Cold War: a Marxist view

The Revolutionary Highway Has No Exits – The History of the Cold War

By Arlen Tracey

The Cold War, a global conflict between the United States and its allies in Western Europe, against the Soviet Union and its allies around the world, was a conflict that evolved and twisted itself over its decades of existence.

It is important to acknowledge that throughout the war, the emphasis and goals of both sides changed numerous times. A historical record must be made of the evolving positions of the Soviet, Chinese, Albanian, Yugoslavian, and United States governments.

Stalin Wanted Peace

The “Cold War” began, according to historians, at the end of World War Two, when the Soviet Union and the United States ended their war-time alliance.

The most ignored aspect of the opening of the cold war was the fact that the Soviet Union had calculated the opposite occurrence. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union predicted, expected, and hoped for period of “peace” among the “Democratic Powers.”

The actions of the Soviet Union even as the war was still in the process of ending, but especially in the few years immediately following it, were devoted to doing its best to prevent any conflict between the US and the USSR.

The Tehran Accords, signed by Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, made clear that these “democratic powers” were to be united after the war. Soviet-American-British cooperation was to be the order of the day following the war, according to the accords.

In order to appease the British and Americans, the Soviets demanded that the French Communist Party agree to withdraw from the French Government, even though it had won a clear majority in the post-war elections. The Italian Partisan Brigades, which had fought the Nazis and were led by Communists, laid down their arms without a shot, and allowed a “democratic government” which excluded to them to take hold.

In the U.S., the Communist Party dissolved itself and became the “Communist Political Association.”

But this was not enough for the imperialists. They never intended to have unity with the “democratic powers” of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s attempts to appease the capitalists in the post war period were of no avail.

Hitler’s staunch allies who led the fascist regimes Spain and Portugal were embraced by the United States and Britain. The forces fighting for democracy against the Pro-Fascist Greek Monarchy found the U.S. and Britain sending guns to their oppressors.

In China, though the Chinese Communist Party had done the bulk of the fighting against the Japanese Imperialists, it was blocked from the government, and again suffering persecution by U.S. backed despot named Chiang Kia-shek.

U.S. military bases were set up in West Germany. U.S. Communists endured the horrific “McCarthy Period” in which they were forced into semi-underground status, and the entire leadership of their organizations were jailed.

In response to this, Stalin’s mild policies of peace and cooperation with the west reversed. The Soviet Union led the World Communist Movement into a “left turn.”

In Response to Aggression, Stalin Turns Left

It was in response to this that the USSR turned away from it post-war “world democratic peace” policies and became a cold warrior. The Chinese Communist Party took up arms and defeated the U.S. backed “nationalist” government and established a socialist regime. The Warsaw Pact created unity among the “People’s Democracies” of Eastern Europe, who rapidly moved to place the Communist Parties in command of the “Democratic Fronts” created during WWII.

In 1949, Chinese Communist Party, due to its popular support was victorious, and removed the U.S. backed dictatorship of the Nationalists.

The Koreans attempted to re-unify their country, and overthrow the U.S. backed dictator, Syngman Rhee, who held power in the South. The U.S. imperialists could not tolerate Korean Re-Unification and the “Korean War” erupted.

In 1948, the U.S. Communist Party, directed by the Soviet Union, abandoned the Democratic Party, which it had supported since 1936. Since 1936, the Communist had always run independent candidates for symbolic purposes, but voted for the Democratic Party in the name of creating a “people’s coalition”, but in 1948, the Communist devoted all their forces to the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace.

Aid to people in Africa and Asia from the Soviet Union increased. The feeling of the Soviet Union was that “peaceful co-existence”, once offered at the end of the war, had been met with betrayal, and that the only hope for survival of the USSR was a stronger, world revolution.

No summing up or self-criticism of the earlier policies with Italy, France, and elsewhere was made publicly, however, it should be noted. However, this can be justified by an understanding that doing so might undermine the credibility of the leaders who made the errors, who still held power.

In 1945, the U.S. Communist Party did expelled Earl Browder, who was the symbol of the classless, pro-imperialist, “democracy” brand of Socialism that marked the war years.

The only internally known vocal opponent of Stalin’s turn toward world revolution within the socialist camp was Tito. Tito headed Yugoslavia, and in 1948, at the same time Stalin was embracing revolution as a response to aggression, announced the opposite position.

Tito proclaimed his opposition to “Stalinist Expansionism” and “Soviet Domination.” He aligned himself with the United States during the Korean Conflict, and in response was given millions of dollars in “aid.” Tito also began to implement “workplace democracy”, which in reality, meant the break up of the state industries created after the war, into small, capitalist corporations.

Tito denounced world revolution as “aggression” and socialist economics as “dogmatism”, throwing Stalin’s name in with both. The words of Stalin for Tito were fiery and critical. Albania’s criticism was equally fiery.

Mao briefly flirted with Tito, before shortly afterward condemning him.

The 20th Party Congress and Revisionism

When Stalin died in 1954 this opened the floodgates for an internal Communist Party fight that had been under the surface for decades, heating up most intensely at that moment.

The “right opposition” of Bukharin, who had opposed a socialist economy for a “market socialism”, and had opposed world revolution but wanted “peaceful co-existence” still existed. They had been suppressed while Stalin was alive, and had no following as Stalin opposed them, and Stalin was so beloved by all who fought against U.S. imperialism and Nazism.

The fight went on for 2 years after Stalin’s death as no longer did the forces defending world revolution and socialist economics have Stalin’s leadership to rally behind.

In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Neo-Bukharinists, gave the “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress. His speech went into detail attacking Stalin on personal grounds, repeating the very content of Hearst Newspaper and Anti-Communist slander.

The speech was “secret” from the people of the Soviet Union, but was circulated throughout the world in order to make clear that the new Soviet leaders were not “revolutionaries” like Stalin, but believers in “peaceful co-existence” and “cooperation.”

Pro-Stalin leaders were jailed and executed. Pro-Stalin literature was burned. China and Albania were silent about the policies at first, hoping they could be corrected without a huge conflict.

The first acts of Khrushchev was to attempt to restore the relationship with Tito in Yugoslavia. Khrushchev had numerous meetings with Tito, and did all he could, unsuccessfully to win Yugoslavia to being friendly toward the Soviet Union.

In 1956, rightists and fascist rose up in Hungary to overthrow socialism and install a pro-western dictatorship. Khrushchev attempted to have dialogue with openly Pro-Nazi Priests and other Neo-Fascists within the regime. Khrushchev also refused to receive the input from the Hungarian leaders about how to deal with the counter-revolutionary uprising.

Finally, he sent in the Red Army to crush them, and symbolically, the Chinese Communist Party sent some of its own troops as well.

China & Albania Speak Out and are Punished

In response to Khrushchev’s open lack of support revolution around the world, Mao Zedong and Enver Hoxha loudly denounced the ideology of Khrushchev. They praised Stalin for the left turn prior to his death, and preached that it was the duty of Communists to support people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere who wanted revolution against colonialism.

They denounced the manner in which Khrushchev sought to negotiate and make peace with capitalism, and his various scheming attempts to de-socialize the Soviet economy and move toward “market socialism” as Tito had done.

China and Albania’s calls were not hostile denunciation, but rather soft spoken critiques. But this was too much for Khrushchev.

While Khrushchev always wanted dialogue and negotiation with the U.S. imperialists and with rightists like Tito and the elements in Hungary, he offered no such understanding to China and Albania.

The USSR cut off diplomatic relations with Albania and China, something never even done to the Nazis. In both China and Albania, soviet engineers and technicians burned their blueprints, and left buildings half built.

In China, the economy had depended on foreign aid from the USSR, and the punishing vengeance of Khrushchev forced an economic disaster as the country was forced to re-organize its economy at the drop of hat.

USSR and USA align for “Peace” Against World Revolution

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union announced that Kennedy was their friend. The battle cry of the Soviet leadership became “world peace.” All who opposed world peace, whether they be the Africans who fought against colonial domination, or the people of Indonesia who sought to elect a socialist government, were the enemy.

Mao, Hoxha, and Che Guevara thunderously preached that it was the duty of third world people to fight against imperialism. Khrushchev and the leaders of the USSR were convinced that “world peace” depended on them keeping these “ultra-lefts” in line.

Khrushchev called for Mao and Hoxha’s overthrow as they were “brutal dictators.” Khrushchev denounced China for seeking atomic weapons.

The USSR urged the people of Vietnam to drop their weapons and “negotiate” the continued existence of the U.S. backed dictatorship in South Vietnam.

It seemed that in their desire to suppress world revolution there was a temporary alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union’s leaders.

The Soviet leaders, acting as social democratic sellouts always do, lectured the figures within their own movement to “slow down” and “stop being so extreme.” It is likely that Khrushchev wanted to go even further with this betrayal, which is why he was removed in coup, and replaced by Kosygin and Brezhnev in 1964. But for the moment, the policies continued.

China and Albania were the fire of the left screaming for world revolution. Cuba, Korea, and the German Democratic Republic walked the “middle of the road”, trying to negotiate with both sides.

The USSR continued to say that revolution was immoral, as it would “provoke” the U.S. imperialists to use atomic weapons.

The Shift of 1972

In 1972, there was a rapid shift in the cold war. No longer were the Soviet and U.S. leaders united in their opposition to world revolution. Now, China was actively fighting the cold war on the side of the U.S., Albania was confused and silent, and the Soviet Union became the main target of U.S. hatred.

In 1972, Nixon was welcomed into China and greeted as a hero. The Chinese government proclaimed that the “main danger” was the Soviet Union. China proclaimed that supporting Marxist-Leninist parties in third world countries was “Social Imperialism.”

China instead embraced leaders like the Shah of Iran who represented the “indigenous identity of the people.” It was better to have a pro-U.S. capitalist leader than to have a revolutionary one who was loyal to the USSR.

China was aligned with the U.S., not against world revolution, but against the Soviet Union.

Chinese allied rebel groups in the third world, which had been constructed in order to defy the Soviet policy of “peace”, suddenly were embracing U.S. dictators as “defense” from the “Soviet Social Imperialists.”

The only “revolution” that China would support would be a revolution to overthrow a pro-Soviet government. China’s internal policy no longer spoke of revolution or Communism, but of “third world unity” against “Soviet Social Imperialism.”

This policy began in 1972, but continued after Mao’s death. In 1979 China invaded Vietnam to “liberate” it from “Soviet Social Imperialism.” China funded the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan along with the U.S. China sent weapons and aid to the Shah of Iran, and denounced the Iranian revolution as a “Social Imperialist Plot.”

Albania denounced this, an as resulted in a period of isolation with horrific economic consequences. China, Albania’s only ally, was gone. Albania was a lone, small, isolated nation, which claimed to be the only socialist country in the world amidst “Soviet and Chinese Social Imperialism.”

The USSR’s Response

In response to China openly siding with the United States, the USSR began to no longer distance itself from revolutionary causes around the world. The Soviet Union, which had previously discouraged people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia from fighting back, instead, openly championed such things.

The African National Congress, which the USSR had discouraged from taking up arms against apartheid, now received Soviet money and weapons. The Cubans became the icon of the Soviet Union’s world revolutionary camp, as did the Koreans.

The USSR embraced U.S. revolutionary Angela Davis and highlighted her as a symbol of Black Liberation in the U.S.

The USSR began to “talk left”, while at the same accusing all who criticized them of being “Maoists”, a world that would that became synonymous with “Trotskyite.”

The response of the U.S. was to intensify its brutality toward the USSR. Contra death squads were sent throughout Latin America to commit fascistic crimes against the people.

Reagan waved his arms preaching about a “world crusade against Bolshevism” in ways that would make Adolph Hitler jealous.

The Crack of 1989

The cold war ended officially in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR, but by 1989 the battle was lost. Gorbachev led a section of the Communist Party that was politically to the right of Khrushchev. They denounced the “working class” in favor “universal humanism” and other nonsensical, non-Marxist ideas.

Margaret Thatcher and Reagan found in Gorbachev’s and his followers to be “Communist leaders we can do business with” because they weren’t “war mongering” like their predecessors, i.e. they were open to surrender.

Gorbachev opened the economy, and let the west pour in. His “market socialism” made Yugoslavia’s look dogmatic.

The cold war ended because China and the USSR had both become dominated by leaders who abandoned any will to fight. With Pro-U.S. forces in power in Russia and China, there was no arms race to be had.

Why?

The cold war was ended, not by a flaw in Communism, not by a lack of ability to “negotiate” on the part of the Soviet leaders, but the opposite.

Neither the leaders of the USSR nor of China were purely committed to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. They had both become infected with careerism and revisionism. They both found comfort and peace, and abandoned their will to fight.

It was treason and lack of endurance that caused the horrific events of 1991.

