GRAYZONE EDITOR MAX BLUMENTHAL ARRESTED IN DC MONTHS AFTER REPORTING ON VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION VIOLENCE by Ben Norton, oct 30, 2019

GRAYZONE EDITOR MAX BLUMENTHAL ARRESTED MONTHS AFTER REPORTING ON VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION VIOLENCE

By Ben Norton

October 28, 2019

MAX BLUMENTHAL HAS BEEN ARRESTED ON FALSE CHARGES AFTER REPORTING ON VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION VIOLENCE OUTSIDE THE DC EMBASSY. HE DESCRIBES THE MANUFACTURED CASE AS PART OF A WIDER CAMPAIGN OF POLITICAL PERSECUTION.

Max Blumenthal, the editor of the news site The Grayzone, was arrested on the morning of October 25 on a fabricated charge related to the siege of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC that took place between April and May.

A team of DC police officers appeared at Blumenthal’s door at just after 9 AM, demanding entry and threatening to break his door down. A number of officers had taken positions on the side of his home as though they were prepared for a SWAT-style raid.

Blumenthal was hauled into a police van and ultimately taken to DC central jail, where he was held for two days in various cells and cages. He was shackled by his hands and ankles for over five hours in one such cage along with other inmates. His request for a phone call was denied by DC police and corrections officers, effectively denying him access to the outside world.

Blumenthal was informed that he was accused of simple assault by a Venezuelan opposition member. He declared the charge completely baseless.

“This charge is a 100 percent false, fabricated, bogus, untrue, and malicious lie,” Blumenthal declared. “It is clearly part of a campaign of political persecution designed to silence me and the The Grayzone for our factual journalism exposing the deceptions, corruption and violence of the far-right Venezuelan opposition.”

The arrest warrant was five months old. According to an individual familiar with the case, the warrant for Blumenthal’s arrest was initially rejected. Strangely, this false charge was revived months later without the defendant’s knowledge.

“If the government had at least told me I had a warrant I could have voluntarily surrendered and appeared at my own arraignment. I have nothing to fear because I’m completely innocent of this bogus charge,” Blumenthal stated. “Instead, the federal government essentially enlisted the DC police to SWAT me, ensuring that I would be subjected to an early morning raid and then languish in prison for days without even the ability to call an attorney.”

BACKGROUND TO THE EMBASSY SIEGE

In April and May, Washington-backed Venezuelan coup leaders began taking over properties in the United States that belong to the internationally recognized government of Venezuela’s democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro, in violation of international law.

A group of activists responded by keeping a vigil inside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC, in order to protect it from an illegal seizure by the US-supported coup leaders. The activists formed what they called the Embassy Protection Collective. The internationally recognized Venezuelan government gave them permission to stay in its embassy, which is its own sovereign territory under international law.

In response, hordes of violent right-wing activists who support the Venezuelan opposition launched a de facto 24/7 siege of the embassy, preventing people, food, and supplies from entering the building.

The Grayzone reporter Anya Parampil and Alex Rubinstein, a contributor to The Grayzone, were embedded in the embassy with several peace activists.

Parampil and journalists including Blumenthal documented the right-wing mobs lashing out with racist and sexist invective as well as violence at Venezuelan solidarity activists who gathered outside the embassy to show support for the protectors.

‘THIS GINNED UP CLAIM… IS SIMPLY FALSE’

Court documents indicate the false charge of simple assault stems from Blumenthal’s participation in a delivery of food and sanitary supplies to peace activists and journalists inside the Venezuelan embassy on May 8, 2019.

The charge was manufactured by a Venezuelan opposition member who was among those laying siege to the embassy in a sustained bid to starve out the activists inside.

“I was not party to any violent actions around the Venezuelan embassy,” Blumenthal reiterated. “This ginned up claim of simple assault is simply false.”

According to court documents, Ben Rubinstein, the brother of journalist Alex Rubinstein, also participated in the non-violent and legal food delivery. Rubinstein was arrested over 12 hours later after the food delivery by Secret Service police officers.

He spent 20 hours in jail, alongside Gerry Condon, president of Veterans for Peace, who was arrested after being brutalized by Secret Service officers for attempting to toss a cucumber inside an embassy window.

“The opposition members made up these lies about Max and I know they’re lying, and they are obviously using the government and police as tools to get revenge,” Ben Rubinstein told The Grayzone.

RETALIATION FOR THE GRAYZONE’S REPORTING ON THE VIOLENT VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION

Max Blumenthal reported extensively from outside the Venezuelan embassy in May. He filed a story explaining how “the pro-coup mob outside turned violent, physically assaulting embassy protectors, and hurling racist, sexist and homophobic abuse at others.”

Blumenthal documented an opposition activist breaking into and subsequently vandalizing the embassy, in violation of international law. He also reported on opposition members destroying the embassy’s security cameras, while the authorities stood idly by.

The Venezuelan coup regime’s supposed ambassador to the United States, Carlos Vecchio, who is not recognized by the United Nations and the vast majority of the international community, helped to lead this aggressive mob as it besieged the embassy.

The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil exposed Vecchio to be a former lawyer for the oil corporation Exxon. The Grayzone has documented his close links to the US government, and has reported at length on accusations of corruption. Vecchio was a regular presence outside the DC embassy, appearing with his gaggle to stage manage the situation.

The Grayzone has also published numerous exposés on Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, who was selected by the US government to be the so-called “interim president” in Caracas, detailing his extensive ties to Washington and his notorious corruption.

Blumenthal was arrested literally hours after The Grayzone published an article on USAID paying the salaries of Guaidó’s team as they lobbied the US government.

“I am firmly convinced that this case is part of a wider campaign of political persecution using the legal system to shut down our factual investigative journalism about the coup against Venezuela and the wider policy of economic warfare and regime change waged by the Trump administration,” Blumenthal stated.

If this had happened to a journalist in Venezuela, every Western human rights NGO and news wire would be howling about Maduro’s authoritarianism. It will be revealing to see how these same elements react to a clear-cut case of political repression in their own backyard.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker.  He is associate  editor of The Grayzone, where this article appeared.

United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow by Harry Targ, Monthly Review, Oct 23, 2019

U.S. troopers move through burning shacks in the Sunchon/Sukchon area of North Korea, Oct. 20, 1950. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow

 Oct 23, 2019 by Harry Targ

 

Just before the Korean War started in 1950, post-World War key foreign policy advisers to President Truman threw their support behind recommendations made in a classified document, National Security Council Document 68, which recommended a dramatic increase in military spending. NSC-68 also recommended that military spending from that point on should be the number one priority of the national government. When presidents sit down to construct a federal budget, the document recommended, they should first allocate all the money requested by military and corporate elites and lobbyists concerned with military spending. Only after that the military advocates receive all they request should government programs address education, health care, roads, transportation, housing and other critical domestic issues. When the United States entered the Korean War, in June, 1950, Truman endorsed the recommendations of NSC 68 and used the war on the Korean peninsula as justification. In Andrew Bacevich’s words the United States fully committed to a “permanent war economy.” As political scientist, Hans Morgenthau wrote about that time; there was no turning back from the new war economy and a “Cold War” against the former Soviet Union. Each subsequent president expanded on the war economy and the narrative of a dangerous world that justified trillions of dollars of spending. According to Chalmers Johnson (Blowback, Sorrows of Empire), between 1947 and 1990, the permanent war economy cost the American people close to $9 trillion. Ruth Sivard (World Military Expenditures) presented data to indicate that over 100,000 U.S. military personnel died in wars and military interventions during this period. And, in other countries, nearly 10 million people died directly or indirectly in wars in which the United States was a participant.

