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When [BR] Ambedkar and others in the anti-caste movement called attention to Brahmanic philosophy or Brahmanism, communists were uneasy with the usage. To them, Brahmanism was, at best, a historical tendency which, in the past, had sought to justify a birth-based social order, and they did not think that the term served a critical purpose in the present. By refusing to grant it analytical significance, they sidestepped questions to do with the historically specific expressions of ruling ideologies and interests in the Indian context.

To Ambedkar, their reluctance to do so was of a part with a more general reluctance to engage with the terrain of religion. His own understanding of religionwas complex and layered, but in this instance, he wished to draw attention to the role of the brahmin class in perpetuating inequality, and rendering it sacerdotal, in and through the roles they had historically assigned to themselves: they were both religious preceptors and intellectuals.

This not only rendered them self-assured purveyors of ideas and arguments, whose terms they came to set, but it also made for a static conception of knowledge, which had proved dangerously consequential: If on any point we have attained to certainty, we make no further inquiry on that point; because inquiry would be useless, or perhaps dangerous. The doubt must intervene, before the investigation can begin. Here, then, we have the act of doubting as the originator, or, at all events, the necessary antecedent, of all progress.

Ambedkars point was not that the brahmin class was not assailed by doubt, but that, in wanting to sustain their vision of the sacred and the social as enduring and timeless, they subverted changes wrought by time and history, in ways that were always already conservative. Thus, every moment of historical disjuncture for example, the revolution wrought by Buddhism was reworked as a moment of transition that only affirmed what already was. Theirs, Ambedkar warned, was an acquisitive politics that enabled them to hoard spiritual and intellectual surplus through an appropriation of diverse sorts of thought to their purpose, and in order to naturalise social inequality.

Ambedkars sorrow was that in India, the intellectual class had not only failed to lead a term that he freighted with pedagogic and political resonance but had insinuated itself into public consciousness in ways that rendered it worthy and worshipful simply because it proclaimed itself to be so: The Hindus are taught that the Brahmins are Bhudevas (gods on earth) [and] that Brahmins alone can be their teachers.

Such limitations appeared particularly acute, given that the brahmins had arranged knowledge systems within a gradation such that knowledge of the practical arts and crafts, of labour and production was not granted the same valence as intellectual and philosophical speculation. This meant that the productive and working classes that intuited these other knowledges could not aspire to produce intellectuals.

This was in contrast to societies where each strata had its educated class and to Ambedkar this was consequential for there was safety if no definite guidance, in the multiplicity of views expressed by different educated classes drawn from different strata of society. Thus, there was no danger of Society being misguided or misdirected by the views of one single educated class drawn from one single class of society This creation of different groups of organic intellectuals had not happened in India even in modern times, when learning was open, notionally at least, to all, and much of society remained bound by world views validated by the brahmins.

The Indian lefts relationship to religion and its understanding of the intellectual class were of a different order. Generally speaking, communists held religion to be a constituent of the superstructure, and an engagement with the religious realm therefore was not viewed as significant as struggles carried out on the shop floor or the field. On the other hand, the many uses of religion in the modern period Gandhis politics, for instance, or those espoused by Hindu and Muslim groups appeared to them to be politically significant, since they looked to distract attention away from the real economic struggle.

They added that they sought to combat religion by pointing out its reactionary role in political and social affairs and its historical roots in exploitation and subordination of class to class. However, this must not be taken to mean that they would not cooperate with people who hold religious beliefs or even preach religion. But, since they held the economic and political struggle to be paramount, questions relating to religion were to be subordinated to it.

In practice this meant that the CPI criticised the use of religion to further ruling class interests, and propagated for unity amongst workers on the basis of a shared experience of economic injustice, but when they encountered religion in the flesh, so to speak, they realised that it could not be easily put away. For, in many contexts, religious expressions associated with Hindu, Muslim as well as Sikh sacred and cultural narratives constituted cultural common sense, and as happened in Bengal during the agrarian struggle of the 1940s, communists ended up drawing on the rich repertoire of local cultural resources to communicate their political ideas and mobilise people into protest actions.

In urban India too, religious festivals and holidays were central to the everyday lives of workers and multiple religious and cultural organisations were active in working class neighbourhoods. Communist organising had to reckon with the workers keen interest in these matters, and as important, ensure that it did not lead to inter-religious strife. In many instances, unions did mitigate sectarian uses of religion, especially the rivalry that sometimes bedevilled Hindu and Muslim worker interactions.

The lefts understanding of Hinduism bears consideration in this regard. Very early in his political life, SA Dange sought to grapple with Hinduism critically, but apart from a few sporadic articles in the Socialist, nothing came of his efforts, until much later, when he took a historical lens to the distant past.

In the 1930s and after, in the context of fascisms advance in Europe, he wrote a great deal on the relationship between religion and the political imagination in India. Roys critique of Hinduism, in this context, was quite similar to Ambedkars: he pointed to the philosophical stranglehold exerted by Brahmanic traditions of thought on all subsequent history, the limits of Hindu moral philosophy and the unfortunate retreat of Buddhism from the role it essayed in its heyday.