The majority of the Communist Parties were filled elements without principles. The parties were also disconnected from the masses, so even the non-revisionist elements within them could not mobilize a defense of the revolution properly.

The only way the imperialists were able to instill the massive set backs of 1991 was because of the very “revisionism” we see in modern times.

It is always easier to be wrong than to be right. It is always a more comfortable life to accommodate and befriend the oppressors.

The most successful period of the cold war was Stalin’s left turn before his death. Sure, he got caught up in illusions during the war. But Stalin’s response to U.S. imperialist backstabbing was different than Khrushchev or Mao.

Stalin saw that being attacked by the imperialists called not for being more moderate, but for being more radical and hostile.

Did this make his life easier? Did this make them like him more?

No. But it strengthened world revolution like nothing else.

Life in 1930s Germany was much easier for “Good Germans” than for underground resistance fighters. Now “good Germans” live in shame.

Life in the Southern U.S. in the early 1960s was much easier for members of the KKK, than for Civil Rights Movement. But now there is Martin Luther King holiday, while the KKK is the subject of jokes, denial, and ridicule.

Progress comes through struggle and confrontation.

The essence of revisionism is refusal to accept the reality of being a revolutionary.

Revolution is a difficult life. It is an uphill battle. It is a road without short-cuts.

Its final victory is the most glorious of all.

But the journey does not end. As long as oppression exists, revolutionaries must fight oppression.

The revolutionary highway has no exits.

The journey must continue until Communism is reached. Reaction will inevitably begin, when the thrust for progress halts.

Source

Jonas Savimbi: Washington’s Freedom Fighter, Africa’s Terrorist

Peace is back on the agenda, if not yet on the horizon in Angola. With the death of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and the state visit to Washington by Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, there is again a glimmer of hope that the country’s 27-year-long civil war may finally be coming to a real end. As Salih Booker, Director of Africa Action, puts it, “Savimbi’s death removes the principal obstacle to peace in that country. So long as he was alive, it seemed virtually impossible that Angolans would ever be able to conclude and implement a peace settlement. But his death does not automatically ensure that peace will follow.”

Following the February 22nd ambush and murder of the 67-year-old veteran rebel leader by the Angolan army, obituaries in the American press have described his remarkable charisma and ferocious drive for power. He is, indeed, an African paradox, who as leader of sub-Saharan Africa’s longest running civil war, continues to perplex and shame many of his own co-conspirators. Savimbi is widely seen as responsible for a nearly nonstop war that has taken nearly one million lives and as the principal spoiler of the Angolan elections and United Nations-backed peace plans in the early 1990s. As the Namibian government said in announcing his death, “Savimbi chose the way of terrorism and turned Angola into a land of many killing fields.” When news of Savimbi’s death reached the Angolan capital of Luanda, people took to the streets chanting, “The terrorist is gone.”

The United States bears some blame for Angola’s brutal civil war because Savimbi was long the darling of American right-wing, conservative politicians and the CIA. Some fifteen years ago, President Ronald Reagan invited Savimbi to the White House and hailed him a “freedom fighter” for his efforts to oust dos Santos and the leftist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)–the party that has ruled Angola since its independence in 1975.

President George W. Bush’s meeting with dos Santos, just four days after Savimbi’s death is both illustrative of the Washington’s erratic involvement in Angola and a signal that these days Washington is more interested in Angola’s resources–oil and diamonds–than its ideology. But, if war is to end in this troubled country, the international community must work quickly and persistently to broker a peace deal and disarm the rebel combatants.

Savimbi first took to the bush in the early 1960s as Angolans began organizing against 400 years of Portuguese colonial rule. Billed as an anticommunist during the height of the cold war, Savimbi was actually no more than a power-hungry opportunist who changed his colors to suit the tastes of his particular financial backers. His enigmatic character confounded a great number of powerful people over the years. In 1999, for instance, one former U.S. diplomat told me in an informal conversation just how unsettling Savimbi’s personality could be. This official, who had met the rebel leader over 25 times while he was in hiding, conceded each time he felt that he was in the presence of “pure evil.” He explained that Savimbi was “so charming, intelligent, articulate, and dangerous” that he frequently had to spend return flights to Luanda “deprogramming African-American delegations who were charmed into thinking that Savimbi’s vision for Angola was the right one.”

UNITA soldier

Jonas Savimbi, a member of Angola’s largest ethnic group, the Ovimbundu, was born and raised in the southern Angolan province of Moxico. A bright, charismatic, former doctorate student, Savimbi became fluent in more than six languages–including Portuguese, French, and English. His knack for learning languages boosted his credibility among the various groups with whom he negotiated. His gift in European languages facilitated his dealings with political opponents, diplomats, and foreign reporters, while he switched into Umbundo when rallying his followers among the Angolan people.

At the start of the Angolan independence struggle in 1961, Savimbi originally tried to acquire a leadership post within the MPLA, the principal national liberation group. However, the MPLA, which was backed by the Soviet Union, only offered him a rank-and-file militant position. Feeling rebuffed, Savimbi aligned with rebel commander Holden Roberto’s anti-colonial group, the Union of Peoples of Angola (UPA), as it offered him a more prestigious rank as minister in its government in exile.

By 1964, Savimbi decided to resign from the UPA, claiming that Roberto (who was related to and backed by Zaire’s pro-American dictator Mobutu Sese Seko) was a stooge for the “American imperialists.” In 1966, Savimbi launched a third movement, the United Front for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Savimbi and other top UNITA leaders had received guerrilla warfare training in China from 1965 to 1966. And, over the next decade, China supplied the rebel movement with weapons and war material.

Since the start of the Angolan liberation struggle, Savimbi had touted himself as a nationalist fighting for independence from Portuguese colonialism. However, Savimbi showed more hostility toward the other indigenous freedom parties and forged a clandestine alliance with the Portuguese colonial government and its secret police, PIDE, according to University of Southern California professor Gerald Bender and a series of subsequently released documents. As part of this alliance, code-named “Operation Timber,” Savimbi and PIDE engaged in military actions against rival movements, and Savimbi provided the Portuguese with information regarding the activities of the opposition forces. After the Portuguese withdrew from Angola in 1974, Savimbi thwarted an agreement for multiparty, nationwide elections in November 1975, returned to the bush, and plunged the nation into another two decades-plus of war.

During the liberation struggle when Savimbi was receiving most of his aid from China, he boasted to reporters of his Maoist ideology. However, following independence, Savimbi strove to cut a better deal in the West. Declaring himself a capitalist, the charismatic rebel leader had, within a short time, joined Holden Roberto on the CIA’s payroll in a civil war against the Soviet-backed MPLA.

Communist Ghadar Party of India: On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan by US imperialism

Anti-Imperialist forces resolve to throw imperialists out of Asia

Anti-imperialist forces organized a public meeting in New Delhi on October 9, 2011. The meeting was initiated by the Lok Raj Sangathan(LRS) and the Jamaat e Islami Hind(JIH). Below we give a report on this event from a correspondent of Mazdoor Ekta Lehar. It was organised to chart out a course of action for the anti-imperialist antiwar forces of our country.

All anti-imperialist forces in India must unite as one to throw the US imperialists and their allies out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and all over the world. We must develop a powerful anti-imperialist, antiwar movement in defense of the rights of peoples and nations, and of peace and security.

Our brothers and sisters by blood, the people of Afghanistan, are victims of the US led NATO occupation forces. Over 1.3 million people killed as a result of the NATO strikes. Over 5 million Afghans have died as a result of the invasion and occupation. Over three million people are in refugee camps in Iran, Pakistan as well as within Afghanistan.

We have ancient and positive relations with the Afghan people. They have helped us in our moment of need. We can never forget that it was the then ruler of Afghanistan who allowed the Hindostani Ghadar Party to set up in Kabul, the first free Hindostani government during the First World War. The heroic resistance struggles of Afghans to all occupiers — British, Russian, and now American, are folklore. We are proud that Indian soldiers of the British Army faced firing squads for refusing to fight the Afghani people during colonial rule.

We demand that the government of India should reverse its anti-Afghan, anti-Indian, pro-imperialist policy. We demand that it defends the rights of all peoples and nations to determine their own economic and political systems, free from foreign imperialist pressure.

We denounce the decision of the Manmohan Singh government to send the Indian Army to Afghanistan to “train” the puppet Afghan army, set up by the US imperialists, to attack the Afghan people’s anti-imperialist national liberation struggle. We consider this as an excuse to intervene in Afghanistan against our own brothers and sisters.

We believe that the fountainhead of terrorism worldwide is US imperialism.

The revolutionary struggle of the people of Afghanistan, against the occupation forces cannot be called terrorism. We support revolutionary liberation struggles.

The killing of innocent people in bomb blasts in Pakistan, India, and other countries – in trains and buses, masjids and mandirs, courts and market places – is terrorism. We condemn terrorism. We condemn the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

This was the content of every speech in the meeting.

The President of LRS, Shri Raghavan spoke of how over the last ten years, the US imperialists and their allies have sought to overturn all established norms regarding the independence and sovereignty of nations and the right of each nation and its people to pursue the economic and political system of its choice. “Regime change” and installing their lackeys in power, through brutal military intervention, has become the way of advancing imperialist interests in whichever country that does not submit to the dictate of the US imperialists.

Md. Salim Engineer, Secretary, JIH, cited several facts to support his argument that the US state itself was the organiser of the terror attack on the US on September 11, 2001. This was used as justification for the aggression on Afghanistan. He highlighted the danger of allying with the US imperialists. He called on all to stand up in defence of the sovereign right of the Afghan people to decide their own future.

Prakash Rao elaborated on the main features of the present Anglo-American strategy for world domination. Aimed at establishing their imperialist control over the rich oil reserves of Central and West Asia, and check mating all potential rivals, this strategy includes wars of aggression and military intervention in the name of “regime change” for alleged “humanitarian” reasons, coupled with savage attack on the Muslim people all over the world, in the name of “war on terrorism”, and heightened state terrorism.

Tracing the development of events in the region beginning with the Iranian revolution and the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet social imperialists in the late seventies. He conclusively established that today US imperialism is the fountainhead of terrorism.

He pointed out that the people of the Islamic faith all over the world are specifically under attack because they have refused to submit to the Anglo-American prescriptions on what form of governance and way of life they choose for themselves.

Elaborating on why Pakistan is being targeted by the US imperialists at this time and what this means for us Indians, he pointed to the mass opposition in Pakistan to the US policy. The people of Pakistan do not want to assist the US imperialists in Afghanistan. Pakistan is also the gateway to China and India and Anglo-American strategy in this region is to block China, India, Russia and Iran.

Prakash Rao condemned the decision of the Manmohan Singh Government to send its army into Afghanistan to train the puppet afghan government’s army to fight the people of Afghanistan . He called on the people of our country to stand with Afghani and Pakistani peoples in these troubled times and to build the unity all the anti-imperialist forces to throw out the Anglo-American imperialists out of Asia.

Dr. Rakesh Rafeeq condemned the growing US imperialist interference in the affairs of India and called for a broad anti-imperialist movement against the designs of US imperialism in this region.

He pointed out that both in Afghanistan and Iraq, Indian state has been collaborating with the US imperialists from the beginning of the occupations and even earlier. India collaborated with the soviet imperialists during their occupation, he pointed out. The infrastructure being built in Afghanistan by the Indian state is to assist the occupation forces. They are not building schools and hospitals for the people.

Those who addressed the meeting included Md. Ahmed, Prof. Ananthnarayan, P.C.Hamzah, Com. Pratap Syamal, Prof. Bharat Seth, Md. Amin Bhat of the Jammu and Kashmir Peace Foundation, Prof. Sheomangal Siddhantkar, Intezar Nayeem. A moving Urdu poem was sung on the theme of the occupation of Iraq.

Manipuri student activists, Malem and Rojesh, denounced the imperialist policy of the Indian state towards the various nations and nationalities and the use of force to deny the peoples their national aspirations. They called for all anti-imperialist forces in our country to oppose the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

Resolutions were unanimously adopted on demanding immediate expulsion of all foreign troops from Afghanistan, condemning the US led war on terror as the biggest threat to peace and well-being of peoples, in solidarity with the people of Pakistan, against the building of close ties between the US and India and for unity with all peace loving and democratic forces to build a strong anti-imperialist movement.

Video: Gettin’ Funky in the DPRK

PCOT Statement on the elections of the Constituent Assembly

On the evening of October 27, 2011, the Superior Independent Election Commission (ISIE) published the provisional results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly. The Ennahdha movement came out on top, followed respectively by the Congress for the Republic (CPR), the Democratic Forum for Labor and Liberties (FDTL), the People’s Petition for Freedom, Justice and Development… the Communist Party of the Workers of Tunisia (PCOT) won only three seats, in Sfax, Kairouan and Siliana.