Seventy years later, Trump era military budgets have reached record highs, $738 billion dollars in the 2020 fiscal year and a projected $740 billion in 2021. As William Hartung wrote: “The agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II (in Jake Johnson, ‘Unprecedented, Wasteful, and Obscene’: House Approves $1.48 Trillion Pentagon Budget,” Common Dreams, Friday, July 26, 2019). Including past and present military-related spending the War Resisters League estimates that the 2020 federal budget will consist of 48 percent of all spending, exceeding non-military spending by six percent. Just one weapon, the notorious F-35 latest generation fighter plane is costing, by conservative estimates, $1.5 trillion. (Manufacturing facilities for the plane are found in 433 of 435 Congressional districts).

Rationalizing the Permanent War Economy

A factional dispute among foreign policy elites began to emerge in the 1970s about the best strategies and tactics which should be pursued to maximize the continued global economic, political, and military dominance of the United States in the international system. The dispute was not over whether the United States should continue to pursue empire but rather how to continue to achieve it. The debates were occasioned by the rise of the countries of the Global South, the societally wrenching experience of the Vietnam War, the growth of power and influence of the former Soviet Union, and since its collapse, the emergence of China as a new global economic, political and military power. In addition, the new international economy was becoming more global, that is to say more interconnected. Debates about strategy, tactics, surfaced between the neoliberal globalists who emphasized so-called free trade, financial speculation, and the promotion of a neoliberal agenda that advocated for the privatization of all public activities by states and the development of austerity policies that would shift wealth from the many to the few. The international debt system would be the vehicle for pressuring poor and rich countries to transform their own economic agendas. This faction dominated United States foreign policy making for generations, particularly from Reagan to Clinton to Obama. In political/military terms, they have sought to push back challengers to neoliberal capitalism: Russia, China, populist Latin American countries, and they have advocated advancing US economic interests in Asia and Africa. Many of the institutions of the neoliberal globalists, sometimes called the “deep state” include the CIA, NSA, and other security agencies.

The other faction represented by President Trump and some of his key aides prefer economic nationalism, restricted trade, building walls, avoiding diplomacy, and they are driven by a deeply held white supremacist ideology. They believe, as political scientist Samuel Huntington argued, that we are engaged in a civilizational conflict with Islam, a fourth world war. The neoliberal globalists undermined Ukraine, put more NATO troops in Eastern Europe and want to depose Putin and weaken Russia. This is not on the Trump agenda.

The forbearers of the current generation of Trumpian economic nationalists, came from the so-called “neo-conservatives,” historically organized around the 1990s lobby group, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and in the 1950s and 1970s of The Committee for the Present Danger (CPD). Both the neoliberals and the neoconservatives share a common vision of a global political economy controlled by the United States but the former prefer selective use of military force and greater use of economic and diplomatic pressure and covert interventionism while justifying policy on humanitarian grounds, including expanding democracy. Since, they say, the United States represents the hope of democracy in the world, it is as Madeleine Albright called it. “the indispensable nation.” The neoconservatives, in a sense more frank, argued that with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the United States was the hegemonic power. With that power PNAC argued, the United States should have imposed a world order and state regimes that comported with US interests and ideology. Over the years, the policies of the two factions converged; hence economic penetration, covert interventions, occasional wars, and support for expanding military spending. But, often for reasons of domestic rather than international politics, conflicts between the two factions resurface. That is the case in 2019.

The Ruling Class Agenda for the United States Role in the World: Before the 2016 election

From a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:

HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being eroded.China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is worth saving, and it is worth reminding ourselves why: It generated unprecedented global prosperity, lifting billions of people out of poverty; democratic government, once rare, spread to more than 100 nations; and for seven decades there has been no cataclysmic war among the great powers. No wonder U.S. engagement with the world enjoyed a bipartisan consensus.

The Washington  Post editorial quoted above clearly articulates the dominant view envisioned by US foreign policy elites for the years ahead: about global political economy, militarism, and ideology. It in effect constitutes a synthesis of the “neocon” and the “liberal interventionist” wings of the ruling class. First, it is inspired by the necessity of 21st century capitalism to defend neoliberal globalization: government for the rich, austerity for the many, and deregulation of trade, investment, and speculation. (Neoliberal globalization, the latest phase in the development of international capitalism is described in an important recent book, Jerry Harris, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy, Clarity Press, 2016).

Second, the Post vision of a New World Order is built upon a reconstituted United States military and economic hegemony that has been a central feature of policymaking at least since the end of World War II even though time after time it has suffered setbacks: from defeat in Vietnam, to radical decolonization across the Global South, and to the rise of competing poles of power in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and even Europe. In addition, despite recent setbacks, grassroots mass mobilizations against neoliberal globalization and austerity policies have risen everywhere, even in the United States. The Washington Post speaks to efforts to reassemble the same constellation of political forces, military resources, and concentrated wealth, that, if anything, is greater than at any time since the establishment of the US “permanent war economy” after the last World War.

Historian, Michael Stanley, in an essay entitled “‘We are Not Denmark’: Hillary Clinton and Liberal American Exceptionalism,” (Common Dreams, February 26, 2016) points to the ideological glue that is used by foreign policy elites, liberal and conservative, to justify the pursuit of neoliberal globalization and militarism; that is the reintroduction of the old idea of American Exceptionalism, which in various forms has been used by elites since the foundation of the Republic.

The modern version, borne in the context of continental and global expansion, serves to justify an imperial US role in the world. Along with posturing that the United States is somehow special and has much to offer the world, American Exceptionalism presumes the world has little to offer the United States. The only difference between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy is whether the exceptionalism still exists and must be maintained or has dissipated requiring the need to “make America great again.” Leaders of both parties, however, support the national security state, high military expenditures, and a global presence—military, economic, political, and cultural.

“Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge:” Council on Foreign Relations 2019

The influential Council on Foreign Relations issued a Task Force report in September, 2019, on national security. Task force members included representatives of prestigious universities, large corporations, and staff from the CFR. In the forward, the report pointed out that the United States had led the world in technological innovation and development since the end of World War Two. But, it said, “…the United States risks falling behind its competitors, principally China.” It goes on to propose that the United States “…needs to respond urgently and comprehensively over the next five years and put forward a national security innovation strategy to ensure it is the predominant power in a range of emerging technologies such as AI and data science, advanced battery storage, advanced semiconductor technologies, genomics and synthetic biology, fifth-generation cellular networks (5G), quantum information systems, and robotics.” The report calls for increases in federal support for basic research and development. This would include investments in higher education, selective immigration of skilled scientists, and reform of military institutions to more effectively incorporate new technologies into military capabilities.

Major findings of the Task Force included the following:

• Technological innovation leads to economic and military advantage.
• US leadership in science and innovation is at risk.
• US federal funding for research and development has stagnated for years.
• US leadership in STEM education is declining
• The Defense Department and the intelligence community risk falling behind “potential adversaries” if they do not employ more technologies from the private sector.
• The defense community “faces deteriorating manufacturing capabilities,” and “insecure” supply chains, while depending on other nations for technologies.
• There is a ”cultural divide” surfacing between technology and policymaking communities weakening connections between the defense and intelligence communities and the private sector.
  And, as to our major competitor China:
• China is investing significantly in new technologies and will be the world’s biggest investor by 2030.
• China is closing “the technological gap” with the United States, and it and other countries are approaching the US as to artificial intelligence (AI).
• China is “exploiting” the openness of the US to secure valuable innovation by violating intellectual property rights.