He also drew parallels between Nietzsches ideas and those expounded in Brahmanical texts, and pointed to how Hindu society was fertile ground for the growth of fascist thought. However, Roy did not offer a critique of the brahmin class and its role in the modern period, though in his latter day writings, he did indict the orthodox among the nationalists for harbouring protofascist ideas.

As far as the role of intellectuals or of the brahmin class was concerned, left thinkers speculated on the intellectuals and their presence in colonial society, but not in relation to the brahmin class. For instance, in an extended note on modern intellectuals, SA Dange referred rather sweepingly to what appeared to him a putative social group that comprised salaried employees who functioned as the office machinery of capitalism in colonial India.

Comprising clerks, office workers, journalists and teachers, this educated and self-conscious group seemed an intellectual proletariat but it was yet not a class, since there was no solidarity in the very base of its economic position between the two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

As a consequence, the consciousness of its constituents was shaped by caste, community and province and in the event, these men were unable to rise beyond their immediate and often limited political and material demands. They wanted better salaries, more Indians in government and were prey to clever propaganda. Dange did not consider it germane that these men were mostly brahmins and Hindus.

Excerpted with permission from The Prerequisites of Communism: Rethinking Revolution in Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, Part of the Marx, Engels, Marxisms series, V Geetha, Palgrave-Macmillan/Springer International.

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ByRichard Baum, Ph.D.,University of California, Los AngelesAccording to Deng Xiaoping, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Europe was due to inadequate economic reform. (Image: helloRuby/Shutterstock)The Velvet Revolution

In the late summer and fall of 1989, the entire Soviet bloc erupted in turmoil,as a massive popular revolt against communism spread like a tsunami throughout eastern and central Europe. Chinese leaders watched in morbid fascination as the aptly named Velvet Revolution swept through the region, toppling Communist governments one after the other, from Berlin and Budapest to Prague and Warsaw.

For the most part, these embattled regimes recognized the handwriting on the wall and left the stage peacefully. But there was one major exception. When the unyielding, hard-line Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu refused to relinquish power gracefully in mid-December, his government headquarters was besieged by angry mobs of Romanian citizens, forcing Ceausescu to flee for his life.

Within days he was hunted down, captured, and executed by his own army. Half a world away, within the cloistered walls of Zhongnanhai, Ceausescus execution set off alarm bells.

This is a transcript from the video seriesThe Fall and Rise of China.Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Seeking to assuage their own obvious discomfort and anxiety, Beijings hard-liners began to spin the story of east Europes collapse. According to their narrative storyline, it wasnt the failure of communism that caused the collapse, but rather the reformist liberal programs of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachevs policies of glasnost and perestroika, they argued, had fueled massive popular demands for political and economic liberalization throughout the Soviet bloc. After coming to power in 1984, Gorbachev had indeed steered SovietRussia toward becoming a more open and pluralistic society. Internationally, he ended the Cold War with the United States and pursued peaceful accommodation with China.

When Gorbachev let it be known in the spring of 89 that he would not send Soviet troops and tanks to defend embattled communist regimes in east and central Europe, those regimes suddenly found themselves powerless to resist a rising tide of popular rebellion.

Faced with a classic choice of fight or flight, most chose to flee. Romanias Ceausescu was the sole exception, and he paid for his obstinacy with his life. Following Ceausescus execution, Chinas traditionalists (conservatives) were increasingly blunt in their criticism of Gorbachevs policies.

Learn more about the birth of Chinese communism.

ChenYun charged that the weakness of Gorbachevs ideological line is that it is pointing in the direction of surrender and retreat. Our party cannot afford to stand by and watch this happen. General Wang Zhen also accused the Soviet leader of abandoning socialism.

Even the normally very cautious Jiang Zemin was moved to join the growing anti-Gorbachev chorus. Early in 1990, he claimed that the Soviet leader should be held personally responsible for the debacle in eastern Europe.

As the anti-reform backlash gathered momentum in China, it was given an enormous boost by the stunning collapse of the Communist Mother Shipthe Soviet Unionin the fall of 1991.

Gorbachev had badly underestimated the growing mood of popular disaffection in Russia, and when he tried to reassert the Communist Partys authority, he was ousted and replaced not by a communist but by a liberal democrat, Boris Yeltsin, as president. Thereafter, the Soviet Communist Party lost whatever remaining legitimacy it might have had, and the USSR simply collapsed.

Chinas diehard conservatives now drew a new lesson from the shocking collapse of the Soviet bloc. Even before the implosion oftheSoviet Union, the hard-liners had begun to draw parallels between Gorbachevs liberalization policies and those of Deng Xiaoping. Seeking to revive Mao Zedong mystique and the Maoist emphasis on class struggle, they openly attacked Dengs reforms.

Learn more about Maos alignment with the Soviets.

Early in 1991, one of Chen Yuns conservative protgs, a sharp-tongued propagandist by the name of Deng Liqun, launched a nationwide campaign to publish a new edition of Mao Zedongs works, with free copies to be distributed to every classroom in China.