The PCOT has noted that these elections, the first since the revolution, were pluralist, open to all parties and all political and ideological trends. However, it cannot help pointing out the irregularities that tainted them, in the interests of truth, far from the hypocrisy of the Ben Ali era, which excels in praise and conceals the truth from the people.

1. According to the official figures of the ISIE, the rate of participation did not exceed 48.9%, which means that the majority of voters (3,867,197 out of 7,569,824 voters) did not take part in the election. One should question what are the causes of this low participation, particularly in view of the general political and social circumstances in which the vote took place.

2. Money played a dirty and dangerous role in these elections, by “political advertising” which did not escape anyone, by large-scale corruption in the form of “gifts” to the electors and “charitable and social services”. These acts persisted up to the day of the elections and in the face of which the ISIE proved impotent.

3. The media still under the control of the agents of the former regime, including the public media, promoted certain political forces to the detriment of others. They did not allow public opinion to understand the issues in the elections to the Constituent Assembly; rather, they focused on secondary themes and sowed confusion about issues relating to religious beliefs.

4. During these elections religion has been seriously exploited in the mosques and public spaces. For example, most of the sermons on Friday, October 21, only two days before the elections, called implicitly or explicitly for a vote for certain parties against others, under the pretext that they represent the religion or that their members pray, which reminds us of the practices of the Ben Ali era.

5. The exploitation of religion goes along with base campaigns of slander against the revolutionary and democratic forces, such as our party. Orchestrated by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, these campaigns diverted the attention of the people from the real political, economic, social and cultural issues but also their division based on religious criteria.

6. Several irregularities were committed on the day of the vote, including by members of the polling stations. Private buses and cars were used to transport voters, especially those who were not registered voluntarily, the election campaign continued until election day, including in front of the polling stations to encourage people to vote for certain lists, food and drinks were distributed inside the polling stations, etc.

Reported by watchdog agencies, independent reports and observers, these violations of the principles of democratic elections sully the honesty and transparency of the elections. One way or another they influenced the results of the elections. The attempt of the ISIE to minimize their importance reveals its inability to thwart them.

7. The successive reports of the announcement of the results call into question the transparency of the elections. The coming days may reveal the causes of these multiple postponements.

8. The PCOT, which participated in this election, was the first to call for the election of a Constituent Assembly to break with the tyranny. It led a clean campaign on the financial and political but also ethical plane. It focused on its proposals and programs, relying on the will of its activists. It was also faced with a very defamatory campaign and suffered from a flagrant media blockade.

The results obtained by the PCOT are weak; they do not reflect its involvement on the ground, its roots, its militant history and its vanguard role in the Tunisian revolution against the dictatorship. While it is true that these results are related to the above-mentioned general climate, the organs of the party never failed to evaluate and analyze our responsibilities.

9. Besides these results, the PCOT will continue to fight tirelessly, alongside the workers and the popular strata, for the fulfillment of the objectives of the revolution and the establishment of a genuine democratic, patriotic and popular change.

In this campaign, the PCOT was able to win many supporters, convinced by its program, its positions, its credibility and its principles; they will form the solid basis of a new start in order to meet future challenges.

On this occasion, the PCOT wishes to thank all those who supported it and gave it their vote, it assures them that its representatives in the Constituent Assembly will strenuously defend the mission for which they were elected.

Communist Party of the Workers of Tunisia
44, rue de Palestine
1002 Tunis, Tunisia
http://www.albadil.org
PCOT@albadil.org

PCOT Statement of support for the detainees of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hunger strike

Engaged in the Palestinian prisoners in the prisons of the Zionist occupation Battle of the steadfastness of the heroic, living cells of the occupation on the impact of strikes hunger heroes of the resistance of the Palestinian National, led by Comrade prisoner, Ahmed Saadat, the Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine under the slogan which was launched since 29 September and continued to the limits of moment, amid the silence of an official from the international community and the weakness of the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, and under careful enemy entity in its policy of racism and continuing reprisals, intimidation, arrests and settlement.

The Communist Workers Party of Tunisia, as it stands in tribute to the struggles of the Palestinian people and the steadfastness of his strength and whose beginnings national against the brutal occupation and against all attempts to alienate the fundamentals of the Palestinian resistance through solutions and efforts to resolve entity that, it expresses its support in principle and unconditional for the Palestinian struggle and stand by the national resistance and foremost ” Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. ”

It also reflects the Communist Workers Party of Tunisia, his belief in the justice of the Palestinian cause and the right of the Palestinian people to establish their own at home to Palestine and Jerusalem as its capital, its solidarity absolute with the prisoners and prisoners of freedom,’s 234 prisoners and prisoner on hunger strike since approximately 14 days and demanding their release without preconditions .

The Tunisian Communist Workers’ Party is the resistance is the strategic option and only for the Liberation of Palestine, stressing the need for unity of the Palestinian national resistance to the reinstatement of the Palestine Liberation Organization as a major victory and the liberation of the occupied territory.

Tunisian Communist Workers’ Party
Tunisia on October 12, 2011

Molotov on Economics

“All of Khrushchev’s errors flowed from this mistake. Marx raised this question, and Lenin confirmed it in his essay State and Revolution. I know it well. There he wrote that at the final stage of communism the principle will be: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The later formulation has only part of this phrase, but the second part, “to each according to his needs,” was replaced by “to each according to his work.” Our press follows this line like a law, but it’s not correct from a Marxist perspective.

Why? First, Marx wrote that only at the final stage of communism could the principle be fulfilled. Why? You can’t demand the best from the common laborer under our conditions. But the constitution was written in 1936, when it was impossible to take “from each according to his ability.” They didn’t even have housing. Only at a higher stage could you talk about it. Could one demand this of a collective farmer? After all, we have established that he must work a certain minimum number of labor-days. But he is paid only a pittance for these labor-days. If he does not fulfill his quota of labor-days, the kolkhoz has the right to exclude him from membership. So what kind of “according to his ability” is that? It’s nothing but window dressing. But window dressing is intolerable in Marxism. Marxism is an objective science; it views things soberly. It calls bad things bad and good things good. It demands genuine, uncompromising struggle for good.

Marx argued, and Lenin confirmed, that the rights of man cannot exceed his economic potential. You can demand that a communist work “according to his ability,” and it doesn’t matter what his working conditions are. But you can’t demand this from the people. How can we have the same demands under socialism as under communism? Do we create some kind of fiction about something that does not exist?… Revolutionaries must destroy what is bad and sacrifice themselves if necessary. Workers scape by and receive their crusts of bread—what more can we demand of them? Meet your quota! That’s it. God grant that everyone conscientiously fulfill his norm. We would lead a much richer life. Better yet—exceed one’s norm. This applies all the more to communists; a communist must work better. This means that contrary to “from each according to his ability” we must inscribe: fulfillment of the norms established by society. Fulfill what is demanded of you by the state, by society; conscientiously fulfill the norms prescribed by the factory, the workshop, the kolkhoz. This applies especially to white-collar workers. They are so many idlers. As they gossip and smoke in corridors, do you believe they are actually working “according to their ability”?

Second, “to each according to his work.” This is especially popular. All of our books go on about it. Some people interpret it as follows: If I work in a factory, I am paid according to my work. But if you are a boss, you have no work-norm to fulfill. In a word, you can take all kinds of liberties…

Marx and Engels said, to each according to his work, but in a economy that has abolished money-commodity relations… Our 1961 program states [the opposite]: money-commodity relations are to be retained throughout socialism. It has things turned around… In Lenin’s State and Revolution, the words “commodity” and “money” are not even mentioned. Why? Everything was already based on them. But these are vestiges of capitalism.”

— Molotov Remembers, pages 202-204

ICMLPO: The Assassination of Gaddafi, A New Crime of Imperialism

The brutal military aggression against Libya, carried out by the imperialist countries, France, England, U.S. and NATO and endorsed by the UN, after destroying the country, massacring tens of thousands of civilians and imposing a puppet government, has concluded its operations with the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi.

We Marxist-Leninists, the working-class, peoples and youth who are fighting for social liberation on all continents, reject and condemn this crime.

The aspirations for freedom and democracy of the working masses and the youth of Libya that were expressed in major demonstrations in February were manipulated by the imperialist countries, reaction and social democracy in order to take over the oil and other wealth. Under the banner of “democracy and freedom” they orchestrated a media offensive which allowed them to invade Libyan territory by air and land. They transformed the just demands of the popular sectors into a crusade to defeat their former ally. They have succeeded by force of arms and have imposed a traitorous and reactionary regime that will bring more hardship and suffering to the working masses and the people.

The last decades of the history of Libya have been marked by the rise of the Gaddafi government that initially raised the defense of natural resources and waved the banners of patriotism; later these positions gave way to the establishment of a despotic government that severed democratic freedoms and in recent years made a pact with the imperialist countries, especially those who today fought and overthrew it. These conditions must be confronted and resolved, in a sovereign way, by the Libyan people without tutelage or interference from anyone.

We always raise the principle of the self-determination of the peoples and we reaffirm it now. Libya’s destiny must be resolved by the workers and people themselves.

Nothing justifies the imperialist aggression and the killing of thousands of human beings and of Colonel Gaddafi. We condemn these monstrous acts.

We call on the working class, on all workers and peoples, on the youth to continue the struggle for the self-determination of the peoples, for social and national liberation.

COORDINATING COMMITTEE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF MARXIST LENINIST PARTIES AND ORGANIZATIONS (ICMLPO)

October 2011

PCMLE: Expression of the serious system crisis

A large demonstration of opposition to the economic crisis and the negative social consequences caused by capitalism occurred simultaneously on 15 October in 82 countries. Thousands of young, unemployed, migrants, unemployed, etc. stormed the streets and squares of more than 900 cities condemning the responsibility and the financial oligarchy and who controls the political power in each of the countries have in the crisis in the world. Political change and the rejection of a democratic system that only serves to perpetuate the power of the bourgeoisie were part of their proposals.

Capitalism faces acute problems: the economic crisis shows unmanageable, and the response of the masses in front of it that is causing the unveiling of a political crisis. Therefore the participants in these demonstrations expressed that there is growing discontent among workers and the people and the desire for change. “We are the 99%”, “against capital, social revolt,” “if not let us decide, not let them sleep” are phrases that discover the motives of the protest. It has been denounced the enormous polarization in capitalist society and has been acting as targets private banks and stock exchanges. All of this is evidence that the capitalist world is experiencing a time of political crisis, as we noted above.

The people seek change and clearly placed the responsible of social problems that are faced, which expresses a development of his political consciousness. These are political banners that motivate social protest and that scare the international bourgeoisie.

Of course, in turn, expresses the same movement limits, especially those imposed by those who have taken the initiative to lead the kind of action that occurred, trying to find a solution to the crisis and the political and social conflicts within the framework capitalist institutions of the same, only with more democracy, which don´t devalue the importance and the fight that has been developed. For revolutionaries is important, be involved in this movement to discuss with the actors about the choices and outputs that lead to overcome the situation in which world is living with experiencing a real social revolution and leave behind capitalism forever

PCMLE

Political Resolution of the XIth of the CC of the PCMLV

After evaluating several plenary sessions during the global situation, we reaffirm our view that we move in successive cyclical crises which are expressed as economic reality, which is deepened especially in the imperialist countries, such as determining component of the general crisis of capitalism, which also of economic base of political and social, creating conditions for moving to a new stage, mixed by wars and revolutions, with high conflict and total decomposition of capitalist society. It is clear that the situation remains tense in the world, continues to deepen the crisis of global capitalism. Riots, demonstrations, war characterize the current moment of world reality.

Expression of this situation is the deepening of the imperialist war against Libya are, we see daily attacks against this country are increasing, and increasingly critical support of the international bourgeois institutions becomes more evident. The bombings are constant and assumptions are civilians who after all end up paying with their lives intemperate attacks of the imperialist forces NATO , Orphans, mothers weeping for their children, this is the scenario that world imperialism has built in this North African country. Unabashedly, the imperialists stole the Libyan people’s money was deposited in European banks, in order to put to the disposal of its interest warmongers. Use the money to strengthen a government coalition made up of reactionary pro-Yankees. About 200 billion dollars of Libya’s international reserves were blocked and placed at the service of imperialism, in addition to this stolen oil, the major facilities and fresh water reserves in this country.

This initially appeared as a political agreement between the imperialist powers to attack Libya, example of this was the position of China and Russia who did not realize their power of veto to prevent the invasion, then the situation worsened, the resistance the Libyan people are maintained over time, setting a problem to be solved by the imperialist powers who doubt the military intervention by land to stop these terrible negative balances and a high political and economic costs.

We understand that this aggression, as well as others made covertly, are part of the imperialist struggle for a new division of the world and are the basis on which to structure the new relationship between world powers, which leads to more wars. The deepening U.S. economic downturn will lead to more conflicts and even wars among the imperialist powers to resolve its economic contradictions.

