse,” The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice: Failures, Legacies, and the Future of Revolution, eds. Thomas Telios et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 173.</ref>

When Horkheimer took over the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, his stewardship was characterized by speculative concerns with culture and authority rather than rigorous historical materialist analyses of capitalism, class struggle and imperialism. In the words of Gillian Rose, “instead of politicizing academia,” the Institute under Horkheimer “academized politics.”<ref group="note"> Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 2.</ref> This was perhaps seen nowhere more clearly than in “the constant policy of the Institute under Horkheimer’s direction,” which “continued to be abstinence, not only from every activity which was even remotely political, but also from any collective or organized effort to publicize the situation in Germany or to support émigrés.”<ref group="note">Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 133. Also see Solty, “Max Horkheimer, a Teacher without a Class” and Rose, The Melancholy Science, 2.</ref> With the rise of Nazism, Adorno attempted to go into hibernation, assuming that the regime would only target “the orthodox pro-Soviet Bolshevists and communists who had drawn attention to themselves politically” (they would indeed be the first to be put in the concentration camps).<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 181.
</ref> He “refrained from public criticism of any kind of the Nazis and their ‘great power’ policies.”<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 181. “Even in his private letters,” Müller-Doohm writes, “until well into the mid-1930s, we find no more than rather generalized, pessimistic mood-pictures, and no unambiguous statements on the political situation” (181).</ref>
==Critical Theory American Style==
This refusal to overtly participate in progressive politics was intensified when the leaders of the Institute moved it to the United States in the early 1930s. The Frankfurt School adapted itself “to the local bourgeois order, censoring its own past and present work to suit local academic or corporate susceptibilities.”<ref group="note">Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 33. Thomas Wheatland explains that the Horkheimer Circle in New York chose to “remain silent about the major political questions of the day and […concealed] its Marxism almost completely. […] Horkheimer remained unwilling to risk the possible repercussions of political activism or even political engagement with the major topics of the era” (The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 99).</ref> Horkheimer had words like Marxism, revolution and communism expunged from its publications in order to avoid offending its U.S. sponsors.<ref group="note">See Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2017), 72 and 197.</ref> Furthermore, any type of political activity was strictly forbidden, as Herbert Marcuse later explained.<ref group="note">See Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile, 72 (also see 141).</ref> Horkheimer put his energy into securing corporate and state funding for the Institute, and he even hired a public relations firm to promote its work in the U.S. Another émigré from Germany, Bertolt Brecht, was thus not fully unjustified when he critically described the Frankfurt scholars as—in the words of Stuart Jeffries—“prostitutes in their quest for foundation support during their American exile, selling their skills and opinions as commodities in order to support the dominant ideology of oppressive U.S. society.”<ref group="note">Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 136. Brecht maintained that “the Frankfurt School perpetrated a bourgeois sleight of hand by posturing as a Marxist institute while at the same time insisting that revolution could no longer depend on insurrection by the working class, and declining to take part in the overthrow of capitalism” (Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 77).</ref> They were indeed intellectual free agents unrestrained by any working-class organizations in their pursuit of corporate and state sponsorship for their brand of market-savvy critical theory.

Brecht’s close friend, Walter Benjamin, was one of the Frankfurt scholars’ most important Marxist interlocutors at the time. He was not able to join them in the United States because he tragically committed suicide in 1940 at the border between France and Spain, the night before he faced near certain apprehension by the Nazis. According to Adorno, he “killed himself after he had already been saved” because he had “been made a permanent member of the Institute and knew it.”<ref group="note">Cited in Ulrich Fries, “Ende der Legende: Hintergründe zu Walter Benjamins Tod,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 96:4 (2021), 421, 422. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Helmut-Harry Loewen, who drew my attention to this important article and shared his partial translation of it with me.</ref> He was “flush with funds” for his trip, in the words of the famous philosopher, and knew “that he could rely completely on us materially.”<ref group="note">Cited in Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 422, 422.</ref> This version of history, which presents Benjamin’s suicide as an incomprehensible personal decision given the circumstances, was an exercise in mendacity for the sake of personal and institutional exoneration, according to a detailed analysis recently published by Ulrich Fries. Not only were the leading figures of the Frankfurt School unwilling to assist Benjamin financially for his flight from the Nazis, Fries argues, but they also ran an extensive cover-up campaign to disingenuously present themselves as his benevolent benefactors.

Prior to his suicide, Benjamin was financially dependent on the Institute for a monthly stipend. However, the Frankfurt scholars despised the influence of Brecht and revolutionary Marxism on his work. Adorno had no compunction about describing Brecht with the anticommunist epithet “savage” when explaining to Horkheimer that Benjamin needed to be “definitively” liberated from his influence.<ref group="note">See Adorno’s letter to Horkheimer on January 26, 1936, published in Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. I, 110.</ref> It is not surprising, then, that Benjamin feared losing his stipend due, in part, to Adorno’s critiques of his work and refusal to publish a section of his Baudelaire study in 1938.<ref group="note">See the epistolary exchange between them in Ronald Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 100-141.</ref> Horkheimer explicitly told Benjamin around the same time, as fascist forces were closing in around him, that he should prepare for the discontinuation of his sole source of income since 1934. He claimed, moreover, that his hands were “unfortunately tied” when he refused to fund Benjamin’s journey to safety by paying for a steamship ticket to the U.S. that would have cost under $200.<ref group="note">Cited in Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 409.</ref> This was literally “a month after transferring an extra $50,000 to an account at his exclusive disposal,” which was the “second time in eight months” that he had secured an additional $50,000 (the equivalent of just over 1 million dollars in 2022).<ref group="note">Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 409, 424.
</ref> In July 1939, Friedrich Pollock also obtained an additional $130,000 for the Institute from Felix Weil, the wealthy son of a capitalist millionaire whose profits from a grain enterprise in Argentina, property speculation and meat trading funded the Frankfurt School.

It was political will, not money, that was lacking. Indeed, Fries concurs with Rolf Wiggershaus that Horkheimer’s cruel decision to abandon Benjamin was part of a broader pattern according to which the directors “systematically placed the realization of their private life goals above the interests of everyone else,” while propagating the false appearance of “outstanding commitment to those persecuted by the Nazi regime.”<ref group="note">Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 414.</ref> As if to put the last nail in Benjamin’s coffin, his literary estate was later purged of its more explicit Marxist elements according to Helmut Heißenbüttel: “In everything Adorno did for Benjamin’s work, the Marxist-materialist side remains erased. […] The work appears in a reinterpretation in which the surviving controversial correspondent imposes his view.”<ref group="note">Cited in Fries, “Ende der Legende,” 410.</ref>

Todd Cronan has argued that there was a palpable shift in the Frankfurt School’s overall political orientation around 1940—the year Pollock wrote “State Capitalism”—as it increasingly turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity. “It often seems to me,” Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that year, “that everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 2014), 59-60.
</ref> According to Cronan, Adorno and Horkheimer “opened up the possibility from within Marxism of seeing class as a matter of power, of domination, rather than economics (the Jews were not a category defined by economic exploitation). And once that possibility was raised, it became the dominant mode of analysis on the left at large.”<ref group="note">Todd Cronan, Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021), 132.</ref> In other words, the Frankfurt theorists helped set the stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics, which would become consolidated in the neoliberal era.

It is highly revealing in this regard that the Institute undertook a massive study of “Anti-Semitism in American Labor” in 1944-45, under Pollock’s stewardship. Fascism had risen to power with extensive financial backing by the capitalist ruling class, and it was still on the war path around the world. Yet, the Frankfurt scholars were hired to focus on the purported anti-Semitism of U.S. workers rather than on the capitalist funders of fascism or the actual Nazis who were fighting a war against the Soviets. They reached the remarkable conclusion that the “communist-run” unions were the worst of all, and that they thus had “fascist” tendencies: “The members of these unions are less communist than fascist-minded.”<ref group="note">Cited in Cronan, Red Aesthetics, 151.</ref> The study in question was commissioned by the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). One of the JLC’s leaders, David Dubinsky, had numerous ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and was involved, along with the likes of CIA operatives Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, in the Company’s expansive campaign to take over organized labor and purge it of communists.<ref group="note"> On the JLC’s leadership, see Catherine Collomp, “‘Anti-Semitism among American Labor’: A Study by the Refugee Scholars of the Frankfurt School of Sociology at the End of World War II,” Labor History 52:4 (November 2011): 417-439. On Dubinsky’s work with the CIA, see the documents available on the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room (https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/home), as well as Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008) and Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999).</ref> By identifying the communist unions as the most anti-Semitic, and even “fascist,” the Frankfurt School appears to have provided some of the ideological justification for destroying the communist labor movement.

Some might consider the Institute for Social Research’s collaboration with U.S. authorities and self-censorship justified due to the anti-communist, and sometimes philofascist, attitudes of the U.S. power elite, not to mention the enemy alien acts and decrees.<ref group="note">See David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 181-2.</ref> Indeed, based on a detailed overview of the Institute’s history and activities on January 21, 1944, the Federal Bureau of Investigation mobilized numerous stool pigeons to spy on the scholars for about ten years due to the concern that the Institute might be serving as a communist front.<ref group="note">See Adorno’s FBI file: https://vault.fbi.gov/theodor-adorno/theodor-adorno-part-01-of-01/view</ref> The informants included close associates of the Institute like Karl Wittfogel, other professional colleagues and even neighbors. The Bureau found little to no evidence of suspicious behavior, however, and its officers appear to have been reassured when some of their snitches, who were personally close to the Frankfurt scholars, explained to them that the critical theorists “believe there is no difference between Hitler and Stalin as to purpose and tactics.”<ref group="note">See Adorno’s FBI file: https://vault.fbi.gov/theodor-adorno/theodor-adorno-part-01-of-01/view</ref> Indeed, as we will see below, they would claim as much in some of their writings, including when they had settled in West Germany and were no longer under the direct threat of FBI surveillance and potential detainment or deportation.
==Malign the East, Defend—While in the Pay of—the West==
In 1949-50, the intellectual front men of the Frankfurt School moved the Institute back to West Germany, one of the epicenters for the intellectual world war against communism. “In this milieu,” writes Perry Anderson, “in which the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] was to be banned and the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] formally abandoned any connection with Marxism, the depoliticization of the Institute was completed.”<ref group="note">Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 34.</ref> No less than Jürgen Habermas—who occasionally outflanked Adorno and Horkheimer to the left in the early years—accused the latter of “opportunist conformity which was at odds with the critical tradition.”<ref group="note">Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 297. Habermas himself, we should recall, was a member of the Hitler Youth and would later support the Persian Gulf War and NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia.</ref> Indeed, Horkheimer had continued his censorship of the Institute’s work, refusing to publish two articles by Habermas that were critical of liberal democracy and spoke of “revolution,” daring to suggest the possibility of an emancipation from “the shackles of bourgeois society.”<ref group="note">See Horkheimer’s jeremiad against Habermas and Marxism in his letter to Adorno on September 27, 1958 in Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. IV, 386-399.</ref> In his private correspondence, Horkheimer candidly submitted to Adorno that “it is simply not possible to have admissions of this sort in the research report of an Institute that exists on the public funds of this shackling society.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 554.</ref> This appears to be a forthright admission that the economic base of the Frankfurt School was the driving force behind its ideology, or at least its public discourse.

It is important to recall, in this regard, that five of the eight members of the Horkheimer circle had worked as analysts and propagandists for the U.S. government and national security state, which “had a vested interest in the continuing loyalty of the Frankfurt School because a number of its members were working on sensitive government research projects.”<ref group="note">Jenemann, Adorno in America, 182.</ref> While Horkheimer and Adorno were not amongst them, since they received more support from the Institute, the latter of the two originally emigrated to the United States to work for Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research, one of the “de facto adjuncts of government psychological warfare programs.”<ref group="note">Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.</ref> This center for communication studies received a substantial grant of $67,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and worked very closely with the U.S. national security state (government money made up over 75 percent of its annual budget). The Rockefeller Foundation also funded Horkheimer’s first return to Germany in April 1948, when he took up a guest professorship at Frankfurt University.

Lest we forget, the Rockefellers are one of the greatest gangster families in the history of U.S. capitalism, and they use their foundation as a tax shelter that allows them to mobilize a portion of their stolen wealth “in the corruption of intellectual activity and culture.”<ref group="note">Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 397.</ref> They were, moreover, directly involved in the national security state during the time of the Frankfurt School’s sponsorship. After serving as the director of the Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (a federal propaganda agency whose work resembled that of the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA), Nelson Rockefeller became, in 1954, the “‘super-coordinator’ for clandestine intelligence operations, with the title of Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Strategy.”<ref group="note">John Loftus, America’s Nazi Secret (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, LLC, 2011), 228.</ref> He also allowed the Rockefeller Fund to be used as a conduit for CIA money, very much like a large number of other capitalist foundations that have an extensive history of working hand-in-glove with the Company (as revealed by the Church Committee report and other sources).

With all of these ties to the capitalist ruling class and the U.S. empire, it is nowise surprising that the U.S. government supported the Institute’s move back to West Germany with a very significant grant in 1950 of 435,000 DM ($103,695, or the equivalent of $1,195,926 dollars in 2022).<ref group="note">See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 434.</ref> These funds were administered by John McCloy, the US High Commissioner of Germany. McCloy was a core member of the U.S. power elite, who had worked as a jurist and banker for big oil and IG Farben, and who granted extensive pardons and commutations to Nazi war criminals. After having served as one of the architects of the US national security state during WWII, he—in a career move indicative of the intimate relationship between the deep state and the capitalist ruling class—went on to become the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, of the Council of Foreign Relations, and of the Ford Foundation. In addition to the funds provided by McCloy, the Institute also received support from private donors, the Society of Social Research, and the city of Frankfurt. In 1954, it even signed a research contract with the Mannesmann corporation, which “had been a founding member of the Anti-Bolshevik League and had financed the Nazi Party.”<ref group="note">Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 479.</ref> During WWII, Mannesmann used slave labor, and its Chairman of the Board was the Nazi Wilhelm Zangen, the War Economy Leader of the Third Reich.<ref group="note">See Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge, 2001), 281.</ref> The Frankfurt School’s postwar contract with this company was for a sociological study of worker’s opinions, with the implicit implication that such a study would help management stall or prevent socialist organizing.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of why capitalist governments and the corporatocracy would support the Institute for Social Research is to be found in the words of Shepard Stone. The latter, we should note, had a background in journalism and military intelligence before going on to serve as the Director of International Affairs at the Ford Foundation, where he worked closely with the CIA in funding cultural projects around the world (Stone even became the President of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, which was the new name given to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in a rebranding effort after its CIA origins had been revealed). When Stone was the director of public affairs for the High Commission for Occupied Germany in the 1940s, he sent a personal note to the U.S. State Department to encourage it to extend Adorno’s passport: “The Institute of Frankfurt is helping to train German leaders who will know something of democratic techniques. I believe it is important for our over-all democratic objectives in Germany that such men as Professor Adorno have an opportunity to work in that country.”<ref group="note">Cited in Jenemann, Adorno in America, 184. Adorno said as much himself in his affidavit: “The Institute of Social Research at Frankfort [sic] University was founded with the support of HICOG and largely supported by American means. It is the aim of this Institution to develop an integration of American and German research methods and to help in the education of German students in the spirit of American democracy” (Jenemann, Adorno in America, 184).</ref> The Institute was doing the kind of ideological work that the U.S. state and capitalist ruling class wanted to—and did—support.

Meeting, and even surpassing, the dictates of ideological conformity to the “shackling society” that funded the Institute, Horkheimer openly expressed his fulsome support for the U.S.’s anti-communist puppet government in West Germany, whose intelligence services had been stocked with former Nazis, as well as its imperial project in Vietnam (which he judged necessary to stop the Chinese).<ref group="note">According to Wiggershaus: “Horkheimer did not, like Paul Tillich, defend socialism or, like Hugo Sinzheimer or Hermann Heller, belong to the committed democrats and declared opponents of Nazism” (The Frankfurt School, 112). On Adenauer, see Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory,” as well as Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (New York: Dorset Press, 1978).</ref> Speaking at one of the Amerika-Häuser in Germany, which were propaganda outposts in the anti-communist Kulturkampf, he solemnly declared in May 1967 that “In America, when it is necessary to conduct a war, – and now listen to me […] it is not so much a question of the defense of the homeland, but it is essentially a matter of the defense of the constitution, the defense of the rights of man.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995, Vol. I: Chronik (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard GmbH & Co. Verlags KG, 1998), 252-3.</ref> The high priest of critical theory is here describing a country that was founded as a settler colony, whose genocidal elimination of the indigenous population seamlessly merged with a project of imperialist expansion that has arguably left the bloodiest footprint—as MLK Jr. argued in April 1967—on the history of the modern world (including some 37 military and CIA interventions between the end of WWII and 1967, when Horkheimer broadcast this ignominious claim via a U.S. propaganda platform).<ref group="note">See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2014).</ref>

Although Adorno often indulged in the petty-bourgeois politics of complicit passivity, avoiding public pronouncements on major political events, the few statements he did make were strikingly reactionary. For instance, in 1956, he co-authored an article with Horkheimer in defense of the imperialist invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France, which aimed at seizing the Suez Canal and overthrowing Nasser (an action condemned by the United Nations). Referring to Nasser, one of the prominent anti-colonial leaders of the non-aligned movement, as “a fascist chieftain […] who conspires with Moscow,” they exclaimed: “No one even ventures to point out that these Arab robber states have been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to fall upon Israel and to slaughter the Jews who have found refuge there.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 297.
</ref> According to this pseudo-dialectical inversion, it is the Arab states that are “robbers,” not the settler colony working with core imperialist countries to infringe upon the self-determination of Arabs. We would be well served to recall Lenin’s trenchant rejection of such sophistry, which is characteristic of much of what counts for “dialectics” in the global theory industry: “Not infrequently have dialectics served […] as a bridge to sophistry. But we remain dialecticians and we combat sophistry not by denying the possibility of all transformations in general, but by analyzing the given phenomenon in its concrete setting and development.”<ref group="note">V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 309.</ref> Such concrete, materialist analysis is precisely what is lacking in idealist inversions à la Adorno and Horkheimer.

The front men of the Frankfurt School published one of their most overtly political texts the same year. Rather than supporting the global movement for anticolonial liberation and the building of a socialist world, they celebrate—with only a few minor exceptions—the superiority of the West, while repeatedly disparaging the Soviet Union and China. Invoking stock racist descriptions of the “barbarians” in the East, whom they describe using the overtly sub-humanizing vocabulary of “beasts” and “hordes,” they flatly proclaim that they are “fascists” who have chosen “slavery.”<ref group="note">The racialization of communists has been an important part of anti-communist ideology, as Domenico Losurdo explained in War and Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2015).</ref> Adorno even chastises Germans who mistakenly think that “the Russians stand for socialism,” reminding them that the Russians are actually “fascists,” adding that the “industrialists and bankers”—with whom he here identifies—already know this.<ref group="note">Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” New Left Review 65 (September-October 2019), 49.</ref>

“Everything the Russians write slips into ideology, into crude, stupid twaddle,” Adorno brazenly asserts in this text, as if he had read everything they wrote, even though, per usual, he does not cite a single source (nor did he even read Russian, as far as I know).<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 59.</ref> Claiming that there is “an element of re-barbarization” in their thinking, which is also to be found in Marx and Engels according to him, he unabashedly asserts that it is “more reified than in the most advanced bourgeois thought.”<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 59.</ref> As if this was not enough disingenuous grandstanding, Adorno has the chutzpah to describe this writing project with Horkheimer as a “strictly Leninist manifesto.”<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 57</ref> This is in a discussion in which they affirm that they “are not calling on anyone to take action,” and Adorno explicitly elevates bourgeois thought and what he refers to as “culture at its most advanced” above the supposed barbarism of socialist thinking.<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 57, 59.</ref> Moreover, it is in this context that Horkheimer doubled down on their social chauvinism by averring, in a world-historical conclusion that provoked no rebuttal on the part of his “Leninist” collaborator: “I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of these gains.”<ref group="note">Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?” 41. Horkheimer expressed similar pro-capitalist, anti-communist views on numerous occasions. For instance, in a long letter to Adorno dated September 27, 1958, he claimed that “revolution really means the passage to terror” and asserted that what must be defended is “the remainder of bourgeois civilization where the idea of individual freedom and authentic society still has its place” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance: 1927-1969, Vol. IV, 395). In 1968, to cite another example, he quite explicitly described his position as counter-revolutionary: “An open declaration that even a dubious democracy, for all its defects, is always better than the dictatorship which would inevitably result from a revolution today, seems to me necessary for the sake of truth” (Horkheimer, Critical Theory, viii). After recalling Horkheimer’s condemnation of the “savage barbarism of the East,” Stefan Müller-Doohm writes in his 700-page biography of Adorno that “Adorno and Horkheimer were in agreement in their assessment of the so-called Eastern bloc, i.e. the Soviet Union, but also communist China” (415). Regarding colonialism, Horkheimer wrote to Adorno that although “the European dream of permanent superiority in the colonial era” was “abominable,” it nevertheless had “its good sides” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. IV, 466).</ref> This was in 1956, when the U.S. was still largely racially segregated, was involved in anti-communist witch hunts and destabilization campaigns around the world, and had recently extended its imperial reach by overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), while the European powers were waging violent struggles to hold onto their colonies or convert them into neo-colonies.
==“Fascism and Communism Are the Same”==
One of the most consistent political claims advanced by Adorno and Horkheimer is that there is a “totalitarian” equivalence between fascism and communism, if it manifests itself in socialist state-building projects, anticolonial movements of the “Third World,” or even New Left mobilizations in the Western world. In all three cases, those who think they are breaking out of the “shackling society,” are only making things worse. The patent fact that Western capitalist countries offered no significant bulwark against fascism, which arose within the capitalist world, and that it was precisely the Soviet Union that ultimately defeated it, does not seem to have caused them to reflect on the viability of this benighted and simplistic thesis (which is to say nothing of the importance of socialism to anti-colonial movements and the uprisings of the 1960s). In fact, for all of his moral opining on the horrors of Auschwitz, Adorno appears to have forgotten who actually liberated the infamous concentration camp (the Red Army).