While praising President Trump for some of his efforts the report says that increased budgets have been too “incremental and narrow in scale.” The Administration has inadequately moved to develop new communications technologies, and to respond to the challenge of Huawei’s global expansion.

Therefore the United States must:

• restore federal funding for research and development.
• attract and educate a science and technology workforce.
• support technology adoption in the defense sector.
• bolster and scale technology alliances and ecosystems.

In short, “during the early years of the Cold War, confronted by serious technological and military competition from the Soviet Union, the United States invested heavily in its scientific base. Those investments ensured U.S. technological leadership for fity years. Faced with the rise of China and a new wave of disruptive technological innovation, the country needs a similar vision and an agenda for realizing it.” (9)

Where Does the Foreign Policy of Donald Trump Fit?

Taking “the long view” of United States foreign policy, it is clear that from NSC-68; to the response to the Soviet challenges in space such as during the Sputnik era; to global wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; to covert interventions in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has pursued global hegemony (and is suggested in the CFR statement). It is also clear that the pursuit of empire has of necessity involved the creation of a permanent war economy, an economy that overcomes economic stagnation by the infusion of enormous military expenditures.

It is also clear that justification for empire and military spending has necessitated the construction of an enemy, first the Soviet Union and international communism; then terrorism; and now China. The obverse of a demonic enemy requires a conception of self to justify the imperial project. That self historically has been various iterations of American exceptionalism, the indispensable nation, US humanitarianism, and implicitly or explicitly the superiority of the white race and western civilization.

In this light, while specific policies vary, the trajectory of US foreign policy in the twenty-first century is a continuation of the policies and programs that were institutionalized in the twentieth century. Three seem primary. First, military spending, particularly in new technologies continues unabated. And the CFR report raises the danger of the United States “falling behind,” the same metaphor that was used by the writers of the NSC-68 document, or the Gaither and Rockefeller Reports composed in the late 1950s to challenge President Eisenhower’s worry about a military/industrial complex, the response to Sputnik, Secretary of Defense McNamara’s transformation of the Pentagon to scientific management in the 1960s, or President Reagan’s huge increase of armaments in the 1980s to overcome the “window of vulnerability.”

Second, the United States continues to engage in policies recently referred to as “hybrid wars.” The concept of hybrid wars suggests that while traditional warfare between nations has declined, warfare within countries has increased. Internal wars, the hybrid wars theorists suggest, are encouraged and supported by covert interventions, employing private armies, spies, and other operatives financed by outside nations like the United States. Also the hybrid wars concept also refers to the use of economic warfare, embargoes and blockades, to bring down adversarial states and movements. The blockades of Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are examples. So the hybrid war concept suggests the carrying out of wars by other, less visible, means.

Third, much of the discourse on the US role in the world replicates the bipolar, super power narrative of the Cold War. Only now the enemy is China. As Alfred McCoy has pointed out (In the Shadows of the American Empire, 2017), the United States in the twenty first century sees its economic hegemony being undermined by Chinese economic development and global reach. To challenge this, McCoy argues, the United States has taken on a project to recreate its military hegemony: AI, a space force, biometrics, new high tech aircraft etc. If the US cannot maintain its hegemony economically, it will have to do so militarily. This position is the centerpiece of the recent CFR Task Force Report.

Recognizing these continuities in United States foreign policy, commentators appropriately recognize the idiosyncrasies of foreign policy in the Trump era. He has reached out to North Korea and Russia (which has had the potential of reducing tensions in Asia and Central Europe). He has rhetorically claimed that the United States must withdraw military forces from trouble spots around the world, including the Middle East. He has declared that the United States cannot be “the policeman of the world,” a declaration made by former President Nixon as he escalated bombing of Vietnam and initiated plans to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile. For some of these measures, Trump has been inappropriately criticized by Democrats and others. Tension-reduction on the Korean Peninsula, for example, should have been encouraged.

However, while Trump moves in one direction he almost immediately undermines the policies he has ordered. His announced withdrawal from Syria, while in the abstract a sign of a more realistic assessment of US military presence in the Middle East was coupled with a direct or implied invitation to the Turkish military to invade Northeast Syria to defeat the Kurds. Also, at the same time he was withdrawing troops from Syria, the Defense Department announced the United States was sending support troops to Saudi Arabia. He withdrew from the accord with Iran on nuclear weapons and the Paris Climate Change agreement. Time after time, one foreign policy decision is contradicted by another. These contradictions occur over and over with allies as well as traditional adversaries. Sometimes policies seem to be made with little historical awareness and without sufficient consultation with professional diplomats. (One is reminded of the old Nixon idea, the so-called “madman theory.” Nixon allegedly wanted to appear mad so that adversaries would be deterred from acting in ways contrary to US interests out of fear of random responses).

The contradictory character of Trump foreign policy has left the peace movement befuddled. How does it respond to Trump’s occasional acts that go against the traditional imperial grain at the same time that he acts impetuously increasing the dangers of war? How does the peace movement participate in the construction of a progressive majority that justifiably seeks to overturn the Trump era and all that it stands for: climate disaster, growing economic inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and hybrid war? Perhaps the task for the peace movement is to include in the project of building a progressive majority ideas about challenging the US as an imperial power, proclaiming that a progressive agenda requires the dismantling of the permanent war economy. These are truly troubled times, with to a substantial degree the survival of humanity and nature at stake. The war system is a significant part of what the struggle is about.

The election results in Toronto tell a story the NDP does not want to hear

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2019,   THELEFTCHAPTER.BLOGSPOT.Com

The election results in Toronto tell a story the NDP does not want to hear

The NDP's Toronto federal elections results really put the lie to a number of the narratives their partisans and organizers are trying to spin.

Already the line -- also adopted by a surprising number of "left" commentators outside the party -- that the NDP would now be more "powerful" even after losing over 600,000 votes and 20 seats because "it will hold the balance of power" has been shown to be an illusion.

Justin Trudeau very quickly ruled out any type of coalition and why wouldn't he. Only needing 13 votes to pass legislation he can turn to the Bloc Quebecois, the NDP or even the Conservatives in some cases. None of the parties will really want to fight another election too quickly for a variety of reasons so it is pretty safe to say the Liberals are likely to get at least a couple of years out of this minority without the need of explicitly pandering to the NDP at all even if you assume the NDP would have pushed a radical agenda in exchange for its support which I do not.

The case of the NDP backing austerity budgets during the minority Liberal government in Ontario shows that their price can usually be had pretty cheap.