Another country that is suffering the ravages of imperialist interference, it is Syria, where the imperialists operate in a different format, a little more discreet, are acting from intelligence agencies, on behalf of groups opposed to President Bashar Al Assad. The characteristics of the Syrian government suggests a family relationship in the areas of power, as in the case of the brother of the president who controls one of the divisions of the army and his brother who controls the intelligence services. Some try to locate the essence of this situation on tribal or ethnic differences, trying to hide the fact that regardless of their ethnic peoples seek structural changes that allow them a chance to get a better life. But improving the brevity of life is impossible in a system where the interests of capitalism are the ones that take precedence over the interests of the people and workers in general, it is clear that the intelligence services of imperialism have been mixed in with the riots try to work the ground for possible future interventions.

The acts of sabotage that the governments of Israel and the U.S. made in this country to seek also weaken Iran, Syria partner in oil and industry, hence the conflict to pursue the control of oil reserves and energy, not only this country, if not the entire region.

Importantly, the position taken by China and Russia to Libya with a complicit silence was modified with respect to the situation in Syria, as the worsening social conflict in this country, both exercised their weight as members of the Security Council to make it clearly did not support any intervention in Syria. This is due to a very momentous, Syria offered its territory to transport fuel to other countries, including Russia, making clear that Russia is involved when the conflict is economic interests are at stake with an intervention . Just to mention some good data to say that at the beginning of 2000 the trade exchange between Syria and Russia exceeded 100 million dollars, and for 2005 exceeded $ 300 million, and has continued to increase. Although it is noteworthy that these figures, in general trade of these countries, expressing only a small part of Syria’s debt to Russia, bringing the cumulative three billion dollars. This is complemented by a major military exchange. Syria even has a Russian military base on its territory, which of course must also defend the Russian government when assessing their positions and interests. A similar situation occurs with China in turn is carving the way to deepen political relations with Syria, which promises not only an intensification of efforts to control these countries, and another part of the imperialists, if not also possible contradictions between them.

In Europe, continues to advance the tension, we see the conflict in Greece again takes place in the international news, as workers have returned to the streets to develop their protests against economic measures imposed by international agencies. In Italy, the third largest economy in the euro area is expected to increase the impact of the crisis. France, imperialist country that currently is playing important role in the aggression worn in North Africa as some of the so-called Maghreb countries were colonies of France, so this, now try to regain influence and control as before, on these countries to try to secure their resources.

PCMLV: The government of Venezuela

Will the other counter-insurgency military base?

The world left, revolutionary and social organizations of Latin America had overcome the disappointment, when he again suffered a blow, which forces us as combatants and Marxist Leninist Communist Party back on the subject.

While President Chavez has reaffirmed his supposed “honest” to proceed and said that the murderer will continue working with the Colombian people, the “lord” Manuel Santos, we will continue to fight the revolutionaries fascism treason and bourgeois and imperialist system. As we are sure, the thousands of Colombians continue demonstrating, organizing and fighting in their homeland, with arms in hand to rotten and retrograde structures of a criminal oligarchy that has always had ability to get new and better friends, now in Bolivarian ground.

The delivery of Comrade Joaquín Pérez, and more recently still, the capture of the guerrilla fighter and revolutionary singer Julián Conrado is serious, very serious, we’re all looking, disappointment not to abandon the march, but rather move through over the Social Democrats, that this confirms the thesis of our party on the bourgeois character of this government. We say this for the obvious joy that without the slightest remorse expressed by national authorities, boasting of their efficiency in capturing revolutionaries, guerrilla fighters, communists. Mr. President, let all see that it was a hot potato as Joaquín Pérez, a Venezuelan state policy, and as you can understand why we should worry and sharpens our caution about his reconciliation with fascism. “We’re not under or subject to blackmail from anyone, or the extreme left or the extreme right.” This said, his ministers and yourself, speaking to groups who questioned his performance in the case Becerra however, the government of Santos Is not one of the far-right governments in the world, one of the criminals and murderers in Latin America?

From the Rio Grande to Patagonia, from the innermost village or indigenous community, even the most distant of our continents, rising voices of protest, that you intend to silence, perhaps because this particular “new form” revolutionary action, not is nothing revolutionary nor new.

This approach favors imperialism, which have no qualms at the time of attack in any way to our country. See the example of Libya, despite the reformist and conciliatory attitude of the world imperialism Gaddafi, Libya is undergoing the most ruthless bombing by the imperialist forces of NATO.

The crisis of capitalism in the world is becoming more complex, constantly growing aggressiveness of imperialism, and reform succumb to their threats, I expressed the seventh resolution of our Party in 2010, “the grassroots and criticism the direction of those games, despite the triumphant speech, know this only demonstrates the vacillating character of its leadership and weak to make big decisions in favor of the revolution … bipartisanship, business, parliamentary theater, buying votes and the agreement under the table will be the norm to impose .. “

Outstanding Contribution to the Exposure of the Strategy of Imperialism & Modern Revisionism

by AGIM POPA

(AGIM POPA — Professor, Editor-in-chief of «Zeri i popullit», organ of the CC of the Party of Labor of Albania.)

The Marxist-Leninists oppose the regressive and counter-revolutionary strategy of imperialism, social-imperialism and revisionism, which try to stop and turn back the wheel of history, with their victorious Marxist-Leninist strategy of the revolution

COMRADE ENVER HOXHA’S BOOK «IMPERIALISM AND THE REVOLUTION» IS A CLEAR REFLECTION OF THE REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST-LENINIST LINE INVARIABLY PURSUED WITH THE GREATEST CONSISTENCY BY THE PARTY OF LABOUR OF ALBANIA BOTH IN REGARD TO THE QUESTIONS OF THE STRATEGY AND TACTIC OF THE REVOLUTION IN OUR COUNTRY AND THE PROBLEMS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND LIBERATION MOVEMENT IN THE WORLD.

THE WORLD TODAY IS AT A PHASE WHEN THE CAPITALIST AND IMPERIALIST SYSTEM IS IN DECAY, IN DEEP AND ALL-ROUND CRISIS AND DECLINE, WHEN ALL ITS CONTRADICTIONS ARE BEING SHARPENED TO THE LIMIT, WHEN THE REVOLUTION AND THE LIBERATION WAR OF THE PEOPLES FOR THE OVERTHROW OF THE BOURGEOISIE AND THE IMPERIALIST ENSLAVEMENT ARE ON THE ORDER OF THE DAY AND DEMANDING SOLUTION.

Confronted with the «spectre» of the revolution, which scares them to death, imperialism and the world capitalist bourgeoisie, social-imperialism, the modern revisionists of all trends and the social-democrats, all the currents of regression and reaction, are resorting to all the weapons of their arsenal in an effort to halt and stamp out the revolution, to disorientate and bemuse the workers and the peoples, to estrange them from any genuine revolutionary and liberation movement, to preserve and perpetuate capitalism and neo-colonialist positions, or to wrest them from others. Such is the essence of the global strategy of imperialism and social-imperialism of our time, in whose service the modern revisionists have placed themselves with their undermining and disruptive preachings and activity. Comrade Enver Hoxha’s work «Imperialism and the Revolution» constitutes an outstanding contribution to the exposure of this dangerous counterrevolutionary strategy.

The Party of Labor of Albania has long ago rejected the misleading preachings of the revisionists, especially of the Chinese revisionists, who, with the aim of justifying their counter-revolutionary alliance with American imperialism, are spreading the dangerous illusion that the latter has lost its expansionist, aggressive and enslaving nature, that it is in the decline and on the defensive, and, as a consequence, no longer poses any serious threat to the peoples, but has supposedly become their ally in the struggle against Soviet social-imperialism, in which the Chinese revisionists see the only threat. But facts prove that American imperialism remains the great and sworn enemy of socialism, the revolution and of the freedom-loving peoples, the biggest international exploiter, the chief bulwark of imperialism and world reaction, the savage gendarme and suppressor of any revolutionary and liberation movement, that it continues to be on the offensive.

In his exposure of the so-called «new policy» of the USA, proclaimed by President Carter in order to cover up the true aims of the strategy of American imperialism, Comrade Enver Hoxha points out that, despite the efforts of American imperialism to give it a new coat of varnish, today, it is by no way a new policy, but the old. predatory imperialist, neo-colonialist policy of enslaving the peoples and exploiting them and their assets, a policy aimed at extinguishing the revolutions and the liberation wars. The foundations of this policy, just as before, lie on the crazy dream of American imperialism for the establishment of its domination in the entire world.

Therefore the attitude towards American imperialism, the uncompromising struggle against its enslaving, hegemonic and aggressive policy and strategy, has been and remains a vital necessity for all the peoples, and a demarcation line between the genuine revolutionaries and the revisionist renegades.

Along with its unyielding and consistent struggle against American imperialism, the Party of Labour of Albania has also been waging a principled and uncompromising struggle against the other dangerous enemy of the revolution, socialism and the peoples of the whole world — Soviet social-imperialism. It has boldly and mercilessly exposed the regressive counter-revolutionary turn that occurred in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death with the usurpation of power by the Krushchevite revisionist clique. Our Party has waged and continues to wage a ceaseless struggle especially for the exposure of the dangerous, misleading, pseudo-socialist, pseudo-anti-imperialist, pseudo-internationalist and pseudo-peace-loving demagogy of Soviet social-imperialism. For, as the 7th Congress of the PLA emphasized, any illusion or vacillation, however slight, in the stand towards the present-day Soviet Union is fraught with catastrophic consequences for those political forces and movements that continue to believe in the demagogy and lies of Moscow.

This unshakeable stand of the Party of Labor of Albania is also thoroughly reflected in Comrade Enver Hoxha’s book «Imperialism and the Revolution», which makes a deep-going analysis of the general strategy of Soviet social-imperialism. «Just like American imperialism», Comrade Enver Hoxha points out, «Soviet social-imperialism, too, has placed expansion and hege-monism, achieved through the armaments race, pressure and blackmail, military, economic and ideological aggression, at the basis of its foreign policy. The aim of this policy is the establishment of social-imperialist domination over the entire world». These aims and this imperialist policy are clearly seen in the economic, political and ideological subjugation, enslavement and exploitation of the countries of the «socialist community» by Soviet social-imperialism, which goes as far as their military occupation, as the case of the social-fascist aggression against Czechoslovakia showed. At the same time, Soviet social-imperialism, just as the other imperialist states, is now fighting for new markets, spheres of influence, capital investments in various countries, the monopolization of the sources of primary materials, the extension of its neo-colonialism to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other countries. Resorting to unrestrained demagogy about their «internationalist aid» to the revolutionary and liberation movements of the various peoples, the Soviet social-imperialists strive to undermine them, to put them under their control and exploit them in order to extend their neo-colonialist domination to various regions and countries.

From the analysis of the counterrevolutionary, enslaving and hegemonic strategy of the superpowers made by Comrade Enver Hoxha in his work «Imperialism and the Revolution», in complete opposition to the anti-Marxist policy of the Chinese revisionists bent on compromise and alliance with American imperialism against Soviet social-imperialism, the genuine revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists draw the conclusion that, the struggle against all superpowers, against any imperialism, is absolutely necessary, because one cannot rely on one superpower in order to fight the other superpower.

Comrade Enver Hoxha attaches special importance to the analysis and exposure, with convincing facts and compelling argument, of the counterrevolutionary, expansionist, warmongering strategy of the Chinese social-imperialist revisionists, of their hegemonic and racist aims of transforming China into a superpower to dominate the world, to the exposure of their anti-Marxist capitalizing on the struggle against Soviet social-imperialism alone. Chinese revisionism, Comrade Enver Hoxha says, «has become the close ally of American imperialism and the international big bourgeoisie in order to throttle and sabotage the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat and the peoples».

The racist dreams of the Chinese revisionists about world hegemony and domination are of long standing, and now they have found their complete embodiment in their ambitious plan for the transformation of China into a capitalist and imperialist superpower by the end of this century. In the present conditions, the essence of their social-imperialist strategy for the achievement of these objectives consists in their alliance with the USA, in the first place and above all, as well as with Japan and the West-European powers in order to get credits and economic, technological and military aid from them, and thus to be able to counter Soviet social-imperialism; in the domination of the countries of the so-called «third world» and «non-alligned world», their transformation into spheres of influence of Chinese social-imperialism; in the sabotage and undermining of any revolutionary and liberation struggle, and the preservation of the status quo of the bourgeois and imperialist rule for the sake of China’s alliances with imperialism, the bourgeoisie and the reactionary regimes, as well as the opening of the road to Chinese expansionism; in the instigation of war and armed conflicts between the USA and the other western powers, on the one hand, and Soviet social-imperialism, on the other, so that its present and future rivals should destroy each other and leave revisionist China the only powerful ruler.