Horkheimer had formulated his version of horseshoe theory with particular clarity in a limited circulation pamphlet published in 1942, which broke with the Aesopian language of many of the Institute’s other publications. Directly accusing Friedrich Engels of utopianism, he averred that the socialization of the means of production had led to an increase in repression, and ultimately to an authoritarian state. “The bourgeoisie earlier held the government in check through its property,” according to this millionaire’s son, whereas in new societies socialism simply “did not function,” except to produce the mistaken belief that one was—through the party, honored leader, or the supposed march of history—“acting in the name of something greater than oneself.”<ref group="note">Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” Telos 15 (spring 1973): 16.</ref> Horkheimer’s position in this piece is perfectly in line with anarcho-anti-communism, which is a very widespread ideology within the Western Left: a “classless democracy” is supposed to emerge spontaneously from the people through “free agreement,” without the supposedly pernicious influence of parties or states. As Domenico Losurdo has insightfully pointed out, the Nazi war machine was ravaging the USSR in the early 1940s, and Horkheimer’s call for socialists to abandon the state and party centralization therefore amounted to nothing less than a demand that they capitulate before the Nazis’s genocidal rampage.<ref group="note">See Domenico Losurdo, El Marxismo occidental: Cómo nació, cómo murió y cómo puede resucitar, trans. Alejandro García Mayo (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2019). This book, originally written in Italian, is being translated into English by Steven Colatrella for 1804 Books.</ref>

Whereas there are vague suggestions at the end of Horkheimer’s 1942 pamphlet that there might be something desirable in socialism, later texts would bring into full relief their unequivocal rejection of it. For instance, when Adorno and Horkheimer were considering making a public statement on their relationship to the Soviet Union, the former sent the following draft of a planned co-authored piece to the latter: “Our philosophy, as a dialectical critique of the overall social tendency of the age, stands in the sharpest opposition to the politics and doctrine that emanates from the Soviet Union. We are unable to see anything in the practice of the military dictatorships disguised as people’s democracies other than a new form of repression.”<ref group="note">Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Vol. 18 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 73. Also see Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 334. Adorno went so far as to explicitly endorse the position of the militant anti-communist and CIA collaborator Arthur Koestler, writing that “communism has become a ‘rightwing party’ (which Koestler highlighted) and […] it has completely identified itself with Russian imperialism” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Correspondance, Vol. IV, 655).</ref> It is worth noting in this regard, given the overwhelming lack of materialist analysis of actually existing socialism on the part of Adorno and Horkheimer, that even the CIA recognized that the Soviet Union was not a dictatorship. In a report dated March 2, 1955, the Agency clearly stated: “Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure.”<ref group="note">See this document in the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80-00810a006000360009-0 I would like to express my gratitude to Colin Bodayle for drawing my attention to this document.</ref>

In 1959, Adorno published a text entitled “The Meaning of Working through the Past” in which he recycled the “shameful truth” of “philistine wisdom” referenced in this earlier draft, namely that—in complete conformity with the dominant Cold War ideology in the West—fascism and communism are the same because they are two forms of “totalitarianism.” Openly rejecting the vantage point of “political-economic ideology,” which obviously distinguishes these two warring camps, Adorno claimed to have privileged access to a deeper social-psychological dynamic that unites them.<ref group="note">Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 94.</ref> As “authoritarian personalities,” he asserted ex cathedra, fascists and communists “possess weak egos” and compensate by identifying themselves with “real-existing power” and “great collectives.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 94.</ref> The very notion of an “authoritarian personality” is thus a deceitful crotchet aimed at synthesizing opposites via psychologizing pseudo-dialectics. It begs the question, moreover, of why psychology and particular ways of thinking appear, at least here, to be more central to historical explanation than material forces and class struggle.

In spite of this attempt to psychologically identify fascists and communists, Adorno nonetheless suggested, in the same text, that the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union could be retrospectively justified due to the fact that the Bolsheviks were—like Hitler himself had said—a menace to Western civilization. “The threat that the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious,” Adorno claimed, “and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 94.</ref> The analogy is revealing because, in this case, it would mean appeasing the “fascist” communists if one did not directly fight against them. In other words, as obscure and convoluted as his phraseology is, this appears to be a clarion call for military opposition to the spread of communism (which is perfectly in line with Horkheimer’s support for the U.S.’s imperialist war in Vietnam).

Adorno’s fierce rejection of actually existing socialism was also on full display in his exchange with Alfred Sohn-Rethel. The latter asked him if Negative Dialectics had anything to say about changing the world, and if the Chinese Cultural Revolution was part of the ‘affirmative tradition’ he condemned. Adorno replied that he rejected the “moral pressure” from “official Marxism” to put philosophy into practice.<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 438.</ref> “Nothing but despair can save us,” he asserted with his signature panache of petty-bourgeois melancholia.<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 438.</ref> Adding, for good measure, that the events in communist China were no cause for hope, he explained with memorable insistence that his entire thinking life had been resolutely pitted against this form—and presumably others—of socialism: “I would have to deny everything I have thought my whole life long if I were to admit to feeling anything but horror at the sight of it.”<ref group="note">Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 438.</ref> Adorno’s open indulgence in despair and simultaneous abhorrence of actually existing socialism are not simply idiosyncratic, personal reactions but are affects arising from a class position. “The representatives of the modern labor movement,” Lenin wrote in 1910, “find that they have plenty to protest against but nothing to despair about.”<ref group="note">V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 332.</ref> In a description that anticipated Adorno’s petty-bourgeois gloom, the leader of the world’s first successful socialist revolution then proceeded to explain that “despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”<ref group="note"> Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16, 332.</ref>

Adorno also pursued this line of thinking, or rather feeling, in his criticisms of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist student activism of the 1960s. He agreed with Habermas—who had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the “Nazi philosopher” (his description of Heidegger)—that this activism amounted to “Left fascism.” He defended West Germany as a functioning democracy rather than a “fascist” state, as some of the students argued.<ref group="note">As I have argued in “Critical and Revolutionary Theory,” this assessment on the part of the students was fully justified.</ref> At the same time, he quarreled with Marcuse over what he judged to be the latter’s misguided support for the students and the antiwar movement, explicitly claiming that the answer to the question ‘what is to be done?’, for good dialecticians, is nothing at all: “the goal of real praxis would be its own abolition.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 267. Adorno’s faux dialectical praise of inaction as the best form of action is reiterated in his correspondence with Marcuse regarding the student protests: “We withstood in our time, you no less than me, a much more dreadful situation—that of the murder of the Jews, without proceeding to praxis; simply because it was blocked to us. […] To put it bluntly: I think that you are deluding yourself in being unable to go on without participating in the student stunts, because of what is occurring in Vietnam or Biafra. If that really is your reaction, then you should not only protest against the horror of napalm bombs but also against the unspeakable Chinese-style tortures that the Vietcong carry out permanently” (Adorno and Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233 (January-February 1999), 127). He makes similar statements elsewhere, such as in his 1969 text on “Resignation” where he celebrates the “utopian moment in thinking” over and against any form of action: “The uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in. […] Thinking is actually the force of resistance” (Adorno, Critical Models, 293).</ref> He thereby inverted, through dialectical sophistry, one of the central tenets of Marxism, notably the primacy of practice. It is in this context of turning Marx on his head that he repeated, once again, the ideological mantra of the capitalist world: “fascism and communism are the same.”<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 268.</ref> Even though he referred to this slogan as a “petit bourgeois truism,” apparently acknowledging its ideological status, he unabashedly embraced it.<ref group="note">Adorno, Critical Models, 268.</ref>

Idealism is the hallmark of Adorno and Horkheimer’s reflections on actually existing socialism and, more generally, progressive social movements. Rather than studying the projects that they denigrate with any of the rigor and earnestness with which they sometimes approach other topics, they rely on stock representations and anti-communist canards devoid of concrete analysis (although they occasionally reference a few of the anti-communist publications, like those by the rabid cold warrior Arthur Koestler, that were amply funded and supported by imperialist states and their intelligence services).<ref group="note">Koestler was a major figure in the networks of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom and MI6’s Information Research Department.</ref> This is particularly true in the case of their vilification of socialist state building projects. Their writings on the topic are not only remarkably devoid of references to any rigorous scholarship on the matter, but they proceed as if such serious engagement was not even necessary. These texts genuflect to the dominant ideology, stalwartly insisting on the anti-Stalinist bona fides of their authors, without being concerned with any of the details, nuances or complexities.

One cannot help but wonder, then, if the students were not correct when, in the late 1960s, they circulated leaflets asserting that these Frankfurt scholars were “left idiots of the authoritarian state” who were “critical in theory, conformist in practice.”<ref group="note">Quoted in Esther Leslie, “Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233 (January-February 1999), 119 and Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung, Vol. 1, 374.</ref> Hans-Jürgen Krahl, one of Theodor Adorno’s doctoral students, went so far as to publicly besmirch his mentor and the other Frankfurt professors as “Scheißkritische Theoretiker [shit-critical theorists].”<ref group="note"> Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentbewegung, Vol. 1, 398. Krahl was the only activist not released from jail the same night, and Adorno decided to press charges against him, like he had in 1964 against the student group Subversive Aktion, in spite of pressure to drop the charges.</ref> He voiced this lapidary critique of these stalwart defenders of ABS Theory when he was being arrested, at the behest of Adorno, for a university occupation related to his involvement in the Socialist German Students’ League. The fact that the author of Negative Dialectics called the police to have his own students arrested is a standard reference point amongst his political critics. As we have seen, however, it is only the very tip of the iceberg. Far from being a bizarre anomaly, it is consistent with his politics, his social function within the intellectual apparatus, his class standing, and his overall orientation within global class struggle.
==The Tuis of Western “Marxism”==
Brecht proposed the neologism “Tuis” to refer to intellectuals (Intellektuellen) who, as subjects of a commodified culture, get everything backwards (hence Tellekt-uellen-in). He had shared his ideas for a Tui-Novel with Benjamin in the 1930s, and he later wrote a play that emerged out of his earlier notes, entitled Turandot or The Whitewashers’ Congress. Having returned to the German Democratic Republic after WWII to contribute to the socialist state building project, unlike the Frankfurt scholars who settled in West Germany with funding from the capitalist ruling class, Turandot was in part written as a satirical critique of these Western “Marxists.”

In the play, the Tuis are presented as professional whitewashers who receive a handsome salary for making things appear the opposite of what they are. “The whole country is governed by injustice,” Sen states in Turandot, before providing a concise summary of ABS Theory: “and in the Tui Academy all you get to learn is why it has to be that way.”<ref group="note">Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays: Six, eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Random House, 1998), 189.</ref> Tui training, like the work of the Institute for Social Research, teaches us that there is no alternative to the dominant order, and it thereby forecloses the possibility of system change. In one of the most striking scenes, the Tuis are shown preparing for the whitewashers’ congress. Nu Shan, one of the teachers in the Academy, operates a pulley system that can raise or lower a basket of bread in front of the speaker’s face. In training a young man named Shi Me to become a Tui, he tells him to speak on the topic “Why Kai Ho’s position is false” (Kai Ho is a revolutionary resembling Mao Zedong). Nu Shan explains that he will raise the bread basket above his head when Shi Me says something wrong and lower it in front of his face when it’s correct. After much raising and lowering in relation to Shi Me’s ability to conform to the dominant ideology, his arguments crescendo to the point of shrill anti-communist slander devoid of rational argumentation: “Kai Ho isn’t a philosopher at all, but just a loudmouth – the basket sinks – a troublemaker, a power-hungry good-for-nothing, an irresponsible gambler, a muckraker, a rapist, an unbeliever, a bandit and a criminal. The basket is hovering just in front of the speaker’s mouth. A tyrant!”<ref group="note">Brecht, Collected Plays: Six, 145.</ref> This scene presents, in microcosm, the relationship between professional intellectuals and their financial backers within class societies: the former earn their bread as academic free agents by providing the best possible ideology for the latter. It is a matter of food for thought.

What the Frankfurt School had to offer the bread givers of “the shackling society” was nowise insignificant. Mobilizing pseudo-dialectical sophistry, they defended in highfalutin academic language the State Department line that communism is indistinguishable from fascism, even though 27 million Soviets had given their lives to defeat the Nazi war machine in WWII (to mention but one of the most blatant forms of opposition between communism and fascism, although there are of course many others since they are mortal enemies). Moreover, by displacing class struggle in favor of an idealist critical theory severed from practical political engagements, they shifted the very foundations of analysis away from historical materialism toward a generalized theoretical critique of domination, power, and identity thinking.

Adorno and Horkheimer thus ultimately played the role of radical recuperators. Cultivating an appearance of radicality, they recuperated the very activity of critique within a pro-Western, anti-communist ideology. Like other members of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in Europe and the United States, which formed the basis of Western Marxism, they publicly expressed their social-chauvinistic disgust with what they described as the savage barbarians in the East, who dared to take up the weapon of Marxist theory à la Lenin and use it to act on the principle that they could rule themselves. From the relative comforts of their capitalist-funded professorial citadel in the West, they defended the superiority of the Euro-American world that promoted them against what they referred to as the levelling project of the bolshevized barbarians in the uncivilized periphery.

Furthermore, their generalized critique of domination is part of a larger embrace of an anti-party and anti-state ideology, which ultimately leaves the Left bereft of the tools of disciplined organization necessary to wage successful struggles against the well-funded political, military and cultural apparatus of the capitalist ruling class. This is perfectly in line with their overall politics of defeat, which Adorno explicitly embraced through his anti-Marxist defense of inaction as the highest form of praxis. The leaders of the Tui Academy in Frankfurt, amply funded and supported by the capitalist ruling class and imperialist states, including the U.S. national security state, were thus ultimately global spokesmen for an anti-communist politics of capitalist accommodation. Wringing their hands at the infelicities of consumer society, which they sometimes described in remarkable detail, they nonetheless refused to do anything practical about them because of the bedrock assumption that the socialist cure to such misfortunes is much worse than the disease itself.

* This article draws on and further develops a detailed analysis whose extensive references further support the claims advanced here: Gabriel Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory” in Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique, Ed. Daniel Benson (London: Roman & Littlefield International, 2021). I am deeply grateful to the friends and colleagues who provided crucial feedback on earlier drafts of this article, including those who expressed reservations about some of the arguments (for which I accept full responsibility): Larry Busk, Helmut-Harry Loewen, Jennifer Ponce de León, Salvador Rangel, and Yves Winter.
==Notes:==
<references group="note"/>
[[Category:Library]]

Gabriel Rockhill

2023-04-13T22:14:15Z

SludgeyRevolution: Created page with "{{Infobox revolutionary | name = Gabriel Rockhill | image = File:GabeRockhill.webp | image_size = 250px | image_upright = | image_alt = | nationality = Statesian | birth_name = Gabriel Rockhill | political_line = Marxism-Leninism Anti-imperialism }} '''Gabriel Rockhill''' (born 1971) is a Statesian cultural critic and philosophy professor. He has written articles exposing the anti-communism and imperialist intellige..."

{{Infobox revolutionary
| name = Gabriel Rockhill
| image = File:GabeRockhill.webp
| image_size = 250px
| image_upright =
| image_alt =
| nationality = [[United States of America|Statesian]]
| birth_name = Gabriel Rockhill
| political_line = [[Marxism-Leninism]] [[Anti-imperialism]]
}}
'''Gabriel Rockhill''' (born 1971) is a Statesian cultural critic and philosophy professor. He has written articles exposing the [[anti-communism]] and imperialist intelligence agency affiliations of [[postmodernists]] and others on the [[compatible left]].

==Library works==
*(2020) [[Library:Foucault: The Faux Radical|Foucault: The Faux Radical]]
*(2022) [[Library:The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism|The CIA & the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism]]
*(2023) [[Library:Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek|Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek]]
[[Category:Statesian Marxists]]

Postmodernists

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#REDIRECT [[Postmodernism]]

File:GabeRockhill.webp

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SludgeyRevolution:

Productive forces

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SludgeyRevolution: added category

'''Productive forces''', '''productive powers''', or '''forces of production''' (German: ''Produktivkräfte'') is a central idea in [[Marxism]] and [[historical materialism]].

In [[Marx|Karl Marx]] and [[Engels|Friedrich Engels]]' own critique of political economy, it refers to the combination of the [[Means of production|means of labor]] (tools, machinery, land, infrastructure, and so on) with human [[labour power]].

Together with the social and technical [[relations of production]], the productive forces constitute a historically specific [[mode of production]].

The productive forces are the unity of means of production and labour:
# All labour (individual, union)
# Instruments of production (buildings, machines)
# Subjects of production (raw materials, labor)

== Modern uses ==
While the definition of productive forces hasn't changed, it's become a popular term in recent decades as the [[People's Republic of China]] (PRC) has been emphasizing increasing their economy's productive forces in order to advance to higher stages of socialism, and eventually to the lofty ideal of [[communism]], where there is [[Post-scarcity|immense material abundance]].

=== Deng Xiaoping ===
[[Deng Xiaoping]], the former leader of the PRC, wrote about the productive forces, writing about how the implementation of a Socialist Market Economy would help China to liberate and develop its productive forces.<ref>[https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/there-is-no-fundamental-contradiction-between-socialism-and-a-market-economy/ There Is No Fundamental Contradiction Between Socialism and a Market Economy]</ref>

== External links ==
{{External links|Wikipedia=[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_forces]|Leftypedia=|EcuRed=}}
[[Category:Marxist terminology]]

Category:International auxiliary languages

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SludgeyRevolution: Created page with "Category:Language"

[[Category:Language]]

Korean revolutionary opera

2023-03-30T00:21:53Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

Korean revolutionary opera (Korean: 조선혁명가극) is a tradition of revolutionary opera in the [[Democratic People's Republic of Korea]]. It is characterized by a highly melodramatic style and reoccurring themes of patriotism and glorification of [[Juche]], President [[Kim Il-sung]], and the [[proletariat|working people]], as well as a focus on [[socialist realist]] themes. Composers of Korean revolutionary opera are employed by the DPRK government and the fundamental principles of Korean revolutionary opera were dictated by [[Kim Jong-il]] in his speech (later transcribed into a book) ''[[On the Art of Opera]]''.

The first opera, ''[[Sea of Blood]]'' debuted in [[Pyongyang]]'s ''Grand Theatre'' in July 1971.

