Slaying Dinosaurs and Dragons or when the young confront their elders and the elders show their unworthiness to be elders

[Trevor Hill, left, is an economics student at New York University. Eliecer Avila, right, was a student at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas]

Two infamous incidents reveal a glaring problem with our activism and our movements

Trevor Hill vs. Nancy Pelosi

The first is from a young college student, Trevor Hill, who confronts California Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi [San Francisco] about young people's attitudes toward socialism.

Note in this interview with the Democratic Socialists of America where Hill says he was supposed to ask a different, “softball” question?

He went off script, thankfully, and Pelosi essentially said “we don’t hear you.” There is something encouragingly, but thinly, Marxist about her answer, when she attributes the wealth created as being created by the workers: unfortunately, she believes this wealth belongs to the owners, and that we are supposed to beg for it. But it makes me mindful that we too handpick our audiences to ask softball or scripted questions.

It also makes me regret that my party, the Communist Party USA, needs to be picking up young women and men, like Hill, who are ripe for the picking.

Eliecer Avila vs Ricardo Alarcon

This interaction reminds me of another off-script moment, which was just as ridiculous but was widely mocked and manipulated in the Western, bourgeois media for other reasons.

That is when another young student, Eliecer Avila, a young Cuban technology student, asked Ricardo Alarcon, then president of Cuba’s National Assembly of People's Power about why Cubans had to work for pesos and buy goods in dollars:

“That means a worker has to work two or three days to buy a toothbrush.”

Avila asked Alarcon why Cubans were forbidden from hotels and tourist shops, to which Alarcon replied incongruently that when he was stationed in New York City non-Anglo people were treated badly in stores.

Avila asked about restrictions on foreign travel, to which Alarcon responded if everyone flew there’d be catastrophes in the skies.

I say this not to mock Alarcon, who served the Revolution well, better than millionairess Pelosi has served the working class, Blacks, and the poor, but this Cuban upper statesman and member of the Politburo doesn't seem to have a clue what the young people are thinking any more than Pelosi, and the recent purges within the Democratic National Committee of leftists and Sanders supporters proves this.

Antiques Road Shows

This means we not only have an economic problem called capitalism, which siphons money and resources from the poor and guarantees the rich, but we have a generational problem, where old guards exceed their relevance and become those antiques we think are valuable but then the appraisers from "Antiques Roads Show" assess them as fakes.

This is the class of people who love to shoot invective at undemocratic regimes, when I don't think they care two bits about democracy. Just power and privilege.

One-time mayor of San Francisco and right-wing Democratic US Senator, Dianne Feinstein has just announced she is seeking yet another term at 84 years old. This is a pitiful story arc that needn't have happened. At ne time, Feinstein was a rising female Democrat in an establishment of men; she was considered vice presidential material because she lead [thanks to the assassinations of the Mayor and city councilman, Harvey Milk, because her bid to become mayor failed] a major US city. But the longer she stayed in that sun, the more the system steeped her.

Hill was able to join the DSA, and they are damn lucky to have him I'm sure. Avila, who had described himself as a Revolutionary, was effectively exiled for his impertinence and lives today in Havana where he gets harassed by the authorities for speaking out against the shortcomings of Cuban policy. It has been suggested, though not proven, he is being funded now by the Miami Mafioso. This is as dark a story arc as Feinstein's and it didn't have to be.

Our radical coalitions have barely dealt with the race issue, where often the leadership looks exactly like those Polo shirt-wearing, Tiki torch-carrying white nationalists in Charlottesville. And the men's club is often exactly as a younger Dianne Feinstein found the Democratic Party in the 1970's. So to burden our radical movements with more requirements might seem too much, it is necessary. It is necessary that the young be put there.

Those who are too fragile can be made into kindling.

The People's Republic of China and Africa: Ideological Hypocrisy or One-Calorie Maoism?