Comrade Enver Hoxha’s all-round analysis of the American, Soviet and Chinese imperialist and social-imperialist strategy, in his book «Imperialism and the Revolution», clearly shows that:

First, it is absolutely necessary to fight and reject any illusion about the character of the relations, alliances and collaboration among the big powers as being allegedly to the advantage of the peoples and peace, as well as about the contradictions among them as being allegedly contradictions among socialist and imperialist countries, among the supporters of the peoples and their enslavers. Instead, this is a case of the clash of interests of the imperialists in their struggle for the redivision of the world. As life and facts prove, both when the superpowers work together and enter into alliances, both when they quarrel and rival with each other, it is the peoples who pay the bill. Any illusion about each of them is fraught with dangerous consequences for those who fall into the trap of the demagogy of the superpowers and lose their vigilance towards the activity of any of them.

Second, the strategy of the big imperialist and social-imperialist powers, their alliances and rivalry, the policy they pursue and the objectives they strive to achieve, are fraught with great dangers of inter-imperialist wars. «Therefore, the peoples who will shed their blood in this war,» Comrade Enver Hoxha writes, «must exert all their strength so that they are not caught unawares, so that they sabotage the inter-imperialist predatory war and stop it from assuming world proportions, and, if they fail to achieve this, they turn it into a liberation war and win.»

Modern revisionism plays a dangerous counterrevolutionary role in the service of the global strategy of imperialism and social-imperialism. Comrade Enver Hoxha, in his book «Imperialism and the Revolution», attaches special importance to the exposure of the strategy of the modern revisionists.

The fact is that in their efforts to liquidate socialism, to undermine the socialist camp and to disrupt and destroy the international communist movement, the bourgeoisie and imperialism, especially American imperialism, in the years following the Second World War, relied strongly on revisionism for the achievement of its aims. The revisionist betrayal of the Yugoslavs, the Soviets, and recently, of the Chinese constitutes the greatest and most dangerous counterrevolutionary turn the history of the world workers’ revolutionary movement ever knows.

The book «Imperialism and the Revolution» subjects to a stern analysis not only the Khrushchevite and Chinese revisionism, but also the Yugoslav revisionism, as the weapon in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and the extinguisher of the revolution and the liberation struggle of the peoples, without sparing the revisionist trend of the so-called «Eurocommunists», who, together with social-democracy and the reformist trade-unions, have become the most assiduous advocates of the western monopoly bourgeoisie against the threat of the revolution. Comrade Enver Hoxha exposes the anti-Marxist and anti-socialist preachings and practices of the Yugoslav «self-administration». «The theory and practice of the Yugoslav ‘self-administration’, he writes, «are an open negation of the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and of the general laws of the construction of socialism. The ‘self-administrative’ economic and political system is an anarchic-syndicalist form of the bourgeois dictatorship which rules in a Yugoslavia dependent on international capital.» It is by no means fortuitous that world capitalism gives unreserved political support and has given billions of dollars in subsidies to this allegedly socialist system, which serves world capitalism, in various circumstances and in various countries, as a reserve system to give a new lease of life to capitalism. Similarly, the Yugoslav policy of «non-alignment», which serves imperialism and social-imperialism to divert the freedom-loving peoples from the road of national liberation and the revolution, to preserve the status quo of imperialist domination unaffected, or to open the doors to the neo-colonialist penetration of the superpowers into the «non-aligned countries», is also subjected to stern criticism.

The Marxist-Leninists oppose the regressive and counterrevolutionary strategy of imperialism, social-imperialism and revisionism, which try to stop and turn back the wheel of history, with their victorious Marxist-Leninist strategy of the revolution, which sooner or later will lead to the complete overthrow of the hated capitalist and imperialist order of oppression and exploitation. As Comrade Enver Hoxha writes in «Imperialism and the Revolution», «time is working for the revolution, for socialism and not for the bourgeoisie and imperialism, not for modern revisionism and world reaction».

Source

Pol Pot Was Not and Is Not A Communist

Who Is and Was Really Responsible for Genocide in Cambodia?

Pol Pot Was Not and Is Not A Communist 

(originally published in Challenge-Desafio, PL Magazine Supplement, February 19, 1986)

Apologists for capitalism are always inventing lies to “prove” how terrible communism is. In recent years one of their favorite tales concerns the mass killings in Cambodia by the supposedly “communist” Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. Lots of articles, a couple of books and at least one major movie, “The Killing Fields,” have focused on the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Pol Pot has almost replaced Joseph Stalin as number one on the capitalists’ all-time hate list.

But there’s a big difference. Comrade Stalin was a great communist. Pol Pot, however, never was one. Some recent books, written by Western experts on Cambodia and using evidence obtained after the fall of Pol Pot, show this clearly. These books must be used with care; the authors are either pro-Vietnamese revisionists (Vickery, Chandler, Thion) or liberal imperialists (Shawcross). It’s the facts they have uncovered that are valuable, not their own opinions and analyses of these facts, which are ruined by their anti-Communist values.

“Khmer Rouge” (KR), or “Red Khmers” (Khmer is the major ethnic group of Cambodia) was the name given to the peasant rebels under the leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (native name of Cambodia), or CPK. In order to see how the CPK turned into a bunch of anti-Communist murderers, a little history is essential.

History of the Cambodian Left

In 1951 the old Indochina Communist Party (ICP), dominated by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese, split into Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian groups. Like the world-wide communist movement as a whole by that time, these groups were rotten with nationalism and eager to compromise with “progressive” (anti-colonialist) capitalists.

In the mid-50s, the old ICPers were joined by a number of militant nationalist students returning from France, including the future KR rulers Pol Pot (real name: Saloth Sar), Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan. A party, the CPK, was formed by these two groups in 1960, but its existence was kept secret until 1977, long after it seized power. Apparently this was an unprincipled concession to the anti-communism of the nationalist ex-students. When anti-communism is not fought it grows, as we shall see.

Repression by the monarchist government under Prince Sihanouk soon forced the party underground. Most of the communists of the former ICP abandoned the struggle, returning to North Vietnam. Only the nationalist Pol Pot group remained.

When a peasant revolt began in 1967 in the Samlaut region near the border with Thailand, the Pol Pot group joined it. Never communists in anything but name, they assumed a line they thought they could easily win some peasants to – that the cities (home of the absentee landlords and exploitative state which taxed the peasants) and everyone in them were the enemy, including professionals, teachers and workers.

Romantic attachments to the peasantry as a class have long been characteristic of bourgeois radicals. In Russia, Lenin’s earliest polemic (1895) was directed against the Narodniki, or “Friends of the People.” The petty-bourgeois Narodniki too preached a peasant communalism in words, but practiced bloody terrorism. Vickery finds another close similarity between the KR and the ‘Antonov’ and Tambov peasant rebels in Western Russia during the Civil War, who fought communists and monarchists with equal vigor and with hair-raising atrocities.

To this peasant dislike of the cities Pol Pot’s faction added a fierce hatred, amounting to racism, for anything Vietnamese. Hatred of Vietnam is a nationalist view developed by the Cambodian elite, who remembered the conflicts in past centuries between Vietnamese and Cambodian kings, and how the Vietnamese rulers had driven the Cambodians out of what is now the Mekong delta region of Vietnam.

In 1970 the military under Lon Nol, backed by the United States, overthrew Sihanouk. U.S. rulers began huge bomb strikes against North Vietnamese troops and supply lines in Northeast Cambodia. The bombing killed many thousands of peasants and virtually destroyed village life.

As hatred of the U.S. and the Lon Nol government grew, peasants flooded to join the KR army. But on returning from North Vietnam to join the movement, the old ICPers found themselves under suspicion, sometimes even killed by the Pol Pot group. Thus the CPK, which took power in April, 1975, was a tense alliance of two distinct groups. The pro-Vietnamese ICPers and the Pol Pot faction had distinct areas of influence, the former being more influential in the East (near Vietnam). Their soldiers even wore different uniforms.

Nicolae Ceauşescu with Pol Pot

The Mass Killings Begin

Although anti-Communist hacks portray the evacuation of the cities in April 1975 as an atrocity, even capitalist scholars tacitly admit it was necessary (e.g. Zasloff and Brown, in Problems of Communism, Jan.-Feb. 1979, p. 34 — a journal published by the U.S. State Department and devoted to anti-Communist propaganda with a “scholarly” slant). For example, the capital, Phnom Penh, had grown to 2 million from about 600,000 from peasants fleeing the U.S. bombings. As in South Vietnam, the U.S. had completely destroyed the peasant economy in order to wipe out the village society in which the KR flourished. Phnom Penh was provisioned only by massive imports of U.S. food, which stopped abruptly when Lon Nol fell. If the city population hadn’t been evacuated, they’d have simply starved to death!

Between 1975 and early 1977 neither group within the CPK really dominated. Anti-Communist “experts” like John Barron and Anthony Paul (authors of Murder of a Gentle Land – this pair are full-time anti-Communist propagandists for the Reader’s Digest) and François Ponchaud (Cambodia Year Zero) give the impression that massacres took place throughout the whole 1975-79 period. From surviving records and from hundreds of interviews of refugees and of those who remained in the country, Michael Vickery reveals a different pattern. Though there were occasional instances of brutality against former city-dwellers in areas held by Pol Pot supporters, mass executions didn’t begin until 1977, when the Pol Pot group consolidated its power.

A blood purge of all those suspected of being pro-Vietnamese or insufficiently “pro-peasant” began. In 1978 the remaining pro-Vietnamese forces in the CPK led a revolt, which was brutally crushed. The Pol Pot government then slaughtered anyone who had supported this group, plus the many ethnic Vietnamese in Eastern Cambodia. This led to the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. The KR had no support except its army, and the Vietnamese easily set up a puppet régime of the defeated ICP faction, which rules Kampuchea today.

U.S. Rulers Murdered More Cambodians than did Khmer Rouge

How many people were killed during these mass murders? The U.S. media, following Dith Pran of The New York Times (on whom the movie “The Killing Fields” was based), claim about three million. When talking about “communists,” no figure under the million mark will satisfy capitalist writers. Vickery shows that 300,000 — still an appalling figure — is about the upper possible limit. In contrast, Zasloff and Brown write of the “heavy toll in lives” which “the enormous U.S. bombing and the intensity of the fighting” caused before 1975, and imply that the KR claims of 600,000 to “more than 1 million” dead from US bombing are credible [Problems of Communism Jan-Feb 1979, p. 40 col. 2 & note 35]. When it comes to genocide, Pol Pot & Co. were amateurs compared to the U.S. imperialists.

The Anti-Communism of the Pol Pot Régime

Whatever the number, though, these killings were not the work of “communists” of any kind, even of Soviet or Chinese-style revisionists but of anti-Communists.

Not every group which calls itself “communist” is so. For example, the Vietnamese, Soviet, Chinese and other relics of the old communist movement are capitalists in a thin disguise. They give only lip service to Marxism-Leninism, the working class, proletarian internationalism, and the need to build a classless society.

In contrast, Pol Pot, the KR, and the CPK openly rejected the idea of communism itself! A few quotations from Vickery and Chandler illustrate this:

• On communism: “We are not communists … we are revolutionaries” who do not ‘belong to the commonly accepted grouping of communist Indochina.” (Ieng Sary, 1977, quoted by Vickery, p. 288).
• On Marxism-Leninism: “The first public admission that the ‘revolutionary organization’ was Marxist-Leninist in its orientation came in the memorial services for Mao Zedong held in Phnom Penh on 18 Sept., 1976″ (Chandler, in Chandler, ed., p. 55, note 28).:
• “They [Kampuchean spokesmen] claim that the CPK is a Marxist-Leninist Party, but say nothing about the writings of these two men.” (Chandler, p. 45)
• On the need for a revolutionary party: “The most striking feature of the idea of revolution entertained by the Khmer Communists… was that it was unexpressed. In the 1960s, opposition to government policies and calls for an anti-imperialist stand, made up the platform of the left wing … In fact, revolution and the existence of a revolutionary party were not only played down in propaganda, they were completely hidden truths, revealed only to the enlightened few who could achieve senior positions in the apparatus [i.e. mainly the ex-student radicals]. (Thion, in Chandler ed., p. 16, emphasis added).

It was not until September 27, 1977 that the existence of a “communist party” was even publicly revealed, in a Pol Pot speech (Chandler, p. 37).

• On the working class: “Though tiny, it [the Cambodian working class] existed, scattered in the towns. But instead of cultivating it, the Khmer Communists proceeded to liquidate it as if it were a decadent legacy of the past…(Thion, p. 27-8).

From all this we can conclude the following:

• Pol Pot & Co. were not communists. In this sense they are no different from the Soviets, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Ronald Reagan, or any capitalist.
• Unlike the Soviets, Vietnamese, Chinese and other revisionist, phony communists, Pol Pot & Co. boasted that they were not communists.
• The influence of a pro-Vietnamese faction meant that some Marxist terminology was used, at least up to 1977. After that time the KR abandoned any talk of communism.

