The "Second Internationalization" of the Western Left

Western leftists pride themselves on seeing through government and corporate media propaganda. Sadly, that's not always the case.

[The following is a brief, slightly revised excerpt from a longer essay I recently wrote on the US’s continued striving for global dominance, the propaganda component of that effort, and the growing struggle against US hegemony, “The Elephant in the Room IS The Elephant in the Room.”]

Left Anticommunism

In 1997, Michael Parenti wrote about “left anticommunism,” the tendency for Western leftists to have nothing good to say about existing socialist governments, if they even acknowledged them as such at all—the term “state capitalism” has been quite popular in some left circles even though there has typically been far less economic inequality in socialist societies than in capitalist ones, and the majority of productive assets were publicly owned and not run on a for-profit basis. Those of us who acknowledge that the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, etc. accomplished many good things are labeled as “Stalinists” or “tankies” by many of these “no true Scotsman” types

even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. (Parenti, 1997, p. 45-46)

Thus, it is not surprising that the overthrow of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies was cheered by many Western leftists, who naively thought that it would usher in an era of “democracy” rather than the rapacious neoliberalism that actually ensued, and overlooked the extent to which the USSR’s support for revolutionary movements and socialist governments in the Global South was crucial to their success or even survival.

This sort of perspective on an existing socialist regime was expressed to me recently. A comrade told me that he believed that “China is an imperialist country dominated by private billionaires and a ‘Communist’ party that rules dictatorially on their behalf,” and that “the Chinese CP and state impose the Han culture coercively everywhere.” Nowhere in this worldview is it acknowledged that China lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty during the last four decades, that it has successfully dealt with the COVID pandemic to an extent not rivaled by any capitalist country, that the commanding heights of the economy are controlled by the government and utilized to facilitate economic growth that has been more rapid than in any capitalist country in history, or that it has invested in an ecologically sustainable future to an extent unrivaled by any capitalist country, with a fraction of the per capita greenhouse gas emissions of European countries or the US despite producing 30% of the world’s manufactured goods. As for the claim that Han culture is “imposed coercively everywhere,” to say the least this claim has a hard time accounting for the facts that ethnic minorities were exempted from the one-child policy China pursued until 2015, that Xinjiang province has one of the highest concentrations of mosques in the world, or that education is conducted in minority groups’ native languages as well as in Mandarin. (In contrast, minority groups’ native languages and cultures have been actively suppressed in locales throughout the Western world—New Zealand, Hawaii, the continental US, Canada, and the list goes on.)

History Repeats Itself: Leftist Warmongering in the 21st Century

But the warping of Western leftists’ views by the ideas of the ruling class can extend far beyond relatively uncritical acceptance of at least a big chunk of the anticommunist conventional wisdom of the societies they have lived in throughout their lives, as exemplified by the support of self-described socialists (particularly members of the Second International) for their respective ruling classes during World War I (along with their reformism and electoralism). We see history repeating itself in many respects over the past few decades. The German Green Party supported the Iraq War. Self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders has supported the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999, the sanctions and bombing of Iraq in the ’90s, military aid to Israel, and a host of other aspects of US foreign policy, and routinely denounces the leaders of official US enemy countries as “authoritarian” or “dictators” even when they are popularly elected. Democracy Now!, once a pillar of the US anti-war movement, now uncritically repeats US government/corporate media propaganda about Syria used to justify US-backed regime change efforts there, interviewed a rabidly anticommunist opponent of the Venezuelan government in an uncritical manner, and features anti-China propagandists such as Adrian Zenz in its almost uniformly negative coverage of China. The 2019 Socialism Conference, backed by an assortment of US socialist groups and media outlets, featured speakers who advocated regime change in Nicaragua, Syria, and Cuba and/or were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. More recently, many of these same forces have characterized Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as unprovoked, imperialist aggression, completely omitting any mention of the 2014 US-backed, fascist-led coup in Ukraine, the 8-year war waged against its largely ethnically Russian eastern provinces for their desire to seek independence from a government hostile to them, or the reign of terror and persecution that has ensued in Ukraine for ethnic Russians, communists, Roma people, etc. (I discussed this historical context in detail here recently.) The Green Party’s 2020 Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins has supported the US’s and NATO’s arming of the Ukrainian government, characterizing its purpose as supporting Ukraine’s “self-defense and national liberation” and attacking those of us who oppose US/NATO intervention in Ukraine as supporting “a ‘peace’ that brings the violence of Russian colonial domination and a ‘peace’ of the graveyard for many Ukrainians who are and will be victims of it.” It is curious that the right of self-determination of (now former) eastern and southern Ukrainians who no longer wanted to be associated with a government that has oppressed and violently attacked them for eight years is airbrushed out of existence by Howie and the other “NATO socialists.”

Even though they may see the elephant in the room of US hegemony, many Western leftists fail to appreciate the significance of its influence on the world (including sometimes on their own political views) or, conversely, the extent of opposition to its hegemony outside the imperialist West. A comrade recently told me that he believed that “we…know enough about the undemocratic processes of the Chinese regime [sic]” to deem the recently issued UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights report on alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang province (which he had not read) credible unless there is evidence to the contrary. I asked him what he thought we “knew” about the Chinese government’s lack of democracy, but got no response. In any case, forgive my bluntness, but it seems very naive to begin with the assumption that a UN OHCHR report on a country whose stability and sovereignty the US has been attempting to undermine would be likely to be unbiased. And in fact, former OHCHR staffer Alfred de Zayas has written that the report was very biased (a topic I will cover in detail some other time), that it was hardly the first time the OHCHR had put out a biased report on a country the US is hostile towards, and that the OHCR is routinely—including in this case—put under extreme pressure to issue a report that reinforces US propaganda narratives about such countries. Those narratives, in turn, are driven by the US ruling class’ desire to portray its rivals as evil and sinister (and obscure its own aims and actions), so as to justify its illegal and violent efforts to thwart challenges to its global dominance.

The bottom line is that the US continues to be the “elephant” on the world stage militarily, politically, economically, and ideologically. Equally importantly, there are growing challenges to US hegemony, and in fact China is poised to become the world’s leading economy within the next few years. We cannot understand any important aspect of what is going on in the world politically—the conflict in Ukraine, the US’s ramping up of tensions with China, allegations in the media or supposedly independent international bodies about human rights violations in this or that country whose government the US ruling class openly expresses a desire to overthrow, etc.—without keeping these central facts in mind, and trying to work out the role they play in world events as well as how we understand them. Otherwise, we are like the proverbial blind men trying and failing to identify what an elephant is by touching it. The elephant is there for us all to see. All we have to do is open our eyes.