Lenin the schoolboy, with his family, Simbirsk, 1879

Editorial

The Legacy of Lenin

This has been an interesting 30 days.

Let’s start with the topic atop the news, this pseudo debate on whether or not sports and politics should mix, especially vis-à-vis the Olympics. Of course this debate is completely bizarre since the Olympics has always been wrapped up with politics. The fact that teams are divided according to countries, and the accompanying paeans to national glory and mass hysteria should be enough to remind us. In case people missed the ties with fascism, we were none to subtly reminded that the Olympic torch relay was Hitler’s innovation. The media didn’t seem bothered by that however. Anyway, the whole issue arose because of the riots in Tibet that Indian media sources hint at CIA backing.

This is not to deny the national oppression of Tibetans under now capitalist China. But it is to point out that China, when it was once socialist did liberate the Tibetans from the grotesque feudal bondage under the Dalai Lama clique. It is also worth stating that whatever reservations people might have about Chinese actions in Tibet since the late 1970s, Tibetan culture would surely have suffered more had the old ruling classes succeed in prying Tibet from China with the claws of US imperialism. So the Tibetans are between a rock and a hard place: Chinese revisionism and capitalism or American imperialism and capitalism. As long as their national movement refuses to dump its feudalist leadership things will go on as they are. Their solution lies with unifying with the rest of the ethnic groups and popular classes in China to overthrow the revisionists in power and return to the road of Mao Zedong.

Anyway, one significance of this coverage of the Tibet riots is that it removed from the spotlight an important milestone, namely that US military deaths had just reached 4000 on March 25 since the war begun five years ago. To put matters into better light, during this same time almost 1.2 million Iraqis died on top of the over 1 million dies in the preceding decade due to US led sanctions. For the willful, this war was never about WMDs. The immediate occasion was by Hussein’s expressed wishes to end the dollarization of Iraqi oil. Oil currently is denominated in US dollars. So if any country wants to this lifeblood of modern economies, they have to amass large dollar reserves. Hence, the massive dollar holdings by US rivals. Meanwhile, the US can print all it wants subject only to fears of inflation. The crux is that wealth that could be invested in locally has to be deposited in US financial instruments. Thus the US gets a free ride and gets to ignore for a long time its profligate ways. This is one instrument of US world dominance. Another is the largest military in the world, which is used in Iraq and other places. The US is currently in the process of reasserting itself globally to try to ensure long term full-spectrum domination, not only of its neo-colonies but against its rivals.

The ability of the US to ignore its profligacy isn’t unlimited, which we are now seeing with the so-called subprime mortgage crisis. I say so-called because this problem is now starting to spread to the credit card and auto loans markets and to the markets of much more complicated financial instruments. Many financial firms have now been laid waste and more are teetering or hurt despite massive state intervention to bail them out. There is a high probability that when all is said and done, we will have gone through a vicious recessions. At the very least millions of workers are going to be ruined by the false bill of goods given to them even as the kings of finance are bound to turn this into a literal killing. Commentators have pointed to the following causes of this crisis: a housing bubble, easy money due to prolonged low interest rates, and willful neglect by financial regulators. These are partly true but the thing to understand is that these were all necessary to cover up the prolonged stagnation inflicting the imperialist world. One bubble after another has been created to maintain an illusion of economic growth where there is none by boosting short-term consumption. The root is a prolonged grave crisis of overproduction intensifying since the transition from competitive capitalism to monopoly (oligopoly) capitalism.

Another result of capitalism and its satanic mills, and especially of monopoly capitalism’s devouring of the world is the externalization of costs. That is, pollution, a cost, is not really charged on the good but dumped as society’s problem. Under that regime eventually all this pollution has accumulated to the point of causing climate change. There is now fear of the potential disruption this will cause to people. Fear of climate change in the West has created a lucrative market for so-called “green” gasoline. I say so-called since gasoline made from corn actually requires more energy than comes out of the process. It is therefore the opposite of green though it gets deceptively marketed as such so that people can salve their consciences even while driving their SUVs. This is the absurdity of leaving anything to the market. The result aside from industrial subsidy, even more CO₂ and other greenhouse gasses pumped into the air to make matters worse is that millions of tones of corn gets diverted from food to this environmental fiasco. Other grains have to make up. Thus all grain prices shoot up. Add to this more bad unpredictable weather from climate change, speculation in the grain markets by financial firms, and the monosopny of Monsanto, former producer of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and you get food shortage in poor countries and food riots.

All this should underline Lenin’s point about monopoly capitalism as moribund and decaying capitalism. We have two roads before us, one the horrors of increasing nationalization without socialization of monopoly capitalism and fascism, the other of the promise of nationalization with socialization of the proletariat. Barbarism or Socialism! The choice is yours. Happy 138^th Lenin’s birthday and happy Earth Day!

Felipe Tagabalita

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