Calling for a sharp increase in political and ideological education and indoctrination, Deng Liqun promised to educate all Chinese students against the lure of Gorbachev-type pied pipers of pluralism.

He joined forces with General Wang Zhen to defend Maos decision to launch the Cultural Revolution, and they applauded Maos efforts to wage a life-and-death class struggle against the enemies of socialism.

Deng hadnt been seen in public since mid-February. One persistent rumor held that Deng had prostate cancer, another (which later proved to be correct) suggested that he had advanced Parkinsons disease.

With Dengs health fading, conservatives saw an opportunity to ratchet up their attacks on his economic reforms. In journals controlled by the partys leftwing propagandists, they began to openly refer to Dengs promarket policies as capitalistic reform and opening up.

From the sidelines, an infirmed Deng Xiaoping watched uncomfortably as the hard-line offensive gathered momentum. Convinced that he had to act decisively to stem the growing leftist assault, Deng summoned his remaining energy to undertake what was to be the final, and perhaps the most important, political campaign of his entire career.

Deng Xiaoping believed that what led to the collapse of communism in Europe and the Soviet Union was inadequate economic reform. He noted that reforms shouldnt be limited, but should have room for progress.

According to Chinas hard-liners narrative storyline, it wasnt the failure of communism that caused the collapse of east Europe, but rather the reformist liberal programs of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the final leader of the Soviet Union. He announced in the spring of 1989 that he wouldnt send troops to help the communist regimes in eastern Europe. Chinas conservatives blamed Gorbachev for being responsible for the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

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China and the Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Europe - The Great Courses Daily News

In less than 40 years, the taxpayer-funded Voice of America went from exposing the crimes and economic failures of communism to in some cases glorifying communists, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

VOA is part of the federal government's $800 million (average annual budget) U.S. Agency for Global Media.

I am an Eastern European refugee from communism. Judging from what one can see online in various languages, Ive concluded that recent and current VOA and USAGM officials either do not know or have forgotten what life was like for tens of millions of people living under communism and in state-run socialist economies in the former Soviet bloc.

My observations are shared by many dissident journalists in China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Ethiopia, as well as political refugees and immigrants from these countries living in the United States, who have been criticizing the management of the VOA programs for damaging the cause of human rights. That was absolutely not the case 40 years ago when I was in charge of the VOA Polish Service, broadcasting to Poland under the martial law imposed by pro-Soviet communists on Dec. 13, 1981.

Today, USAGM and VOA press releases are full of laudatory and often misleading claims from government bureaucrats. It is true that not all of todays VOA language services are bad, and many outstanding journalists still work there. But the kind of criticism one hears now from citizens of captive nations about strategically important VOA programs would not have been ignored by any U.S. administration during the Cold War or by the commercial U.S. media.

After the VOA's management was reformed under President Ronald Reagan, to the great discomfort of many former longtime executives and some central English newsroom reporters, VOAs weekly audience in Poland increased fivefold in less than 10 years to more than 50% of the adult population. In the 1980s, VOA was finally able to contribute significantly to the fall of communism in East-Central Europe, almost as much as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In contrast, VOAs recent broadcasting in Afghanistan ended in a disaster. VOAs impact in Russia, China, and Iran is now minuscule. Independent experts question USAGMs inflated and often meaningless audience claims.

The amnesia of recent and current VOA officials about history and their failure to provide leadership are particularly dangerous at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin may be getting ready to invade Ukraine and uses Belarus in a hybrid war against the neighboring nations in the European Union.

Chinese, Cuban, Ethiopian, and Iranian government propagandists have also been given an advantage by VOA and USAGM managements failures. During the Cold War, VOA did not abandon any journalists behind the Iron Curtain. The VOA/USAGM management left behind in Afghanistan about 500 Afghan employees and family members. Senior agency executives could not see what was coming and did not order a prompt evacuation.

There are not enough VOA and USAGM managers with good judgment informed by a solid grasp of history.

A few years ago, a top VOA official seemed to question whether disinformation outlets such as Russias RT should be made to register in the U.S. as foreign agents. When the U.S. government compels RT to register as a foreign agent, then other governments consider requiring U.S. media to register as foreign agents and then, the VOA executive wrote in a 2017 Facebook post, which was later deleted. It happened at about the same time VOA's management carelessly hired several former Russian state media employees.

Foreign propaganda had found its way into VOA programs at various times. The VOA chief news writer and editor in 1943 was American novelist Howard Fast, who was later a Communist Party activist and the recipient of the 1953 Stalin International Peace Prize.

Censorship in favor of Soviet Russia has also been part of VOA history. In the early 1950s, before President Harry Truman carried out reforms, VOA censored a Polish writer and artist, Jozef Czapski, who had been a witness of Stalins genocidal crimes. In the 1970s, VOA even censored Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Such censorship ended under Reagan but has returned in recent years. Under Obama administration appointees, VOA English programs lauded American communist winner of the Lenin Peace Prize Angela Davis as a fighter for human rights, without any attempt to provide balance with information about her pro-Soviet past. Solzhenitsyn had once spoken bitterly about Davis in describing the methods of Soviet propaganda and how figures such as her were used to justify oppression.