There has also been a tendency in some quarters to try to say the party's lackluster results are due largely to "racist Quebec". Dave McKee deals with this bogus line very effectively in the People's Voice piece "ELECTION RESULTS NO EXCUSE FOR NATIONAL CHAUVINISM". As McKee notes:

Upon seeing that the NDP had been reduced to a single seat, CBC anchor opined, “It is fair to also ask whether Quebec was ready for a person of colour to be leading a party.” When Chantal Hebert pointed out that the Bloc Quebecois “ate [all of] the Liberals, the Conservatives and the NDP,” Barton quickly moved to another question. Whereas elsewhere in the country, the NDP’s poor results were packaged into somewhat understandable or even supportable excuses, its near wipeout in Quebec was immediately attributed to racism.
Never mind that Maxime Bernier, leader of the ultra-right racist People’s Party was trounced in the Quebec riding he’d held since 2006. Never mind that a key issue for Quebecers is supply management in agriculture, a system the Bloc squarely committed to defending. Never mind that the same CBC election broadcast included a clip of an anglophone Canadian saying of Jagmeet Singh that “people aren’t ready for his [points to her hair] religion.” And never mind the numerous incidents of racism that Singh directly encountered in English-speaking Canada, virtually all of which were celebrated as examples of the NDP leader’s “principled response” rather than condemned as examples of xenophobia.
The narrative that “Quebec is the racist core of Canada” is not confined to CBC or other media pundits. It has, unfortunately, been echoed by some on the political left, with comments ranging from a smug tsk-tsk to outright bigotry against Quebecers. Much of this discourse seeks cultural evidence by pointing to Quebec’s “Law on the Secularism of the State”, Bill 21, which bans most public workers from wearing or displaying religious symbols and is widely understood to be focused on Muslims. But the legislation has received a lot of opposition within Quebec.

Obviously NDP partisans are upset that the big upsurge in support they were insisting was occurring, despite the rather scant evidence for it, did not happen. If not scapegoating Quebec they have also turned to the notion that "at the last second" voters in places like Toronto changed their minds and voted Liberal out of fear swinging ridings to Trudeau that Singh and crew had been about to win.

To some extent this probably did occur, though as we will see this is a deeper trend than New Democrats might want to admit and cannot be used to explain everything away. Despite their protestations that the NDP was running on a truly "left" platform that was resonating with voters there was actually no indication that this was the case going into the election at all.

In fact, despite knowing when the election would occur the NDP was totally disorganized, its headquarters obsessively blocking or ghosting potential nominees for months meaning they had many ridings with no candidates just a few weeks or even days before the writ dropped, and far from having done the work to build momentum on the ground or in the streets that you need to do to promote a transformative platform the party was only saved from oblivion by the combination of a terrible outing by the Greens and a good couple of weeks from Singh.

The NDP's fate is always tied to electoral shifts like this as it eschews any meaningful movement orientation between elections of any kind and has been entirely electorally focused for decades. I still remember NDP partisans confident that Tom Mulcair's strength as a parliamentarian and during things like Question Period would bring victory and impress the people prior to the 2015 election.  Of course it didn't.

With a party's outcomes being based on the whims and short-term currents of bourgeois electoralism you can be up one week and down the next given the reality that most voters do not really think there is all that much that fundamentally separates parties like the Liberals and the NDP.

They are not wrong. Decades of the NDP in "power" in many provinces as well as in opposition have shown this to be a basically sound assessment regardless of whether the NDP brass have decided to cycle rhetorically more left or more centrist in this or that election and in response to this or that trend. So if the one looks the more likely to win than the other many progressives often don't really care either way.

That the NDP's various incarnations over the years have failed to build a serious base of support and left movement in places where they absolutely need it to "win" or to have any true influence on the country's political agenda is made nowhere more clear than in its results in Toronto.

Doug Nesbitt compiled a very telling chart of the NDP's fortunes in the city of Toronto since 1962 federally which I am using here with permission.

These are not relative numbers they are the NDP's vote and seat wins in absolute terms meaning that in 2019 the party only took just over 1,000 more votes in Toronto than it did in 1972 and won 5 fewer seats. As we all know, Toronto's population is much higher now and there were 5 fewer seats to win in 1972 so this looks even worse once that is factored in.

Not only did the Liberals win far more votes in Toronto in 2019 (681,551) so did the Conservatives (291,776). Only in the riding of Davenport did the NDP come close enough to winning for a last second shift to be a believable explanation for the loss.

Toronto is quite possibly the most diverse city in the world. It is politically progressive overall and given the pressures many Torontonians face in terms of housing, transit, the high cost of living and the consequences of social inequality and stratification, the failure of the NDP to build support that is not ephemeral in it tells a story the party does not seem to want to hear or learn from.

If you spend decades running on platforms that are just ever so slightly to the "left" of the Liberals, that are indistinguishable now from the Greens and that are packaged and framed with all the usual cynicism and "what is in the news this week" electoral thinking of bourgeois party politics then this is the likely result.

The NDP can try to spin the 2019 election as if it is detached from a broader reality all they want. But it is not and the fact that they are getting the same number of votes in Toronto that they did 47 years ago makes that pretty clear.

Capital not ideology, Michael Roberts

Capital not ideology, Michael Roberts

https://bit.ly/2pAiFJ3

Back in 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty published a blockbuster book, Capital in the 21st century.  Repeating the name of Marx’s Capital, the implication of the title was that it was an updating Marx’s 19th century critique of capitalism for the 21st century.  Piketty argued that the inequality of income and wealth in the major capitalist economies had reached extremes not seen since the late 18th century and unless something was done, inequality would continue to rise.

The book had a huge impact, not just among economists (particularly in America, less so in France) but also among the general public.  Two million copies were sold of this monumental 800p publication which was full of theoretical arguments, empirical data and anecdotes to explain increased inequality of wealth in modern capitalist economies.  The book eventually won the dubious honour for the most bought book that nobody read, taking over from Stephen Hawking’s The Brief History of Time.  I suppose Marx’s Capital is also part of this club.

Many critiques of Piketty’s arguments followed, both from the mainstream and the heterodox.  Piketty has made a great contribution in the empirical work that he, fellow Frenchman Daniel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez have made in estimating the levels of inequality in capitalist economies.  And before that, there was the father of inequality studies, the recently deceased Anthony Atkinson, (whose work was the foundation of my own PhD thesis on inequality of wealth in 19th century Britain).

But, as I argued in my own critique of Piketty, which was published in Historical Materialism at the time, Piketty was not following Marx at all – indeed, he trashed Marx’s economic theory based on the law of value and profitability. For Piketty, the exploitation of labour by capital was not the issue but the ownership of wealth (ie property and financial assets), which enabled the rich to increase their share of total income in an economy.  So it was not the replacement of the capitalist mode of production that was needed but the redistribution of the wealth accumulated by the rich.

Piketty’s fame among the mainstream soon faded.  At the 2015 annual conference of the American Economic Association, Piketty was feted, if criticised.  Within a year, all was forgotten. Now, six years later, Piketty has followed up with a new book, Capital and Ideology, which is even larger: some 1200pp; as one reviewer said, longer than War and Peace. Whereas the first book provided theory and evidence on inequality, this book seeks to explain why this had been allowed to happen in the second half of the 20th century.  And from that, he proposes some policies to reverse it.  Piketty broadens the scope of his analysis to the entire world and presents a historical panorama of how ownership of assets (including people) was treated, and justified, in various historical societies, from China, Japan, and India, to the European-ruled American colonies, and feudal and capitalist societies in Europe.

His premise is that inequality is a choice. It’s something ‘societies’ opt for, not an inevitable result of technology and globalisation. Whereas Marx saw ideologies as a product of class interests, Piketty takes the idealist view that history is a battle of ideologies. The major economies have increased inequalities because the ruling elites have provided bogus justifications for inequality. Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. All these justifications add up to what he calls the “sacralisation of property”.