[[File:KoreanOpera.jpg|thumb|An opera performance in Pyongyang]]
[[Category:Democratic People's Republic of Korea]]

Class collaboration

2023-03-29T04:29:39Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

'''Class collaboration''' is a [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] [[ideology]] based on the belief that the division of society into a hierarchy of [[Social class|social classes]] is a positive, natural, inevitable and essential aspect of society. It's a central ideological pillar of [[fascism]].
[[Category:Right-wing ideologies]]

Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938)

2023-03-25T22:26:12Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox country|name=Czechoslovak Republic|native_name=Československá republika ([[Czech language|Czech]]) Česko-slovenská republika ([[Slovak language|Slovak]])|image_flag=Czech flag.png|capital=[[Prague]]|largest_city=[[Prague]]|mode_of_production=Capitalism|flag_caption=The flag of Czechoslovakia, from 1920 to 1938.|official_languages=[[Czechoslovak language|Czechoslovak]]|common_languages=[[Czechoslovak language|Czechoslovak]] ([[Czech language|Czech]] · [[Slovak language|Slovak]]), [[German language|German]], [[Hungarian language|Hungarian]], [[Polish language|Polish]], [[Romani language|Romani]], [[Rusyn language|Rusyn]], [[Yiddish]]}}

The '''(First) Czechoslovak Republic''' was a binational, multi-ethnic [[Bourgeois Democracy|bourgeois democratic]] state in [[Central Europe]] that existed during the [[Interwar Period]]. It was proclaimed by the [[Czechoslovak National Council]] in 1918 following the [[dissolution of Austria-Hungary]]. In 1938, with [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland|Britain]] and [[French Republic (1870–1940)|France]]'s grace, much of Czechoslovakia's territory was forcibly ceded over to [[German Reich (1933–1945)|Nazi Germany]] via the [[Munich Agreement]], with [[Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)|Hungary]] and [[Republic of Poland (1918–1939)|Poland]] also occupying parcels of land. This resulted in a major political crisis in Czechoslovakia and the resignation of then-[[President of Czechoslovakia|President]] [[Edvard Beneš]], thereby ending the First Republic.

==History ==
Throughout the 1930s, sensing that a German invasion was imminent, Czechoslovakia began to militarise, [[Czechoslovak border fortifications|sparking the construction of a line of fortifications along the German border]]. They built pillboxes, machine gun nests, and anti-tank obstacles. They also began developing their own small arms, tanks, and artillery pieces.

During the early stages of the [[Second World War]], many of these Czechoslovak guns, tanks, artillery pieces, and anti-tank obstacles (e.g. the "[[Czech hedgehog]]") were used by Nazi Germany<ref><blockquote>''"Czech tanks are included [in the 'Axis Tanks' section], as many were subsequently taken over by the Germans during the invasion of France in 1940 and remained in production in Czechoslovakia after that country's occupation."''</blockquote>
[[Chris Bishop (historian)|Chris Bishop]] (1988).: ''The Encyclopedia of Weapons of World War II: A Comprehensive Guide to Weapons Systems, Including Tanks, Small Arms, Warplanes, Artillery, Ships, and Submarines.'' p. 9.</ref> or sold to neighbouring countries such as [[Kingdom of Romania (1881–1947)|Romania]] and the [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991)|Soviet Union]].

=== Munich Agreement===
In May 1938, Nazi Germany concentrated its troops on the Czechoslovak border. On 30 September, after nearly two weeks of an undeclared border war between the [[Sudeten German Freikorps]] (a terrorist organisation funded by the [[Army (Wehrmacht)|German Army]]) and the Czechoslovak state, British [[Prime Minister of the United Kingdom|Prime Minister]] [[Neville Chamberlain]] and French [[Prime Minister of France|Prime Minister]] [[Édouard Daladier]] met in [[Munich]] with German leader [[Adolf Hitler]]. Without any input from Czechoslovakia itself, they agreed that Germany could annex the [[Sudetenland]], a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited primarily by [[Sudeten Germans|ethnic Germans]]. The Czechoslovak leadership had no choice but to go along with this decision.

====International reaction====
In response to the German buildup along the Czechoslovak border, the Soviet Union sent 40 divisions to Czechoslovakia's western border and called up 330,000 reservists. After the Munich Agreement was made, [[Joseph Stalin|Stalin]] offered to defend the rest of Czechoslovakia in the event of a German invasion, but Czechoslovakia declined the offer.<ref name=":022332">{{Citation|author=Ludo Martens|year=1996|title=Another View of Stalin|chapter=Stalin and the anti-fascist war|isbn=9782872620814|publisher=Editions EPO|pdf=https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaceab64vxtxpqt2cdl4zsrsftmedqidn4foq74gr25qkd35z5nwogdi?filename=Ludo%20Martens%20-%20Another%20View%20of%20Stalin-Editions%20EPO%20%281996%29.pdf|page=186}}</ref>

==References==

<references />
[[Category:Countries]]

Category:Sign languages

2023-03-25T20:35:02Z

SludgeyRevolution: created category

[[Category:Language]]

German Sign Language

2023-03-25T20:34:46Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

'''German Sign Language''' ([[German language|German]]: '''Deutsche Gebärdensprache''' ('''DGS''')) is the [[sign language]] used by the [[Deaf culture|Deaf community]] in [[Federal Republic of Germany|Germany]], [[Grand Duchy of Luxembourg|Luxembourg]], and parts of [[Kingdom of Belgium|Belgium]]. It differs from [[Austrian Sign Language]] (used in [[Republic of Austria|Austria]]) and [[Swiss-German Sign Language]] (used in [[Swiss Confederation|Switzerland]] and [[Principality of Liechtenstein|Liechtenstein]]), both of which are considered to be part of the [[French Sign Language family]].
[[Category:Sign languages]]

Korea

2023-03-25T20:32:36Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox country|name=Korea|native_name=조선|image_flag=Korean Unification Flag.png|image_map=Korea.png|largest_city=[[Seoul]]|official_languages=Korean|area_km2=223,155|population_estimate=77,000,000|population_estimate_year=2017|map_width=250}}

'''Korea''' is a nation in [[East Asia]] consisting of the Korean Peninsula and nearby islands, including the island of [[Jeju]]. In the present day, Korea is split between two governments, one located in the north and the other in the south. The [[Democratic People's Republic of Korea]] (DPRK), commonly called North Korea, is located in the northern portion of the peninsula. Meanwhile, the [[United States of America|US]]-occupied [[Republic of Korea]] (ROK), commonly called South Korea, is located in the southern portion of the peninsula. The division of the peninsula in 1945 was originally meant only to be temporary, but has persisted to the present day due to the continued occupation of the South and uncompromising policy of aggression toward the DPRK by the United States.

In the past, Korea was a single nation for at least 1,000 years with a continuous society, language and political system.<ref>Jay Hauben (2011-08-20). [http://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1865 "People's Republic of Korea: Jeju, 1945-1946"] ''The Jeju Weekly''.</ref> [[Empire of Japan (1868–1947)|Japan]] forced Korea to open its ports in 1876 and annexed it in 1905. From 1910 to 1945, Korea was a colony of the Empire of Japan.<ref>{{Citation|author=Ki-baik Lee|year=2019|title=Korea|title-url=https://www.britannica.com/place/Korea/Korea-under-Japanese-rule|chapter=Korea since c. 1400|section=Korea under Japanese rule|publisher=Encyclopedia Britannica|chapter-url=https://www.britannica.com/place/Korea/Korea-since-c-1400}}</ref> Under Japanese colonial rule, Korean language and culture were banned, and the Korean people faced conditions of forced labor and sexual [[slavery]].<ref>{{Web citation|author=Derek Ford|newspaper=[[Liberation School]]|title=Chongryon: The struggle of Koreans in Japan|date=2019-01-30|url=https://www.liberationschool.org/the-chongryon-movement-the-struggle-of-koreans-in-japan/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220814225352/https://www.liberationschool.org/the-chongryon-movement-the-struggle-of-koreans-in-japan/|archive-date=2022-08-14|retrieved=2022-08-27}}</ref>

The DPRK's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ri Yong Ho, stated to the [[United Nations|UN]] General Assembly in 2017 that the essence of the situation of the Korean peninsula is a confrontation between the DPRK and the US, where the DPRK tries to defend its national dignity and sovereignty against the hostile policy and nuclear threats of the US, and clarified that the DPRK "do[es] not have any intention at all to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against the countries that do not join in the U.S. military actions against the DPRK."<ref>Ri Yong Ho, DPRK Minister for Foreign Affairs. [https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/72/kp_en.pdf "Statement by H.E. Mr. RI YONG HO, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at the General Debate of the 72 Session of the United Nations General Assembly."] New York, 23rd September 2017. gadebate.un.org. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220709114619/https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/72/kp_en.pdf Archived] 2022-08-28.</ref>
[[File:Provinces of Korea.png|thumb|395x395px|Provinces of Korea.]]
The [[People's Democracy Party]] (PDP), a revolutionary [[Communist party|workers' party]] in South Korea, stated in a 2020 article that the Korean reunification and peace struggle is contingent on the withdrawal of U.S. troops, that the U.S. troops are "occupation forces in South Corea and invading army to North Corea" and therefore U.S. military withdrawal from South Korea is "the most desperate and preferred struggle task for the whole Corean nation to solve." The PDP added that as long as the U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea and war exercises are conducted against North Korea, "the prospect for peace is bound to be dark."<ref>People's Democracy Party and Liberation School. [https://www.liberationschool.org/korean-war-70-years/ “70 Years Too Long: The Struggle to End the Korean War – Liberation School.”] ''Liberation School – Revolutionary Marxism for a New Generation of Fighters'', 25 June 2020. [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.liberationschool.org/korean-war-70-years/ Archived].</ref>

The Korean Peninsula is bordered by [[People's Republic of China|China]] to the northwest and [[Russia (disambiguation)|Russia]] to the northeast. It is separated from [[Japan]] to the east by the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan (East Sea).

== Etymology ==
The English name "Korea" derives from the Korean kingdom of Goryeo, also transcribed as Koryŏ (Korean: 고려), which lasted from 918 to 1392. It is commonly considered that during the Goryeo period, the individual identities of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla were successfully merged into a single entity that became the basis of modern-day Korean identity.

In the modern Korean language, the word used to refer to Korea differs in usage between DPRK and the south. In DPRK, Korea is referred to as ''Choson'' (Korean: 조선; Hanja: 朝鮮), while in the south, Korea is referred to as ''Hanguk'' (Korean: 한국; Hanja: 韓國). Each of these names has roots in both modern and ancient Korean history.<ref>[https://tongiltours.com/part-1-study-in-north-korea-kim-il-sung-university “How to Speak the North Korean Language: Part 1”] Tongil Tours. March 10, 2017. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221025103531/https://tongiltours.com/part-1-study-in-north-korea-kim-il-sung-university Archived] 2022-10-25.

‌</ref> Therefore, among the liberation movement in Korea during the imperial Japanese occupation period, the names ''Choson'' and ''Hanguk'' both came to be regarded as potential choices for the future name of the post-liberation country.

In south Korea, it is common to refer to DPRK as "Bukhan" (북한; 北韓), meaning "North ''Han'' (Korea)". Meanwhile, it is common for people in DPRK to refer to south Korea as "Namchoson" (남조선; 南朝鮮), "South ''Choson'' (Korea)". In some contexts, the word ''cheuk'' (측; 側), meaning "side" is used, forming ''bukcheuk'', "north side" and ''namcheuk'', "south side", to speak more neutrally about each other.<ref>이진욱. [https://www.nocutnews.co.kr/news/4910375 “언론은 왜 북한을 '북측’이라고 할까?”] 노컷뉴스. 노컷뉴스. January 22, 2018. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221025120530/https://www.nocutnews.co.kr/news/4910375 Archived] 2022-10-25.</ref>

The name Choson derives from a Korean dynasty which ruled from 1392 to 1897. However, in October of 1897, the monarch of Korea declared an end to the Choson Kingdom, founding a new regime known as the ''Daehanjeguk'' or "Great Han Empire" (Korean: 대한제국; Hanja: 大韓帝國) in 1897, with himself as emperor. The name "Daehan" was formed in reference to the three states that existed in Korea in the past, Mahan, Byunhan, and Jinhan. However, with the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, the name for Korea was reverted back to "Choson" during the period of Japanese [[imperialism]].<ref name=":4">[https://615tv.net/432?category=1051910 <nowiki>“[1조] 북한의 국호에 민주주의를 유지하는 이유는?”</nowiki>] 주권방송. The615tv. July 29, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220904010957/https://615tv.net/432?category=1051910 Archived] 2022-09-04.

‌</ref>

Therefore, an argument emerged that the future name of the country should be "Daehan" (Korean: 대한; Hanja: 大韓) as it had been the name of the country just prior to the Japanese colonial period, and "Choson" had been the name revived by the Japanese. However, the independence movement activists affiliated with socialism preferred "Choson" to "Daehan" because, for the general public, the name Choson was a more familiar country name than "Daehan Empire" which had only lasted for about 10 years, and "Daehan" was the name of the country that fell to Japanese annexation, making it an undesirable name.<ref name=":4" />

Eventually, the government that formed in south Korea came to be called ''Daehanminguk'' (Korean: 대한민국; Hanja: 大韓民國), which literally means “The Great Han Republic”, or, since “Han” here refers to Korea, “The Great Korean Republic”, with the name ''Hanguk'' being a short version of this name. Meanwhile in north Korea, people continued using ''Choson'', the word for Korea that had been used during the early 20th century Japanese [[Colonialism|colonial]] period and the 14th – 19th century Choson Dynasty.<ref>[https://tongiltours.com/part-2-korea-south-korean-hanguk “How to Speak the North Korean Language: Part 2”] Tongil Tours. March 19, 2017. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221025103547/https://tongiltours.com/part-2-korea-south-korean-hanguk Archived] 2022-10-25.</ref>

== History ==

=== Early history ===
The history of the Korean nation began in [[Manchuria]] and the Korean Peninsula when people started settling there 700,000 years ago. Korea's Neolithic Age began around 8,000 BCE. People started farming, cultivating cereals such as millet, and used polished stone tools. They started settling down permanently in places and formed clan societies.

Over time, clan leaders started merging many clans into one, and these groups very gradually developed into early states. Eventually, Gojoseon emerged as the first recognizable state of the Korean people. It was eventually followed by other states and groups of states on the Korean Peninsula, such as the Three Kingdoms, Unified Silla and Balhae, the Koryo Dynasty, and the Choson Dynasty.<ref>[https://www.korea.net/AboutKorea/History/The-Beginnings-of-the-Countrys-History “The Beginnings of Korea’s History (Prehistoric Times – Gojoseon) : Korea.net : The Official Website of the Republic of Korea.”] Korea.net. 2021. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221012230807/https://www.korea.net/AboutKorea/History/The-Beginnings-of-the-Countrys-History Archived] 2022-10-12.

‌</ref><ref>[https://www.korea.net/AboutKorea/History/Joseon “Joseon Dynasty : Korea.net : The Official Website of the Republic of Korea.”] Korea.net. 2021. </ref>

=== Japanese colonialism ===
The USA was the first Western state which set up diplomatic relations with the [[Feudalism|feudal]] Korean kingdom, and King Kojong, alarmed by the increasing threats of Japanese imperialism, sent emissaries to Washington twice, in 1896 and 1905, requesting Statesian assistance, in accordance with the duty the US had assumed under an 1882 Korea-US Treaty. The USA and Japan made a secret agreement dividing Korea and the [[Republic of the Philippines|Philippines]] between themselves, known as the Katsura-Taft Agreement. The USA, [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland|Britain]] and other Western powers at one time pursued the strategy of alliance with Japan, from the ulterior motive of backing, encouraging and using the bellicose Japanese militarist forces as a deterrent to the rapidly growing national liberation forces and the influence of communism in Asia, but that their alliance was fraught with contradictions due to their competing colonial interests. With the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941, it became pointless for the Western empires to continue to regard Korea as a colony of Japan now that Japan, formerly their imperialist collaborator and ally, was at war against them, nullifying the treaties and agreements it had concluded with them, and therefore the US and British found themselves rehashing their policy on Korea to fit the new situation.<ref name=":0">Ryo Sung Chol. "KOREA -- The 38th Parallel North." Foreign Languages Publishing House. Pyongyang, Korea. 1995. [https://www.koryography.com/wp-content/images/1548.pdf PDF]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20200926235752/https://www.koryography.com/wp-content/images/1548.pdf Archive].</ref>

In 1894, [[Qing dynasty (1636–1912)|China]] and Japan went to war over control of Korea. The Japanese established a military base in the Korean capital city of Hanseong (now Seoul) and murdered Empress [[Myeongseong]], who had sought [[Russian Empire (1721–1917)|Russian]] protection against the Japanese. In 1896, Japan offered to divide Korea with Russia along the 38th parallel, the same line along which the [[United States imperialism|U.S. imperialists]] later split Korea after Japan's defeat in 1945. Russia rejected the proposal along with another proposal giving [[Manchuria]] to Russia and Korea to Japan. After negotiations failed, the Japanese attacked a Russian fleet at Port Arthur and took control of Korea in 1905. The Japanese killed 29,000 Korean rebels in the first three years of occupation and disbanded the Korean army in 1907. After the first few years of colonial rule, most of the resistance fighters fled to Manchuria. Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910.

Under Japanese rule, all Korean political organizations were banned. Koreans were forced to speak Japanese, have Japanese names, and follow [[Shintoism]]. The Japanese developed Korea's economy for their own purposes, and 60% of Korean rice was exported to Japan. The land that remained under Korean ownership was controlled by feudal [[Landlord|landlords]] who later became the south Korean [[bourgeoisie]]. All industrial goods made in Korea were exported to Japan, and Japanese workers were paid three times as much as Koreans. The Japanese sent one eighth of the Korean population to other parts of their empire to work as slaves.<ref>{{Citation|author=Stephen Gowans|year=2018|title=Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom|chapter=The Empire of Japan|page=25–29|pdf=https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4iiga4ngtxusr2civjxewbili5jne2sbpefbx2s3im2kphattzc?filename=Stephen%20Gowans%20-%20Patriots%2C%20Traitors%20and%20Empires_%20The%20Story%20of%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Struggle%20for%20Freedom-Baraka%20Books%20%282018%29.pdf|city=Montreal|publisher=Baraka Books|isbn=9781771861427|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8435F6FF91279531705764823FDC2A7F}}</ref>

Under Japanese rule, Patriotic Groups (Korean: 애국반; Hanja: 愛國班) were neighborhood cells which functioned as the local arm of the Korean Federation of National Power, the single ruling party of colonial Korea. They typically consisted of groups of 10 households led by a Patriotic Group leader, who would monitor and control others within the Patriotic Group. This included rationing food and goods, enforcing mandatory State Shinto prayer times and shrine visits, "volunteering" laborers upon the colonial government’s request, arranging marriages, holding mandatory Japanese language classes, and spying on "ideological criminals". Patriotic Group leaders were among the first to be targeted for reprisals following Korean Independence in August 1945, with many of their homes set on fire.<ref>[https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0073853 “애국반(愛國班).”] Encyclopedia of Korean Culture.Aks.ac.kr. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230314133948/https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0073853 Archived] 2023-03-14.</ref><ref>[https://exposingimperialjapan.com/yoko-versus-hoshiko-a-1944-morality-play-pitting-good-korean-woman-yoko-who-is-kind-and-considerate-against-bad-korean-woman-hoshiko-the-selfish-corrupt-patriotic-group-leader-harbori/ “‘Yōko versus Hoshiko’, a 1944 Morality Play Pitting ‘Good Korean Woman’ Yōko, Who Is Kind and Considerate, against ‘Bad Korean Woman’ Hoshiko, the Selfish, Corrupt Patriotic Group Leader Harboring Liberal and Hedonistic British/American Thoughts Who ‘Needs to Be Shot’ for Betraying Imperial Japan.”] Exposing Imperial Japan. September 21, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230314133325/https://exposingimperialjapan.com/yoko-versus-hoshiko-a-1944-morality-play-pitting-good-korean-woman-yoko-who-is-kind-and-considerate-against-bad-korean-woman-hoshiko-the-selfish-corrupt-patriotic-group-leader-harbori/ Archived] 2023-03-14.

‌</ref><ref>[http://contents.history.go.kr/front/tg/view.do?treeId=0106&levelId=tg_004_2520&ganada=&pageUnit=10 “애국반 - 교과서 용어해설 | 우리역사넷.”] History.go.kr. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230314134446/http://contents.history.go.kr/front/tg/view.do?treeId=0106&levelId=tg_004_2520&ganada=&pageUnit=10 Archived] 2023-03-14.</ref>

=== Struggle for independence ===
Koreans engaged in persistent struggles to regain their independence, including armed struggle against the Japanese. They organized numerous clandestine organizations to fight the Japanese. In March 1919, Korean leaders announced the Declaration of Independence. This is known as the March 1st Movement.<ref>[https://www.korea.net/AboutKorea/History/Independence-Movement “Independence Movement : Korea.net : The Official Website of the Republic of Korea.”] Korea.net. 2021.

