The Progressive International, a Global Green New Deal and the Limits of ‘Left Unity’
It is time for progressives of the world to unite.
The Progressive International, May 2020
One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for ‘unity.’ Those who have this word most often on their lips are those who sow the most dissension… Those unity fanatics are either the people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything up together into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again in much more acute opposition because they are now all together in one pot … or else they are people who consciously or unconsciously … want to adulterate the movement.
Frederick Engels, June 1873
On 11 May 2020, Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis announced the establishment of a new political project, the Progressive International (PI). Varoufakis, a man who believes that the revolution will take place miraculously as a result of technologies like 3-D printing ‘rendering corporations obsolete’, rather than protest, which he dismissively refers to as ‘people waving flags and going out’, does not exactly inspire confidence as a leader invested in real change. Indeed, his main claim to fame is his disastrous handling of the EU-Greece bailout negotiations which resulted in the country’s immiseration. Sanders, meanwhile, is a man who, through both word and deed, has repeatedly demonstrated his opposition to communism and his allegiance to US imperialism – including a staunchly pro-Israel position. Therefore, I immediately had serious reservations about the global ambitions of a movement led by such individuals.
My instinctive reaction was that the PI seemed like an attempt to promote a ‘leftist’ fig leaf for a global Green New Deal – a kind of worldwide Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that will draw well-meaning potential radicals into supporting the continuation of an inherently irreformable system through vague promises of ‘progressive’ change. All this without actually opposing or even impeding capitalism and imperialism in any way. These fears were not alleviated when I saw it receive positive coverage in The New Statesman, an ostensibly leftist UK publication, for which even the prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government was too radical to support. However, not wanting to judge the group solely on the basis of its most well-known members, and because a handful of people and organisations I respect are listed as being affiliated to the PI, I decided to research it more closely before making a judgement. Far from allaying my concerns, what I found has served to heighten them.
A Global Green New Deal: ‘Progressive’ Imperialism
Describing itself as ‘a global initiative with a mission to unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces around the world’, the PI is the outcome of a joint call made in December 2018 by the Sanders Institute and Varoufakis’ Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) to form ‘a common front in the fight against the twin forces of fascism and free market fundamentalism’. The group’s general coordinator and member of its cabinet is David Adler, who is also Policy Director for DiEM25 and was previously a Research Fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Varoufakis and Adler made the aims of the PI explicit in an op-ed published in The Guardian in December 2018. In a comically ahistorical and disingenuous argument, the pair hail the ‘remarkable’ Bretton Woods Conference as the ‘heyday of Western internationalism’ and paint a picture of a once virtuous World Bank and IMF being turned awry in the 1970s. Lavishing such praise on the conference which established the mechanisms and institutions through which the US formalised the dollarization of the post-war global economy, destroyed Western European communist parties and instigated the era of neo-colonialism across Africa, Asia and Latin America is troubling to put it mildly.
Adler and Varoufakis then make their pitch for the PI: a movement ‘to mobilize people around the world to transform the global order and the institutions that shape it’. Specifically, they call for the IMF to ‘oversee an international monetary clearing union that rebalances the current gross capital and trade imbalances’; the World Bank to oversee a Green New Deal; and a ‘reinvigorated’ United Nations to ‘forge binding commitments to swift ecological transition’. In the words of Adler, ‘the vision we are putting forward is to build precisely on the foundations set out in 1944 [at Bretton Woods]’, to ‘redeem its radical spirit’ and use these ‘amazing institutions’ in the service of a global Green New Deal. At best, the notion that the IMF and the World Bank can be repurposed to solve problems of their own creation is naïve in the extreme; as Audre Lorde famously wrote, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. And at worst, it appears to be a cynical attempt to generate support from the left for the very institutions that have impoverished the Global South for more than half a century, and whose raison d'être has been the perpetuation of US-led capitalist hegemony.