The job of economists is to expose these bogus arguments.  Take billionaires. “How can we justify that their existence is necessary for the common good? Contrary to what is often said, their enrichment was obtained thanks to collective goods, which are the public knowledge, the infrastructures, the laboratories of research.” (Shades of Mariana Mazzucato’s work here).  The notion that billionaires create jobs and boost growth is false.  Per capita income growth was 2.2% a year in the U.S. between 1950 and 1990. But when the number of billionaires exploded in the 1990s and 2000s — growing from about 100 in 1990 to around 600 today — per capita income growth fell to 1.1%.

Piketty says that the type of free-market capitalism that has dominated the US since Ronald Reagan needs to be reformed. “Reaganism begun to justify any concentration of wealth, as if the billionaires were our saviours.” But; “Reaganism has shown its limits: Growth has been halved, inequalities have doubled. It is time to break out of this phase of sacredness of property.”

He does not want what most people consider ‘socialism’, but he wants to “overcome capitalism.”  Far from abolishing property or capital, he wants to spread its rewards to the bottom half of the population, who even in rich countries have never owned much. To do this, he says, requires redefining private property as “temporary” and limited: you can enjoy it during your lifetime, in moderate quantities.

How is this to be done? Well, Piketty calls for a graduated wealth tax of 5% on those worth 2 million euros or more and up to 90% on those worth more than 2 billion euros. “Entrepreneurs will have millions or tens of millions,” he said. “But beyond that, those who have hundreds of millions or billions will have to share with shareholders, who could be employees. So no, there won’t be billionaires anymore.” From the proceeds, a country such as France could give each citizen a trust fund worth about €120,000 at age 25. Very high tax rates, he notes, didn’t impede fast growth in the 1950-80 period.

Piketty also calls for “educational justice” — essentially, spending the same amount on each person’s education. And he favours giving workers a major say over how their companies are run, as in Germany and Sweden.  Employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards; that the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be capped at 10%; much higher taxes on property, rising to 90% for the largest estates; a lump sum capital allocation of €120,000 (just over £107,000) to everyone when they reach 25; and an individualised carbon tax calculated by a personalised card that would track each person’s contribution to global heating.  He calls this moving beyond capitalism to “participatory socialism and social-federalism”.

This all smacks of returning capitalist economies to the days of the so-called ‘golden age’ from 1948-65, when inequality was much lower, economic growth was much stronger and working class households experienced full employment and were able to get educated to levels that enabled them to do more skilled and better paid jobs.  There was a ‘mixed economy’, where capitalist companies supposedly worked in partnership with trade unions and the government. This was a myth.  But if you accept Piketty’s premise that this social democratic paradise existed and its demise was brought about by a change of ideology, it is possible to consider that “redistributive ideas’ could gain support after the experience of the Great Recession and the rise of extreme inequality now.

Piketty argues that the social democratic parties dropped their original aims of equality and opted instead for meritocracy ie hard work and education will deliver better lives for the working class.  And they did so because they had gradually transformed themselves from being parties of the less-educated and poorer classes to become parties of the educated and affluent middle and upper-middle classes. To a large extent, he reckons, traditionally left parties changed because their original social-democratic agenda was so successful in opening up education and high-income possibilities to the people, who in the 1950s and 1960s came from modest backgrounds. These people, the “winners” of social democracy, continued voting for left-wing parties but their interests and worldview were no longer the same as that of their (less-educated) parents. The parties’ internal social structure thus changed— it was the product of their own political and social success.

Really?  The failure of social democratic parties to represent the interests of working people goes way back before the 1970s.  Social democratic parties supported the nationalist aims of the warring capitalist powers in WW1; in Britain, the leaders of the Labour Party went into coalition with the Conservatives to impose austerity and break the trade unions in 1929.  After WW2, social democracy moved from Attlee to Wilson to Callaghan to Kinnock and finally to Blair and Brown.  It was a similar story in continental Europe: in France from Mitterand to Hollande; in Germany from Brandt to Schmidt.

This was not just because the composition of the SD parties changed from industrial workers to educated professionals.  The very health of post-war capitalist economies changed.  The brief ‘golden age’ came to an end, not because of a change of ideology (or as Joseph Stiglitz has put it, ‘a change of rules’) but because the profitability of capital plummeted in the 1970s (following Marx’s law of profitability as outlined in Capital).  That meant that pro-capitalist politicians could no longer make concessions to labour; indeed, the gains of the golden age had to be reversed in the ‘neoliberal’ period.  So ideology changed with the change in the economic health of capital.  And social democratic leaders went along with this change because, in the last analysis, they do not think it is possible to replace capitalism with socialism. “There is no alternative” – to use Thatcher’s phrase.

At least, Piketty reckons it is possible to go beyond capitalism, unlike Branco Milanovic who, in his latest book, Capitalism Alone that I reviewed recently, agrees with Thatcher and reckons capitalism is here to stay. “You have to go beyond capitalism,” says Piketty.  In an interview, when asked “Why this word ‘beyond”, why not “To get out of capitalism”?  Piketty replied: “I say “go beyond” to say go out, abolish, replace. But the term “exceed” me allows for a little more emphasis on the need to discuss the alternative system. After the Soviet failure, we can no longer promise the abolition of capitalism without debating long and precisely what we will put in place next. I’m trying to contribute.”

Piketty reckons the “propriétariste and meritocratic narrative” of the neo-liberal period is getting fragile. “There’s a growing understanding that so-called meritocracy has been captured by the rich, who get their kids into the top universities, buy political parties and hide their money from taxation.”  That leaves a gap in the political market for redistributionist ideas.

But Piketty’s answers are just that: a redistribution of unequal wealth and income generated by the private ownership of capital, not replacing the ownership and control of the means of production and the exploitation of labour in production with a system of common ownership and control.  Apparently, the big multi-nationals will continue, big pharma will continue; the fossil-fuel companies will continue; the military-industrial complex will continue.  Regular and recurring crises in capitalist production and accumulation will continue.  But, as these vested interests of capital are still not generating enough profitability to allow any significant increase in the taxation of extreme wealth and income that they control, what chances are there that the current ‘ideology’ of the ‘sacralisation of property’ can be overcome, without taking them over?

Letter to Stalin: “can a homosexual be in the Communist Party?” by Harry Whyte, May 1934

Letter to Stalin: “can a homosexual be in the Communist Party?”

Reproduced here is a letter that Harry Whyte (a British Communist Party member) wrote to Stalin in May 1934, in which Whyte posed the question: “can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party?”.

At the time, Whyte (himself homosexual) was working in Moscow at the Moscow Daily News. When he heard about the new law re-criminalizing same-sex acts, he wrote a letter to Stalin asking him how he could justify it. Whyte pointed out how the new law was cancelling all the progress that had been made on such matters since the October Revolution.

Harry Whyte's letter

Comrade Stalin,

The content of my appeal is briefly as follows. The author of this letter, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, requests a theoretical grounding of the March 7 [1934] decree of the USSR Central Executive Committee on [the institution of] criminal liability for sodomy. Since he strives to approach this question from a Marxist viewpoint, the author of this letter believes that the decree contradicts both the facts of life itself and the principles of Marxism-Leninism.