‌</ref>

The revolutionary tradition of the anti-Japanese struggle still has heavy influence on DPRK's guiding ideology today. The anti-Japanese struggle influenced the development of the [[Juche]] idea and is intimately linked with the history of Korean socialism, the Korean independence movement, and the life of [[Kim Il-sung]]. Therefore, the revolutionary tradition of the anti-Japanese struggle remains important in the DPRK, as both a source of inspiration as well as important material for study.<ref name=":7">[https://615tv.net/376 <nowiki>“[기획연재1] 김일성 주석의 항일운동 역사.”</nowiki>] 2022. 주권방송. April 5, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221020065905/https://615tv.net/376 Archived] 2022-10-20.</ref>

At a meeting in 1930, Kim Il-sung established the line and strategy of the anti-Japanese revolution and argued that national liberation can be achieved only when all Koreans emerge under the banner of organized armed struggle. Kim Il-sung criticized the existing anti-Japanese movement at the time for the fact that some of the upper classes were only studying words and fighting, and were alienated from the masses.<ref name=":7" />

The [[Battle of Pochonbo]] is an important battle in the history of the liberation of Korea from Japanese occupation. The battle was fought from 3-4 June 1937 by a unit from the guerilla army, who crossed into Korea from China, crept through the forests, rested beside Samjiyon Lake before starting their final advance. Kim Il-sung became a wanted man to the Japanese after the battle, and a hero to the resistance movement and to Korean patriots.<ref>[https://koryogroup.com/travel-guide/pochonbo-battle-site-monument-north-korea-travel-guide-needs-photos “Pochonbo Battle Site & Monument | North Korea Travel Guide - Koryo Tours.”] Koryogroup.com. May 18, 2020. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230314132053/https://koryogroup.com/travel-guide/pochonbo-battle-site-monument-north-korea-travel-guide-needs-photos Archived] 2023-03-14.</ref>

The [[Workers' and Peasants' Red Army|Red Army]] entered Korea on 8 August 1948 and continued fighting until the Japanese surrendered on 15 August. US forces did not arrive in Korea until 8 September.<ref name=":12">{{Citation|author=Stephen Gowans|year=2018|title=Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom|chapter=The US Occupation|page=79–80|pdf=https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4iiga4ngtxusr2civjxewbili5jne2sbpefbx2s3im2kphattzc?filename=Stephen%20Gowans%20-%20Patriots%2C%20Traitors%20and%20Empires_%20The%20Story%20of%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Struggle%20for%20Freedom-Baraka%20Books%20%282018%29.pdf|city=Montreal|publisher=Baraka Books|isbn=9781771861427|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8435F6FF91279531705764823FDC2A7F}}</ref>

According to the blog ''Exposing Imperial Japan,'' which translates Japanese colonial era news articles, the 1000+ Shinto shrines that were built in colonial Korea were all destroyed following Japan's surrender, starting with the Pyongyang shrine which was set on fire on August 15, 1945, the day Imperial Japan surrendered. A statue of Kim Il-sung now stands on the former site of Pyongyang shrine.<ref>[https://exposingimperialjapan.com/imperial-japan-built-shinto-shrines-all-over-korea-in-every-eup-and-myeon-enlisting-patriotic-groups-to-cultivate-the-worship-of-gods-and-faith-in-the-emperor-among-koreans-and-realize-the-fusi/ “Imperial Japan Built Shinto Shrines All over Korea in Every Eup and Myeon, Enlisting Patriotic Groups to ‘Cultivate the Worship of Gods and Faith in the Emperor’ among Koreans and Realize ‘the Fusion of the Japanese-Korean Family Based on Divine Will’.”] Exposing Imperial Japan. October 6, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230314135238/https://exposingimperialjapan.com/imperial-japan-built-shinto-shrines-all-over-korea-in-every-eup-and-myeon-enlisting-patriotic-groups-to-cultivate-the-worship-of-gods-and-faith-in-the-emperor-among-koreans-and-realize-the-fusi/ Archived] 2023-03-14.

‌</ref>

=== Division into North and South ===
[[File:Actors re-enact the massacre of residents branded as communist insurgents during the Jeju Uprising and Massacre, for its 70th anniversary.jpg|thumb|319x319px|People in South Korea re-enact the massacre of residents branded as communist insurgents during the [[Jeju Uprising|Jeju massacre]], which occurred from 1948-1949 and claimed the lives of 10% of Jeju's population. Many residents of Jeju had protested the division of Korea and the separate elections held in the south, and virtually the entire population of the island was brutally punished by the right wing southern regime as a result.]]
After the surrender of the Japanese empire at the end of the [[Second World War]], Korea was divided as a temporary measure by the outside powers of the United States and [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991)|Soviet Union]] to assist in the transition away from Japanese colonial rule and the re-establishment of Korea's independence. The line was agreed upon between the Soviet Union and the United States only as a temporary boundary of military operations, and never as a line for the division of Korea.

In the northern zone, the Soviets allowed Koreans to govern themselves through a system of people's committees. In the south, General [[Douglas MacArthur]] ruled as a dictator and established English as the official language.

While the Soviets left Korea in late 1948,<ref name=":12" /> the United States failed to withdraw its troops from the south and instead promoted the installation of a pro-US, right wing regime rather than promoting the reunification of Korea. This resulted in opposition among the southern masses, the [[Jeju Uprising]] and massacre, the escalation of the [[Korean War]], and the continued division of the Korean nation and continued occupation of the south by US forces which persists to the present day.

In the words of author Ryo Sung Chol, "The strife among the great powers for hegemony in the world in the complicated military and political situation towards the close of World War II forced the tragedy of national split upon the Korean people before their rejoicing over liberation subsided."<ref name=":0" />

On February 20, 1948, the day after the US-led UN proposition of the resolution on the US-sponsored separate election in the south, the Central Committee of the Democratic National United Front of North Korea made public its appeal to the entire Korean people at its 24th conference. The appeal indicated that it was clear what kind of election would take place in south Korea, where democratic parties and organizations had been forced underground and democrats were being arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered, and called for a general election across the whole of Korea after the withdrawal of the foreign armies. It called for holding elections to the People’s Assembly throughout Korea by secret ballot on the principles of universal, direct and equal vote. The People’s Assembly elected in that way would approve the constitution and establish a democratic government, and Kim Il Sung put forward the line of convening a joint conference of political parties and social organizations of north and south Korea.<ref name=":0" />

=== Establishment of DPRK and ROK ===
Faced with the serious menace of division of the nation by the United States, Kim Kyu Sik, Kim Ku and other nationalists in south Korea supported the policy of establishing a unified government of north and south Korea in order to prevent national division, and resolutely and finally parted from [[Far-right politics|extreme rightist]] [[Syngman Rhee]] and the reactionaries of the “Korean Democratic Party” who advocated a separate election. Kim Ku opposed election under UN observation, claiming that “the United Nations is an extraneous body with no right to interfere in the internal affairs of Korea”. Kim Kyu Sik also opposed it for the reason that a separate election would mean “the permanent division of the country”. According to author Ryo Sung Chol, seven public figures, including Kim Ku and Kim Kyu Sik, who led 12 political parties and social organizations including the Korean Independence Party, complied with the proposal for a north-south political conference as opposed to a separate election.<ref name=":0" />

In April 1948 there was held in [[Pyongyang]] a joint conference of 16 political parties and 40 social organizations of north and south Korea for the first time since liberation, with the participation of 695 representatives of the north and 216 the south, including Kim Kyu Sik, Hong Myong Hui and Kim Ku, who had crossed the 38th parallel to be present. The joint conference adopted a decision calling for opposition to the separate election, the withdrawal of foreign troops and the founding of a unified democratic state, and issued a manifesto. They officially called for the simultaneous withdrawal of the troops of the USSR and the United States, pointing out that "We, the Korean people, are mature enough to settle our problems by ourselves without foreign interference, and our country has many cadres prepared to settle them" as well as laid out a plan of action for peaceful reunification of Korea and the formation of a unified, democratic government. The manifesto was signed by 42 political parties and social organizations of north and south Korea which opposed the division of the country and people.<ref name=":0" /> In south Korea, general strikes and popular uprisings, such as the [[Jeju Uprising|Jeju uprising]], arose in opposition to the US-led separate elections.

According to Ryo, at the UN, the Australian delegate demanded that the separate election be suspended because it was clear that all the political parties in south Korea except the ultra-right party would boycott it. The Canadian delegate warned that it had been an illegal and indiscreet act for the US-led "Little Assembly" on Korea to have accepted the US draft resolution, and that it would create a new and grave situation. Regardless of these statements at the UN and the clear and widespread opposition by the Korean people themselves, on May 10, 1948 the United States carried out the separate election.<ref name=":0" />

After the US-occupied southern regime under extreme rightist Syngman Rhee was declared in August 1948, the [[socialist state|socialist]] DPRK, led by [[Kim Il-sung]], was declared in the north in September, 1948.

Syngman Rhee and his regime are widely recognized to be responsible for the killing of 30,000 Jeju islanders, resulting in the death of about 10% of the island's total population. The massacre was a result of severe crack-down against Jeju islanders who protested against the division of the country and police oppression by Syngman Rhee’s administration and the US military who held an operational control over the South Korean military and police.<ref name=":1">The Association for Bereaved Families of the Jeju 4.3 Victims, Bereaved Family Association of Korean War and 252 South Korean NGOs (2020-01-20). [https://www.jejudarktours.org/en/news/letter-251-south-korean-ngos-against-syngman-rhee-day/ "Letter from 252 South Korean NGOs against Syngman Rhee Day"] ''Jeju Dark Tours''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220818105837/https://www.jejudarktours.org/en/news/letter-251-south-korean-ngos-against-syngman-rhee-day/ Archived] from the original on 2022-08-19.</ref>

=== Fatherland Liberation War ===
{{Main article|Korean War}}
The period that is referred to by bourgeois historians as the Korean War is considered to have occurred between 1950 and 1953. However, the 1950 start date of the war conforms to the imperialist narrative that the war began with an unprovoked attack from the North that took the US and Southern forces by surprise. However, considering the tens of thousands of people being killed in Korea throughout the 1940s by US, UN, and Southern forces, the continuous resistance in the South to the division of the country, and the numerous skirmishes that regularly occurred along the border between North and South, some consider it more accurate to frame the 1950-1953 period as an escalation of a war that was already in progress, rather than the sudden outbreak narrative favored by the bourgeois states.

Author William Blum writes of this period of escalation: <blockquote>The two sides had been clashing across the Parallel for several years. What happened on that fateful day in June could thus be regarded as no more than the escalation of an ongoing civil war. The North Korean Government has claimed that in 1949 alone, the South Korean army or police perpetrated 2,617 armed incursions into the North to carry out murder, kidnapping, pillage and arson for the purpose of causing social disorder and unrest, as well as to increase the combat capabilities of the invaders. At times, stated the Pyongyang government, thousands of soldiers were involved in a single battle with many casualties resulting. [...] Seen in this context, the question of who fired the first shot on 25 June 1950 takes on a much reduced air of significance. As it is, the North Korean version of events is that their invasion was provoked by two days of bombardment by the South Koreans, on the 23rd and 24th, followed by a surprise South Korean attack across the border on the 25th against the western town of Haeju and other places. Announcement of the Southern attack was broadcast over the North's radio later in the morning of the 25th.<ref name=":2">Blum, William. ''[https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/13/130AEF1531746AAD6AC03EF59F91E1A1_Killing_Hope_Blum_William.pdf Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II].'' Zed Books London, 2004.</ref></blockquote>According to Blum, citing Joseph C. Goulden's ''Korea: The Untold Story of the War'', "On 26 June, the United States presented a resolution before the UN Security Council condemning North Korea for its 'unprovoked aggression'. The resolution was approved, although there were arguments that 'this was a fight between Koreans' and should be treated as a civil war, and a suggestion from the Egyptian delegate that the word 'unprovoked' should be dropped in view of the longstanding hostilities between the two Koreas."<ref name=":2" />
[[File:South Korean soldiers walk among dead political prisoners, Taejon, South Korea.jpg|thumb|July 1950 U.S. Army file photograph once classified "top secret", South Korean soldiers walk among dead political prisoners, Taejon (Daejeon), South Korea.]]
During the Korean War period, between 1950 and 1953, Syngman Rhee's government indiscriminately and arbitrarily killed civilians without any legal evidence, on the pretense that they may have cooperated with the North Korean People's Army. During this process, around 1 million people were massacred, including people who were against the Rhee administration. According to a letter signed by 252 Korean NGOs, including The Association for Bereaved Families of the Jeju 4.3 Victims and the Bereaved Family Association of Korean War, Rhee engaged in "the mass killing of civilians, fraudulent elections, illegal amendment of the Constitution and several cases of enforced disappearance and torture leading to the death of his opponents", crimes and corruption which he was not held legally responsible for in his lifetime, but which were later investigated and confirmed by South Korean national investigation committees.<ref name=":1" />
[[File:Prisoners lie on the ground before execution by South Korean troops near Daejon, South Korea, July 1950. Photo by U.S. Army Maj. Abbott.jpg|thumb|July 1950 U.S. Army file photograph once classified "top secret," prisoners lie on the ground before their execution by South Korean troops in Taejon (Daejeon), South Korea. Photo by U.S. Army Maj. Abbott.]]
The atrocities committed by the US-backed Southern forces during this period were continuously covered up and dismissed as communist propaganda throughout the war. Western journalists, many of them leftists, who attempted to expose the atrocities committed by the US-backed regime had their passports revoked, some of them for decades, effectively exiling them from their native countries for their truthful reporting. An article that details the fates of some of these persecuted journalists notes that "The atrocities committed by the US-led UN forces are beyond dispute [...] Almost as shameful as the atrocities in Korea were the extreme steps taken to silence and eventually to punish those who sought to expose them."<ref>Ewing, K. D., Mahoney, J., & Moretta, A. (2018). [https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/94544925/Ewing_Korean_2017_Article.pdf "Civil Liberties and the Korean War."] Modern Law Review, 81(3), 395-421. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12339</nowiki> [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/94544925/Ewing_Korean_2017_Article.pdf Archive].</ref> Mass killings committed by Southern forces in Daejeon, now known as the [[Daejeon massacre]], were falsely attributed to the Northern army in US Army reports. An article in the Asia-Pacific Journal says of this false reporting, "Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence."<ref name=":3">Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang (July 2, 2008). [https://apjjf.org/-Charles-J.-Hanley/2827/article.html "Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of US in 1950"] ''The Asia-Pacific Journal''. [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://apjjf.org/-Charles-J.-Hanley/2827/article.html Archived] from the original on 2022-08-26.</ref> Silencing tactics persisted for decades under the succession of right-wing authoritarian regimes in South Korea, where people who tried to speak out or bring light to atrocities committed by the South were harassed by police, or found themselves arrested and beaten.<ref name=":3" /><ref>Kim, Hun Joon. (2014). ''The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea''. Cornell University Press.</ref> One author who wrote about the Jeju massacre 30 years after it had occurred was arrested by the [[National Intelligence Service|Korean intelligence agency]] and tortured for three days and told not to write about the massacre again. He was then released with no charges, so a trial could be avoided so as not to further expose the public to the truth of the massacre.<ref>Darryl Coote (2012.11.20). [http://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=2841 "My Dinner With Hyun Ki Young"] ''The Jeju Weekly''. [https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=2841 Archived] 2022-08-26.</ref> Given the facts of such widespread and systematic suppression of the truth by the US-backed Southern regime and the US itself, who regularly dismissed reporting of their own crimes as "communist propaganda", many of which later proved to be indisputably truthful accounts of US and Southern regime crimes, caution must be taken in interpreting anti-communist narratives of the Korean War.
[[File:Thatched huts go up in flames after B-26 bombers unload napalm bombs on a village near Hanchon, North Korea, on May 10, 1951 (AP photo).png|thumb|Thatched huts go up in flames after B-26 bombers unload napalm bombs on a village near Hanchon, North Korea, on May 10, 1951.]]
During the Korean War, U.S. troops killed large numbers of Korean civilians and engaged in copious firebombing with [[napalm]], and, as was eventually revealed through declassified documents, had at certain times a policy of deliberately firing on South Korean refugee groups approaching its lines.<ref>Youkyung Lee (2014-08-07). [https://apnews.com/article/108b4bd1dc854caeaf5f9349fcd5a176 "S. Korean who forced US to admit massacre has died"] ''Associated Press''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220726115036/https://apnews.com/article/108b4bd1dc854caeaf5f9349fcd5a176 Archive]. </ref> During the war, the United States dropped "635,000 tons of bombs in Korea (not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II" and "at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North's twenty-two major cities were obliterated."<ref>Bruce Cumings (2010). [https://archive.org/details/koreanwarhistory0000cumi/ ''The Korean War: A History'': '"The Most Disproportionate Result:"] The Air War' (pp. 159-160). New York: Modern Library. ISBN 978-0-679-64357-9</ref>

In the words of the United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S.'s Strategic Air Command, "[W]e went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too. We even burned down Pusan—an accident, but we burned it down anyway. The Marines started a battle down there with no enemy in sight. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?"<ref>Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan (1988). ''Strategic Air Warfare: an interview with generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton'' (p. 88). [https://media.defense.gov/2010/Sep/29/2001329790/-1/-1/0/AFD-100929-052.pdf <nowiki>[PDF]</nowiki>] Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force. ISBN 0-912799-56-0</ref>
[[File:Pyongyang after U.S. Air Force bombing.jpg|thumb|Pyongyang after U.S. Air Force bombing.]]
U.S. Naval Captain Walter Karig, in his book ''Battle Report: The War in Korea,'' a compilation from official sources, wrote: "[W]e killed civilians, friendly civilians, and bombed their homes; fired whole villages with the occupants--women and children and ten times as many hidden Communist soldiers--under showers of napalm, and the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do."<ref>Walter Karig; Malcolm W Cagle; Frank A Manson; et al (1952). ''Battle Report: The War in Korea'' (pp. 111-112). New York: Rinehart.</ref>

US sanctions on DPRK began in conjunction with the 1950 escalation of the war, with the US imposing an export ban on DPRK and forbidding financial transactions by or on behalf of DPRK. This began with U.S. President [[Harry S. Truman]] ordering naval blockade of Korean coast and imposing a total trade embargo against north Korea in June of 1950. This was followed by the Trading with the Enemy Act in December 1950, to terminate all US economic contacts with north Korea and freezing north Korea's assets.<ref name=":5">Gary Clyde Hufbauer (PIIE), Jeffrey J. Schott (PIIE), Kimberly Ann Elliott (PIIE) and Barbara Oegg (PIIE). [https://www.piie.com/commentary/speeches-papers/case-50-1-and-93-1 “US and UN v. North Korea: Case 50-1 and 93-1.”] 2016. Peterson Institute for International Economics. May 1, 2008. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220909082604/https://www.piie.com/commentary/speeches-papers/case-50-1-and-93-1 Archived] 2022-09-09. </ref>

After three years, an armistice agreement was signed that stopped the active fighting. The armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. The signed armistice established the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the de facto new border between the two nations, put into force a cease-fire, and finalized repatriation of prisoners of war. The DMZ runs close to the 38th parallel and has continued to separate north and south Korea since the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953.

=== Post-war ===
After the armistice agreement, the US continued to prohibit all US economic contacts with DPRK in line with its general strategic controls against socialist countries.<ref name=":5" />

At a meeting in 1957, the U.S. informed the north Korean representatives that the United Nations Command no longer considered itself bound by paragraph 13d of the armistice, and in 1958 the U.S. abrogated paragraph 13d of the armistice by introducing nuclear weapons into south Korea.<ref>[https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,809583,00.html "Korea: The End of 13d"] (1957-07-01). ''Time Magazine''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220728030416/https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,809583,00.html Archived] 2022-07-28.</ref><ref>Lee Jae-Bong (2009-02-07). [https://apjjf.org/-Lee-Jae-Bong/3053/article.html "US Deployment of Nuclear Weapons in 1950s South Korea & North Korea's Nuclear Development: Toward Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula"] ''The Asia-Pacific Journal''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220819105903/https://apjjf.org/-Lee-Jae-Bong/3053/article.html Archived] 2022-18-19.</ref> The armistice has never been replaced with a peace treaty and the two sides remain technically at war, with the U.S. occupying the south and retaining operational control over the south Korean military in wartime, and regularly engaging in provocative joint military exercises with south Korea aimed at "decapitating" DPRK's government,<ref>Flounders, Sara. [https://www.workers.org/2022/08/66398/ “Faced with U.S. ‘Decapitation Drill’/DPRK Korea Missile Launch Is Self-Defense.”] Workers World. August 26, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221014032939/https://www.workers.org/2022/08/66398/ Archived] 2022-10-14.</ref> while enforcing strict [[economic sanctions]] against DPRK as a form of siege warfare.