The VOA Russian Service used recently as an on-air personality a former Russian TV anchor who, before his employment with VOA, produced anti-U.S. propaganda films with antisemitic overtones. One of his older videos on YouTube promoted conspiracy theories spread in Russia and in the West by Putins state media. The film put the blame on the U.S. government, American capitalists, and Jewish bankers for exploiting the economies of other countries around the world.

In March 2019, top USAGM and VOA officials received an email with information about this provided by opposition journalists from Belarus. A Belorussian refugee media outlet had expressed a profound shock that a person with a Russian propaganda work record could be hired by the U.S. government-funded broadcaster to host VOA programs. But nothing happened for many months, during which this journalist continued to be employed by VOA. The VOA management has since hired a few other journalists who had previously worked for Putins state media and seem particularly proud of their work in Russia.

During the same time, under the watch of recent and current VOA and USAGM executives, employees and contractors produced news reports and graphics that glorified repressive communist leaders. They did not mention the crimes of Marxist dictators and the failures of socialist state economies.

That is a far cry from how the VOA responded to propaganda from the Soviet Union and other communist states in the 1980s.

In mid-December 2021, the VOA English news website ignored the 40th anniversary of the imposition of martial law in Poland by the pro-Soviet regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. The event could have provided a useful history lesson, given that Soviet threats at that time against the Polish Solidarity movement were very similar to todays Russian threats against Ukraine.

There was something else VOAs foreign and U.S. audiences could have learned from history. During martial law in Poland, we received thousands of letters from listeners with requests for humanitarian assistance. In one such letter, sent to the VOA in November 1982, a mother of three girls, ages 7, 11, and 12, asked if VOA could help her. She wanted to find an American family willing to send used clothing and shoes for her young children. All three girls signed their names. The letter came to us from central Poland.

The mother wrote that the helplessness of her situation had forced her to suppress her shame and to ask VOA for help. She wanted her girls to have something warm to wear going to school in the approaching winter months. We already have frost, she wrote. Im afraid that my children will not have anything to wear to go to school. They have outgrown what we had bought two years ago. I cant count on any humanitarian aid; I had already tried. You have to have connections. Women wrote the majority of letters sent from Poland to VOA during the Cold War with requests for humanitarian assistance.

Unfortunately, this letter did not reach VOA before Christmas. A U.S. Postal Service stamp on the envelope shows that it was received in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 27, 1982. We used to forward such letters to charitable organizations in the U.S. If any packages from America with aid had arrived at their home in Poland, it would have been long after Christmas.

In her letter to VOA, the Polish woman did not make any direct references to the political situation in her country, but she made it abundantly clear that the communist regime in power was responsible for many years of economic deprivation for her young family. The system that produced such economic misery and killed millions of people should not be promoted by VOA to the rest of the world at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and in violation of the VOA Charter.

Ted Lipien is a journalist, writer, and media freedom advocate. He was Voice of Americas Polish Service chief during Polands struggle for democracy and VOAs acting associate director. He also served briefly in 2020-2021 as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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Voice of America went from exposing the failures of communism to glorifying its dictators - Washington Examiner

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As Bernie Sanders was building his political career as a Vermont mayor, he visited the Soviet Union in 1988 for a 10-day "honeymoon" and returned to America extolling how impressive the communist state was. Just three years later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president and the red Soviet flag was pulled from the Kremlin.

Decades following Sanders self-described "very strange honeymoon," his trip has seemingly continued shaping his domestic and foreign policies and moved the dial of the Democratic Party to the left.

"The fact that we were willing to be critical of the United States I think that made them maybe more appreciative of our criticisms we made of their own society," Sanders said in 88 when he returned home.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by CNN/New York Times at Otterbein University, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019, in Westerville, Ohio. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

"We were saying, Yeah, in our country, we also have a housing crisis. Our housing in general is better than yours, but people are paying 40 percent of their income for housing. The quality of your housing is not good, but we appreciate the fact that people are paying 5 percent. The quality of your health care is not good, but in the United States, believe me, we have enormous problems in terms of our health-care system."

DETAILS OF SANDERS SOVIET HONEYMOON EXPOSED, AS ENTOURAGE MEMBER RECALLS SHOCK AT BERNIES AMERICA-BASHING

He praised the USSR for its public transportation system and its "absolutely beautiful" train stations with chandeliers, culture programs, youth programs and took shots at U.S. foreign policies under then-President Ronald Reagan.

"Lets take the strengths of both systems," he added following the trip. "Lets learn from each other."

This year, negotiations over President Biden's signature legislation, called Build Back Better - which Sanders helped design - is looming over Congress, and features policies similar to those Sanders applauded when they were implemented in other nations, such as an expansion of government health care and taxpayer-funded child care programs.

Recent interviews with those who attended the USSR trip with Sanders say, however, that the group was warned by locals that the USSR was about to collapse.