It is unlikely a coincidence that Adler’s recent employer, Tony Blair, has been calling for a Green New Deal along similar lines for over a decade. Adler is currently a policy fellow at the EU’s university in Florence where he is writing ‘a policy framework for a new Bretton Woods’. In January 2020, when expanding upon what his vision of a Europe-wide Green New Deal would look like, Adler in fact described an exploitative imperialist process through which German pensioners extract profit from ‘environmental investments in communities that have been hit by austerity in Southern Europe’. He underlined the fact that ‘we can deliver a healthy return on investments for…pensioners in France and Germany and, at the same time, provide…jobs to workers in Greece’. Thus, what Adler is advocating is essentially a mechanism for France and Germany to extract further value from what is left of the post-bailout Greek state and other weaker member states of the EU. It is safe to assume that the PI’s vision for a global Green New Deal is similarly unequal, with investors in the imperialist core receiving a ‘healthy return’ from investments in ostensibly green development projects in the Global South; or, in other words, a direct continuation of imperialist exploitation but with a ‘progressive’ veneer.
The specific aims and demands previously outlined by Adler and Varoufakis are missing from both the PI's founding charter online and its launch video, an omission which is striking to say the least. In their place is a host of vague and non-committal language – much like that of the Western NGO ‘activist’ milieu – that amounts to little more than platitudes without substance. Nor is it surprising that, given the individuals behind the enterprise, there are no specific demands for the end of US imperialist aggression against Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere. In fact, there is not a single mention of the existence of US imperialism, let alone an acknowledgment that it is the primary threat to humanity’s survival, or any statement made in opposition to it. Similarly, there is no call for reparations for the victims of colonialism and neo-colonialism and no statement in support of the right to armed resistance against these destructive forces, in Palestine or elsewhere. The ambiguity of the PI’s statement stands in marked contrast to the positions of earlier progressive internationalist alliances. By way of comparison, the general declaration of the 1967 Afro-Asian Writers Conference is replete with specific demands, including ‘an immediate end to the barbarous bombings and US aggression in Vietnam’, as well as forthright denunciations of ‘the bitterest enemies of mankind’, Zionism, neo-colonialism and US imperialism.
A Channel for Imperialist Propaganda
Exploring the PI’s website and the limited amount of material currently available online, it is concerning, – though still unsurprising, – to see an article by Claire Wordley, a prominent proponent of the spurious narrative that claimed Evo Morales’s responsibility for the Amazon fires, as it paved the way for the 2019 US-backed coup in Bolivia. As Lucas Koerner reported in FAIR, Wordley ‘explicitly compared the Morales government to Bolsonaro in Brazil, calling MAS policies “every bit as extractivist and damaging as those of the capitalists Morales claims to hate”.’ Koerner continued: ‘more damning, [Wordley] cites Jhanisse Vaca-Daza, a Western-backed regime change operative, to disparage the Morales government’s handling of the fires’. As the coup was unfolding, Wordley repeatedly argued that it was not a coup, and that it was ‘US-centered’ to label it as such. One of the publications that gave Wordley a platform to project these transparently imperialist talking points was Novara Media, which happens to be a media partner of the PI. Novara is a small media organisation, the most prominent members of which have shown themselves to be cynical opportunists who, despite radical pretensions (like many on the UK Left), are neither communist nor anti-imperialist in any meaningful way – a lamentable trend which characterizes several other media partners of the PI, notably the US-based Jacobin magazine.
A further worrying sign is the PI’s affiliation with the Lausan Collective, a Hong Kong based group that was involved in the violent, pro-US protests that took place there last year, and that continues to agitate against what it calls ‘Chinese imperialism’. The canard of China being an imperialist power is echoed in another piece published by the PI, in which historian Mike Davis takes several swipes at China. In language nearly indistinguishable from that of the US State Department, Davis repeatedly describes China as an ‘authoritarian regime’ guilty of ‘mass repression’. He also spuriously equates China’s international aid with US imperialism, for which its recipients are compelled to be thankful in a manner that ‘is little different from Washington’s heavy hand in the past’. Similarly, a piece hosted by the PI from another of its media partners, Nueva Sociedad, contains a series of attacks against China, repeats a number of falsehoods about its response to the virus outbreak (which are debunked here) and even scolds those in the West who have praised China’s handling of the crisis. Such rhetoric not only diverts attention from Western Government’s own failures in managing the crisis, most notably those of the US and UK, but builds the justification for further imperialist aggression against China in the future.