The years following the Korean war, DPRK carried out its [[Chollima]] policy. The Chollima policy encouraged people to produce and innovate more in order to speed up the reconstruction of the country. In line with this policy, the DPRK concentrated its economy on [[heavy industry]] in the years following the war and it economically outperformed its southern counterpart until the early 1970s.<ref>[https://www.north-korea-travel.com/political-history-of-north-korea.html “Political History of North Korea | KTG® Tours | Information and North Korea Tours.”] North-Korea-Travel.com. </ref>

=== 1960s ===
In 1960, south Korea's right-wing dictator Syngman Rhee resigned and fled the country due to mass protests across the nation after the body of a student killed by police was found floating in the harbor. As a result of the protests against him, he fled to [[Honolulu]], [[Hawaii]], where he remained in exile until his death. After Rhee's resignation, president [[Yun Bo-seon]] briefly governed in a somewhat more democratic but still bourgeois government. After thirteen months this administration was overthrown by the south Korean Army in the May 16 coup led by [[Park Chung-hee]], former Japanese collaborator and the father of future president [[Park Geun-hye]] (who served as the 11th president of South Korea from 2013 to 2017, until she was impeached and convicted on related corruption charges). Park Chung-hee ruled as a military dictator for 18 years and sent 320,000 troops to support the [[Republic of Vietnam (1955–1975)|South Vietnamese]] puppet state in the [[Vietnam War]].

The Korean DMZ conflict was a series of low-level armed clashes between north Korean forces and the forces of south Korea and the United States, largely occurring between 1966 and 1969 at the Korean DMZ.

=== 1970s ===
In 1972, the [[Supreme People's Assembly]] elected Kim Il-sung as President of the DPRK.

In south Korea, the fourth republic was founded on the approval of the Yushin Constitution in the 1972 constitutional referendum, codifying the ''de facto'' dictatorial powers held by President Park Chung-hee. The Fourth Republic entered a period of political instability under Park's successor, Choi Kyu-hah, and the escalating martial law declared after Park's death. Choi was unofficially overthrown by [[Chun Doo-hwan]] in a coup d'état of December Twelfth in December 1979, and began the armed suppression of the [[May 18 uprising|Gwangju Democratization Movement]] against martial law.

=== 1980s ===
During Chun Doo-hawn's presidency in south Korea, he perpetrated the largest massacre of Korean civilians since the Korean war. In May 1980, protests against martial law began in [[Gwangju]], which were met with special warfare troops. Estimates vary as to the amount of casualties, but they range from 165 at the most conservative, to over 300. Some also claim that up to 2,300 civilians were killed in the Gwangju massacre, in response to the May 18 uprising also known as the Gwangju uprising.<ref>K. J. Noh (2020-12-02). [https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/south-korean-dictator-dies-western-media-resurrects-a-myth "South Korean Dictator Dies, Western Media Resurrects a Myth"] ''Hampton Institute''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220519190752/https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/south-korean-dictator-dies-western-media-resurrects-a-myth Archived] from the original on 2022-05-19. Retrieved 2022-06-02.</ref> Chun Doo-hawn's administration faced growing opposition from the democratization movement of the Gwangju Uprising, and the June Democracy Movement of 1987 resulted in the election of [[Roh Tae-woo]] in the December 1987 presidential election. Roh's election was the first direct presidential election in 16 years. The fifth republic was dissolved three days after the election upon the adoption of a new constitution that laid the foundations for the relatively stable (although bourgeois and rife with corruption scandals) democratic system of the current sixth Republic of Korea.

In 1988, south Korea and the US eased isolation of north Korea by opening bilateral dialogue and allowing limited export of goods to the North for humanitarian purposes. Some travel restrictions were also lifted on a case-by-case basis. However, in that same year, DPRK was added to the [[U.S. State Department]] [[State Sponsors of Terrorism|"State Sponsors of Terrorism"]] list.<ref name=":6">[https://nodutdol.org/sanctions-of-empire/ "제국의 제재 - Sanctions of Empire."] Nodutdol. October 20, 2020. [https://nodutdol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Sanctions-of-Empire.pdf PDF]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220520095404/https://nodutdol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Sanctions-of-Empire.pdf Archive].</ref>

=== 1990s ===
A unified team under the name Korea (KOR) competed in 1991 World Table Tennis Championships and FIFA World Youth Championship with athletes from both North and South Korea. In 1991, the team used the Unification Flag and the anthem "Arirang". [[Kim Jong-il]] became Supreme Commander of the [[Korean People's Army]] in 1991.

In July 1994, [[Kim Il-sung]] passed away. Kim Jong-il became the General Secretary of the party in 1997.

The period of economic crisis, floods, and [[famine]] in DPRK known as the [[Arduous March]] lasted from 1994 to 1998. Factors such as the fall of the Soviet Union and worldwide economic shifts in its wake, unprecedented natural disasters, and economic sanctions imposed on DPRK compounded at this time, contributing to the severity of the crisis.<ref>[https://www.north-korea-travel.com/north-korean-history.html “North Korean History 1980s & 1990s | KTG® Tours.”] North-Korea-Travel.com.</ref>

Beginning in 1997, the period known as the [[Asian financial crisis]] or the [[International Monetary Fund|IMF]] crisis affected several Asian countries, with south Korea being among some of the most heavily impacted, with the crisis resulting in the bankruptcy of major south Korean companies and the imposition of [[austerity]] measures. The generation of people who entered the job market in this period are sometimes called the "IMF generation" and have faced a pattern of worsened economic conditions and struggling with job security.<ref>[https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2019/11/17/economy/IMF-generation-feels-job-shortage/3070390.html “‘IMF Generation’ Feels Job Shortage.”] November 17, 2019. [https://web.archive.org/web/20211207004114/https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2019/11/17/economy/IMF-generation-feels-job-shortage/3070390.html Archived] Dec. 7, 2021.</ref><ref>[https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2021/05/693_33603.html “A Familiar Story.”] Koreatimes. The Korea Times. October 30, 2008. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221101044751/https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2021/05/693_33603.html Archived] 2022-11-01.</ref>

In south Korea in the late 1990s, amnesty was declared for certain elderly and ill political prisoners who had been held in prison for decades, facing torture and solitary confinement for refusing to renounce communism and their support for DPRK. Some of these prisoners then began a movement to be repatriated to DPRK, with some of them being allowed to return while others remained in south Korea, some willingly and some unwillingly, with many of the participants mistakenly believing that more repatriations and further freedom of movement between north and south would follow.<ref>Liberation School (Jul 27, 2022). [https://www.liberationschool.org/interview-with-ahn-hak-sop/ "Still fighting for Korea’s liberation: An interview with Ahn Hak-sop"] ''Liberation School''. [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.liberationschool.org/interview-with-ahn-hak-sop/ Archived] from the original.</ref> This series of events is detailed in the 2003 documentary [[Repatriation (film)|''Repatriation'']], which follows the release of several of these political prisoners and the different events in their lives afterward.

=== 2000s ===
[[File:President Kim Dae-jung and Chairman Kim Jong-il join hands at Inter-Korean summit.jpg|thumb|250x250px|President Kim Dae-jung and Chairman Kim Jong-il join hands at the 2000 Inter-Korean summit, which resulted in the 6.15 Inter-Korean Joint Declaration.]]
The south Korean policy towards DPRK from the late 1990s to mid 2000s is known as the period of "Sunshine Policy" and is primarily associated with the south Korean [[Kim Dae-jung]] administration (1998–2003) and the [[Roh Moo-hyun]] administration (2003–2008).

During this time, a notable attitude of reconciliation between north and south Korea was expressed by south Korean leadership toward DPRK, and on June 13-15, 2000 the leaders of south and north Korea met for the first time since the war. South Korean president Kim Dae-jung and DPRK leader Kim Jong-il signed an agreement calling for family reunions, economic cooperation, social and cultural exchanges and follow-up governmental contacts between the North and South to ease tensions. This is known as the June 15th North–South Joint Declaration or the [[6.15 Inter-Korean Joint Declaration]].

In 2002, [[George W. Bush|President Bush's]] State of the Union address singled out [[Islamic Republic of Iran|Iran]], [[Republic of Iraq|Iraq]] and DPRK as the so-called "[[Axis of Evil|axis of evil]]" for their supposed pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Since the beginning of the DPRK nuclear tests in 2003, the Bush and [[Barack Obama|Obama]] administrations respectively lifted some sanctions to facilitate negotiations around DPRK denuclearization, and then reinstated them when the negotiations failed to produce the results desired by the US.<ref name=":5" /><ref name=":6" /> Following the country’s 2006 nuclear test, the US, EU, and others added more stringent sanctions, which have periodically intensified since then. Sanctions now target oil imports, and cover most finance and trade, and the country’s key minerals sector.<ref>Galant, Michael. [https://cepr.net/cepr-sanctions-watch-may-june-2022/ “CEPR Sanctions Watch, May-June 2022”] Center for Economic and Policy Research. July 8, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220907145545/https://cepr.net/cepr-sanctions-watch-may-june-2022/ Archived] 2022-09-07</ref>

=== 2010s ===
Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Chung-hee, was in office as the 11th president of south Korea from 2013–2017 until she was impeached and convicted on corruption charges following public demonstrations, commonly known as the Candlelight Revolution or Candlelight Demonstrations. She became the first South Korean president to be removed from power by impeachment, and was sentenced to 24 years in prison, but received a pardon and was released in 2021 after serving just under 5 years.<ref>Hyonhee Shin (2021-12-31). [https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/skoreas-disgraced-ex-president-park-freed-after-nearly-5-years-prison-2021-12-31/ "S.Korea's disgraced ex-president Park freed after nearly 5 years in prison"] ''Reuters''.</ref> Park Geun-hye's presidency was followed by [[Moon Jae-in]] (in office 2017–2022).

According to a 2017 article by CNN, 49 countries, including [[Republic of Cuba|Cuba]], [[Islamic Republic of Iran|Iran]], and [[Syrian Arab Republic|Syria]] have violated sanctions and have traded with DPRK.<ref>Rishi Iyengar (2017-12-06). [https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/06/news/north-korea-sanctions-countries-violation/index.html "Report: 49 countries have been busting sanctions on North Korea"] ''[[CNN]]''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20210508065837/https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/06/news/north-korea-sanctions-countries-violation/index.html Archived] from the original on 2021-05-08.</ref> In 2017, sanctions imposed by the UN caused thousands of DPRK workers who had been working abroad to be forced to return to DPRK as well as led to the closure of numerous DPRK companies and joint ventures.<ref>[https://www.asianews.it/news-en/North-Korean-workers-leave-China-because-of-UN-sanctions-41942.html “North Korean Workers Leave China because of UN Sanctions.”] Asianews.it. 2017. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220909073331/https://www.asianews.it/news-en/North-Korean-workers-leave-China-because-of-UN-sanctions-41942.html Archived] 2022-09-09.</ref> According to Nodutdol, in 2018, 3,968 people in the DPRK, who were mostly children under the age of 5, died as a result of shortages and delays to UN aid programs caused by sanctions.<ref name=":6" />

Talks between General secretary [[Kim Jong-un]] and Former U.S. [[President of the United states|President]] [[Donald Trump]] began on June of 2019 to discuss disarmament and potential reunification with the [[Republic of Korea]].

=== 2020s ===
In January 2020 when south Korean President [[Moon Jae-In]] expressed interest in developing tourism to north Korea, the US ambassador Harry Harris blocked this effort, claiming that "independent" tourism plans would have to undergo U.S. consultation. The U.S. ambassador emphasized that the items inside South Korean tourists' luggage could violate sanctions.<ref name=":6" />

The 13th and current president of south Korea is [[Yoon Suk-yeol]] of the conservative People Power Party, who took office in 2022. His presidency has been surrounded with criticism, with numerous protests drawing thousands of participants calling for his resignation and his approval rating frequently falling below 30%.<ref>[https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/1063998.html "Rekindled candlelight rallies amid near collapse of Korean politics."] Hankyoreh. Oct.24,2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221030111216/http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/1063998.html Archived] 2022-10-30.</ref> On August 13, 2022, thousands of south Korean unionists and their progressive supporters rallied in downtown Seoul to protest against joint US-south Korea war game exercises. In a video uploaded by [[Press TV]], Oh Eun-Jung of the National Teachers Union was quoted as saying "The threat of nuclear war is growing on the Korean peninsula, conservative forces of Yoon Suk-yeol in south Korea and those in the U.S. are frantically conducting aggressive war drills in the sky, the land, and the sea, and are about to start large-scale military exercises, aimed at the invasion of north Korea. We must stamp out this behavior of anti-reunification forces." In the same video, construction worker Lee Seung-Woo stated, "We not only oppose the war exercises, but we want the U.S. Forces Korea, which is actually controlling and interfering with the Korean peninsula to leave this land. We believe that only then will the eighty million Koreans from both north and south be able to live peacefully."<ref>Frank Smith. [https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/08/13/687322/South-Korean-unionists-protest-US-South-Korea-war-games “‘South Korean Unionists Protest US-South Korea War Games.’”] PressTV News. August 13, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220826124551/https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/08/13/687322/South-Korean-unionists-protest-US-South-Korea-war-games Archived] 2022-08-28.</ref>

In September 2022, a statement on the nuclear force policy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was carried by DPRK's [[Korean Central News Agency]] (KCNA), noting that while the government considers nuclear weapons a last resort, it would deploy them to prevent aggression that seriously threatens the security of the state and people. The statement stressed that DPRK "does not threaten or use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries," and warned it would forcefully respond to aggression, or to nations threatening the DPRK by "colluding with other nuclear-armed states."<ref>[https://www.rt.com/news/562473-north-korea-nuclear-doctrine/ “North Korea Clarifies Nuclear Doctrine.”] RT International. September 9, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221026142625/https://www.rt.com/news/562473-north-korea-nuclear-doctrine/ Archived] 2022-10-26.

‌</ref>

== Culture ==

== Languages ==

=== Korean language ===
[[Korean language|Korean]] is the official language of both north and south Korea.

There are regional dialects and accents of Korean spoken throughout the Korean Peninsula. In general they are largely mutually intelligible with standardized forms of Korean. Additionally, despite the division of the country into north and south, the language has not diverged to the point of unintelligibility, although certain vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation differences do exist. Notably, in the north, a preference for using native Korean words is shown, while in the south, foreign loanwords show a higher prevalence of use.

Korean is also the official language of [[Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture]] in [[Jilin Province]], China (along with [[Mandarin]]). Other large groups of Korean speakers are found in China, the United States, Japan, former [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991)|Soviet Union]] and elsewhere.

=== Jeju language ===
The [[Jeju language]], which is closely related to Korean, is an endangered language whose main community of speakers come from Jeju Island. While often classified as a divergent dialect of the Korean language, the variety is referred to as a language in local government and increasingly in both South Korean and foreign academia. Jeju language is not mutually intelligible with the mainland dialects of South Korea. Most people in Jeju Island now speak a variety of Korean with a Jeju substratum, and efforts to revitalize the endangered language are ongoing.

=== North and South Korean Sign Language ===
A form of [[Korean Sign Language]] (KSL) is used in both north and south Korea. Following the division of the country, the heterogeneity of sign language has accelerated. Researchers Lee and Choi compared the handshapes of north and south Korean Sign Languages, and found in 2017 that there was 15% both hands agreement, 21% dominant hand agreement, 23% nondominant hand agreement, and 71% disagreement.<ref>Choi Sangbae, Ko Eunji. [https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jasl/29/3/29_51/_pdf/-char/ja "Contrastive Linguistic Study of South and North Korean Sign Language and Japanese Sign Language at the Level of Phoneme and Lexis."] 2020. Kongju National University. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230325065228/https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jasl/29/3/29_51/_pdf/-char/ja Archived] 2023-03-25.</ref> A YouTube channel called Sonmal Sueo (Korean: 손말수어) is dedicated to presenting the differences between north and south Korean signs to promote communication and understanding.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/@sonmalsueo3478/featured Sonmal Sueo 손말수어]. YouTube.</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Asian countries]]

Yasukuni Shrine

2023-03-25T20:30:59Z

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Yasukuni Shrine (Japanese:靖国神社 Hiragana:やすくにじんじゃ) was established in 1869 to commemorate those who died on the battlefield for [[Japan]], but in fact it is dedicated to many war criminals who committed serious crimes in [[World War II]].

== Consecration of war criminals ==
Yasukuni Shrine is dedicated to the 2.5 million Japanese soldiers who died in battle, 2.1 million of whom died in World War II. Almost every Japanese Prime Minister visits Yasukuni Shrine.
[[File:43a7d933c895d143ad2632997bf082025aaf0733.jpg|thumb|Japanese cabinet minister visits Yasukuni Shrine]]
Fourteen Class A war criminals tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are enshrined in the Yasukuni Shrine. These are all mass murderers whose crimes are so numerous that it can be said that their existence is a disgrace to Japan and a disgrace to humanity as a whole.

== Attacked ==
A Chinese national, [[Liu Qiang]], arrived at Yasukuni Shrine on 26 December 2011 and flew to [[South Korea]] on a plane after setting fire to it. The fire did not cause any casualties. In South Korea, he then set fire to the Japanese Consulate in South Korea. South Korea sentenced him to ten months in prison and refused to extradite him to Japan.

Liu Qiang said that his grandmother was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese army during World War II. His grandfather was brutally murdered by the Japanese while participating in a movement to resist Japanese aggression.
[[File:6f061d950a7b02085328fe3364d9f2d3562cc87b.jpg|thumb]]
On 22 September 2013, a South Korean man was arrested by Japanese police for breaking into Yasukuni Shrine and attempting to set fire to it.
[[Category:Japan]]

Japan

2023-03-25T20:30:42Z

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{{Infobox country
|name=Japan
|native_name=日本国（にっぽんこく／にほんこく）
|image_coat=Imperial Seal of Japan.svg|capital=Tokyo|largest_city=Tokyo|image_map=Japan map.svg|map_width=260|official_languages=Japanese|government_type=Unitary parliamentary monarchy|mode_of_production=[[Capitalism]]|leader_title1=Emperor|leader_name1=Naruhito|leader_title2=Prime Minister|leader_name2=[[Fumio Kishida]]|area_km2=377,975|population_estimate=125,360,000|population_estimate_year=2021|currency=Japanese yen|image_flag=Flag of Japan.svg}}
'''Japan''' (日本) is an island country in [[East Asia]]. Japan spans an archipelago of 6,852 islands; the four main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu.

The first written mention of the archipelago appears in the Chinese chronicle, ''the Book of Han,'' finished in the 2nd century AD. The country was unified in 1603 under the Tokugawa shogunate. In 1931, Japan invaded [[China]], and later in 1937 Japan reignited hostilities, starting [[World War II]]. Japan surrendered in 1945 and came under a seven-year occupation.

Japan is a member of the [[United Nations]], the [[OECD]], and the [[Group of Seven]]. It is an ally of the United States, and is also a capitalist country. Japan is a highly economically developed country, but suffers from the wealth inequality inherent in capitalism. Japan also has a problem with ultranationalist groups, one being [[Nippon Kaigi]], of which the previous Prime Minister, [[Shinzo Abe]], was a member.

Despite being a capitalist country and geopolitical US ally, the US still saw them as an economic rival in the 1980s due to their rising economic power, and actively sabotaged their economy.

Japan has not invaded another country since World War II, as their constitution forbids them from doing so. However, their military bases are of vital importance for the US to maintain their hegemony in east Asia. Prime Minister [[Fumio Kishida]] is planning to double Japan's military spending by 2027 to commit acts of aggression against China.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Hannah Middleton|newspaper=[[The Guardian (Australia)|The Guardian]]|title=Japan’s dangerous military expansion|date=2023-02-06|url=https://cpa.org.au/guardian/issue-2039/japans-dangerous-military-expansion/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230205132526/https://cpa.org.au/guardian/issue-2039/japans-dangerous-military-expansion/|archive-date=2023-02-05|retrieved=2023-02-12}}</ref>

== History ==

=== Feudal era ===
In the sixth century CE, Japan came into contact with China on a large scale, and its culture was deeply influenced by [[Chinese culture]] and entered into [[feudal society]].

