Daily Times

“To shelve the traumatic events, human memory has a tremendous potential of undergoing amnesia, which helps to eclipse the past yet history knows no Alzheimer’s. It neither forgets nor forgives though it cannot help the victims nor can absolve their executioners.” — Herbert Marcuse

In the past few years, the world especially the Middle East has undergone such a monumental disaster that the much-hyped 9/11 — kept alive by the US media — has nearly passed into oblivion if not incinerated in various infernos ignited by imperialism. One can only hope the executioners will not be forgiven provided they are not deliberately forgotten, petering out after serving an unfortunate purpose of being used as a pretext for accentuating the domination of a hegemonic power. How precious those lives were, how wasteful and petrified in the end they were turned into.

It will be an understatement to say that the US ‘Armageddon’ began on 9/11/2001. To appropriate the world resources, this crusade has been underway from the 19th century. Cuba was annexed in 1898. Both Hawaii and Puerto Rico succumbed to its onslaught in the same year. Then came the turn of Philippines that valiantly fought against the occupation only to yield in 1899 after losing over two million people. Since then, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada and, in recent years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine became the direct victim of its aggression. José Saramago is precise in stating that we “have to recover, maintain and transmit the historical memory, because we are starting from oblivion and it ends at the indifference.”

Where do countries such as Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Al Salvador, Brazil, Uruguay, Haiti and other states of Southern Cone stand whose population and leaders were massacred through covert operations fully backed by CIA and the White House? After completion of this ‘alphabet’, the US is now back to ransack Brazil where an elected president was forced to bow out on charges of ‘corruption’ in favour of a business-friendly deputy. The latter, according to The New York Times, is “under scrutiny over claims that he was involved in illegal ethanol purchasing schemes.

Those in the lower house who voted against Dilma Rousseff had no less a tainted history of wallowing in corruption than Temer. The Guardian reported: “Yes, voted Paulo Maluf, who is on Interpol’s red list for conspiracy. Yes, voted Nilton Capixaba, who is accused of money laundering. ‘For the love of God, yes!’ declared Silas Camara, who is under investigation for forging documents and misappropriating public funds.”

The house speaker Eduardo Cunha “was caught last year with millions of dollars in bribes in secret Swiss bank accounts, after having falsely denied to Congress that he had any foreign bank accounts. Cunha also appears in the Panama Papers, working to stash his ill-gotten millions offshore…” “Corruption is just the pretext for a wealthy elite who failed to defeat Brazil’s president at the ballot box, ” The Guardian wrote.

“Those who sleep with dogs get up with lice;” is it a lesson worth recalling? Why the Left finds itself exceedingly desperate to share power with the Right? Probably due to the weakness of both objective and subjective conditions when neither a revolutionary impetus nor a conscious proletariat is available to dislodge this inhuman system. Rousseff, unlike many others, was not an armchair socialist but a hard-core guerrilla fighter who heroically fought to save her people from the debacle of capitalism. To guard against another ‘defensive mechanism’ that rocked Brazil in 1964, “when the military regime, fully supported by the US… to bring ‘order’ back to a country slipping towards communism, intervened,” BBC reports. Ironically, Rousseff met the same fate destined for João Goulart.

The question remains whether there is any likelihood that people like Rousseff can stem or turn the tide of this reactionary trend. After her removal from the presidency, she addressed the people quoting Mayakovski, “There is no cause for joy and there is no cause for grief. For the waters of history are roiling”. Of course, they are roiling from France to Brazil, even to the US and India, yet not enough to inundate the bourgeoisie that has learnt to disarm its adversaries. To advance the cause of workers, the concept of a ‘redeemer’, a charismatic leader, has invariably proved futile. The road-to-revolution can vary, but the nature of the class supposed to lead the revolution is incontestable. The fact cannot be neglected, negated or nullified that the self-organisation of proletariat alone guarantees a socialist revolution. The organisation of workers into a party that develops straight out of the “soil of the modern society itself” is the only prescription for a change. Until then the last laugh will remain on the side of capitalists, and they need no proof to justify their might and excesses.

For Nietzsche, “It is not when the truth is dirty but when it is shallow that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.” What if the truth is both muddy and shallow or society prefers exchange value over truth value, or the truth is not desired for its own sake but only to attain the best results? Is it likely that a lover of truth would throw his towel to the established reality? In a society where every joy is postponed to the advent of hereafter, and every struggle for a better future and liberty is sacrificed at the altar of a whimsical concept of security, the possibility of ‘refusal’ seems both neurotic and unnecessary. Indoctrination determines the human needs that become his own, freedom becomes slavery and superimposed inequality equality — words that contradict yet hypnotise people. Does this possibility of transcendence exist in a society that is going through its socioeconomic 9/11?

The answer may be in affirmative since the unfolding of class-consciousness of workers does not follow any hardcore mechanical process. This does not reveal itself as a bolt from blue; it exists and continues to develop with every blow dealt to their class-interests. Under the harsh, inhuman working conditions, workers develop a sensitivity of being a class that is constantly suppressed and expropriated. They recognise their enemy, yet remain stupefied by its power and their own powerlessness. In ordinary conditions, sensitivity and awareness remain restricted to a struggle for attaining a ‘living wage’ and/or improved working conditions. The real objective of overthrowing the system remains shelved. This may herald the blossoming of the subterranean revolutionary moment, a 9/11 led by the proletariat.

In less than two-and-a-half decades after “the end of the history” the red flag fluttering in thousands can be seen in every street of the world. Nearly 150 million workers marshalled their way in India alone, a sight worth relishing, which signifies that world can be altered for better. Their struggle is revolutionary, their consciousness may not be! Capitalism has yet again created its own gravediggers. Never before Marx was that authentic and relevant as he is after 9/11.

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com