We often hear about "victims of communism", but rarely about the colossal and continuous death toll imposed by capitalism.

The historic mortality crisis that capitalist restoration caused in Eastern Europe — unprecedented in peace time — tells a very different story.🧵 After the fall of socialism, states across the Eastern Bloc experienced the largest mortality crisis outside of war or famine in human history.

Previous figures published in @TheLancet put the number at roughly seven million. But more recent research carried out by @jasonhickel and his colleagues identified 16.9 million excess deaths between 1991 and 2019.

What does it mean, concretely, for the Communist Party of China to seek to build a “modern socialist society” by 2049?

Today, I saw one example of that vision in Dongyue, a small village in Henan Province — a model in the processes of poverty reduction and common prosperity. In 1992, when the village was first electrified, there was only sufficient energy to power household lightbulbs. Even by 2014, the power grid could not support a single air-conditioning unit in the village, and when CPC officials visited in 2016, the roads were all unpaved.

We rightly celebrate the breathtaking images of technological progress emerging out of China.

But the Chinese revolution was primarily an agrarian one — and it is in the countryside where the advancement of Chinese socialism can be observed most clearly. 🧵 Today I visited the village of Zhangzhuang in the northern part of Lankao Country in the Yudong Plain on the last bend of the Yellow River. The village has 1,017 households and just over 3,000 residents.

In the heart of Zhangzhuang, there is a canteen that provides free daily lunches to the elderly.

🧵Over the course of its revolutionary history, Cuba has dispatched some 605,000 health professionals and technicians to 165 countries, bringing health to as many nations as the US has sanctioned.

Now, the US State Department is expanding its sanctions to target the program. "Our country does not drop bombs on other people, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities," Fidel Castro once said. "Instead our country sends doctors to those most lost corners of the world."

Some initial thoughts on the Trump administration's policies on Ukraine.

1. The "aid for minerals" ploy simply makes explicit what has implicitly been US policy since 2014, using Ukrainian land and lives to line the pockets of the US oligarchy and military-industrial complex. 2. On NATO membership, Trump's "maybe it will, maybe it won't" approach hardly differs from the ambiguity that was always implicit in the offer.

NATO membership has been dangled in front of Ukraine—and, for nearly a decade before it, Georgia—as a ploy to drive both countries into increasingly-aggressive postures against Russia.

I doubt anyone seriously considered NATO membership realistic behind closed doors: these countries were meant to be NATO's instruments, not its members. They both know this. Indeed, Georgia's government has now said it explicitly.

🧵The liberal memory is fickle and short.

It will have you forget the Holocaust in Gaza and try to convince you that US American fascism arrived, fully-formed, with orange foundation and a blond sweep.

It will have you forget that, many decades ago, the US inspired Hitler. While Europe colonized and exterminated Indigenous peoples from India to the Congo, the US expanded West.

State governments offered bounties for "red skins sent to Purgatory." By 1900, the Indigenous population in what is now the US collapsed from up to 15 million to 237,000.

🧵: We are witnessing tectonic changes in the international system on a scale unseen in generations — and much of the West remains wilfully blind to this epochal process or what it means for the future of humanity. To understand this moment, we need to turn back to World War I, a vicious inter-imperial conflict fought for the spoils of colonial loot.

That war, which slaughtered over sixty million working people, both gave the impetus to the October Revolution in Russia and revealed the unspeakable brutality of an international order dominated by colonial and imperial rule.

When British imperial policy starved some four million Bengalis to death, Churchill said it was “their own fault for breeding like rabbits”. It is clear as day that Churchill and Hitler were part of the same rotten European colonial tradition.

https://twitter.com/michaelsobolik/status/1831142608346734666

For years, Churchill backed fascism as a bulwark against communism. “If I had been an Italian," he said in 1927, "I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”

My uncle once lived on Patrice Lumumba Street in Gdańsk. When our socialist project fell, Lumumba’s name made way for that of the Jagiellon dynasty, a royal family from a time when history measured the exchange of thrones, not the heartbeats of people. 🧵

https://twitter.com/incontextmedia/status/1669767261349969922

Together with Lumumba’s memory went a rich legacy of socialist internationalism.

The Polish people had been in Accra, Baghdad, Lagos, Hanoi and beyond. They left behind schools, roads, hospitals, universities, and social housing.

NATO was founded on this day in 1949. Its mission, as its first Secretary General said, was "to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Like the fascist project that it absorbed, NATO's anti-communism was directed not just at the USSR, but at the aspirations of the European people—and the anticolonial movements springing up around the globe.

Today, Germany celebrates “Unity Day”: ideological cover for the 1990 annexation of the German Democratic Republic by west Germany.