Feudal civil wars split Japan apart during the 15th and 16th centuries. Lords (daimyo) hired armies of samurai to fight for them. In the early 17th century, the Tokugawa clan defeated all of its rivals. The Tokugawa shogun became the absolute ruler of Japan and reduced the emperor to a figurehead. The [[Tokugawa Shogunate]] also banned guns and foreign books and restricted trade to a single port. Many former samurai became farmers or merchants, and capitalism began to develop.<ref name=":0222">{{Citation|author=Neil Faulkner|year=2013|title=A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals|chapter=The Age of Blood and Iron|page=158–159|pdf=https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacedljwr5izotdclz23o3c5p4di4t3ero3ncbfytip55slhiz4otuls?filename=Neil%20Faulkner%20-%20A%20Marxist%20History%20of%20the%20World_%20From%20Neanderthals%20to%20Neoliberals-Pluto%20Press%20%282013%29.pdf|publisher=Pluto Press|isbn=9781849648639|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=91CA6C708BFE15444FE27899217FBA8E}}</ref>

=== Meiji Restoration and early empire ===
In 1853, [[United States of America|Statesian]] warships forced their way into Edo Bay, which was called the [[Black Ship Turmoil]] (黒船来航). They signed an unequal treaty with Japan which increased foreign imports to Japan and restricted Japanese exports. Between 1867 and 1869, an alliance of lords overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate and put emperor [[Meiji]] in power, bringing Japan into capitalism. Using heavy taxes and conscription, they industrialized Japan and reformed its army and navy based on [[British]] and [[German Empire (1871–1918)|German]] forces. Peasants and former samurai frequently rebelled, and Japan began imperialist acts of foreign expansion.<ref name=":0222" />

=== Early expansion ===
In 1894, Japan invaded [[Qing dynasty (1636–1912)|China]] and [[Korea]] and started the [[Sino-Japanese War]]. The Qing army was defeated and signed the unequal Treaty of Shimonoseki, which required China to cede [[Taiwan Province|Taiwan]] and some other islands to Japan. In 1904, war broke out between two imperialist countries, Japan and [[Russian Empire (1721–1917)|Russia]]. Most of the battles of this war were fought on the territory of China and Korea. Japan eventually won the war.

=== Second World War ===
The 14-year Chinese war of resistance against Japanese aggression began on 18 September 1931 with the Japanese invasion of [[Manchuria]].<ref>{{Web citation|journalist=You Yang, Shi Xuchen|date=2020-10-15|title=A look back at China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression|url=https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-15/A-look-back-at-China-s-War-of-Resistance-Against-Japanese-Aggression-SYEXkRUBIQ/index.html|newspaper=CGTN}}</ref>

The Japanese invasion united the [[Communist Party of China]] with the [[Kuomintang]], and on July 7, 1937 the Japanese army, claiming that its soldiers had wandered off during maneuvers on Chinese territory, demanded to enter the city of Wanping to search it, and after being refused, launched a heavy attack on the city.

====== Atrocities committed by the Japanese ======
In northeast China, the Japanese Army established the [[Unit 731|731 Biochemical Unit]] to conduct bacteriological and poisonous gas experiments on Chinese people, including exposing living people to -20 degrees Celsius outdoors for several hours before pouring hot boiling water over them. The unit also released plague-infected rats into villages to study the spread of the disease. More than 3,000 victims of live experiments by the unit alone are registered.

In December 1937, the Japanese army carried out a massacre after capturing the Chinese capital [[Nanjing]]. The death toll exceeded 300,000, and China designated December 13 as the National Day of Public Sacrifice. Japanese newspapers openly reported a [[Nanjing Killing Contest|killing contest]] between two Japanese soldiers (Toshiaki Mukai and Takeshi Noda), in which the first one to kill 100 Chinese people won. At the same time, Japan stole ancient Chinese documents and artifacts from Nanjing and sent them to Japan itself. [[John H. D. Rabe]], a member of the [[National Socialist German Workers' Party|Nazi Party]] in Nanjing, relied on his status to shelter, along with other foreigners, 250,000 Chinese from Japanese murder. His diaries reveal Japanese atrocities.

Japan surrendered on 1945 August 9. This decision is often blamed on the [[U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]], but was also influenced by the [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991)|Soviet Union]]'s invasion of southern [[Sakhalin]] and preparation to invade [[Hokkaido]].<ref>{{News citation|author=Ward Wilson|newspaper=Foreign Policy|title=The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan … Stalin Did|date=2013-05-30|url=https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220125175559/https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/|archive-date=2022-01-25|retrieved=2022-04-27}}</ref>

=== Postwar history ===
After the war, [[United States imperialism|U.S. imperialists]] made Japan into a puppet state and exempted the Unit 731 war criminals from punishment in order to obtain the experimental data of Unit 731. They installed [[Nobusuke Kishi]], a war criminal who oversaw the occupation of Manchuria, as Japan's new prime minister.<ref>{{Citation|author=Stephen Gowans|year=2018|title=Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom|chapter=The Empire of Japan|page=32|pdf=https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4iiga4ngtxusr2civjxewbili5jne2sbpefbx2s3im2kphattzc?filename=Stephen%20Gowans%20-%20Patriots%2C%20Traitors%20and%20Empires_%20The%20Story%20of%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Struggle%20for%20Freedom-Baraka%20Books%20%282018%29.pdf|city=Montreal|publisher=Baraka Books|isbn=9781771861427|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8435F6FF91279531705764823FDC2A7F}}</ref> To this day, the Japanese [[Right-wing politics|right wing]] refuses to acknowledge Japan's atrocities in China, and history textbooks make no mention of the [[Nanjing Massacre]]. Japan's Yasukuni Shrine is dedicated mainly to World War II war criminals, and former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has repeatedly visited it, causing national outrage in China and Korea. Abe also passed the Conspiracy bill to criminalize actions against [[United States imperialism#Military bases|U.S. military bases]].<ref>{{Web citation|author=Curry Malott|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=Japan’s Conspiracy bill signals new threats to the anti-U.S. base movement|date=2017-07-13|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/japans-conspiracy-bill-signals-new-threats-to-the-anti-u-s-base-movement/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220717181646/https://www.liberationnews.org/japans-conspiracy-bill-signals-new-threats-to-the-anti-u-s-base-movement/|archive-date=2022-07-17|retrieved=2022-11-25}}</ref>

== Government ==
Article 9 of the Japanese constitution prevents Japan from having an army, air force, or navy. Since 1952, Japan has used the [[Japanese Self-Defense Forces]] as an extension of the [[police]] and [[prison]] system. The [[Government of the United States of America|U.S. government]] and Prime Minister [[Fumio Kishida]] are trying to remove the article and rearm Japan. The right-wing imperialist [[Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)|Liberal Democratic Party]], which has ruled almost continually since the 1950s, also supports militarism and rearmament.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Sarah Flounders|newspaper=[[Workers World]]|title=Japan rearms under Washington’s pressure − a wake-up call to the antiwar movement|date=2022-12-28|url=https://www.workers.org/2022/12/68400/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221229040859/https://www.workers.org/2022/12/68400/|archive-date=2022-12-29|retrieved=2023-01-02}}</ref>

== Culture ==

=== Art ===

==== Animation ====

Japanese animation is a staple of Japanese popular culture. After the 1960s, Japan has garnered a reputation for the production of Japanese animation; a particular style of Japanese animation is a mix of foreign and Japanese influence, often referred to by foreigners as ''anime.''

The Japanese animation industry was worth 2.4 trillion yen (17.2 billion USD) in 2020.<ref>{{Citation|trans-title=アニメ産業レポート2021|trans-lang=Japanese|title=Anime Industry Report 2021|publisher=[[Association of Japanese Animation]]|quote=Despite the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic, the anime industry market grossed 2.4 trillion yen in 2020 (96.5%). When broken down into individual categories, the demand for people to stay at home affected the streaming market, which reached its highest profits ever at 93 billion yen (135.8%), and the international market overtook the domestic market for the first time at 1.2 trillion yen (103.2%)}}</ref>

The Japanese animation industry notoriously exploits workers. Japanese animators are commonly overworked for low wages.<ref>{{Web citation|url=https://www.japan-press.co.jp/2008/2557/labor.html|title=Animation workers seek better working conditions|newspaper=[[Akahata]]|date=2007-01-05}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|url=https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/exploitation-in-the-anime-industry-an-entry-level-animator-in-japan-explains-why-she-earned-175-week-202283.html|title=Exploitation In The Anime Industry: An Entry-Level Animator In Japan Explains Why She Earned $175/Week|author=Alex Dudok de Wit|date=2021-02-24-T17:35}}</ref>

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Imperialist countries]]
[[Category:Global north]]
[[Category:Asian countries]]
[[Category:Countries]]
[[Category:Japan]]

Category:Japan

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[[Category:Asian countries]]
[[Category:Imperialist countries]]
[[Category:Global north]]

Havana

2023-03-24T22:02:33Z

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'''Havana''' is the capital of and largest city in the [[Republic of Cuba]], one of only five remaining [[Marxist-Leninist]] [[socialist state]]s.
[[Category:Cities]]

Category:Language

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[[Category:Sociology]]

Minnan language

2023-03-24T20:20:47Z

SludgeyRevolution: added category

Minnan Language, a dialect of [[Chinese]], spoken in southern [[Fujian]], [[Hainan]], northeastern [[Guangdong]], [[Taiwan]] and [[Southeast Asia]].

Minnan means "southern Fujian", in Taiwan it's called "台语"(Taiwanese language). In fact the language originated in Fujian Province.
[[Category:Chinese dialects]]

Mandarin

2023-03-24T20:20:27Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

'''Mandarin''' (Chinese: 普通话 Pinyin: pǔ tōng huà) It is the common language in [[China]], population of users is about 1.6 billion.

== History ==
Since the [[Xia Dynasty]], the Chinese language has spread to all parts of the country. Due to the geographical barriers between places, the Chinese language has been divided into many different dialects. Although Hanzi still connects these dialects, they have become very different in pronunciation.

In order to unify the language across the country, China adopted and promoted the dialect of [[Luanping]], [[Chengde]], [[Hebei Province]] as the common language.

== Penetration rate ==
China's nationwide Mandarin penetration rate reaches 80.72% by 2020.
[[Category:Chinese dialects]]

Category:Chinese dialects

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[[Category:People's Republic of China]]
[[Category:Language]]

Category:Provinces of China

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[[Category:Province-level administrative divisions]]
[[Category:People's Republic of China]]

Chinese characters

2023-03-24T20:17:54Z

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#REDIRECT [[Chinese Characters]]

Chinese Characters

2023-03-24T20:17:31Z

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[[File:汉字.jpg|thumb|Different fonts of the Chinese character "字"]]
[[Chinese Characters]], also known as [[Hanzi]], [[Kanji]], is a hieroglyphic script of [[People's Republic of China|Chinese]] origin.

== History ==
Legend has it that in ancient times, [[Cangjie]] created characters based on the footprints of birds.
[[File:甲骨文与现代汉字的对比.jpg|thumb|Modern Chinese characters versus oracle bone inscriptions]]
In 1600 BC, the [[Shang dynasty]] created the [[oracle bone script]]. Modern people have found that these scripts can be linked to modern Chinese characters.

In the development of Chinese characters, they have gradually become square in order to make them easier to write and decipher.

Throughout history, Chinese characters have spread to [[Japan]], [[Korea]] and [[Socialist Republic of Vietnam|Vietnam]] and have been used on a large scale. However, due to the prevalence of [[nationalism]] and the need to improve literacy rates in modern times, Chinese characters were modified or restricted in both China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

== The contribution of Chinese characters to the course of East Asian history ==
Chinese characters are an ideographic script, so that even after thousands of years of geographical separation, people across China who use different dialects can communicate through them. This is why China can still be a unified country today. This is true even in Japan, Vietnam and Korea. This allows advanced ideas to spread rapidly across national boundaries using Chinese characters as a medium. In 600 AD, for example, Japan stepped into [[Feudalism|feudal]] society by learning the Chinese system. And in the second half of the 19th century, [[Empire of Japan (1868–1947)|Japanese]] ideas of modernisation were introduced into China, contributing to its progress.

Chinese characters are in fact transnational characters, and each country that uses them can create new words and spread them to other countries through Chinese characters, although historically most words have been created by China and Japan. In the 19th century, [[Black Ship Turmoil|Japan]] was the first country to learn from the Western [[Capitalism|capitalist]] system. The spread of capitalist ideas with words to China, Korea and Vietnam accelerated the collapse of the feudal system in these countries.
[[Category:Language]]

Language

2023-03-24T20:16:27Z

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[[File:Emblem of the Soviet Union (1946–1956).svg|thumb|267x267px|Emblem of the [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991)|Soviet Union]] saying "[[Workers of the world, unite|Workers of the world, unite!]]" in 16 languages]]
'''Language''' is a structured system of communication consisting of vocabulary and grammar. It is not part of the [[Base and superstructure|superstructure]] and develops over many centuries without relation to a specific [[mode of production]]. Language benefits all members of a society, not just the [[ruling class]], and has existed since before [[class society]]. The vocabulary of living languages is constantly in a state of change as the [[productive forces]] develop.<ref name=":0">{{Citation|author=[[Joseph Stalin]]|year=1950|title=Marxism and Problems of Linguistics|chapter=Concerning Marxism in Linguistics|city=Moscow|publisher=''[[Pravda]]''|mia=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1950/jun/20.htm}}</ref>

A common language is one of the defining characteristics of a [[nation]].<ref>{{Citation|author=[[Joseph Stalin]]|year=1913|title=Marxism and the National Question|chapter=The Nation|chapter-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#s1|publisher=''Prosveshcheniye''|mia=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm}}</ref> In class societies, all classes of the same nation share one language, although there may be minor differences in vocabulary between classes.<ref name=":0" />

== Further Reading ==
* {{Citation|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D20503CD2AFAEB8A5966ADC115B3A16F|isbn=978-90-04-25639-2|series=Historical materialism|title=Gramsci and languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony|author=Carlucci, Alessandro; Gramsci, Antonio|publisher=Brill|year=2013}}

== References ==
[[Category:Language]]

German language

2023-03-24T20:15:28Z

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'''German''' (German: ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in [[Central Europe]]. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in [[Germany]], [[Austria]], [[Switzerland]], [[Liechtenstein]], and the [[Italy|Italian]] province of [[South Tyrol]]. It is also a co-official language of [[Luxembourg]] and [[Belgium]], as well as a recognized national language in [[Namibia]]. Outside Germany, it is also spoken by German communities in [[France]] ([[Bas-Rhin]]), the [[Czech Republic]] ([[North Bohemia]]), [[Poland]] ([[Upper Silesia]]), [[Slovakia]] ([[Bratislava Region]]), and [[Hungary]] ([[Sopron]]).

High German is most similar to other languages within the West Germanic language branch, including [[Afrikaans]], [[Dutch language|Dutch]], [[English language|English]], the [[Frisian languages]], [[Low German]], [[Luxembourgish]], [[Scots language|Scots]], and [[Yiddish]]. It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the [[North Germanic languages|North Germanic group]], such as [[Danish language|Danish]], [[Norwegian language|Norwegian]], and [[Swedish language|Swedish]]. German is the second most widely spoken [[Germanic languages|Germanic language]] after English, which is also a West Germanic language.

German is one of the major languages of the world. It is the most spoken native language within the [[European Union]]. German is also widely taught as a foreign language, especially in continental [[Europe]], where it is the third most taught foreign language (after English and French), and in the [[United States of America|United States]]. The language has been influential in the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. It is the second most commonly used scientific language and among the most widely used languages on websites. The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one-tenth of all books (including e-books) in the world being published in German.

German is an inflected language, with four grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and two numbers (singular, plural). It has strong and weak verbs. The majority of its vocabulary derives from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share is partly derived from Latin and Greek, along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English.

German is a pluricentric language; the three standardized variants are [[Standard High German]], [[Austrian German]], and [[Swiss Standard German]]. It is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these non-standard varieties have become recognized and protected by regional or national governments.

Since 2004, meetings of German-speaking countries have been held annually with six participants: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.<ref name="land.lu">[http://www.land.lu/page/article/379/9379/DEU/index.html d’Lëtzebuerger Land - Beim Deutschen Bund in Eupen (02. September 2016)]</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Language]]

Category:Language

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Stonewall rebellion

2023-03-23T23:33:21Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

The '''Stonewall rebellion''' was an uprising against police oppression against [[LGBT+]] people that began on June 27, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in [[New York City]]. Police attempted to remove LGBT people from the bar, but they fought back and 18 people were arrested.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Preston Wood|newspaper=[[Liberation School]]|title=The 1969 Stonewall rebellion and lessons for today|date=2005-06-01|url=https://www.liberationschool.org/05-06-01-the-1969-stonewall-rebellion-les-html/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200922131546/https://liberationschool.org/05-06-01-the-1969-stonewall-rebellion-les-html/|archive-date=2020-09-22|retrieved=2022-08-28}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:LGBT+]]
[[Category:History of the USA]]

Adrian Zenz

2023-03-22T20:45:22Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox person
| name = Adrian Zenz
| image = Adrian zenz.jpg
| nationality = [[German]]
| birth_date = 1974
| birth_place =
| death_date =
| death_place =
}}

'''Adrian Zenz''' (born 1974) is a [[Germany|German]] anthropologist. He claims to be an "independent researcher" with a particular interest in [[People's Republic of China|China]] and the [[Xinjiang|Xinjiang province]], while notably not speaking a word of Chinese.<ref>https://twitter.com/adrianzenz/status/1175499119139405824 archive: [https://archive.ph/wip/SMeOr https://archive.ph/SMeOr]</ref> He was the subject of a [[Grayzone]] article in December 2019<ref name=":0">https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/</ref> which exposed his fraudulent research and hypocritical indignation.

== Religious fundamentalism ==
A born-again Christian who claims to preach at his local church, Adrian Zenz is a lecturer at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible [to be] the ultimate foundation and the “final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.” Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.” Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.<ref name=":0" />

In his 2012 book ''Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation,''<ref>https://books.google.com/books?id=lRtSQB3HHJcC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=false</ref> which he co-authored, Zenz wrote some of the following quotes:

* Through notions of gender equality...the enemy is undermining God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women
* Another important God-given authority structure that Satan is attacking through the postmodern spirit is that of gender authority structures
* true scriptural spanking is loving discipline
* countries are banning all forms of physical punishment of children, the primary scriptural method for instilling respect
* It is very likely that the global persecution of true believers will center on the charge that they promote "intolerant views," especially related to preaching against homosexuality.
* ... anti-discrimination laws put in place throughout the European Union ... forbid employers to discriminate based on gender or sexual orientation. That way, it becomes illegal for churches or Christian organizations to refuse to hire homosexuals into important positions.

Notably, he claims that "God's refining process will wipe out all unbelieving Jews" which raises questions as to probable anti-Semitic views.

In September 2019, Zenz tweeted the following:<blockquote>Many Germans liked [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]]'s control mechanisms. They reduced crime and rid society of unpopular minorities.<ref>https://archive.vn/AVs6t</ref> </blockquote>To the question "Were Germany’s concentration camps an overreaction to a real problem?"

== Imperialist ties ==
Adrian Zenz has many ties to imperialist organisations, notably being employed as a "senior fellow" by the [[Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation]] as per his own Twitter page.<ref>https://archive.is/esnu5</ref>

He is also invited to many different news shows all over the world to share his shoddy research, which solely comes from publicly-available documents published by various PRC agencies. Since Zenz does not speak Chinese, he relies on various unknown sources to translate these documents. None of this is challenged by the news anchors who invite him on set.

== Debunked claims ==
Zenz takes a particular interest against China, claiming that he feels "led by God" in his mission against communism. To that end, he has largely "researched" the re-education initiative by the [[Communist Party of China|CPC]] to combat terrorism and far-right radicalisation in the [[Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region|Xinjiang autonomous region]]. His work has been examined by less biased researchers who exposed his amateur methods and ulterior motives.

For example, his initial assertion that up to 1.5 million Uyghurs were interned in "concentration camps" came from an Uyghur separatist group who interviewed 8 people, asking them how many people from their village they ''thought'' were in such centres, and averaging the results to the whole population of Xinjiang. This is presented as and unquestionable fact by Zenz.

More recently, Zenz has started moving his interests towards the [[Tibet|autonomous region of Tibet]], claiming that much the same thing is happening in Xinjiang -- Tibetans, he claims, are being arrested en masse and driven to concentration camps where they are forced to work for free, cannot express their culture, and are not allowed to speak their language. Reuters themselves were unable to confirm his claims.<ref>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-tibet-exclusive-idUSKCN26D0GT</ref> What is actually happening is that the CPC, in their decades-long program to eradicate poverty in China, are providing populations in less-developed regions the possibility of working manufacturing jobs which pay more and teach them skills that may be useful on the labour market. Most of the money these workers receive, they send back to their family.