The Pol Pot group also sometimes described themselves as communists between 1975 and 1977 in an attempt to get help from China. For example:

…Pol Pot’s tribute to the crucial role played by Mao Zedong’s thought in the Cambodian revolution, contained in a speech in Beijing on 29 September 1977, was not re-broadcast over Phnom Penh radio” (Chandler, in Chandler, ed., p. 45).

Mao and the Chinese Communist party had won millions of peasants to a communist, pro-working class line, whereas the Pol Pot group had tried to win the peasantry to an anti-working class, anarchist line. What China — and, equally important, the U.S. — like about Pol Pot & Co. is their genuine hostility to Vietnam, not their phony praises to Mao.

Khmer Rouge Anti-Communists Propped Up By U.S. Today

In order to weaken pro-Soviet Vietnam, the U.S. ruling class now supports a coalition of Cambodian rebel forces, of which Pol Pot’s KR are by far the strongest element. It is only a mild embarrassment to the U.S. bosses that the group they are now keeping afloat is the very one they point to as guilty of “communist” genocide! In turn, the KR call for “democratic elections” and a reformed capitalism.

For the world’s workers, the lessons of the Pol Pot experience are clear:

• There is no substitute for communism in the fight against imperialism and capitalism. The KR tried to build a “new kind” of revolution based upon petit-bourgeois radicalism. Instead, they plunged Kampuchea into a nightmare.
• You can’t believe anything the U.S. media or ruling class say about communism! The capitalists care nothing for the hundreds of thousands who were murdered. If they did, why do they continue to support Pol Pot?

In December 1981, The New York Times Magazine published a story in which the author said he’d visited KR “freedom fighters” leading the war of independence against the Vietnamese occupiers. Jones, the author of the story, claimed to have seen Pol Pot directing the struggle, an heroic figure silhouetted against the sky.

The Times’ editors thought it was so good they printed it without the checking-up they usually give an article from an unknown writer. It turned out that Jones had made it all up while sitting on a beach in Spain! The Times was so eager to believe a story that made the KR and Pol Pot — whom they were already calling a genocidal mass murderer — into an anti-Communist hero that they rushed it into print! Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the willingness of the liberal ruling class to clasp to its bosom any fascist murderer who can help out in the fight against communism.

Bibliography

David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan, editors, Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays, New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monograph No. 25, 1983.

Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975-1982. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

Source

The Communist League: Response to ‘Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?’

For the original article, “Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?” look here.

Dear Comrades,

Our delegate has reported to us the decision of the ‘Committee for the Marxist-Leninist Party’ to publish in the Committee’s journal the article entitled ‘Why Did The Soviet Union Collapse?’ the author of which is Comrade Ted Talbot, a former member of the Committee.

We have now read and considered the article concerned, and we give below some of the reasons why we consider that this article is contrary to established and agreed Marxist-Leninist principles. We feel that the article should not be published unless together with a critical commentary.

The ‘Traitors Thesis’

The article concerned begins by attacking what its calls the ‘traitors thesis’, which, according to the article,

“… . at its crudest.. .argues that the USSR was on track for socialism until the death of Stalin when a group of traitors to socialism, who had managed to worm their way into the top echelons of the Party, took control”. (Why did the Soviet Union collapse?’ p.1).

The article attributes this thesis to Cathy Majid, apparently on the basis that attacks on its content will be more acceptable if it is said to emanate from a source whom members of the Committee have learned from their own experience to distrust.

In fact, since the 1960s this so-called ‘traitors thesis’ has been a key thesis dividing Marxist-Leninists from revisionists.

At this time, for example, the ‘People’s Daily’, the principal organ of the Communist Party of China, published the seminal article ‘Leninism or Social Imperialism?’ which stated:

“How was it possible for the restoration of capitalism to take place in the Soviet Union… and.. .to become social-imperialist? If we examine the question from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism,… . we shall be able to understand that this was mainly. . . the result of the usurpation of the Party and government leadership by a handful of Party persons in power taking the capitalist road”.

(‘Leninism or Social Imperialism?’, in: David Milton, Nancy Milton & Franz Schurmann: ‘People’s China: Social Experimentation, Politics, Entry onto the World Scene: 1966 through 1972′; New York; 1974; p. 454).

By October 1964, the differences between tile Soviet and Chinese parties had become, in the words of the Albanian Marxist-Leninist leader Enver Hoxha,

“…this great historic battle between Marxism and revisionism”.

(Enver Hoxha: ‘An Open Letter to the Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, in: ‘Selected Works’, Volume 3; Tirana; 1980; p. 631).

In his letter to the Committee dated 4 August 1998, Comrade Powell (Comrade Talbot’s close collaborator) endorses this characterisation, speaking of

“…the great struggle waged by the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labour of Albania during the 1950s and 60s against Soviet-style revisionism”.

(Harry Powell: Letter to Committee of 4 August 1998; p. 1).

And chides the ‘Partisan’ comrades for allegedly having been

“…enthusiastic supporters of Soviet social imperialism right up until its final collapse in the early 1990s”.

(Harry Powell: Letter to Committee of 4 August 1998; p. 1).

At the recent Congress of the ‘Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, Viktor Ampilov endorsed the ‘traitors thesis’, declaring that

“The break up of the first state of workers and farmers in the world started with the revisionism of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union”.

(Viktor Ampilov: Political Statement at the Congress of the CPSU. In: ‘North Star Supplement’; p. 1).

and in a lecture at Kim 11 Sung University in Pyongyang in October 1992, Nina Andreyeva, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Bolshevik Communist Party, declared that the AUBOP held

“… the degradation of the CPSU into Right opportunism and revisionism started from the end of the 50s when the leadership of the Party and state was seized by Khrushchev and his associates. The starting point of the degeneration of the CPSU into opportunism was its 20th Congress”.

(Nina Andreyeva: Lecture at Kim Ii Sung University, Pyongyang (6 October 1992), in:

‘Unpresented Principles’; Leningrad; 1992; p. 305).

Thus, the so-called ‘traitors thesis’ is completely in accord with the general outlook of’ the International Communist Movement.

We must, therefore, draw the Committee’s attention to a paper submitted to the December 1997 conference of the organisation ‘International Struggle – Marxist Leninist’ by Ted Talbot and Harry Powell, which lays down the following important principle for ‘a serious pre-party grouping’, namely that

“…at the initial stage of its existence,.. .certain basic theoretical principles need to be agreed. In particular adherence to the general outlook of the International Communist Movement”.

(Ted Talbot and Harry Powell: ‘International Struggle – Marxist-Leninist’, No 4, 1998; p. 41).

The article ‘Why did the Soviet Union collapse?’ is in clear violation of that principle.

Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

For the Communist League response to this article, see here.

by Ted Hankin

INTRODUCTION

One of the most retailed reasons amongst Marxist-Leninists for the demise of the Soviet Union is the ‘traitors thesis’. At its crudest, the traitors thesis argues that the USSR was on track for socialism until the death of Stalin when a group of traitors to socialism, who had managed to worm their way into the top echelons of the party, took control.

“The tragedy of the Second World War Period was that instead of men in the mould of Lenin and Stalin, it was Nikita Khruschev who became the leader of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement.” (Majid, p.1)

Khruschev is said to have taken a “chosen path of capitulation to imperialism.” (Majid, p.3) Why did he ‘choose’ this path: the reader will look in vain for any answer in this booklet, and indeed Khruschev’s poor peasant origins appear totally unexceptional. (Majid, p.1) At bottom, the traitors thesis is a personalist and psychological account. It is a ‘bad man’ theory of history that has a similar methodology to the manner in which bourgeois history is taught in terms of the reign of wicked and beneficial King’s and Queen’s.

The traitors thesis leaves many questions unanswered. In particular, where did the traitors keep coming from? It is true that Stalin was well aware that many of the ruling elite had ideas alien to socialism, and that promotion within the bureaucracy could also be a step closer to the labour camp. However, this could only ever be an extremely arbitrary and short-term measure. Stalin used organisational means to attempt to deal with a recurring political problem. In any case, such a policy could only survive Stalin’s lifetime, as it was reliant on Stalin’s ruthlessness and prestige. The real question is: why were ‘capitalist roaders’ constantly produced and reproduced under a regime, which was supposed to be socialist? What is required is a materialist analysis.

ORIGINS

Precisely due to the extremely adverse circumstances that conditioned the aftermath of 1917: civil war, economic disruption, famine, etc., the Bolshevik regime was forced to implement extremely repressive measures in order to maintain its rule. These measures tended to narrow the social basis of the regime, which had already lost many of its best supporters in the fighting. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by the early Bolshevik regime was, in Trotsky’s words, “a tragic necessity.” (Lenin and Trotsky, 1978) The Bolsheviks had no choice; they had to recreate the working class.

The adverse situation meant that many procedures had to be enacted in the Soviet Union, which were inimical to the building of socialism. Productive forces theory was strongly represented in early positivist, (Second International), interpretations of Marxism and this tendency was reinforced by the pressing material circumstances. (Carchedi, 1987, pp.5-6)

It is quite clear now, from the experiences in both the Soviet Union and China, that simply raising the level of productive forces without really revolutionising the relations of production is doomed to failure. In particular the masses have to be drawn into the real decision making processes in order to achieve the high level of political consciousness necessary for socialism to be built. The idea that the proletarian state is the bourgeois state turned on its head is entirely incorrect. The bourgeois state relies for its continued existence on only a narrow stratum of oppressors, whilst for its survival the proletarian state must undertake the massive task of bringing the mass of people to political consciousness. As Luxemburg puts it:

“Socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule. Social instincts in place of egotistical ones, mass initiative in place of inertia, idealism which conquers all suffering, etc., etc. No one knows this better, describes it more penetratingly, describes it more stubbornly than Lenin. But he is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconic penalties, rule by terror – all these things are but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.” (Luxemburg, p.70)

There is a substantial element of idealism in Luxemburg’s analysis if taken in conjunctural terms. She is writing as if there was no Civil War and famine in the period (1918) on which she is commentating, when it is difficult to see how anyone could have ruled except by the exercise of force. Nevertheless, initial habits die hard and command methods remained when they were no longer necessary for the imminent survival of the Bolshevik regime. Luxemburg’s analysis takes on an added relevance when we note that policies such as one-man management, piecework, and Taylorist work practices have no chance of drawing the masses into the ‘public life’ which she enumerates. Such practices decompose the working class and are bourgeois modes of labour organisation. (Sirianni, p.147)

That important opportunities were missed is illustrated by the extraordinary initial development of the Soviet economy, a development which cannot be explained in bourgeois economic terms of material self-interest. It can only be explained by the fact that Soviet citizens were prepared to make tremendous sacrifices for the future of socialist construction. As Hoffman mentions, “even anti- Stalinist liberals were to describe the Stalinist system as one of totalitarian democracy in order to acknowledge the popular enthusiasm it had aroused.” (Hoffman, 1990, p.16) This reliance, actually partial reliance, on the masses was time limited. In the 1920s:

“Stalin had nothing else to rely on except the masses, so he demanded all out mobilization of the party and the masses. Afterwards when they had realized some gains this way, they became less reliant on the masses. (RCP, 1981, p.4)

The principal contradiction in the former Soviet Union was the encirclement by imperialism. The fundamental contradiction was internal: the failure throughout to revolutionise the relations of production.

The U.S. Is Even More Guilty Than Pol Pot

To the Editor:

In all the hubbub about the death of Pol Pot, neither the U.S. government nor the American news media have seen fit to mention that

• this mass murderer was supported for fifteen years by the United States.
• the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during 1970-75 killed as many or more Cambodians as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge ever did;
• Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were not Communists.

These last two facts have been documented by anti-communist researchers (see “Who Is and Was Really Responsible for Genocide in Cambodia? Pol Pot Was Not and Is Not A Communist,”). For example: The Khmer Rouge not communist? Yes, by their own statement:

“We are not communists … we are revolutionaries” who do not ‘belong to the commonly accepted grouping of communist Indochina.”(Ieng Sary, 1977, quoted by Vickery, Cambodia: 1978-1983, p. 288).

As for how many were killed by American bombing, Zasloff and Brown, in Problems of Communism, Jan.-Feb. 1979, write of the “heavy toll in lives” which “the enormous U.S. bombing and the intensity of the fighting” caused before 1975, and imply the Khmer Rouge claims of 600,000 to “more than 1 million” dead are credible. (These two authors are dedicated anti-Communists who did much research for the U.S. government during the Vietnam War.)

