Canadian Prime Minister used anti-communism to argue for ending US hegemony.
Details. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum in Davos that the US-led “rules-based international order” is fading. He framed this shift through a Cold War anti-communist analogy drawn from Václav Havel, the first president of post-socialist Czechoslovakia.
► Carney retold Havel’s “greengrocer” story: a small shopkeeper in people’s democratic Czechoslovakia places the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” in his window – not out of conviction, but as an act of ideological compliance. Carney used the story to claim that the socialist system was sustained by “living within a lie” and mass apathy.
► Carney then drew a parallel to Western states and institutions that kept “the sign in the window,” helping maintain the US-led “rules-based order,” while “the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient” and “international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” He noted that the arrangement had “worked well for countries like Canada” but now no longer delivers stability or advantage.
Context. Economic and political relations between states are becoming openly conflictual. Tariffs, sanctions, “economic intimidation,” and strategic supply-chains controls are now standard weapons in bloc rivalry between major imperialist powers, eroding the stability that “rules-based order” propaganda once promised.
► Such measures have long been imposed on weaker, dependent states. What is new is that sharpening inter-imperialist contradictions are now driving the United States to deploy them against former allies as well.
► At the same time, a renewed wave of anti-communist rhetoric is sweeping Western states, illustrated by cases such as US Democrats and Republicans accusing each other of being “communists.”
► Even where communist organisations pose no immediate threat, capitalist states are preemptively hardening ideology and law, responding to general crisis, declining living standards, and intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry – conditions that sharpen class struggle and advance class consciousness.