== References ==
<references />
[[de:Adrian Zenz]]
[[Category:Imperialist propaganda]]

Republic of South Africa

2023-03-22T20:40:55Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox country|name=Republic of South Africa|image_flag=Flag_of_South_Africa.svg|image_coat=South Africa COA.svg|image_map=South_Africa_Map.svg|map_width=290|largest_city=Johannesburg|official_languages=Afrikaans English Ndebele Sepedi Sesotho Setswana Swazi Tshivenda Xhosa Xitsonga Zulu|mode_of_production=[[Capitalism]]|area_km2=1,221,037|population_estimate=60,142,978|population_estimate_year=2021}}

'''South Africa''', officially the '''Republic of South Africa''', is the southernmost country in [[Africa]]. The richest 1% of the population controls more than 40% of the wealth.<ref name=":1">{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Tricontinental]]|title=This Land Is the Land of Our Ancestors|date=2022-06-22|url=https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-farmworkers-south-africa/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220905041651/https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-farmworkers-south-africa/|archive-date=2022-09-05|retrieved=2022-11-12}}</ref> From 1948 to 1994, South Africa was a [[White supremacy|white supremacist]] state under the [[apartheid]] system.<ref name=":2">{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Tricontinental]]|title=The 1973 Durban Strikes: Building Popular Democratic Power in South Africa|date=2023-01-24|url=https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-1973-durban-strikes/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230124145200/https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-1973-durban-strikes/|archive-date=2023-01-24|retrieved=2023-02-10}}</ref> Apartheid South Africa supported [[Republic of Rhodesia (1965–1979)|Rhodesia]]'s [[Racism|racist]] government and invaded [[Republic of Angola|Angola]], [[Republic of Mozambique|Mozambique]], and [[Republic of Namibia|Namibia]].<ref name=":3">{{News citation|title=South Africa and the continental struggle for socialism|date=2014-01-26|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/south-africa-and-the-struggle-for-socialism-html/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190714090508/https://www.liberationnews.org/south-africa-and-the-struggle-for-socialism-html/|archive-date=2019-07-14|retrieved=2022-07-02|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]}}</ref>

== History ==

=== British colonization ===
The [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland|British Empire]] defeated the Boer [[Settler colonialism|settlers]] but let them create their own state and racially segregate Africans.<ref>{{Citation|author=[[Domenico Losurdo]]|year=2011|title=Liberalism: A Counter-History|chapter=The West and the Barbarians|page=221–222|publisher=Verso|isbn=9781844676934|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=5BB3406BC2E64972831A1C00D5D4BFE4|pdf=https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebhsj2yxuoudkhkjp6lzgr5jvgyhu76zxe4gw3d65gpg32a6nded4?filename=Domenico%20Losurdo%2C%20Gregory%20Elliott%20-%20Liberalism_%20A%20Counter-History-Verso%20%282011%29.pdf}}</ref> African dockworkers first [[Strike action|struck]] in 1874.<ref name=":2" /> At the 1885 [[Berlin Conference]], European powers divided and colonized Africa, and the British took control of what is now South Africa. Africans rebelled again in 1906 under the leadership of [[Bambatha kaMancinza]] following a poll tax.<ref name=":3" />

=== Apartheid era ===
During the apartheid era, many Black Africans were confined to puppet states called [[Bantustan|Bantustans]] that were nominally independent. Bantustans made up 13% of the country's area and were on poor land far from urban areas. Africans who left the Bantustans without identification documents could be arrested and deported to the nearest Bantustan.<ref name=":0">{{News citation|author=Lewis Barnes|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=South Africa: Major developments in the long struggle for land reform|date=2018-05-05|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/south-africa-major-developments-in-the-long-struggle-for-land-reform/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190714114629/https://www.liberationnews.org/south-africa-major-developments-in-the-long-struggle-for-land-reform/|archive-date=2019-07-14|retrieved=2022-07-02}}</ref>

In 1960, [[White supremacy|white supremacist]] forces killed members of the [[Pan-Africanist Congress]] who were protesting against apartheid in the [[Sharpeville massacre]]. Dockworkers in Durban struck in 1969 and again in 1972. [[Inkatha Freedom Party|Inkatha]], a [[reactionary]] [[Zulu]] [[Nationalism|nationalist]] organization, opposed the strikes.<ref name=":2" />

The [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] suppressed the anti-apartheid movement from the 1960s to 1980s and provided information about [[African National Congress|ANC]] members and activities. In 1981, they sent the South African military into [[People's Republic of Mozambique (1975–1990)|Mozambique]] to assassinate ANC members in exile. The CIA was responsible for the arrest of [[Nelson Mandela]] and violated a [[United Nations|UN]] policy by sending weapons to South Africa.<ref>{{Citation|author=William Blum|year=2002|title=Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower|chapter=A Concise History of United States Global Interventions,
1945 to the Present|isbn=9781842772201|publisher=Zed Books Ltd|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=29EED3C6906FF165E08303B9EAF66B4F|pdf=https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacedas5bwprytpzcih6tof3ipede5uzmcvt47tfzwp4cptdau6vmjpy?filename=William%20Blum%20-%20Rogue%20State_%20A%20Guide%20to%20the%20World%27s%20Only%20Superpower-Zed%20Books%20Ltd%20%282002%29.pdf|page=122–123}}</ref>

In the 1980s, the [[United States of America|United States]] provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to South African media to promote Western [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] ideals and counter [[Marxism]].<ref>{{Web citation|author=Ajit Singh, Roscoe Palm|newspaper=[[Monthly Review]]|title=Manufacturing consent: How the United States has penetrated South African media|date=2022-08-08|url=https://mronline.org/2022/08/08/manufacturing-consent-how-the-united-states-has-penetrated-south-african-media/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220808182146/https://mronline.org/2022/08/08/manufacturing-consent-how-the-united-states-has-penetrated-south-african-media/|archive-date=2022-08-08|retrieved=2022-08-09}}</ref>

== Racial inequality ==
White settlers own over 70% of South Africa's farmland despite only being 8% of the population,<ref>{{News citation|author=Francis Njubi Nesbitt|newspaper=[[MintPress News]]|title=In South Africa, Trump Embraces a Global Neo-Nazi Myth|date=2018-08-27|url=https://www.mintpressnews.com/south-africa-white-genocide/248288/|retrieved=2022-07-02}}</ref> whereas Africans only own 4% of the farmland.<ref name=":1" /> The average income for settlers is five times as high as for Black Africans.<ref name=":0" />

== References ==
[[Category:Countries]]
[[Category:Global south]]
[[Category:African countries]]
[[Category:Settler-colonial states]]

Ultra-leftism

2023-03-22T20:30:12Z

SludgeyRevolution: Changed first sentence

{{Stub}}
<blockquote> ''<nowiki>'Ultra'</nowiki> redirects here. For ultra-capitalist sympathisers, see [[Far-right]].</blockquote>

'''Ultra-leftism''' (sometimes abbreviated '''ultra''') is a derogatory label used by [[Marxism-Leninism|Marxist-Leninists]] or other [[Socialism|socialists]] (such as [[anarcho-communism|anarcho-communists]]) to denounce other socialist or [[Marxism|Marxist]] ideologies as usually either [[Dogmatism|dogmatic]], [[Adventurism|adventurist]], or a left deviation. Ideologies which are commonly called ultra-leftist are mainly [[left communism]] but also include [[Trotskyism]], [[Hoxhaism]], and [[Maoism]]. The advocacy for [[Terrorism|terror]] is a common hallmark of ultra-leftism.

The term originated in the 1920s in the [[German Reich (1918–1933)|German]] and [[Kingdom of the Netherlands|Dutch]] workers movements, originally referring to a Marxist group opposed to both Marxism-Leninism and [[social democracy]], and with some affinities with [[anarchism]].
[[Category:Left-wing ideologies]]

2022 Russo-Ukranian conflict

2023-03-22T03:48:06Z

SludgeyRevolution: Removing categories since the page it redirects to already has them

#REDIRECT [[2022 Russo-Ukrainian conflict]]

Vaush

2023-03-21T22:51:51Z

SludgeyRevolution: changed infobox and modified a section

{{Infobox youtuber
|name=Vaush
|subscribers=430,000
|views=252,682,352
|stats_update=21 March 2023
|image=Vaush logo.png
|image_size=200
|Ideology=[[Anarchism]] (nominally) [[Libertarian socialism]] (nominally) [[Liberalism]] [[Anti-communism]]
|years_active=2019–present
|nationality=Statesian}}

'''Vaush''' is a [[United States of America|Statesian]] [[YouTube]] and [[Twitch]] streamer. He identifies as a [[Libertarian socialism|libertarian socialist]] and an [[Anarchism|anarchist]]. Vaush was banned from Twitch for calling white people "crackers."<ref>{{News citation|author=Ethan Gach|newspaper=Kotaku|title=Socialist Twitch Streamer Banned For Calling White People ‘Cracker’ <nowiki>[Update]</nowiki>|date=2021-12-14|url=https://kotaku.com/socialist-twitch-streamer-banned-for-calling-white-peop-1848213042|retrieved=2022-04-17}}</ref> Vaush has also been accused of being a [[Pedophilia|pedophile]]<ref>{{News citation|author=Beige Goat|newspaper=Twitter|title=Context, for what it's worth.|date=2020-11-09|url=https://twitter.com/beigegoat45/status/1325705005886746624|retrieved=2022-04-17|quote=In fact — and this is gonna be a real hot take — I have yet to hear a convincing moral or legal argument as to why possession of child pornography should be illegal.}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|author=Vaush|newspaper=Discord|date=2018-02-13|url=https://i.redd.it/z3nrrkf179l51.png|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220806085802/https://i.redd.it/z3nrrkf179l51.png|archive-date=2022-08-06|quote=As those imbalances (or at least some of them) are redressed through the advent of socialism, the age of consent should therefor [sic] be lowered.}}</ref> and claimed [[Karl Marx|Marx]] and [[Vladimir Lenin|Lenin]] would have voted for [[Joe Biden|Biden]] in the [[2020 United States presidential election|2020 presidential election]].<ref>{{News citation|author=[[BadEmpanada]]|newspaper=Twitter|title=Vaush misread stuff so badly in his latest video that it led me to make a serious youtube comment that I now must post here. the lack of non-US knowledge is clear in his misreading of Lenin especially|date=2020-08-20|url=https://twitter.com/RadEmpanada/status/1296701957739077633|archive-url=https://archive.ph/MQ3bo|archive-date=2020-10-26|retrieved=2022-04-17}}</ref>

== Criticism ==

===Anti-Semitism===
While discussing the [[National Socialist German Workers' Party|Nazis]] in a debate with [[NonCompete]], Vaush said [[Judaism|Jews]] disproportionately controlled banks in [[German Reich (1918–1933)|Weimar Germany]].<ref name=":0">{{YouTube citation|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lR1FdFefcA&t=3050s|channel=Vaush|title=HE HUNG UP - Absurd Debate w/ NonCompete Quickly Derails|quote=There was a disproportionate number of Jewish control of banks in Germany during the Weimar Republic.}}</ref>

===Racism===
Vaush has called Black people "subhuman"<ref>{{Web citation|author=Vaush|newspaper=Discord|url=https://i.redd.it/q1bs0pmcuk661.png|archive-url=https://archive.ph/DP5nR|archive-date=2020-12-21|quote=you guys know ive called black and trans people subhuman too}}</ref> and intentionally said the N-word in a debate.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Vaush|newspaper=YouTube|title=Am I a Jew? Arguing with Nazis on THE KILLSTREAM|date=2019-05-14|url=https://i.imgur.com/TMMwFra.png|archive-url=https://archive.ph/C7g1n|archive-date=2020-11-15|quote=In this video, I drop an n-bomb. Biiiig one; hard 'R' [...] It was a power move which I am entirely unashamed of}}</ref> He is against preserving Black culture even though it was systematically repressed by the United States.<ref>{{Web citation|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220722205131/https://twitter.com/high_define/status/1258520435655766022|archive-date=2022-07-22|quote=Wait, fuck Black culture—I don't give a fuck about preserving culture. What? That's exactly the same as a white ethnonationalist argument.}}</ref>

===Settler apologia===

In a debate with the Youtuber [[Professor Flowers]] on the subject of [[decolonization]] and [[black nationalism]], Vaush compared [[Republic of South Africa|South African]] [[Settler|settlers]] who gained their "home" via [[apartheid]] to [[Jewish]] people who faced persecution by [[National Socialist German Workers' Party|the Nazi party]].<ref>{{Web citation|author=BadEmpanada|newspaper=[[YouTube]]|title=Vaush Knows Nothing About Decolonization and Self-Determination, Yet Sure Has Some Strong Opinions!|date=2021-09-13 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4zJxP2hgpc|retrieved=2023-03-06}}</ref>

===Transphobia===
Vaush has called the [[LGBT+]] community "cancerous"<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Streamable|url=https://streamable.com/fdy60u|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220308145927/https://streamable.com/fdy60u|archive-date=2022-03-08|quote=The left community online, particularly the LGBT community, is cancerous as fuck. If you're not an idiot, you will agree with me.}}</ref> and "[[Ableism|mentally ill]]."<ref>{{News citation|newspaper=Streamable|title=I know this is fundamentally reactionary thinking, but still, I can’t think of anything else|url=https://streamable.com/uu2mkv|quote=A lot of the people who are trying to cancel [[Contrapoints]] are fucking dejected, worthless, mentally ill, basement-dweller, fucking queer people who have absolutely nothing to offer the world apart from their bitter scorn.|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220308152603/https://streamable.com/uu2mkv|archive-date=2022-03-08}}</ref>

===Promotion of U.S. imperialism===
On the 11 December, 2020 stream Vaush made the "joke" that [[Republic of Iraq|Iraqis]] have him to thank for stopping and preventing [[United States imperialism|U.S. imperialism]] in Iraq due to his position to vote for Biden.<ref>{{YouTube citation|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxn2aNbqa6w&t=13060s|channel=Vaush|title=GOING OVER VIDEOS CRITICIZING ME {{!}} CHILL STREAM|date=2020-12-11|quote=…you [[https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Hakim Hakim]] are lucky that I personally got Biden into office because otherwise – is Hakim from Iraq? Well, hey listen ok, we're going to get Biden to get those troops out of Iraq ok – wait did he already do that? We are going to keep Biden from fucking bombing anymore of your airports ok. That's what we're going to do! You're welcome Hakim!
I know, I know it–, I know it sucks, because frantically Democrats and Republicans both have a pretty fucking bad record when it comes to foreign policy, but listen you. Ok, I got Biden elected and I'm gonna wield that infinite power, alright, and I'm gonna make sure we quit fucking around in the Middle East ok. We're gonna pull troops out of – we're gonna pull troops out of [[Afghanistan]], we're gonna pay reparations to the countries we bomb, we're gonna stop that [[Yemen]] shit, we're gonna start arguing with [[Saudi Arabia]], we're going to reinstitute the nuclear fucking arms shit deal with [[Iran]] – the nuclear treatus [sic], we're going to establish fuckin' one state council solution with [[Israel]] and [[Palestine]] – 'cos I feel that's closest we're going to be able to get – um, we're gonna – we're gonna do it. "This won't happen under Biden." Goddamn right it will. It will 'cos of me. 'Cos of all the socialist influence I have in the Democratic party. Yeah, we're gonna lift sanctions on [[Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela|Vuvuzuela]] [sic], we're gonna fix the world. "No it won't Vaush." Do you think I'm being serious man?}}</ref>

On the 3 Febuary, 2023 Vaush advocated expanding [[United States imperialism|U.S. imperialism]] in a [[Twitter|tweet]]. Responding to a tweet criticising the number of [[U.S. Military]] bases in the [[Asia-Pacific]], Vaush stated that "We [[[:en:United_States_of_America|U.S.]]] need more"<ref>{{Web citation|author=Vaush|newspaper=[[Twitter]]|date=2023-02-03|url=https://twitter.com/VaushV/status/1621586438814072834|archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20230204024826/https://twitter.com/VaushV/status/1621586438814072834|archive-date=2023-02-04|retrieved=2023-02-04|quote=We need more}}</ref>

On the 23 February, 2023 Vaush advocated for the removal of indigenous peoples from their homeland in order to recieve English education in the U.S.<ref>{{YouTube citation|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpPtoNq4wvQ&t=5405s|channel=Vaush|title=Feb 25, 2023 Trump wins & Biden loses in Ohio, INSANE anti-trans bills, JP is deteriorating|date=2023-02-26|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230310150109/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_xyUtgwls|archive-date=2023-03-10|quote=I know that Hakim is Iraqi, but I think they should have, like, airlifted him and brought him over to an American English class and had him sit there for 20 straight years after the Iraq War began – which was about 20 years ago – solely so that he wouldn't have made this retarded fucking video.}}</ref>

===Anti-communism===
Vaush has diminished [[George Orwell]]'s reporting of [[Left-wing politics|leftists]], non-white and [[LGBT+]] peoples to the [[Information Research Department]] (IRD) within the [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland|British]] government, as acceptible by claiming that Orwell was reporting "[[Stalinism|Stalinists]]".<ref>{{YouTube citation|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpPtoNq4wvQ&t=2755s|channel=Vaush|title=Feb 25, 2023 Trump wins & Biden loses in Ohio, INSANE anti-trans bills, JP is deteriorating|date=2023-02-26|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230310150109/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_xyUtgwls|archive-date=2023-03-10|quote=I don't give a fuck if Stalinists are reported to the state, I don't give a shit.}}</ref>

Vaush called the promotion of George Orwell's anti-communist writings by the IRD and [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] as "based".<ref>{{YouTube citation|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpPtoNq4wvQ&t=2765s|channel=Vaush|title=Feb 25, 2023 Trump wins & Biden loses in Ohio, INSANE anti-trans bills, JP is deteriorating|date=2023-02-26|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230310150109/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_xyUtgwls|archive-date=2023-03-10|quote=“This office [IRD] not only got the rights to Orwell's works but also directly translated and published Animal Farm and his other garbage works into 20 languages on every continent on Earth.”
Based
“In fact, Orwell's entire literary reputation is due to direct CIA and other anti-communist organisation efforts at popularising his nonsense, which is…”
Based. Based CIA.}}</ref>

==References==
<references />

[[Category:YouTube channels]]
[[Category:Imperialist propaganda]]
[[Category:Child pornography defenders]]
[[Category:Breadtube]]

Topic:Xer9rhetcszpde77

2023-03-21T21:02:35Z

SludgeyRevolution (talk | contribs) commented on "皆❕チルノのパーフェクト算数教室、始まるよ～" (キラキラダイアモンド輝く星のように)

Party for Socialism and Liberation

2023-03-21T04:37:05Z

SludgeyRevolution: /* Controversies */ Adding that PSL seems to be like a cult.

{{Infobox political party|name=Party for Socialism and Liberation|logo=PSL.png|founded=June 2004|newspaper=''[[Liberation News]]''|political_orientation=[[Marxism–Leninism]] [[Anti-imperialism]]|website=https://pslweb.org}}{{Communist parties}}
The '''Party for Socialism and Liberation''' is a [[Marxist-Leninist]] political party in the [[United States of America|United States]] founded in June 2004 after a split from the [[Workers World Party]]. Their platform is closely related to the broader [[The ANSWER Coalition|ANSWER Coalition]]. The PSL has funded numerous movements within [[the ANSWER Coalition]] including the movement to liberate [[Republic of Cuba|Cuba]] from [[United States imperialism|Statesian imperialism]].<ref>An article from the [https://www.answercoalition.org/actions_nationwide_to_demand_u_s_hands_off_cuba Answer Coalition] depicting their stance on Cuba, sponsored by the PSL</ref> The PSL held its first congress in February 2010 in Los Angeles, California.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Ian Thompson|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=PSL’s First National Congress strengthens the struggle for socialism|date=2010-02-22|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/10-02-22-psls-first-national-congress-st-html/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190714145018/https://www.liberationnews.org/10-02-22-psls-first-national-congress-st-html/|archive-date=2019-07-14|retrieved=2022-08-08}}</ref>

== History ==
At its founding in 2004, the PSL held a two-part congress to establish publications and a party structure. Between 2004 and 2010, it held regular conventions that were open to all members to elect party leadership between conventions. In 2010, the party held its first delegated congress and adopted its constitution and program. The PSL held a second congress in 2013.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=Building democratic centralism: stages of Party growth and internal development|date=2014-07-31|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/building-democratic-centralism-stages-party-growth-internal-development/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210116082555/https://www.liberationnews.org/building-democratic-centralism-stages-party-growth-internal-development/|archive-date=2021-01-16|retrieved=2022-12-25}}</ref>

== Program ==

=== Anti-imperialism ===
The PSL supports immediate independence and reparations for [[Puerto Rico]] with freedom of travel between Puerto Rico and the United States. It also supports self-determination and potential independence of [[American Samoa]], [[Guam]], the [[Virgin Islands of the United States|Virgin Islands]], the [[Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands|Mariana Islands]], and indigenous nations on the U.S. mainland.<ref name=":0">{{News citation|newspaper=Party for Socialism and Liberation|title=Program of the Party for Socialism and Liberation|date=2010|url=https://pslweb.org/program/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220615034341/https://pslweb.org/program/|archive-date=2022-06-15|retrieved=2022-06-18}}</ref>

=== Social benefits ===
The PSL advocates for a 30-hour work week, up to two years of paid parental leave, a minimum of one month of paid vacation and 12 paid holidays. It also supports universal citizenship for everyone living in the United States, free education from preschool to college, and reducing housing costs to 10% of total income or less.<ref name=":0" />

== Chapters ==
Contact information of the following PSL chapters is available on the party website.<ref>{{News citation|newspaper=Party for Socialism and Liberation|title=Contact us|url=https://www2.pslweb.org/contact|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220707094332/https://www2.pslweb.org/contact|archive-date=2022-07-07|retrieved=2022-07-28}}</ref> This list is organized by region of the United States.