The PI’s anti-Communist orientation, reminiscent of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, is revealed in manifold ways, not least of which is the absence of any explicitly communist parties or groups among its membership. Furthermore, according to the online profile of another writer for the PI, Albena Azmanova, she actively participated ‘in the dissident movements that brought down the communist regime in her native Bulgaria’. This explicitly anti-communist tendency is also evident in the career of ‘Cypherpunk’ Harry Halpin, a member of the PI’s council. The CEO of a secure technology company and an alternative currency advocate, Halpin has received over one million dollars in funding from the US Government’s anti-Communist propaganda outfit, Radio Free Asia (as well as from the European Commission). It is telling too that although references to the US Empire are absent, this PI-hosted article mentions the ‘Soviet Empire’. There are countless more examples of similarly worrying connections and content on the PI website, but for the sake of brevity, I have focused on a few revealing examples. I encourage others to delve further into the organisation and its affiliates to come to their own conclusions.
The Limits of Left Unity
Anyone who criticizes or questions a seemingly well-intentioned venture like the PI will likely be labelled a ‘sectarian crank’ guilty of undermining sorely needed unity on the left. But it is evident that the unity for which the PI is calling is so all-encompassing that it includes supporters of what should be anathema to any “progressive" – imperialism. As Lenin once observed, ‘before we can unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation. Otherwise, our unity will be purely fictitious, it will conceal the prevailing confusion and binder its radical elimination’. The movement’s council, due to meet at an inaugural conference in Iceland in September, contains a surreal array of individuals. Yet, notably absent are any representatives of the already existing anti-imperialist forces in the world, such as the governments of Venezuela or Cuba, or those who, despite continuous pressure and aggression from the US, are already engaged in tangible internationalism and transnational solidarity without a need for a conference in Iceland. Ominously, it is not at all clear from the PI’s website how and why its council or cabinet were selected, or what role its members play in that process.
As the Marxist philosopher Marshall Berman argued in his 1982 work, All That is Solid Melts into Air, crises ‘can force the Bourgeoisie to innovate, expand and combine more intensively and ingeniously than ever’, and it appears that the PI is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed even more starkly both the inequality and unsustainability of the capitalist system, and there is a growing awareness among the ruling class that the status quo is not sustainable. Much like the original New Deal in the 1930s was a means to salvage capitalism in the US and forestall the growth of a popular revolutionary communist movement at a time of crisis and mass unemployment, it appears that this is a comparable effort on a global scale. It is likely that the PI is an attempt to corral those who identify as left-wing back into supporting the very institutions and ideologies that are pushing the planet ever closer to the point of no return. It seems to represent a means to generate leftist support for an EU policy document by Adler and represent it as a harbinger of revolutionary change. The American communist William Z Foster presciently wrote in 1951 that the so-called ‘third force’ of social democrats ‘has nothing to offer the world but a perspective of rotting, disintegrating capitalism’, and that ‘capitalism can never be made “progressive”, it is hopelessly reactionary”.’ This truth is lost amidst the slick aesthetic of the PI, which wants us to believe that the answers to the existential crises humanity faces lie within the same institutions that are causing and profiting from them.
When concluding his 1974 exposé Inside the Company, CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee wrote:
Now, more than ever, indifference to injustice at home and abroad is impossible. Now, more clearly than ever, the extremes of poverty and wealth demonstrate the irreconcilable class conflicts that only socialist revolution can resolve. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as international order. It’s harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognise that like it or not we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or the other.
It is clear that the PI serves to blur the line between those two sides. Everyone involved with it should ask themselves what impact associating with such an organisation will have on causes they are invested in. Are they lending their credibility and reputation to an organisation that does not share the same core principles as they do? Evidently, the PI intends to be much more than a flash in a pan; its opening declaration, written by Adler, announces its intention is ‘to build a lasting infrastructure for internationalism’. Instead of ‘relying on temporary campaigns and petitions, the PI strives to be a durable institution that can bind progressive forces together and support them to build power everywhere’. Such plans bring to mind Engels’ assessment of bourgeois socialists that,
come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations...of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow.
So, the question for anyone who sincerely opposes imperialism and capitalism is: how does one respond to the creation of such a seemingly disingenuous movement that has lofty, lasting and global ambitions? The first step will be to preserve the revolutionary sentiments emerging throughout the world in the face of a glossy effort clearly intended to misdirect and weaken them.