U.S. support of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is thoroughly documented in an article in CAQ magazine (formerly Covert Action Quarterly) by Australian journalist John Pilger, “The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot.“* Some quotations from that article:

“The US not only helped to create conditions that brought Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot’s exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support — $85 million from 1980-86 — was revealed 6 years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.”

“In 1981, Pres. Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The US”, he added, “winked publicly” as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge(KR) through Thailand.”

“In 1980, under US pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to the Thai Army to pass on to the KR. According to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke,’20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited. This aid helped restore the KR to a fighting force, based in Thailand, from which it destabilized Cambodia for more than a decade.’”

“In 1982, the US and China, supported by Singapore, invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was, as Ben Kiernan pointed out, neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government, not in Kampuchea. Rather, it was what the CIA calls a ‘master illusion.’ … Cambodia’s former ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The KR dominated the two “non-communist” members, the Sihanoukists and the Khmer Peoples’ National Liberation Front (KPNLF). From his office at the UN, Pol Pot’s ambassador, the urbane Thereon Parish, continued to speak for Cambodia. A close associate of Pol Pot, he had in 1975 called on Khmer expatriates to return home, whereupon many of them disappeared.”

(I have also put another article from Covert Action Information Bulletin No. 34, Summer 1990, on this subject: Jack Colhoun, “On the side of Pol Pot: U.S. Supports Khmer Rouge“.*

The United States government pressured the United Nations to retain Pol Pot’s representative as the “official” representative of Cambodia to the UN, to keep the pro-Vietnamese government out.

During the past year or two the Khmer Rouge guerrilla forces have begun to disintegrate, and Pol Pot’s usefulness to the Western imperialists has evaporated. Therefore the U.S. government has talked vaguely about putting Pol Pot on trial for genocide. His death last week spared the imperialists a potentially embarrassing situation.

What does this all mean for us?

1. There is no substitute for real communism — egalitarian, anti-racist, based on class interests, anti-nationalist. Pol Pot’s nationalism — based upon “peasant” radicalism, anti-Vietnamese racism, and anti-communism — created a nightmare state in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, including Communists, who had opportunistically entered into an alliance with them against French and American imperialists, were slaughtered.

2. The western imperialists, the U.S. among them, are the biggest mass murderers in history.

3. The mass media usually play the role of unofficial mouthpiece for government propaganda. What they write about communism, “human rights”, and so on, is normally false. Do not drink water from a poisoned well! Don’t believe anything they say.

Grover Furr
English Department

Source

Enver Hoxha on Pol Pot

This [the Sino-American imperialist alliance] is obvious, also, from the fact that now the American government is trying to put China, which has attacked Vietnam, on the same plane as Vietnam because, allegedly, it has attacked Cambodia. In Cambodia, the Cambodian people, communists and patriots, have risen against the barbarous government of Pol Pot, which was nothing but a group of provocateurs in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Chinese revisionists, in particular, which had as its aim to discredit the idea of socialism in the international arena.

Even Prince Sihanouk, who was incarcerated for nearly four years in Pnom Pen, has spoken publicly at UNO about the crimes of the Pol Pot government and its extermination of the Cambodian people. The anti-popular line of that regime is confirmed, also, by the fact that the Albanian embassy in the Cambodian capital, the embassy of a country which has given the people of Cambodia every possible aid, was kept isolated, indeed, encircled with barbed wire, as if it were in a concentration camp. The other embassies, too, were in a similar situation.

The Albanian diplomats have seen with their own eyes that the Cambodian people were treated inhumanly by the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari. Pnom Pen was turned into a deserted city, empty of people, where food was difficult to secure even for the diplomats, where no doctors or even aspirins could be found. We think that the people and patriots of Cambodia waited too long before overthrowing this clique which was completely linked with Beijing and in its service. When the first conflicts broke out on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, the view of socialist Albania was, and the world is witness to this, that disagreements between the two neighbour countries should be resolved through talks and without the interference of the Chinese or Soviet social-imperialists. But this was not done. On the contrary, the Pol Pot group, incited by Beijing, brought out in Pnom Pen daily communiques in which they announced that thousands of Vietnamese were being kill led by its army on Vietnamese territory.

It was quite apparent that this provocative and warmongering activity was supported and carried out for the expansionist aims of Deng Xiaoping, Hua Guofeng and on their account. And why should Deng Xiaoping not support and back the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari when he has rehabilitated all the scum of Chinese reaction, when he has returned property, money and power over the plants and factories to the big bourgeoisie, the men of the Kuomintang and all the counter-revolutionaries, and has turned China into a social-imperialist capitalist country, as our Party has rightly described it? The bourgeoisie in the party and the bourgeois intellectuals are in power in China. There this scum is considered the élite, while they demand that the working class bend its head and work for the «modernizations». It was precisely these capitalists, the clique of Deng Xiaoping and Co., who kept Pol Pot in power in Cambodia and now, after he has been overthrown, are trying with every means to restore him. The Chinese leadership are trying to cover up the aggressive act they undertook against Vietnam with the absurd pretext that Vietnam is seeking «small-scale hegemony», thinking that in this way they will be excused for the large-scale hegemony of China.

But the question must be asked: Why do the Chinese imperialists allegedly have the right to defend the barbarous fascist Pol Pot group, and Vietnam does not have the right to support the revolutionaries and the people of Cambodia to build a free, independent and sovereign country? The Vietnamese government has officially and publicly rejected the Chinese allegation that it is aiming to set up a federation of Indochina and has declared that Vietnam wants the peoples of this zone to live free, in friendship and independence, each in its own country.

 – From The Chinese Leadership headed by Deng Xiaoping have Launched a Military Attack on Vietnam from the newspaper “Zeri i Popoullit.”

Straight Talk on the Trial of Pol Pot

by Mike Ely

Revolutionary Worker #918, Aug. 10, 1997

In the end of July, ABC News broadcast parts of a videotape showing a trial of Pol Pot in territory controlled by Khmer Rouge forces in western Cambodia.

Pol Pot has been the long-time leader of the Khmer Rouge (which means “Red Cambodians”). The Khmer Rouge armed forces seized power in Cambodia in 1975 after many years of guerrilla warfare. They led the country for three years. Then they were driven out of power and back into the countryside by a 1979 Vietnamese invasion.

With news that Pol Pot had been arrested and put on trial, the U.S. media reissued their familiar charges about “killing fields” during the years 1975-79 when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. They insisted that Pol Pot be handed over to an international tribunal to be tried for genocide.

Nowhere is it mentioned that for years the U.S. bombed and invaded Cambodia in an attempt to defeat the anti-imperialist forces, totally wreck the country’s economy and punish the people of Cambodia. Given this bloody history, the U.S. imperialists have no right to speak on what is good for Cambodia–and no right to judge those who fought them.

In the hands of the western media, the story of Cambodia has become a crude anti-communist morality tale. New York Times reporter Elizabeth Becker appeared on TV again recently as an official “expert” to hammer home the message: Cambodia, she said, shows that attempts to carry out “wonderful-sounding ideals” about equality using “social engineering” produces a disaster for people.

To make the facts fit this message, official discussion rips the Cambodian events out of any recognizable context. Cambodia is portrayed as a gentle, peasant land destroyed by communist revolution. In fact, any serious approach to the events in Cambodia has to start with the imperialist invasion of Indochina launched by the U.S. in 1965 and the class nature of Cambodian society.

U.S. Destruction and the Challenges of the Year Zero

“Traditional” Cambodia was a brutal feudal society that needed a revolution. About 80 percent of the people were peasants, most of them extremely poor and exploited by a class of government officials based in urban strongholds. Cambodia’s absolute monarchy rested on a military that repeatedly suppressed peasant uprisings. The country was colonized by France in the late 1800s. In one famous incident, 900 workers died constructing a colonial resort at Bokor during nine months of forced corvée labor.

As the French imperialists were defeated in Indochina, the U.S. moved in to assert influence and control. In Cambodia the U.S. maneuvered for influence through aid and arms to the government of Prince Sihanouk, while backing reactionary armed forces in opposition to Sihanouk.

In the 1960s the Khmer Rouge, led by Angkar (which means “the Organization” in the Khmer language), launched a just revolutionary armed struggle by establishing rural base areas among the peasants. (Angkar later publicly named itself the Communist Party of Kampuchea–CPK.) Their goals were to overthrow feudalism, develop an independent new economy, and drive any foreign dominating forces out of Cambodia.

As revolutionary forces made progress in Indochina, U.S. forces invaded in 1965. Within a few years, the U.S. had 500,000 troops in Vietnam.

Unknown to most of the world, the U.S. also launched a “secret war” of massive bombardment of the neighboring countries Cambodia and Laos–targeting the rural base areas of the guerrilla forces. The U.S. expanded its aggression against Cambodia. In 1969 a U.S.-instigated coup overthrew Sihanouk and brought the right-wing general Lon Nol to power. Then, in 1970, President Nixon ordered a land invasion of eastern Cambodia to attack Vietnamese liberation forces based there. It was a defeat for the U.S.–their armies had to withdraw. And the Khmer Rouge made major advances.

The U.S. responded with one of the most intense and protracted air wars in history. They dropped over 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia between 1970 and 1973–three times what the U.S. dropped on Japan during World War 2. In 160 days of “carpet bombings” in 1973, U.S. planes dropped over 240,000 tons, concentrated on the main farming areas along the Mekong River.

This was the real genocidal episode in Cambodia and it marked everything that followed.

In April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge troops took the capital Phnom Penh, Angkar and the masses of people faced extremely difficult conditions. Unable to win the war, the U.S. had set out to wreck and punish the country. Agriculture was in ruins. At least 500,000 people had died during the war–many because of the U.S. bombing. About two million people–a third of the country’s population–had fled the countryside into Phnom Penh, where they faced starvation.

At the beginning of what Angkar called “Year Zero,” the challenges were huge: a new state system, agriculture, and industry had to be rebuilt, virtually from scratch, in one of the poorest countries of the world–under constant threat of new invasion.

In May 1975, U.S. President Gerald Ford staged the so-called Mayaguez incident, launched new air raids and destroyed Cambodia’s only oil refinery.

Under these conditions, any government leading Cambodia would have had to take emergency measures to ensure survival for the masses of people. In the process, the Khmer Rouge attempted to replace the old semifeudal, semicolonial society with their vision of a new independent Democratic Kampuchea.

Any serious analysis of the Khmer Rouge has to start with understanding these conditions–which is precisely what the standard tales about “Khmer Rouge genocide” try to hide.

Dishonest Distortions

The western press repeats a standard formula: “at least a million people died under Pol Pot.” When people hear this, they are supposed to believe that one million people were killed by Pol Pot.

In fact, these numbers include everyone who died from starvation, disease and political execution in the 1975-79 period between wars–and assigns blame for each of those deaths to the new government of the Khmer Rouge-led Democratic Kampuchea.

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman devote a useful chapter in their book After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology to documenting how the official myth of “Khmer Rouge genocide” was systematically created using false information and distortions.

In Cambodia, after 10 years of war, revolution, invasion, bombardment, famine and dislocation, the country was dotted with mass graves. Many people, certainly hundreds of thousands, died during the years that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia. Their skulls and bones are offered as proof of “Khmer Rouge atrocities.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of those who died during the 1970s died of war, bombardment, starvation and disease.

Michael Vickery, in his book Cambodia 1975-82, shows why no one knows how many Cambodians died during the wars and upheavals of the 1970s. There were no reliable population figures before the fighting. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (The Nation, June 25, 1977) point out that John Barron and Anthony Paul, who wrote the first widely publicized book accusing the Khmer Rouge of genocide, estimated that only about 10 percent of those who died in that hard first year of 1976 were from political executions. Vickery’s account covering the larger period from 1975-79 suggests a higher range estimate for the number who died from execution, but he emphasizes the lack of precision inherent in all the data and estimates concerning this period.

A former U.S. Foreign Service officer in Phnom Penh, David Chandler, reported that the U.S. government itself estimated that a million Cambodians were going to die of starvation in the years after the U.S. bombardment. Then–when hundreds of thousands did die of starvation–the U.S. media machine claims all this was “auto-genocide” by those who opposed the U.S. aggression.

Any serious international tribunal on genocide in Cambodia would have to indict the U.S. war-makers Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, General Westmoreland, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Gerald Ford and all the rest.

A Standard for a Serious Analysis

The defenders of capitalist/imperialist society examine the experience of Cambodia from their perspective–from the perspective of defending and justifying capitalist society. In these accounts, the disruption of the old society is itself considered a crime. The fact that the upper class elite had to do manual labor under the Khmer Rouge, or that young people and women should be encouraged to break from the traditional family control, or that officials of the old society were deposed and often punished–these things are portrayed as atrocities.

Clearly, analyses that start from that bourgeois class stand cannot serve our struggle for liberation. For oppressed people, a serious analysis has to approach these experiences from a completely different point of view, using a completely different standard–seeking to make radical ruptures in traditional ideas and traditional property relations.