=== Midwest ===

* Champaign–Urbana
* Chicago
* Cleveland
* Detroit
* Indianapolis
* Lexington
* Miami Valley
* Milwaukee
* Springfield

=== Northeast ===

* Albany
* Baltimore
* Boston
* Chester County, Pennsylvania
* Finger Lakes
* Lancaster
* New Haven
* New Paltz
* New York City
* Philadelphia
* Pittsburgh
* Southern New Hampshire
* Syracuse
* Washington, D.C.

=== Plains ===

* Albuquerque
* Dallas
* Denver
* Houston
* San Antonio

=== Southeast ===

* Asheville
* Atlanta
* Birmingham
* Central Gulf Coast
* Columbia
* Raleigh–Durham
* Sarasota
* Tampa

=== West ===

* Anchorage
* Boise/Pocatello
* Kennewick–Pasco–Richland
* Los Angeles
* Phoenix
* Portland
* Sacramento
* Salt Lake City
* San Diego
* San Francisco
* San Jose
* Seattle

== Publications ==
The party's main publication is the monthly paper ''[[Liberation News]]'',<ref>https://www.liberationnews.org</ref> which replaced a quarterly magazine, ''Socialism and Liberation''.<ref>[https://www.liberationnews.org/07-06-05-socialism-liberation-magazine-is-html/ "Socialism and Liberation magazine is changing"]. June 5, 2007. January 7, 2018.</ref> The PSL also publishes ''Breaking the Chains: A Socialist Perspective on Women's Liberation,'' a quarterly socialist and [[Feminism|feminist]] magazine,<ref>{{News citation|journalist=|date=|title=About Breaking the Chains|url=https://www.breakingthechainsmag.org/about/|newspaper=Breaking the Chains|archive-url=|archive-date=|retrieved=2022-01-03}}</ref> and ''Reds In Ed'', a monthly newsletter initiated by teachers who are members of the PSL.<ref>{{News citation|journalist=|date=2020-03-13|title=Reds In Ed program|url=https://redsined.org/the-reds-in-ed-program/|newspaper=Reds in Ed|archive-url=|archive-date=|retrieved=2022-01-02}}</ref> Additionally, the PSL publishes ''Liberation School'', which publishes longer-form analysis, Party documents, interviews, and educational resources including study guides, curricula, and video and audio courses.<ref>{{News citation|journalist=|date=2022-01-02|title=Our mission|url=https://liberationschool.org/about/|newspaper=Liberation School|archive-url=|archive-date=|retrieved=2022-01-02}}</ref>

== Controversies ==
Some controversies of the PSL have arisen in recent years as its prominence grows in the public eye<ref>[https://medium.com/@dotcommunism/psls-brian-becker-loud-clear-radio-and-right-wing-entryism-349cf6f29aa4 Medium Article surrounding the actions of Brian Becker (with its own citations)]</ref><ref>[https://archive.is/yT5vp#selection-42.0-42.1 Writings of a PSL member who was allegedly abused by Steven Powers]</ref> and while no political organization is completely without fault, these controversies must also be viewed within the context that communist parties in the US are regularly targeted by intelligence agencies for sabotage, as demonstrated by the FBI's [[COINTELPRO]] operation.

The PSL has been accused of being cult-like.<ref>[https://medium.com/@jacobscb/documentation-of-corruption-institutional-bigotry-and-high-control-group-cult-like-behavior-in-6afa65b8072e Medium post that is a directory of various accounts of PSL's bad behavior.]</ref>

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Communist parties]]
[[Category:Statesian communist parties]]

New Democracy

2023-03-21T01:18:08Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

The '''New Democracy (Chinese: 新民主主义; Pinyin:Xīn mínzhǔ zhǔyì)''' is a [[Revolution|revolutionary]] form of [[State|government]] developed by [[Mao Zedong]], based on the alliance of 4 [[Progressivism|progressive]] [[Social class|classes]] (the [[proletariat]] as the ideological core, the [[peasantry]], the urban [[petty bourgeoisie]] and the [[national bourgeoisie]]) in [[semi-feudal]] and [[semi-colonial]] countries. The goal of New Democracy is to advance to the [[dictatorship of the proletariat]] through the dictatorship of the 4 classes or the [[Dictatorship of the proletariat#People's Democratic Dictatorship|people's democratic dictatorship]]. As most countries that need New Democracy are [[Agriculture|agricultural]] countries, the peasantry is the engine of this type of revolution.<ref>{{Citation|author=Mao Zedong|year=1993|title=The New Democratic Revolution|chapter=Tasks of the Chinese Revolution|page=48|publisher=The Umut Publishing|trans-title=Yeni Demokratik Devrim|trans-lang=Turkish}}</ref>

== Chinese Revolution ==
China was a semi-feudal country. The [[Communist Party of China]] realized that the main power of the reactionary government was concentrated in the cities but weak in the countryside. There was exploitation of peasants by landlords. So one of the goals of the revolution was a [[land reform]]. For these reasons and due to the [[Shanghai Massacre]], the communists withdrew to the countryside.

China was a semi-colonial country. So one of the goals of the revolution was to achieve independence. The national bourgeoisie was one of the classes that supported this goal, as it was backward in competition with the [[comprador bourgeoisie]] and imperialist monopolies. However, the national bourgeoisie is a class with a dual character, lacking the courage to stand against imperialism and feudalism as a whole.<ref>{{Citation|author=Mao Zedong|year=1993|title=The New Democratic Revolution|chapter=Driving forces of the Chinese Revolution|section=b) Bourgeoisie|page=51|publisher=The Umut Publishing|trans-title=Yeni Demokratik Devrim|trans-lang=Turkish}}</ref>

== Other Countries ==
Today some communists from all over the World claim that their society is semi-feudal and semi-colonial. The communists in these countries declare the current revolutionary situation as New Democratic. People who see New Democracy as a universal reality are usually [[Maoism|Maoists]]. Some [[Maoism in Turkey|Maoists in Turkey]], [[Communist Party of the Philippines|Filipino Maoists]], [[Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path|Peruvian Maoists]] and [[Communist Party of India (Maoist)|Indian Maoists]] are the most well known.

== Criticism ==
Some [[Hoxhaism|Hoxhaists]] and other groups criticize New Democracy for "advocating [[class collaboration]]".

== References ==
[[Category:Mao Zedong Thought]]

Non-Communist Left

2023-03-20T13:45:39Z

SludgeyRevolution: Removing link that loops back to this page

The '''Non-Communist Left''' ('''NCL''') was a designation used in the [[United States Department of State|US State Department]] and [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] referring to left-wing intellectuals who took positions against the [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics|USSR]] under [[Joseph Stalin|Stalin]].<ref>{{Citation|author=Sarah Miller Harris|year=2016|title=The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War: The Limits of Making Common Cause (1st ed.)|chapter=The CIA and the non- Communist left|section=|page=|quote=|pdf=|city=|publisher=|isbn=|doi=|lg=|mia=|title-url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315669847/cia-congress-cultural-freedom-early-cold-war-sarah-miller-harris?refId=0ffab15f-93d7-4f1f-95ef-0c30dc759076&context=ubx|chapter-url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315669847-17/cia-non-communist-left-sarah-miller-harris|trans-title=|trans-lang=}}</ref> Arthur Schlesinger Jr. highlighted the group's growing power in a popular 1948 essay titled "Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center".<ref>http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schlesinger-notrightleft.html</ref> Another such publication was ''The God that Failed'' (1948), a collection consisting of six essays from former Communists who ostensibly remained on the left which was edited by R.H.S. Crossman.

Winning over and harnessing the power of the NCL became central to the US propaganda struggle against the USSR during the early [[Cold War]]. This strategy directly inspired the creation of the [[Congress for Cultural Freedom]] (CCF), as well as international journals like ''Der Monat'' and ''Encounter''; it also influenced existing publications such as the ''[[Partisan Review]]''.<ref>Saunders, ''Cultural Cold War'' (1999), pp. 162. "The headquarters of 'professional' anti-Stalinism was the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and the magazines whose editors who sat on its board, namely ''Commentary'', the ''New Leader'' and ''Partisan Review''."</ref>

Under these auspices and consequently in fashionable intellectual circles in the United States and Europe, anti-Stalinism became "almost a professional stance", "a total outlook on life, no less, or even a philosophy of history."<ref>[[Philip Rahv]], quoted in: Saunders, ''Cultural Cold War''(1999), pp. 161–2.</ref> Prominent figures in this group include Arthur Koestler, Melvin J. Lasky, Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook, Stephen Spender, Nicolas Nabokov, and Isaiah Berlin. (The NCL notably excluded [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] because it could not accept his individualistic existentialist views.) Key organizers of the CIA's Non-Communist Left operation, titled QKOPERA, included Frank Wisner, Lawrence de Neufville, Thomas Braden, Charles Douglas Jackson and Michael Josselson.<ref>Saunders, ''Cultural Cold War'' (1999), pp. 99</ref> Other supporters within the intelligence community included [[George F. Kennan]], [[W. Averell Harriman]] and General [[Lucius D. Clay]].<ref>Saunders, ''Cultural Cold War'' (1999), pp. 66.</ref>

The NCL began to lose its cohesion and its appeal to the CIA during the radicalism of the late 1960s. Opposition to the Vietnam War fractured the coalition, and 1967 revelations of CIA funding (by ''Ramparts'' and others) were embarrassing for many of the intellectuals involved. Soon after the story broke, Braden (with tacit support from the CIA) wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post which exposed CIA involvement with the Non-Communist Left and organized labor.<ref>Saunders, ''Cultural Cold War'' (1999), pp. 401–402. "Richard Helms, who was now director of the CIA, was, according to Rostow's memo, aware of the article, and conceivably of its contents also. The CIA had ample time to invoke its secrecy agreement with Braden, and prevent him publishing the piece."</ref><ref>Braden, Thomas (20 May 1967). "I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'". ''Saturday Evening Post''. pp. 10–14. Retrieved 19 September 2012.</ref> Some argued that this article represented an intentional and final break of the CIA with the NCL.<ref>Saunders, ''Cultural Cold War'' (1999), pp. 398–399.</ref>

== See Also ==

* [[Left-wing anticommunism]]
* [[Anti-Leninism]]
* [[New Left]]
* [[Eurocommunism]]
*[[Breadtube]]

== External links ==
{{External links|Wikipedia=Anti-Stalinist_left#Non-Communist_Left}}

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Anti-communism]]

Second Thought

2023-03-20T13:41:55Z

SludgeyRevolution: Changed category

{{Youtuber|name=Second Thought|nationality=[[Statesian]]|subscribers=1,330,000|views=137,298,978|URL=[https://www.youtube.com/c/SecondThought Second Thought]|birth_name=JT Chapman|occupation=Youtuber|years_active=2017–present|stats_update=16 September 2022|location=Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, [[Texas]], [[USA]]|logo=Second Thought image.png|Ideology=[[Marxism]]}}

'''Second Thought''' is a [[Socialism|socialist]] media outlet that produces medium-length online videos in English. It is produced by JT Chapman who lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, [[United States of America|United States]]. JT Chapman is also a co-host of the podcast [[The Deprogram]] with [[Hakim]] and [[Yugopnik]].

With over 1.3 million subscribers and 130 million views as of 2022, he is one of the most popular socialist creators on [[YouTube|youtube]].<ref>{{News citation|author=Second Thought|newspaper=Youtube|title=About|url=https://www.youtube.com/c/SecondThought/about|retrieved=2022-7-11}}</ref>

== Content ==
Second Thought creates content which is largely intended for more nascent socialists and communists. Furthermore, he largely focuses on social, political, and economic problems that are most relevant to viewers in the [[United States of America]]. He commonly addresses myths and propaganda spread by the [[corporate media]] about [[capitalism]], and uses factual information to show how it is an exploitive system.

He also tends to talk about present trends in the capitalist news, which often includes discrediting their lies. An example of Second Thought's reporting is its exposure of the Western media's lies about the [[2021 Cuban protests|2021 Cuban color revolution attempt]].<ref>{{News citation|journalist=|date=2021-07-30|title=The Truth About The Cuba Protests|url=https://youtu.be/zIOw6fSOJI4|newspaper=|archive-url=|archive-date=|retrieved=}}</ref>

== Links ==

* [https://www.youtube.com/c/SecondThought/ YouTube]
* [https://twitter.com/_SecondThought Twitter]
* [https://www.patreon.com/secondthought Patreon]

== Contact ==

* Business email: secondthought@standard.tv

== References ==
[[Category:Socialist media outlets]]
[[Category:Communist YouTube channels]]
<references />
[[Category:Targets of censorship]]

Cathy Rojas

2023-03-20T13:27:33Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox revolutionary|name=Cathy Rojas|birth_date=October 1991|birth_place=[[New York City]], [[United States of America|United States]]|political_party=[[Party for Socialism and Liberation]]|image=Cathy Rojas.png}}

'''Cathy Rojas''' (born October 1991) is a PSL member who ran for mayor of New York City and received 25,000 votes, more than all other third party candidates combined. The [[bourgeois media]] largely ignored her campaign and did not allow her on television debates.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=25,000 in NYC vote for a socialist mayor|date=2021-11-11|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/25000-in-nyc-vote-for-a-socialist-mayor/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221206142433/https://www.liberationnews.org/25000-in-nyc-vote-for-a-socialist-mayor/|archive-date=2022-12-06|retrieved=2023-01-13}}</ref>

== Platform ==
Rojas ran on the following 14-point program:

* Tax the [[Bourgeoisie|rich]]
* Provide jobs for all and [[Petty bourgeoisie|small business]] relief
* Defund the [[police]] and end police brutality
* Cancel all rents and mortgages
* Guarantee quality housing for all
* Upgrade and protect NYC Housing Authority
* Make the MTA free and public
* Fund quality public education
* End mass incarceration and cash bail
* Expand health care access across the city
* Make NYC environmentally sustainable
* Full equality for women and [[LGBT+|LGBTQIA+]] people
* Full rights for all immigrants
* Stand with all oppressed people fighting against [[colonialism]], [[imperialism]] and state repression<ref>{{Web citation|author=Adina Benno|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=Socialist Cathy Rojas announces run for New York City mayor|date=2021-06-29|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/socialist-cathy-rojas-announces-run-for-new-york-city-mayor/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221127005854/https://www.liberationnews.org/socialist-cathy-rojas-announces-run-for-new-york-city-mayor/|archive-date=2022-11-27|retrieved=2023-01-13}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Communist political candidates]]
[[Category:PSL members]]

Rosa Peñate

2023-03-20T13:26:45Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox politician|name=Rosa Peñate|birth_date=June 2, 1938|birth_place=[[El Salvador]]|death_date=March 1, 2020|death_place=San Francisco, [[California]], [[United States of America|United States]]|political_party=[[Party for Socialism and Liberation]]|image=Rosa Peñate.png}}

'''Rosa Peñate''' was a Salvadoran [[Communism|communist]] and founding member of PSL. She moved to the United States in 1968 and was a major supporter of the [[FMLN]] and [[Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities|Zapatistas]]. For 13 years, she organized to free five [[Republic of Cuba|Cuban]] political prisoners of the [[United States imperialism|U.S. empire]].<ref>{{Web citation|author=[[Gloria La Riva]]|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=Rosa Peñate, beloved comrade, presente!|date=2020-03-02|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/rosa-penate-beloved-comrade-presente/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221115150231/https://www.liberationnews.org/rosa-penate-beloved-comrade-presente/|archive-date=2022-11-15|retrieved=2022-11-27}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Communists]]
[[Category:PSL members]]

Joseph Little

2023-03-20T13:26:11Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox person|name=Joseph Little|birth_date=November 7, 1944|death_date=November 2010|death_place=[[New York City]], [[United States of America|United States]]|image=Joseph Little.png}}

'''Joseph Little''' was a Statesian [[Communism|communist]] and [[Party for Socialism and Liberation|PSL]] member. He was one of the last survivors of the 1971 [[Attica prison rebellion]]. He supported [[Frances Villar]]'s campaign for mayor of New York and protested against the U.S. invasion of [[Republic of Haiti|Haiti]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=Joseph Little, presente!|date=2010-11-18|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/10-11-18-joseph-little-presente-html/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210516100019/https://www.liberationnews.org/10-11-18-joseph-little-presente-html/|archive-date=2021-05-16|retrieved=2022-12-04}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Statesian communists]]
[[Category:PSL members]]

William Massey

2023-03-20T13:24:58Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

{{Infobox politician|name=William Massey|birth_date=1934|death_date=April 16, 2018|nationality=Statesian|political_party=[[Party for Socialism and Liberation]]|image=William Massey.png}}

'''William Massey''' was a [[United States of America|Statesian]] communist and founding member of PSL. He was arrested several times, including once at a [[House Committee on Un-American Activities]] meeting.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|author=Beth Semmer Massey|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=William Massey Presente! Honoring the life of a PSL founding member|date=2018-04-25|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/william-massey-presente-honoring-life-psl-founding-member/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220504163757/https://www.liberationnews.org/william-massey-presente-honoring-life-psl-founding-member/|archive-date=2022-05-04|retrieved=2022-11-28}}</ref>

== Early life ==
Massey was born in 1934 and attended Cardinal Hayes High School in [[New York City]]. He joined the [[United States Marine Corps|Marines]] but was later discharged.<ref name=":0" />

== Political activism ==
Massey hitchhiked to Albany, Georgia in 1962 to participate in the [[Civil rights movement]]. He joined the [[Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]] under the direction of [[James Forman]] and ended up in the same jail as [[Martin Luther King|Martin Luther King Jr.]] and [[Bob Zellner]]. He was radicalized in jail and joined the [[Socialist Workers Party (United States)|Socialist Workers Party]].

In 1974, he was expelled from the SWP and joined the newly founded [[Workers World Party]]. In 2004, he helped found the Party for Socialism and Liberation.<ref name=":0" />

== References ==
[[Category:Statesian communists]]
[[Category:PSL members]]

Gloria La Riva

2023-03-20T13:24:05Z

SludgeyRevolution: Replaced nonexistent category with existing one

{{Infobox politician|name=Gloria La Riva|political_line=[[Anti-imperialism]] [[Marxism–Leninism]] [[Socialism]]|birth_date=August 13, 1954|political_party=[[Party for Socialism and Liberation]]|image=Gloria La Riva.png}}

'''Gloria La Riva''' is a [[Party for Socialism and Liberation|PSL]] member who ran for [[President of the United States]] in 2016<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=La Riva for president campaign makes major strides for socialist movement|date=2020-11-20|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/la-riva-for-president-campaign-makes-major-strides-for-socialist-movement/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211207090943/https://www.liberationnews.org/la-riva-for-president-campaign-makes-major-strides-for-socialist-movement/|archive-date=2021-12-07|retrieved=2022-10-28}}</ref> and 2020.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=The socialist response to the 2020 presidential debate|date=2020-08-01|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/the-socialist-response-to-the-2020-presidential-debate/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211005031234/https://www.liberationnews.org/the-socialist-response-to-the-2020-presidential-debate/|archive-date=2021-10-05|retrieved=2022-08-27}}</ref> She campaigned to abolish the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]], and [[National Security Agency|NSA]], withdraw from the [[United Nations]], disarm the [[police]], and raise the [[minimum wage]] to $20 per hour.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Peter Gemma|newspaper=[[Liberation School]]|title=Interview with Gloria La Riva: ‘the fog of anti-communism is lifting’|date=2016-11-07|url=https://www.liberationschool.org/interview-with-gloria-la-riva-the-fog-of-anti-communism-is-lifting/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220722191458/https://www.liberationschool.org/interview-with-gloria-la-riva-the-fog-of-anti-communism-is-lifting/|archive-date=2022-07-22|retrieved=2022-08-27}}</ref> She received over 83,000 votes, the most for any [[Socialism|socialist]] candidate in over 40 years.<ref name=":0" />

== References ==
[[Category:PSL members]]
[[Category:Statesian communists]]
<references />
[[Category:Communist political candidates]]
[[Category:Politicians in the United States]]
[[Category:Statesian Marxists]]
[[Category:Communists]]

Category:Statesians of Belarusian descent

2023-03-20T13:17:08Z

SludgeyRevolution: Added category

[[Category:Statesians by descent]]