Here is a summary of the facts that are discussed in detail in the attached letter:

1. On the whole, the condition of homosexuals under capitalism is analogous to the condition of women, the coloured races, ethnic minorities, and other groups that are repressed for one reason or another;
2. The attitude of bourgeois society to homosexuality is based on the contradiction between:
• capitalism’s need for “cannon fodder” and a reserve army of labour (leading to repressive laws against homosexuality, which is regarded as a threat to birth rates);
• the ever-growing poverty of the masses under capitalism (leading to the collapse of the working-class family and an increase in homosexuality).
3. This contradiction can be resolved only in a society where the liquidation of unemployment and the constant growth of the material well being of workers fosters conditions in which people who are normal in the sexual sense can enter into marriage.
4. Science confirms that an insignificant percentage of the population suffers from constitutional homosexuality.
5. The existence of this insignificant minority is not a threat to a society under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
6. The new law on homosexuality has provoked the most various and contradictory interpretations.
7. The March 7 law fundamentally contradicts the basic principle of the previous law on this question.
8. The March 7 law essentially calls for “levelling” in the realm of sexual life.
9. The March 7 law is absurd and unjust from the viewpoint of science, which has proven the existence of constitutional homosexuals and has no means at its disposal to change the sexual nature of homosexuals.

Dear Comrade Stalin:

Although I am a foreign communist who has not yet been promoted to the AUCP(b), [later to be renamed the CPSU, Communist Party of the Soviet Union] I nevertheless think that it will not seem unnatural to you, the leader of the world proletariat, that I address you with a request to shed light on a question that, as it seems to me, has huge significance for a large number of communists in the USSR as well as in other countries.

The question is as follows: can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party?

The recently promulgated law on criminal liability for sodomy, which was affirmed by the USSR Central Executive Committee on March 7 of this year, apparently means that homosexuals cannot be recognized as worthy of the title of Soviet citizen. Consequently, they should be considered even less worthy to be members of the AUCP(b).

Since I have a personal stake in this question insofar as I am a homosexual myself, I addressed this question to a number of comrades from the OGPU and the People’s Commissariat for Justice, to psychiatrists, and to Comrade Borodin, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper where I work. [Note: Mikhail Borodin, 1884-1951, was editor-in-chief of the Moscow Daily News. In 1949 he was arrested and later disappeared; he either died in a Siberian labour camp in 1951 or was shot in 1949, depending on different sources].

A photograph of homosexual and cross-dressing Russians, prior to 1917 / Image: public domain

All that I managed to extract from them was a number of contradictory opinions which show that amongst these comrades there is no clear theoretical understanding of what might have served as the basis for passage of the given law. The first psychiatrist from whom I sought help with this question twice assured me (after verifying this with the People’s Commissariat for Justice) that if they are honest citizens or good communists, his patients may order their personal lives as they see fit. Comrade Borodin, who said that he personally took a negative view of homosexuality, at the same time declared that he regarded me as a fairly good communist, that I could be trusted, and that I could lead my personal life as I liked. Somewhat earlier, when the arrests of homosexuals had only just begun, Comrade Borodin was quite disinclined to view me as a potential criminal; he did not regard me as a bad communist, and this was confirmed by the fact that he promoted me at work by appointing me head of editorial staff, which is the highest-ranking supervisory position with the exception of members of the editorial board. Somewhat later, when the December 17 version of the law already existed, but before the March 7 decree, I contacted the OGPU in connection with the arrest of a certain person with whom I had had homosexual relations. I was told there that there was nothing that incriminated me.

All these statements produced the impression that the Soviet organs of justice were not prosecuting homosexuality as such, only certain socially dangerous homosexuals. If this is really the case, then is there a need for the general law?

On the other hand, however, after the law was issued on March 7, I had a conversation in the OGPU in which I was told that the law would be strictly applied to each case of homosexuality that was brought to light.

In connection with the lack of clarity that exists in this matter, I turn to you in the hope that you will find the time to give me an answer.

Allow me to explain to you this question as I understand it.

First and foremost, I would like to point out that I view the condition of homosexuals who are either of working-class origin or workers themselves to be analogous to the condition of women under the capitalist regime and the coloured races who are oppressed by imperialism. This condition is likewise similar in many ways to the condition of the Jews under Hitler’s dictatorship, and in general it is not hard to see in it an analogy with the condition of any social stratum subjected to exploitation and persecution under capitalist domination.

When we analyse the nature of the persecution of homosexuals, we should keep in mind that there are two types of homosexuals: first, those who are the way they are from birth (moreover, if scientists disagree about the precise reasons for this, then there is no disagreement that certain deep-seated reasons do exist); second, there are homosexuals who had a normal sexual life but later became homosexuals, sometimes out of viciousness, sometimes out of economic considerations.

As for the second type, the question is decided relatively simply. People who become homosexuals by virtue of their depravity usually belong to the bourgeoisie, a number of whose members take to this way of life after they have sated themselves with all the forms of pleasure and perversity that are available in sexual relations with women. Amongst those who take to this way of life out of economic considerations, we find members of the petit bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and (as strange as it might seem) the proletariat. As a result of material necessity, which is particularly aggravated during periods of crisis, these people are forced temporarily to turn to this method of satisfying their sexual urges insofar as the absence of means deprives them of the possibility of marrying or at least contracting the services of prostitutes. There are also those who become homosexuals not in order to satisfy their urges, but in order to earn their keep by means of prostitution (this phenomenon has become especially widespread in modern Germany).

But science has established the existence of constitutional homosexuals. Research has shown that homosexuals of this type exist in approximately equal proportions within all classes of society. We can likewise consider as established fact that, with slight deviations, homosexuals as a whole constitute around two percent of the population. If we accept this proportion, then it follows that there are around two million homosexuals in the USSR. Not to mention the fact that amongst these people there are no doubt those who are aiding in the construction of socialism, can it really be possible, as the March 7 law demands, that such a large number of people be subjected to imprisonment?

"[A]mongst [homosexuals] there are no doubt those who are aiding in the construction of socialism, can it really be possible, as the March 7 law demands, that such a large number of people be subjected to imprisonment?" / Image: public domain

Just as the women of the bourgeois class suffer to a significantly lesser degree from the injustices of the capitalist regime (you of course remember what Lenin said about this), so do natural-born homosexuals of the dominant class suffer much less from persecution than homosexuals from the working-class milieu. It must be said that even within the USSR there are conditions that complicate the daily lives of homosexuals and often place them in a difficult situation. (I have in mind the difficulty of finding a partner for the sexual act, insofar as homosexuals constitute a minority of the population, a minority that is forced to conceal its true proclivities to one degree or another.)

What is the attitude of bourgeois society to homosexuals? Even if we take into account the differences existing on this score in the legislation of various countries, can we speak of a specifically bourgeois attitude to this question? Yes, we can. Independently of these laws, capitalism is against homosexuality by virtue of its entire class-based tendency. This tendency can be observed throughout the course of history, but it is manifested with especial force now, during the period of capitalism’s general crisis.

Capitalism, which needs an enormous reserve army of labour and cannon fodder in order to flourish, regards homosexuality as a factor that threatens to lower birth rates (as we know, in the capitalist countries there are laws that punish abortion and other methods of contraception).

Of course, the attitude of the bourgeoisie to the homosexual question is typical hypocrisy. Strict laws are the cause of few nuisances for the bourgeois homosexual. Anyone who is at all familiar with the internal history of the capitalist class knows of the periodic scandals that arise in this regard; moreover, members of the dominant class who are mixed up in these affairs suffer to an insignificant degree. I can cite a little-known fact in this connection. Several years ago, one of the sons of Lord and Lady Astor was convicted of homosexuality. The English and American press omitted to report this fact, with the exception of the Morning Advertiser. This newspaper is owned by beer manufacturers, and it was in its interests to compromise Lord and Lady Astor, who had been agitating for the introduction of prohibition. Thus the fact of [Astor’s conviction] became known thanks to contradictions within the dominant class.