The process was accompanied by perhaps the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history, estimated at $2 trillion. The annexation was marked by the severe curtailment of political and economic rights for the residents of east Germany.

With no democratic mandate, west German monopolists seized factories, farms, mills, and other GDR property, which they asset-stripped and wound down.

Gorbachev died. His legacy? Russia's GDP dropped by 40%. Real wages halved. Poverty ballooned from 2.2 million in 1987-88 to 66 million in 1993-95. Millions died under the brutal regime of privatization and shock therapy. Half a million women were trafficked into sexual slavery. Does Gorbachev hold sole responsibility? Of course not. He was just the feeble culmination of a revisionist current in Soviet governance that made increasing accommodation to capitalist interests. But he presided over the final capitulation, and that is his weight to bear.

Zelensky has ratified Law 5371, which strips 70% of Ukrainian workers of collective bargaining rights, introduces zero-hours contracts, and allows the state to confiscate trade union property. The price of admission into the imperialist alliance is heavy. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/ukra… The British Foreign Office has been spearheading a major campaign of capitalist propaganda, advising Ukraine on the benefits of "liberalizing" labor laws. It looks like they got their way, throwing Ukrainian workers right back to the 19th century.
progressive.international/wire/2022-01-1…

Today, as 'Black Ribbon Day' plays out on social media, you will be inundated with grotesque attempts to equate Nazism and Communism — an act that both minimizes the crimes of fascism and erases their colonial roots. Let us instead remember the victims of colonialism and fascism. We do not have a day in Europe to commemorate the millions of lives destroyed by Belgium's Leopold II in the Congo. His brutal regime would sever the arms of children in front of their enslaved parents for the crime of working too slowly.

Operation Barbarossa, likely the most momentous military confrontation in human history, began on this day in 1941.

Just as US settler colonialism conquered the “Wild West”, Hitler hoped to conquer the "Wild East" and build a slave nation — a "German Indies in Eastern Europe". Hitler admired, he said, how the US had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep[s] the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

In this way, Nazism carried forward the colonial tradition against the promise unleashed in October 1917.

Who controls women's reproduction is a question of who holds power in society.

Look to Poland as an example. The socialist Polish People's Republic was the second country in the world to legalise abortion — after the Soviet Union. (1/6) In 1956, former revolutionary organiser and Auschwitz prisoner Maria Jaszczuk, now a Member of Parliament, fought to extend abortion rights to cases of economic hardship. The law that was passed was so progressive that women would travel to Poland from Sweden for abortions. (2/6)

The attempt to divert blame for climate inaction onto China and Russia is perhaps history's most cynical and destructive provocation.

The US has not only been the greatest contributor to climate change, but also the greatest obstacle to climate action. aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/2… As @jasonhickel has shown, the Global North is collectively responsible for 92% of total excess emissions — effectively colonizing the atmosphere, depleting carbon budgets while denying the Global South the right to industrialize and build prosperity.

https://twitter.com/ProgIntl/status/1424726967862038529

This annual "commemoration" is a vicious act of revisionism that crept into the Brussels technocracy through the veins of Eastern European reaction.

It is a smear as grotesque as Holocaust Denial — designed to mask the roots of fascism and inoculate us against Marxism.

https://twitter.com/eucopresident/status/1429680772672262146

It begins with the reinvention of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as the original sin of the war.

On this account, it was Stalin and Hitler's division of Poland that marked the start of war, plunging Europe into darkness.

The historical record could not be more different.

Whatever measures the EU takes in Belarus from today will not be motivated by concerns about "democracy" or "free speech".

There were no sanctions against Saudi Arabia when it dismembered Khashoggi, Britain when it kidnapped Assange, or Israel when it decimated media offices. A recent @Europarl_EN resolution gives us a clue as to the real motivation.

The resolution expressed “regret” that the Belarusian authorities failed to follow World Bank and IMF recommendations to privatize the state sector, implement austerity, and "encourage entrepreneurship".

Each year on Victory Day — after a celebratory round of military parades, flybys, and speeches — the people of Russia take to the streets in one of the most profound and solemn expressions of historical remembrance I have ever witnessed: the Immortal Regiment. The streets are filled with the faces of lost relatives and comrades.

For a few hours, the partisans and soldiers, workers and resistance fighters, medical personnel and others who had lost their lives in the brutal war of resistance against Nazi barbarism are returned to life.

Today marks 102 years since the start of the Spartacist Uprising, in which a group of revolutionaries led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht launched a general strike in Berlin — and were massacred by the Freikorps at the orders of SPD President Friedrich Ebert. Ebert unleashed some 3,000 soldiers from the Freikorps — a proto-fascist militia that incubated parts of the Nazi leadership — on the strikers. Using weaponry from World War I, the Freikorps murdered over a hundred striking workers.