"I think [Sanders] saw and we all saw the downside of the Soviet system," Howard Seaver, a Vermont businessman who was on the trip, told the Washington Post in 2019. "Yes, they may have had low-cost apartments, but things were very out of whack there were food shortages, no political freedom."

BEN SHAPIRO: BERNIE SANDERS IS NOT A SOCIAL DEMOCRAT, HE'S A LIFELONG COMMUNIST. DEMS HAVE NO GATEKEEPERS

"I suspect that what Bernie saw in Russia probably affected his views that you see today, where he is not anti-free-enterprise or capitalism but he wants to have a safety net and give a fair shake to all, but certainly not to have a command economy we saw in the Soviet Union," Seaver said.

The warnings from locals proved true and the USSR collapsed in 1991, when Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day.

FILE - In this Jan. 14, 1991 file photo, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev says in Moscow that a local military commander ordered the use of force in the breakaway republic of Lithuania, where an assault by Soviet troops on Jan. 13, 1991 claimed 14 lives. On Monday, Oct. 17, 2016, a Lithuanian court has called on Gorbachev to testify in a mass trial related to the 1991 crackdown on the countrys independence movement. (AP Photo/Boris Yurchenko, File) (The Associated Press)

IS BERNIE SANDERS 'DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM' REALLY JUST SOCIALISM?

Experts have disputed Sanders rosy depiction of the USSR, saying it's a far cry from what residents actually lived through on a daily basis.

"When I lived in the Soviet Union, everything was falling apart," Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Washington Examiner in 2019. "People don't realize how many people Stalin killed by building the Moscow subway station. Sure, the trains worked, but that other factor is dismissed. I have no doubt Bernie was sincere in what he said, but there was a whole disregard for life and safety in every aspect of Soviet life, including infrastructure."

But the USSR trip was so ostensibly moving for Sanders,he planned another trip abroad - this time to communist Cuba the following year.

He returned from the trip also extolling the communist state as one that was "not a perfect society," but having "very high-quality health care" and no homelessness that he witnessed.

BERNIE SANDERS' LONG HISTORY OF PRAISING CUBA'S COMMUNISTS

"I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people," Sanders said of the trip. The country "not only has free health care but very high-quality health care The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values."

Just last year, Sanders again praised communist Cuba, telling "60 Minutes," "its unfair to simply say everything is bad" about the late Fidel Castro's regime. Adding that though he was "opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba," Castro implemented a "massive literacy program."

HAVANA, CUBA - MAY 1: Fidel Castro observes the May Day parade at the Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba May 1, 1998. (Photo by Sven Creutzmann/Mambo Photography/Getty Images)

Sanders history with communism, socialism and Marxism has roots in his youth. In 1963 when he was a college student, Sanders was the guest of a Marxist youth movement founded by communist Yaakov Hazan. In the 70s he helped found the socialist Liberty Union Party in Vermont. By 1972 he said he didnt "mind people calling me a communist." And in 1985, he also made a trip to Nicaragua and called Marxist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega "an impressive guy."

The accolades of such regimes have earned Sanders stern criticism from those who suffered under communism and socialism, as well as from fellow politicians. But Sanders has continued pushing for the acceptance of mainstream socialism and has helped move the dial of the Democratic Party further left.

This year, Democratic in-fighting over Sanders' version of Build Back Better, which started as a $6 trillion social spending proposal, has since been whittled down to a $1.7 trillion social spending package.

BERNIE SANDERS SILENT ON CUBAN PRO-FREEDOM UPRISINGS AFTER PRAISING FIDEL CASTRO'S COMMUNIST POLICIES

Conservatives have panned the bill as the "Democrats' down payment on socialism" and shifting a massive amount of power from state and local governments to the federal government. Sen. Joe Manchin broke with Democrats last weekend, sounding the bill's death knell by saying he wouldnt vote for it.

"Radical lawmakers are looking to stuff far-left, unpopular wish-list items into this proposal, including taxpayer-funded universal pre-K, expansion of government health care, and more just as they did with special interest bailouts in the recent COVID stimulus package," David Ditch, research associate for the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Hertiage Foudation, recently said.

FILE - In this March 15, 2020, file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden, left, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right, greet one another before they participate in a Democratic presidential primary debate at CNN Studios in Washington. Sanders said Tuesday that it would be "irresponsible" for his loyalists not to support Joe Biden, warning that progressives who "sit on their hands" in the months ahead would simply enable President Donald Trumps reelection (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

But Sanders has only become more vocal in his advocacy for the legislation, and his comments harken back to his praise of communist nations, and his claims of their commitment to education, health care and the poor.

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"At this pivotal moment in U.S. history, its time for the Senate to vote on a bill that will substantially improve the lives of working families, the elderly, the sick and the poor, while taking on the unbridled greed of the wealthy and the powerful," Sanders wrote in a recent op-ed for Fox News.