Thanks to its wealth, the bourgeoisie can avoid the legal punishment that descends in all its severity on homosexual workers with the exception of those cases when the latter have prostituted themselves to members of the dominant class.

I have already mentioned that capitalism, which has need of cannon fodder and a reserve army of labor, attempts to combat homosexuality. But at the same time, by worsening the living conditions of workers, capitalism produces the objective conditions for an increase in the number of homosexuals who take to this way of life by virtue of material necessity.

This contradiction is reflected in the fact that fascism, which employed the pederast [Marinus] van der Lubbe as a weapon in its provocation, at the same time brutally suppressed the liberal-intelligentsia “liberation” movement of homosexuals led by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. (See the Brown Book, which cites the Hirschfeld case as an instance of the anti-cultural barbarism of the fascists.) [Note: van der Lubbe (1909-1934) was the young Dutch council communist accused of setting fire to the German Reichstag on February 27, 1933, sentenced to death and guillotined in Leipzig on January 1934. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German doctor, sex researcher, and advocator of homosexual emancipation. The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag was a book published by the World Committee for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism in 1933.]

Another reflection of this contradiction is the figure of André Gide, French homosexual writer, leader of the antifascist movement, and ardent friend of the USSR. The general public in France knows about Gide’s homosexuality, for he has written about it openly in his books. And despite this, his authority amongst the masses as a fellow traveller of the communist party in France has not been shaken. The fact that Gide has joined the revolutionary movement has not hindered its growth or the support of the masses for the leadership of the communist party. In my view, this shows that the masses are not intolerant of homosexuals.

Praising the “purity of the race” and family values, fascism has taken an even sterner stance against homosexuality than the pre-Hitler government. However, because fascism destroys the working-class family and furthers the impoverishment of the masses, it essentially stimulates the development of the second type of homosexuality I have described — that is, [homosexuality] out of necessity.

The only solution to this contradiction is the revolutionary transformation of the existing order and the creation of a society in which the absence of unemployment, the growing prosperity of the masses, and the liquidation of the family as an economic unit secure the conditions in which no one will be forced into pederasty out of necessity. As for so-called constitutional homosexuals, as insignificant percentage of the population they are incapable of threatening the birth rate in the socialist state.

“Overall results in the growth of material prosperity have led to the fact that, whereas mortality rates have grown along with poverty in the capitalist countries, mortality has decreased and birth rates have increased in the USSR. Compared to the pre-war years, the population in the USSR has grown by a third, while in capitalist Europe it has fallen by ten percent. Today our country with its population of 165 million shows the same population increase as capitalist Europe with its population of 360 million. As you can see, in this matter as well the pace here [in the Soviet Union] is furious (laughter).” (Comrade Kaganovich’s report on the work of the AUCP(b) Central Committee at the conference of the Moscow organization — the italics are Comrade Kaganovich’s.)

Despite the unusually severe laws on marriage that exist in the capitalist countries, perversion in the realm of normal sexual life is significantly more widespread in the capitalist countries than in the USSR, where the laws on marriage are the freest and more rational than in rest of the world. True, we know that in the first years of the Revolution certain people tried to abuse the freedom provided by the Soviet laws on marriage. However, these abuses were stopped not by repressive measures, but by broad-based political education and cultural work, and by the evolution of the economy towards socialism. I imagine that with respect to homosexuality (of the second type) a similar policy would prove the most fruitful.

I have always believed that it was wrong to advance the separate slogan of the emancipation of working-class homosexuals from the conditions of capitalist exploitation. I believe that this emancipation is inseparable from the general struggle for the emancipation of all humanity from the oppression of private-ownership exploitation.

I had no intention of turning this into a problem, of posing this question theoretically and seeking a definite opinion on this question from the Party. However, at present, reality itself has forced this question on me, and I consider it essential to achieve general clarity on this issue.

Comrade Borodin has indicated to me that the fact that I am homosexual in no way diminishes my value as a revolutionary. He has shown great confidence in me by appointing me the head of editorial staff. Then he did not treat me as someone who might become or was a convicted criminal. He likewise indicated that my personal life was not something that could even in the slightest degree harm my status as a Party member and editorial worker.

When I posed to him the question of the arrests, he once again (and the OGPU through him) assured me that in the given instance the reasons [for the arrests] were political in nature, and not in any way social or moral, although the December 17 variant of the law existed already then. After I made the corresponding request to the OGPU, I was told: “There is nothing incriminating against you.” When I learned of the December 17 variant of the law, I received replies of a similar sort from a number of people. True, Comrade Degot from the People’s Commissariat of Justice said that the reason for the law was that homosexuality was a form of bourgeois degeneracy.

The specialist psychiatrist with whom I spoke about this matter refused to believe in the existence of such a law until I showed him a copy of it.

Despite the existence of a number of incorrect interpretations on the part of certain comrades, it is completely obvious that in the period preceding the promulgation of the law, public opinion on this question was nevertheless not in the least hostile to homosexuals. And this did not surprise me at all.

I accepted the arrests of homosexuals as a wholly natural phenomenon insofar as the occasion [for the arrests] were reasons of a political nature. As I have already mentioned, this was all wholly in line with my own analysis of the question (as stated above), and in exactly the same way it did not contradict the officially expressed viewpoint of the Soviet public. Comrade Borodin pointed out to me that I should not attach too much significance to the article on homosexuality in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia because (he said) its author was a homosexual himself and the article was published during a period when a number of deviations had still not yet been exposed. I do not think we should mistrust a history of the Communist Party if a communist wrote it. If a homosexual in fact wrote this article, then all that was required of him was an objective and scientific approach to homosexuality. Second, I know enough about the efficacy of Soviet political control of the press that I cannot admit the possibility that an article with serious deviations could be printed in such a publication as the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. If this is possible when it comes to individual articles in some insignificant journal or newspaper, then it is not possible in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. In any case, I thought it possible to have full confidence in a publication whose editors include such people as Molotov, Kuibyshev, and Pokrovsky (or even Bukharin, although he deserves less confidence).

However, from the point of view that I am defending, the article in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia was of no great significance. The attitude of the Soviet public to this question was expressed with sufficient clarity in the law that existed right up until the adoption of the March 7 law. If the law had said nothing about this question, then doubts might have existed earlier. But the law in fact did formulate an opinion on this question: it defended the interests of society by forbidding the seduction and perversion of minors. But this led one to conclude that homosexual relations between adults were not forbidden.

The law, of course, is dialectical: it changes as circumstances change. It is obvious, however, that when the first law was ratified, the entire question of homosexuality was taken into account as a whole (this, at any rate, is what one might think on the basis of the conclusion that followed from the law). This law established that the Soviet government altogether rejected the principle of persecuting homosexuality. This principle is fundamental in character, and we know that basic principles are not altered in order to bring them into line with new circumstances. Altering basic principles for such ends means being an opportunist, not a dialectician.

I am capable of grasping that changed circumstances also require certain partial changes in the legislation, the application of new measures for the defence of society, but I cannot understand how changed circumstances can force us to change one of [our] basic principles.

