Select date
The pseudo-left’s silent complicity in the drive to war against Syria and Russia
It’s interesting to see various far left tendencies coming out and saying what I have been saying about the Western Left for years.
“Four of the most prominent pseudo-left websites—Jacobin magazine, which is closely connected to the Democratic Socialists of America; Socialist Worker, the online newspaper of the International Socialist Organization; the website of Socialist Alternative; and International Viewpoint, the magazine of the Pabloite, ex-Trotskyist United Secretariat, have written next to nothing about the growing danger of a major world war.
Given the issues at stake, any genuinely progressive, let alone socialist, organization would subject the campaign for war against Russia and Syria to intensive criticism and analysis, in order to educate the working class and inure it against war propaganda.
Jacobin, Socialist Worker, etc., however, are not left-wing publications. They are right-wing, pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist. In the US, they function as political auxiliary organizations of the Democratic Party, which is spearheading the offensive against Russia, the campaign against Assange, and the drive to censor the Internet.
These tendencies articulate the interests of a narrow layer of privileged upper-middle-class academics, professionals and trade union functionaries whose rising incomes over the past thirty years, even as the working class has seen its living standards collapse, have led it into direct support for American imperialism. Since the NATO bombing of the Balkans in the 1990s, the pseudo-left has supported a whole series of “humanitarian” imperialist interventions and imperialist-backed separatist and nationalist movements.”
By Tom Hall
World Socialist Website
In evaluating political tendencies, one must take into account not only what they say, but also what they do not say. If an organization responds to such significant geopolitical developments as the drive by US and European imperialism for war against Russia, or the imminent escalation of US intervention in Syria, by choosing to say nothing, this silence, as the old saying goes, denotes consent.
Such is the case with the press of the various organizations that comprise the pseudo-left—tendencies representing better-off layers of the upper middle class who mask their pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist politics with populist and radical-sounding phrases.
Four of the most prominent pseudo-left websites—Jacobin magazine, which is closely connected to the Democratic Socialists of America; Socialist Worker, the online newspaper of the International Socialist Organization; the website of Socialist Alternative; and International Viewpoint, the magazine of the Pabloite, ex-Trotskyist United Secretariat, have written next to nothing about the growing danger of a major world war. What little they have written only underscores their support for American and world imperialism.
Jacobin has written nothing on the Skripal affair—that is, the effort of the UK and US to use unsubstantiated charges that Russia was behind the alleged poisoning of the double agent Sergei Skripal, which has been used to justify war provocations against Russia. As the official narrative of the Skripal poisoning has broken down, the media and imperialist governments have shifted to the CIA-organized provocation over Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons to demand war.