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BBB advocate Bernie Sanders extolled the USSR in 1988, three years later the empire collapsed - Fox News

In Western European countries it used often to be said: We must have fascism before communism. First the capitalists will abandon democracy and introduce the fascist dictatorship, and then the workers will overthrow the fascist dictatorship. But the Communists replied, no, we will fight together with all the democratic forces to preserve bourgeois democracy and to defeat the fascists, and that will create the best conditions for going forward to win working-class power and to commence to build socialism.

Maurice Cornforth, Materialism and the Dialectical Method

There is a concerning, but not surprising, trend that is exposing itself among the left that smacks of social democracy and class collaboration. This trend, though seemingly harmless, is damaging to youth coming into the movement. It wraps itself in Marxist verbiage while its conclusions end up taking positions of the right. Those who promote these ideas are falling into the hands of the racist monopolists and reactionaries. As a result, they will slow progress toward socialism, potentially putting us on the march toward fascism.

Let me remind readers that our party, the Communist Party, was in part founded in response to the rejection of the anti-Marxist denial of the special character of racist oppression in the U.S. held by the old Socialist Party. Our late chair, Henry Winston, said in Strategy for a Black Agenda,

While the Communist Party saw from its inception that the struggle against racist oppression was part of the class struggle, it also recognized that Blacks were oppressed as a people and that labor with a white skin and labor with a Black skin could not be free unless the special demands of the triply oppressed Black people were put at the center of the struggle for progress and socialism.

An ideological trend that might be classified as white left nationalism repeats the mistakes of the old Socialist Party on its approach to the national question. These white left nationalist trends shout class, class, class! and left, left, left! while deploring what they call identity politics and narrowly pointing to historical failures of socialist projects and the left in the United States in particular.

They repeat the line voiced by New Left socialists and Third Worldist Maoists that the working class in the United States has betrayed the movement for socialism and that it is time to think of it in a new way, if not completely ignore it as a mainspring of revolutionary activity.

At best this is a defeatist position.

Much of these ideas come from folks who contributed to what we now call the crisis of petty bourgeois radicalism, where middle-class radicals reach a certain level of consciousness and want to take shortcuts to revolution and leave the masses (less conscious sections) of people behind in this process. These ideas persist to this day in various forms of postmodernism, anarchism, and Maoism.

Instead of seeing revolutionary potential in the U.S. working class, these forces promote a newfound fetishization of the lumpen-proletariat (that is, declassed strata) as the new revolutionary class, urban peasant guerilla warfare, and other theories associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Science (like Herbert Marcuse). A seemingly odd combination of national nihilism (downplaying of a countrys traditions) and national chauvinism (an overemphasis of the same) also plays a part.

Identity politics, or struggle for equality?

With respect to whats derisively called identity politics, political correctness, wokeness, or cancel culture (but what we call the struggle for equality), these forces allege that addressing discrimination contributes to disunity and de-emphasizes class, by which they mean white male workers.

Our party does not reduce all struggles to class. It participates in the equality struggles of racially and nationally oppressed peoples (African American, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, Middle Eastern, Asian American, Native American and other Indigenous nations, etc.) and recognizes that true liberation will come from a) fighting on these issues in the here and now and b) in the process of the battle for a different political, social, and economic system socialism. Both have to happen simultaneously.

The overwhelming majority of the different specially oppressed peoples in the United States are working class upwards of 80% to 90%. And they are oppressed in that they face special forms of mistreatment because of their race, that is, the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, and so on. This means that, to build the requisite unity needed for substantial class struggle victories, and to liberate the entire working class, the struggle against racism and national oppression must be put at the center of all these struggles.

These are all-class questions, meaning that we are championing the equality demands for entire peoples, regardless of what class or strata they come from. The racially oppressed and women face historic and present discrimination in the form of pay and voting rights, for example, no matter their class position.

And let us not forget that this country was founded on the near genocide of its native population, and the modern capitalist system was built on the backs of African peoples.

The Communist Party in the United States has historically been at the forefront of the global struggle against white supremacy. This includes but is not limited to the struggle to free the Scottsboro Nine; fighting Italian fascist aggression in Ethiopia; the battle for equal wages between black, brown, Asian, and white workers; bringing the charge of genocide against the African American people to the United Nations; along with campaigns against Jim Crow segregation here and South African apartheid abroad the list goes on.

All of these struggles included many forces across the political spectrum (not strictly Communists) who came together on these issues a united front was and remains an essential part of the struggle.

A false unity

But, while championing the fight for unity, the CPUSA doesnt treat the concept as an abstract ideal or promote unity at all costs. Indeed, theres a false unity implied by dismissing the democratic struggles of sections of our class in order to supposedly organize reactionaries under the pretext of bringing in white workers. As noted by Ferdinand Smith, leader of the National Maritime Union in a letter to William L. Patterson in 1958, Unity is always a most desirable thing but unity at all cost can be a mistake of the first order.