I visited two psychiatrists in the search for an answer to the question of whether it was possible to “cure” homosexuality — perhaps you will find this surprising. I admit that this was opportunism on my part (this time, perhaps, it can be forgiven), but I was incited to do this by the desire to find some kind of solution to this cursed dilemma. Least of all did I want to contradict the decision of the Soviet government. I was prepared to do anything if only to avoid the necessity of finding myself in contradiction with Soviet law. I took this step despite the fact that I did not know whether contemporary researchers had succeeded in establishing the true nature of homosexuality and the possibility of converting homosexuals into heterosexuals — that is, into people who engage in the sexual act only with members of the opposite sex. If such a possibility were in fact established, then everything would be much simpler of course.

But, frankly speaking, even if this possibility were established, I would be uncertain all the same how desirable it was in fact to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals. Of course, there might be certain political reasons that would make this desirable. But I imagine that the necessity for such a leveling procedure should be supported by unusually strong reasons.

It is no doubt desirable that the majority of people be normal in the sexual sense. I fear, however, that this will be never be the case. And I think that my fears are confirmed by the facts of history. I think that one can say with certainty that the majority of people desire and will continue to desire a normal sexual life. However, I greatly doubt in the possibility of all people becoming utterly identical in terms of their sexual proclivities.

I remind you that homosexuals constitute a mere two percent of the population. You should also remember that amongst those two percent there were such exceptionally talented people as Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Tchaikovsky. These are the ones about whom we know that they were homosexuals. But how many other such talented people have there been amongst homosexuals who hid their true proclivities? I have no intention of defending the absurd theory that homosexuals belong to a breed of superhumans, that homosexuality and genius are synonyms, that homosexuals will, allegedly, someday take their revenge on society for their sufferings by uniting to conquer heterosexuals. “Theories” of this ilk were already condemned with considerable contempt (as they deserved to be) by Engels in his letter to Marx from June 22, 1869. In this letter, Engels writes about the “theory” advanced by a clique of German bourgeois homosexuals who had formed their own special organization. Engels characterizes this whole affair with the epithet “swinishness” (schweinerei).

That it was precisely the political “theory” of the organization, not the specific sexual orientation of its members, that aroused the ire of Engels, can be seen in his letter to [Friedrich] Sorge from February 8, 1890. Engels writes:

Here there is another storm in a teacup under way. You’ll read in the Labour Elector about the brouhaha provoked by Peake [?], assistant editor of the Star, who in one of the local papers openly accused Lord Gaston of sodomy in connection with the scandalous homosexuality of the local aristocracy. The article was disgraceful, but was only of a personal nature; the matter was hardly political. [The translation is imprecise and made from the English text published in an English communist journal.]

“The matter was hardly political.” The fact that Engels regards the case of a member of the enemy class who was accused of sodomy and caused a scandal in the aristocratic world as “hardly political,” as “storm in a teacup,” is of great and fundamental significance to us. If homosexuality is viewed as a characteristic trait of bourgeois degeneracy, then it is correct to attack its individual manifestations, especially during a period when homosexual scandals were widespread in the aristocratic milieu. However, it follows from the quotation that Engels did not view homosexuality as a specifically bourgeois form of degeneracy. He attacked it only when (as, for example, in cases involving Germany) it adopted the political form of an association of certain bourgeois elements. When, on the other hand, the matter had no political overtones (as in the case cited above), Engels did not find it necessary to attack it.

I assume that certain kinds of talent (in particular, talent in the realm of the arts) are startlingly often combined with homosexuality. This should be kept in mind, and it seems to me that one should carefully weigh the dangers of sexual levelling precisely for this branch of Soviet culture, for at present we do not as yet possess a sufficiently scientific explanation of homosexuality.

This image is a Chinese Communist Party propaganda poster, celebrating the relationship between Mao's China and the USSR, regimes in which homosexuals were severely oppressed. But recently, and especially online, it has acquired a different meaning... / Image: public domain

I will permit myself to cite one passage from Comrade Stalin’s report to the Seventeenth Party Congress:

[A]ny Leninist knows, if he is a genuine Leninist, that levelling in the realm of needs and personal daily life is a reactionary absurdity worthy of some primitive sect of ascetics, not of a socialist state organized in the Marxist manner, for one cannot require that all people should have identical needs and tastes, that all people live their daily lives according to a single model. […]

To conclude from this that socialism requires the egalitarianism, equalization, and levelling of the needs of society’s members, the levelling of their tastes and personal lives, that according to Marxism everyone should wear identical clothes and eat the same quantity of one and the same dishes, is tantamount to uttering banalities and slandering Marxism.” (Stalin, Report to the 17th Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b). Lenpartizdat, 1934, pp. 54-55. The italics are mine — H.W.)

It seems to me that this excerpt from Comrade Stalin’s report has a direct bearing on the question that I am analysing.

What is important, however, is that even if one pursues this levelling in the present, it is impossible to achieve it either with medical or legislative methods.

When both psychiatrists whom I visited were forced by my insistent questions to confess that cases of incurable homosexuality exist, I finally established my own attitude to the question.

One should recognize that there is such a thing as ineradicable homosexuality— I have yet to encounter facts that would refute this— and hence as a consequence, it seems to me, one should recognize as inevitable the existence of this minority in society, be it a capitalist or even a socialist society. In this case, one cannot find any justification for declaring these people criminally liable for their distinguishing traits, traits for whose creation they bear no measure of responsibility and which they are incapable of changing even if they wanted to.

Thus, attempting to reason in accordance with the principles of Marxism-Leninism as I understand them, I have arrived in the end at the contradiction between the law and those conclusions that have followed from my line of reasoning. And it is just this contradiction that compels me to desire an authoritative statement on this question.

Communist greetings,

Harry Whyte

Information about the author of the letter

Whyte, Harry. 27 years old. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Son of a working-class painter who recently acquired his own business. Secondary school education. Journalist by profession. Worked for bourgeois newspapers until 1932. Worked in his free time for the journal of the USSR Friends Society, Russia Today (from 1931 to 1932). Joined the Independent Labour Party in 1927; the Communist Party of Great Britain, in 1931. Assisted in the organisation of party cells and district organizations on Fleet Street, the centre of the British press. In 1932, was hired onto the staff of the Moscow News (Moskovskie Novosti). In 1933, was appointed head of the editorial staff of this newspaper. Singled out as best shock worker. Promotion to the AUCP(b) from the Communist Party of England [sic] has been postponed until completion of the Party purge.

The arguments set forth in the attached letter were originally formulated by me in a letter to Comrade Borodin, managing editor of the Moscow Daily News, in the hope that he would direct Comrade Stalin’s attention to the question that I broach. However, he deemed it impossible to do this. Aside from what is stated in the present letter, the letter addressed to Comrade Borodin also contains certain facts that concern me personally and have on the whole no great bearing on the question under consideration, but which, however, I deemed necessary to bring to his attention. A copy of this letter has been presented to the OGPU at their request insofar as I informed one comrade in the OGPU about this letter.

[AP RF (Archive of the President of the Russian Federation), f. 3, op. 57, d. 37, l. 29-45; notarised copy. The original Russian text of this letter was published in the journal Istochnik (5/6 (1993): 185-191).]

This English translation of Harry Whyte’s letter to Stalin was published in the book "Moscow" by New York-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks. We would like to thank Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, New York, the publishers, and Tom Campbell, Editor at the The Russian Reader, who translated Harry Whyte’s letter from the original Russian to English, for their kind permission to republish the letter.