Here is a way to understand Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election

You don’t need to be a Hillary Clinton supporter (and I certainly am not) to recognize the strong evidence that elements from Russia flooded American social media with racially polarizing social media during the 2016 election campaign. Why did it occur? How about considering the following context?

Traditionally socialism has envisioned a joining together of the entire working class, across nations and across races. When the USSR existed and the Communist Party USA was active, especially from the 1930s and subsequent decades, the CPUSA really worked vigorously for racial integration and equality as part of this larger struggle. Instead of coming out of the Black Church (as did much of the Civil Rights Movement), the CPUSA’s work came out of a socialist vision for a united working class.

For many decades – all the way up to and including our current time – white employers in the American South promoted racial polarization as a way to divide the working class by pitting white workers against black workers, and thereby prevent the working class from uniting across races to form labor unions. This has kept the South largely non-unionized and has kept wages in the South the lowest in the nation. Racial polarization was a deliberate tool of capitalism.

When the USSR collapsed, some of the most powerful leaders of their Communist Party manipulated ways for them to become capitalist owners of the industries, utilities, and other businesses that previously had been owned by “the people,” so they converted a socialist nation into a rabidly capitalist one. The U.S. sent hard-core “free-market” capitalist experts to Russia to help that process, so Russia became an extremely hyper-capitalist nation with some billionaires on top and the vast majority of Russia’s people suffering serious loss of economic standing.

Vladimir Putin worked for the USSR’s secret police, the KGB. He performed sneaky counter-intelligence work and rose to a high position within the KGB. Then he practiced very crafty political scheming and rose to become Russia’s president. He has continued to practice very crafty political scheming – both to solidify Russia as a world power and to accumulate a huge amount of financial wealth for himself in Russia’s new hyper-capitalist system. In fact, Putin also managed to become one of the very richest people in the world.

Strong evidence shows that a number of Russian entities meddled significantly in the U.S.’s 2016 election, especially with the intention of helping Trump (another ruthlessly corrupt capitalist). Trump had strong business dealings with a number of entities in Russia, so Russia wanted to help its crony capitalist business parter Trump, who could help their businesses in Russia. Also, they designed their election meddling to hurt Hillary Clinton, who is a notorious Cold Warrior antagonistic to Russia even after the Cold War.

While both Bill and Hillary Clinton have long served big business capitalism in many ways for decades, they always pretended to care about the working class and racial minorities. Trump pretended to care about workers, but his track record for decades has shown that he has actually been hurting workers. For the 2016 campaign he promoted explicit racist messaging. He was extremely divisive and hostile toward people of color. As I said above, racial polarization serves the capitalistic “divide-and-conquer” strategy of opposing workers’ rights.

One way Russian capitalist entities could help their business crony Trump was to help Trump polarize Americans by race. Racial polarization serves Trump and hard-core capitalism.

The U.S. has a long, horrible history of racial oppression and violence. Sadly, some people who are working for racial justice now are mistakenly fostering anti-white antagonism. When they promote polarization, they are unwittingly helping Trump and capitalism and their politics of racial animosity. If we want to really achieve racial justice we need to work for the realization that ALL PEOPLE ARE ONE HUMAN FAMILY, and work to UNIFY, NOT POLARIZE. We need to bring the entire working class and all decent Americans together.

 

Let’s oppose Trump and abusive capitalism.
Let’s unite the working class and promote truly progressive economic and political reforms.
Let’s promote compassion instead of anger and polarization.

 

All people are ONE human family.
Stop letting anyone polarize us by nation, race, religion, gender, orientation, ability, or any other demographic variable.
All people are ONE human family.

About GlenAnderson 1498 Articles
Since the late 1960s Glen Anderson has devoted his life to working as a volunteer for peace, nonviolence, social justice, and progressive political issues. He has worked through many existing organizations and started several. Over the years he has worked especially for such wide-ranging goals as making peace with Vietnam, eliminating nuclear weapons, converting from a military economy to a peacetime economy, abolishing the death penalty, promoting nonviolence at all levels throughout society, and helping people organize and strategize for grassroots movements to solve many kinds of problems. He writes, speaks, and conducts training workshops on a wide variety of topics. Since 1987 he has produced and hosted a one-hour cable TV interview program on many kinds of issues. Since 2017 he has blogged at https://parallaxperspectives.org He lives in Lacey near Olympia WA. You can reach him at (360) 491-9093 glen@parallaxperspectives.org