As noted by Gerald Horne in a recent piece, the attempt to build class unity without confronting these underlying tensions often has meant coercing oppressed nationalities Blacks in the first place to co-sign a kind of left-wing white nationalism. What Horne is trying to argue is that if we dont reckon with this countrys foundational history regarding settler colonial genocide of its native population and the class collaboration inherent in subsequent enslavement of African peoples, were likely to end up uncritically uplifting slave owners, putting ourselves in a conundrum of uniting with the ideological descendants of those who created the conditions in the first place. Horne was attacked by right-opportunist Trotskyites on the World Socialist Website for his important contributions on these topics.

Former chair of the CPUSAs Black Liberation Commission Roscoe Proctor noted in his must-read pamphlet Black Workers and the Class Struggle:

There are many differences within the working class. These differences, though not inherently contradictory, are constantly used by the ruling class to pit one section of workers against another, thereby dividing the working class against itself and weakening its struggle against the capitalist class. Among these differences are differences between young and old, male and female, skilled and unskilled, craft and industrial workers, white-collar and blue-collar workers.

Without a doubt, one single most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class used to cause division in the ranks of the working class is racism. Together with anti-Communism, racism historically and today has blinded white workers from seeing that their true class interest lies in unity with Black and other oppressed workers at the point of production and in fighting against all such oppression throughout the society.

So, left nationalism among whites in this context blinds them from seeing that their true class interest lies in unity with Black and other oppressed workers. White Americans cannot struggle for progress while participating in the oppression of Black and other specially oppressed workers and peoples.

Working class white workers

Its important to point out here that white left nationalism is not a working-class concept but is instead a feature of middle-class radicalism.

Often youll hear it when folks use the term working class or Trump voters when what is actually meant is white workers. Trumpsters do it all the time when they talk about the GOP as a workers party. Listen and youll hear a subtle switch, replacing in the minds eye people of color with workers of the majority nationality. Its precisely here that the deep chauvinism lies. This applies not only to how people think about it but also in how interests are framed. The alleged interests of the majority of one people in the multiracial U.S. nation are identified with the interests of the entire class.

The term white left nationalism is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Why? Because it identifies the interests of the majority nationality with the interests of the country as whole, superseding class interests or even general democratic demands. But white Americans as a people do not in general share interests separate from the multinational United States. This is because a) there are class divisions in the white population and b) white folks do not face special forms of discrimination because they are white. For this reason, the real interests of the majority of white Americans, who, by the way are also workers, lie with the rest of the countrys workers and multi-racial and multi-national peoples, and not with the minority white bosses.

This can more readily be seen with the term white nationalism so widely used today. However, there is no white nation as such in our country. Obviously, there is a white identity forged from various Euro-American nationality groups in no small part over and against people of color that grew out of attempts to justify capitalisms racial-social division of labor. Here, the majority white nationality was urged to participate in the subjugation of other oppressed peoples by posing a false all-class us-against-them unity. An identity conceived and rationalized in this way can only be anti-democratic and right-wing, a nationalism that always assumes the form of the chauvinism of its ruling class. Chauvinist slogans like Make America Great Again, America First, The American Century, and Law and Order are cases in point.

Thats one side of the equation.

At the same time, theres always been an anti-racist, working-class, and democratic component in this emerging nationality grouping, often latent and submerged but now and again emerging to fight the good fight, a stand seen most recently in the mass movement protesting the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd murders. As its democratic character grows, deepens, and takes on consistent working-class positions, it becomes not left nationalism but anti-racist proletarian internationalism.

As a political trend, left nationalism does indeed exist and can play a progressive role, but only in situations involving racially and nationally oppressed peoples. Taken out of that context, it turns into its opposite, as seen in various calls for a so-called patriotic socialism.

In the case of oppressing nations, as Lenin once acutely observed, nationalism is always backward and reactionary, a relic that in his words should be shelved for observation in a museum or zoo.

Thus the fight for class unity imposes on white workers the imperative of addressing the special oppression that exists against others in our multi-racial, multi-national, multi-gender working class.

Confusion on the left

Below are some examples of how these issues manifest:

1. 74 million people voted for Trump, which means a lot of workers support fascism in this country. We need to organize these people at their rallies and events, an anonymous conversation with a new CPUSA member.

The fact that tens of millions of people voted for an extreme-right candidate like Trump does not mean the entire working class supports the fascist-like policy of certain sections of the ruling class. It does mean that certain sections of the population in particular, the white petit bourgeoisie, class collaborators who support racist policy and have romantic intentions of becoming the monopolists support reaction.

The fact that some working people voted for a fascist does not mean we need to go to Trump rallies. Not only would we be setting ourselves up for provocations, but its likely that such efforts would be self-defeating. It does mean that we, in our places of work, school, and communities, work to build unity of action on the issues to win people whether influenced by Trumpism or not over to the struggle against racism and white supremacy.

In Black and WhiteOne Class, One Fight, Henry Winston noted,

The Communist Party helped make a lasting contribution to the history of the United States when, in 1928, and two years later in 1930, it adopted resolutions on the struggle for Black Liberation which opened up new vistas for the total struggle for democracy and its extension, and for the fight for economic, political and social equality for the Black people in the U.S.