Amilcar Cabral and Fidel Castro in Guinea Bissau

The problem with those leftists celebrating the People's Republic of China's role in Africa is not that they're unknowingly lifting their talking points from the Economist, but rather that they don't show the nasty flip side of the coin to this involvement - as even the Economist does.

They also happen mostly to be white and fall into that chauvinism that anything a white person, or a white nation, does or believes to be done, for the lesser races, is a good thing. Even when they fuck up [viz., the narrative the US had "good intentions" by invading Vietnam, which still pollutes newsfeeds and Ken Burns].

These supporters will cite such things as hundreds of billions "invested," but may not mention it was for things like an extensive railroad. If they mention the railroad, they won't mention that it's to move raw materials from Addis Ababa to coastal Djibouti and to a port that China has built.

Further, how much of this investment billions comprises the low wages of imported Chinese laborers that bristle the rising unemployed African laborer? (Locals often assume because these Chinese laborers are dressed in identical jumpsuits that they are prison labor, which bristles even more). Investment is a pretty broad, ideologically blank page on which one can put almost anything - like a loan to a bank to repay a loan held in Paris.

In places like SOWETO in South Africa and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, local vendors and craftspeople are anxious as Chinese investment comes, their own markets are downgraded or dry up completely. Opposition movements are getting more vocal against the Chinese while their governments continue to make more and more deals.

The ongoing convention of the Communist Party of China has been watched closely, President Xi Jinping's words measured by left and right as closely as we used to measure Federal Reserve chairman Allan Greenspan's riddles. Analysis is interesting. Rhetoric indicative. But so are actions.

Xi Jinping is General Secy of the Central Committee of the CPC and President

The visuals of the auditorium are a thing of beauty to a communist. The red flags. The giant hammer and sickle. Lenin. This contrasts sharply to Cuba's Communist Party congresses, where only the Cuban flag is prominent, no hammer and sickles, and the images are of Cuban liberation fighters.

From the visuals alone, one might conclude the PRC is staunchly Marxist-Leninist and that revolutionary Cuba has centered itself on a purely nationalist, anti-imperialist fight.

But actions mean things too, like Cuba's renowned internationalism, and how even after the collapse of the USSR it sustained its support of armed liberation forces in the Americas. Almost 40 years since the death of Chairman Mao, the PRC has not only not lent its support to liberation movements of the global South but has made these business deals and lucrative “investments” with the shady characters that Western capitalism has installed in power, as reliable African leaders.

A good place to start a wakeup call is to read Marxist historian Walter Rodney’s HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA to get a sense on the various tactics employed by Europeans to rape Africa and build its capitalist super world. Then read some of Kenyan historian and African Pan-nationalist Ali Mazrui, author of THE AFRICANS: A TRIPLE HERITAGE, THE AFRICAN CONDITION, etc. Mazrui was no communist, but he was able to distinguish, like other communists and nationalists on the continent, “development without industrialization.” He was decrying this at least as far back as the 80’s and would find, for instance, the malls in Namibia filled to the brim with Chinese manufactures indistinguishable from what the French, Portuguese, and USAID were implementing over a generation ago.

Guyanese-born Walter Rodney [left] and Kenyan-born Ali Mazrui [right]

Someone told me I was obscene for comparing the PRC with Western imperialists. The PRC has no invading armies, I was told. Besides the fact that there are PRC troops in Africa – like, the 10,000 in Eastern Africa – has no one heard of neocolonialism? The PRC needn’t shoot communists and labor militants if the post-apartheid South African government will shoot them instead. This is what neocolonial governments do. This is why they are well funded and handpicked by Western power brokers to secure “our interests.” It cannot be beyond consideration that these same regimes benefit the Chinese designs in Africa, and this is counter-revolutionary.

Whatever Xi Jinping says of Mao and Marx and Lenin and Stalin from the floor of the CPC conference, whatever the PRC’s domestic policy, these results remain to be seen within China itself. But I see none of these luminaries influencing the PRC’s foreign policy where it regards Africa, which disempowers workers and communities and can at best be called a grossly reformulated Maoism Lite..