Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what happens when the words that the pictures are shouting out do not fit their intended use?
Every year during the first week of June, the U.S. media push the myth of the "Tiananmen Square massacre" down people's throats -- especially now, with Washington on an anti-China rampage. Comrades who today belong to the Socialist Unity Party have been fighting against these lies since 1989.
In a two-part article written on the 30th anniversary of these events, John Parker exposed the fiction that continues to pervade much of the Western left, and how the imperialist narrative has evolved over time.
Part 1: https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2019/06/08/capitalist-lies-on-china-exposed-the-evolving-tiananmen-square-narrative-part-1/
Part 2: https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2019/06/12/the-evolving-tiananmen-square-narrative/
Supporters of Belarus ‘Resuscitation Reform Package’ proposed to carry out privatization to attract transnational corporations
Shortly before the presidential elections in Belarus, a joint platform of political organizations and independent experts appeared and presented the "Resuscitation Reform Package" -- a program for the republic's economic revival.
Curiously, it is a copy of the Ukrainian project of the same name, which appeared after the Maidan events in 2014.
Political analyst Andriy Manchuk drew attention to this on Facebook.
"This is a program for the ‘economic revival of a future free Belarus’ ... The coalition that promotes it is a clone of the Ukrainian ‘Resuscitation Reform Package’ -- they haven’t even bothered to change the name. This is a grant-eating structure, which was formed in 2014 and supplies the Ukrainian government neoliberal reformers and experts -- with an emphasis on privatization, denationalization of the economy, and promotion of the interests of international financial organizations and transnational corporations," the journalist wrote.
He also noted that the official sponsors of the platform are the European Union, USAID, Pact, the European Fund for Democracy and the International Renaissance Fund.
During the Cold War and the struggle that put the USSR and China on one side and imperialism headed by Washington on the other side, revolutionaries used to characterize the conflict as a class war between two irreconcilable social systems.
There was the socialist camp, based upon socialized property, economic planning for human need and the government monopoly of foreign trade on the USSR-China side, and capitalism, a system of production for profit, on the other.
That the two systems were irreconcilable was at the bottom of the conflict dubbed the Cold War. In light of the current sharpening economic, diplomatic, political and military conflict between U.S. imperialism and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is time to revive the concepts that were applied during the height of the Cold War. ...
To be sure, there has been a steady erosion of China’s socialist institutions. The “iron rice bowl” which guaranteed a living to Chinese workers has been eliminated in private enterprises. Numerous state factories and enterprises have been sold off to the detriment of the workers, and in the rural areas land was decollectivized.
One of the biggest setbacks for socialism in China and one which truly gladdened the hearts of the prophets of counterrevolution, was the decision by the Jiang Jemin CCP leadership to allow capitalists into the Chinese Communist Party in 2001. ...
But on balance, this capitalist takeover has not materialized. Chinese socialism, despite the capitalist inroads into the economy, has proved far more durable than Washington ever imagined.
It is not that Xi Jinping has become a revolutionary internationalist and a champion of proletarian control. But it has become apparent that China’s status in the world is completely connected to its social and economic planning.