These were resolutions to be fought for not alone by Black Communists. They were, above all else, documents to guide the Party as a whole and, in the first place, white Communists for work among the white masses, to win them for the struggle against the chief source of Black oppression, which was, and remains, the monopolies.

That is why one of the main tenets of the Party in such a struggle has always been that white Communists should be among the first to challenge those monopolists and apologists for the monopolies who justify the special oppression of Black workers.

2. January 6 was a good thing! White workers led that uprising! We need to be organizing January 6 people! (paraphrased from anonymous article by a new CPUSA member and an anonymous email sent to the DC District during the J6 events).

Those who hold such positions are confused about the class makeup involved in the J6 insurrection. Our district in Washington, D.C., clearly noted that the different forces involved included the likes of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, American Firsters, the Boogaloo movement, Turning Point USA, Falun Gong cultists, Q-Anon conspiracy theorists, reactionary Cubans, Vietnamese, and Hong Kong and Tibetan separatists.

It also included petty bourgeois forces like real estate developers, former intelligence agents, right-wing politicians, professional managers, and small business owners. A small section of it was working class. Forces within the Capitol Police and Republican Party played a major role in allowing fascists to enter the Capitol to potentially murder sitting members of Congress. There was no revolutionary character to this insurrection, as it was financed and provoked by reactionary sections of the ruling class and the fascist street thugs that carry water for them.

3. The Biden administration is identical to Trumps. The recent Republican victories are good for the working class so the Democratic Party will die once and for all! The popular front is dead! We need a true working-class party representative of our people!

This statement completely ignores the social makeup and correlation of forces that tend to vote for the Democrat or Republican parties. While it is objectively true that the Democrat and Republican parties are both backed by ruling-class interests and do not represent the interests of the working class, it does not mean that there are no differences between them. The two corporate, duopolist parties represent two factions within the imperialist ruling class, with one tending toward fascism and the other being open to small minimal capitalist reforms (supporting policy on climate change, voting rights, etc.). Consider the following from Lenins Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder:

The more powerful enemy can be conquered only by exerting the utmost effort, and by necessarily, thoroughly, carefully, attentively and skillfully taking advantage of every, even the smallest rift among the enemies, of every antagonism of interest among the bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, by taking advantage of every, even the smallest, opportunity of gaining a mass ally, even though this ally be temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional. Those who do not understand this do not understand even a particle of Marxism, or of scientific, modern Socialism in general. (emphasis in the original)

What Lenin said above is true of united front politics in general. Our role as the CPUSA is to apply the Communist plus as we engage in mass struggle on issues. And while doing so, we must build sustaining coalitions that bring together a large coalition of forces. Take for example the recent victory in Chicago, the adoption of the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance, fought for by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. This mass coalition organizes around the issues of racism and police violence (which are linked), involving labor unions, churches, cultural/nationality groups, community organizations, Chicago aldermen, and more. They would have never achieved victory if it were not for the hard work of organizing this mass effort.

Though reforms may give illusions about the capitalist system, radical reforms can also expose the limitations of the system and lead to greater consciousness of the need to change it and fight for socialism.

On the other hand, sectarian politics are a dead end and a recipe for defeat. One example of this is the local D.C. Cuba Solidarity Committee, which has been unable to pass a resolution denouncing the blockade on Cuba because it is wrapped in ultra-left verbiage that will never pass through a Democratic-controlled city council. Sectarianism is an ultra-left tendency that separates conscious forces from the rest of the masses of people. The CPUSA was at its largest at the height of the popular front against fascism in the early 1940s. After this period and following the McCarthy period, the party continued this policy by developing formations such as NAIMSAL and NAARPR. This energy is needed today.

As Georgi Dimitrov brilliantly stated at the 7th Congress of the Communist International, Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory (emphasis in the original).

4. By calling the Republican Party fascist, we lose white workers for our movement. We need to organize them!

If we are afraid to name our enemies, then we are disarming our class. The GOP is not yet an openly fascist party, but there are clearly fascist-minded people in and leading it. If its current trajectory is not halted, that is what it will become. And while its true that little is accomplished by yelling fascist at folks, its also true that tactics are needed for raising issues in ways that point out the fascist danger inherent in todays Republican Party. This is particularly the case after January 6th. This includes using the F word. Thus the issue is not whether to say it, but how and when.

To continue with Dimitrov:

Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions. . . .

Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses but it approaches them with the most artful anticapitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, trusts and financial magnates, and advancing those slogans which at the given moment are most alluring to the politically immature masses. . . .

Fascism is a most ferocious attack by capital on the mass of working people;Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war;Fascism is rabid reaction and counter-revolution;Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people. (emphasis in the original)

How do we stop this march toward fascist victory? By forming a united front which is establishing unity of action of the workers in every factory, every district, in every region, in every country, all over the world. Unity of action of the proletariat on a national and international scale is the mighty weapon which renders the working class capable not only of successful defense but also of successful counterattack against fascism, against the class enemy.

Comrades, lets struggle against the march toward fascism in this country, and not contribute to its victory, which will end us all!

Image: D is for.320/365 by AndYaDontStop is licensed under CC BY 2.0).

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