In a discussion of Cambodia, Chairman Avakian asked (Revolution/Fall 1990): “How do you break with these very oppressive and exploitative relations and traditions, customs, and cultures in a way that… fundamentally relies on the masses and acts on the understanding that they are the ones that have to carry out these social transformations. Not that this will just happen spontaneously–it requires that the masses have the leadership of a vanguard party, but a vanguard party that precisely relies fundamentally on the masses to carry this out and doesn’t try to impose it from the top down.”

Evaluating the experience of the Khmer Rouge is a very complex and difficult problem. Reliable information and analysis is hard to come by and fragmentary. But some initial investigation points to several important questions that would have to be looked at in the course of any serious evaluation of the experience of Cambodia and the approach of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

The Relocation of People and the Reconstruction of Agriculture

The bourgeois press often accuses the Khmer Rouge of atrocities because they immediately evacuated Phnom Penh after taking it in April 1975. This evacuation is portrayed as an irrational and cruel “death march.”

In fact, the Khmer Rouge had real reasons to fear that the U.S. might launch bombing raids to attack Phnom Penh and the people there. The U.S. had done this during the 1968 Tet offensive when Vietnamese fighters seized parts of Hue and Cholon.

In addition, the huge refugee encampments around Phnom Penh had only days worth of food stocks. Eight thousand people there had already starved to death in the month before liberation. Hospitals were terribly overcrowded, and over half the country’s doctors had left for exile. This objective situation has to be taken into account in evaluating the decision to evacuate Phnom Penh.

At the same time, the lines and policies that were then carried out need to be evaluated. The new government of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) put the whole country on an emergency footing–and moved the relocated people into peasant villages or uninhabited forest areas to plant rice, create new irrigation systems, restore agriculture, and rebuild roads. Vickery estimates that after overthrowing Lon Nol, the Khmer Rouge quickly relocated over 2.5 million people to the countryside.

This was undoubtedly a wrenching process. In many areas people had to scratch for roots and edible plants until the first crops could be harvested. There were often few tools, and many of the relocated people knew little about how to farm the new areas. There were many deaths from starvation and disease.

But it was also wrenching in a political sense–strangers were moved in large numbers into isolated and insulated villages, resources were strained–and there were inevitably sharp conflicts over who would rule, who would control the land, and how food, tools and seed grain would be distributed.

Vickery reports a new political arrangement was envisioned where the population was divided into three categories: Full rights, Candidate, and Depositee. “The Full rights people were poor peasants, the lower middle strata of the middle peasants, and workers. Candidates were upper middle peasants, wealthy peasants and petty bourgeoisie; while the Depositees were capitalist and foreign minorities.” People with links to Lon Nol’s officers and police were reportedly made Depositees.

Vickery writes that these divisions often were applied, in practice, so that the “really operative division was between `new’ people (evacuees) and `old’ or `base’ people…who had lived in the revolutionary areas since before April 1975. This division is all the more meaningful in that even peasants from non-revolutionary areas were classed as Depositees, and in some cases there was a distinction between base area Depositees (former capitalists or non-Khmer) and `new’ Depositees from the city.” Some sources report that peasant refugees who had fled to the cities were sometimes accused of having “defected” to the Lon Nol side and were therefore treated as politically suspect. These reports require more investigation.

It would be important to understand better the line and policies of the Khmer Rouge in constructing the new revolutionary power. Were they constructing a revolutionary dictatorship of workers and peasants, and what classes did they see as allies? What were their policies on “land to the tiller” and on land collectivization? Did they envision a united front led by the proletariat?

Vickery and other sources point out that the line and policies that guided reconstruction varied tremendously from region to region, and even between neighboring towns. It would also be important to understand better the causes for the differences in line.

In many cases, these new arrangements had to be set up almost overnight–with little or no participation of trained political cadre. How much of the practical policies flowed from the spontaneous actions and outlooks of the “base” peasants? Cambodian villagers had long-standing hostilities toward towns and townspeople. Some may have resisted uniting with large numbers of strangers entering their villages.

To what degree did organizational and political weaknesses in the Angkar contribute to incorrect and uneven policies? Vickery and other sources report that the centralized connections between Khmer Rouge of various regions were extremely loose–and that widely different polices were carried out in the country’s seven main Khmer Rouge regions. This suggests that lack of strong party organization may have been a serious problem in this movement.

To understand what happened in Cambodia it would be important to evaluate the line associated with Pol Pot that eventually emerged out of intense internal struggles within the Angkar/CPK after the seizure of power. As a unified command was consolidated, the Angkar/CPK attempted to quickly abolish all money, wages systems, marketplaces, religion, and private ownership of land and productive forces.

These policies are often called “ultra-Maoist” in the western press. But in reality, they are quite different from the policies of New Democratic Revolution carried out by Mao in the liberation of China. And Mao developed a whole theory which saw the socialist transition to communism as a protracted and wave-like process of struggling to overcome class society through relying on the masses of people.

Vickery suggests that the implementation of these new consolidated policies coincided with a change in the use of political execution. Before 1977, he writes, extreme punishment was mainly used against officers and officials associated with the crimes of the old regime. After 1977, he believes the numbers of executions rose and involved more punishment of both “new” people and “base” people who ran afoul of the new campaigns and the new authorities. Again, more investigation would be needed to evaluate the truth of such reports, and to understand the extent to which incorrect methods were used to enforce the policies of the new power.

The Problem of Nationalism

It is clear that Khmer Rouge politics were heavily colored by an intense Khmer nationalism. There were apparently attempts to forcibly suppress the language, religion and culture of minority nationalities–such as the Moslem Cham people. Vietnamese people living in Cambodia were reportedly treated very harshly. Vickery’s report that national minorities as a whole were categorized as “depositees” suggests that such policies were not just local errors.

Such narrow nationalism may also have played a role in the alliance between the Khmer Rouge and capitalist roaders in China. The Khmer Rouge movement had developed close ties to Maoist China during their years of guerrilla warfare. But in September 1976, a year after the CPK came to power, Mao Tsetung died and his close allies were arrested in a counterrevolutionary coup. Pol Pot traveled to China in September 1977 in his first public appearance and, on behalf of the DK government and the CPK, embraced the new reactionary leaders of China.

The bourgeois press often connects Pol Pot with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that Mao led in China–but in practice, Pol Pot associated himself with forces like Deng Xiaoping who overthrew the Maoist forces and reversed the Cultural Revolution.

*****

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge movement only held overall power in Cambodia for three short years. The internal struggles between Pol Pot and the CPK forces of Cambodia’s eastern region erupted into open military fighting–which Vietnam used as a pretext to invade Cambodia and set up a new government allied to them. The Khmer Rouge was driven back into rural base areas in western Cambodia–where they still exist as an armed force. At the time, a section of the population clearly fought to defend the Democratic Kampuchean government–and for years a sizable section of the population supported Pol Pot for his incorruptible reputation, his identification with the peasants and his relentless fight against foreign domination.

Any revolutionary critique of Pol Pot requires much deeper investigation into the events and policies of this complex experience. But meanwhile, Pol Pot’s recent trial in the jungle appears to be an attempt by forces within the Khmer Rouge to make themselves acceptable to factions within the Cambodian government and to the world’s imperialist powers.

Pol Pot kicked the U.S. imperialists out of Cambodia. And that’s why they hate him. By vilifying Pol Pot, the U.S. is pressing ahead with their attempts to slam the door on all dreams of social change–to declare that communist revolution and even national independence for oppressed countries must be rejected and denounced. They cannot be allowed to get away with this.

Source

Trotsky and Makhno

“In January 1920 [Trotsky] received a telegram from the Ukrainian Anarchist military leader Nestor Makhno, explaining why he, Makhno, was not willing to go to the Polish Front. While continuing ‘peace talks’ with Makhno, Trotsky maintained contact with the Revolutionary Military Committee through Stalin, to whom he cabled: ‘Do you think it would be possible to encircle Makhno right away and carry out a complete liquidation? It would probably be possible to destroy his artillery base if we sent some entirely reliable people there posing as anarchists. Makhno uses hardly any security measures, so we could most probably destroy his ammunition stores.’ Stalin replied: ‘The encirclement of Makhno was started a few days ago and will be accomplished by the ninth. The order [for him] to move against the Poles was issued with the intention of collecting extra material against Makhno.’ Thus, even while Makhno was still an ally, his termination was being planned and executed.”

(Volkogonov, Dimitri. Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary. 1st ed. New York: Free Press, 1996., p. 158.)

AML Principles

PRINCIPLES OF ALLIANCE (M-L)

1. The aims of the Newsletter are to :
i) Provide a Marxist-Leninist analysis of modern life, and to analyse the rise of revisionism world wide.
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4. Anybody barred has right of reply to the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board will have to reply in the Newsletter.

5. Liberal or counter Marxist – Leninist articles submitted are only printed at editorial discretion; with added commentary, to stimulate discussion.

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New U.S. imperialist provocation and pro-American government of South Korea against the Democratic Republic of Korea

KFA Greece (Greek-Korean Friendship Association)

PYONGYANG, 23 Νοεμβρίου

The Army of the People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) responded to the fire of the artillery of South Korea after Tuesday, November 23 in the afternoon “decisive military action.”

The pro-American government of South Korea has insisted on carrying out military exercises close to the border line, ignoring repeated warnings from the Democratic Republic of Korea. The South Korean army launched a shot repeatedly in the direction of PR

Korea, resulting in several dozen South Korean missiles falling around the island Yonphyong at 1:00 pm local time Tuesday afternoon. These relate to today’s announcement of the Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army (KPA).

The Korean People’s Army responded immediately to a military provocation in South Korea a “decisive military action.”

“The reaction of the Korean People’s Army is the stable and specific way to deal with ruthless firing of agents provocateurs” in accordance with the announcement of the Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army.

“If South Korea has dared to invade the waters of the PDR of Korea, the Korean People’s Army will not hesitate to proceed to mercilessly military countermeasures,” warned the military command of DR Korea.

The new provocation of the puppet government of South Korea ‘coincide’:

• With the implementation of large-scale military exercise (challenge), which involved more than 70,000 troops of all the South Korean army corps, which started on Monday 22/11 and is scheduled to last until 30 November.

• By visiting U.S. special envoy to the region, Stephen Bosworth, who landed in Seoul a few hours before provocation (Monday 22/11). The Bosworth after his meeting with South Korean Minister

Foreign Affairs Kim Sung-Huan, said provocatively way: “It is neither surprising nor a revelation that the present DF Korea has made” rapid progress “in uranium enrichment but unpleasant challenge ‘

The KFA Greece calls on the Greek people to react and to actively support the heroic people of the DPRK taking part in a protest march to be held Friday in the direction of U.S. Consulates

Collection in Athens at 6:30 pm at Mars Area and Thessaloniki at 6:00 pm at the Statue of Venizelos

American Party of Labor Statement on the Killing of Muammar Gaddafi

No the Colonization of Libya!

With the victory of the NATO-backed rebels and the National Transitional Council, Libya has been colonized once again. Moammar Gaddafi, the leader of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, has been killed according to the country’s rebel government on October 20th, 2011. Gaddafi was murdered in his hometown of Sirte, a stronghold for his supporters.

From 1911 to 1943, Italy ruled Libya as a protectorate. Under the reign of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the colonialists ruthlessly crushed any national resistance to fascism that would threaten Italy’s imperial interests over this oil-rich country. Now, in 2011, the country is once again under the control of foreign powers. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has states that the war against Libya is “over,” declaring the domination of Libya complete. Libya’s rich natural resources and enormous oil wealth, estimated to be among the greatest on earth, is once again to be siphoned by imperialism.

Gaddafi was executed on the spot in a brutal and arbitrary way, which raises questions about what sort of regime the Libyan “rebels” are going to build, as if the ethnic cleansing of black Libyans and foreign migrants from cities under their control, as well as their cozy relationship with the Western powers and NATO didn’t raise enough already.

A convoy of Gaddafi loyalists' vehicles is pictured destroyed ny NATO bombs and littered with bodies near Sirte

Bodies of killed Gaddafi loyalists around the drain pipe where the Libyan leader was allegedly found

Gaddafi’s Execution

Gruesome images of Gaddafi’s bloody corpse have been telecast with glee by TV channels all over the world. The circumstances for his death are reprehensible – he had attempted to flee the bombing assault on Sirte in a military convoy when NATO hit two of the vehicles with a Hellfire missile. The rebel forces allegedly found him hiding in a drain pipe near Sirte. Badly wounded in both legs from the bombs, Gaddafi was captured and executed by rebels.

Photos and cell phone video footage of the event, released shortly after the story of the capture broke, show a wounded and injured Gaddafi with his face and shoulders awash in blood. He appeared to have a wound on his head.

The rebel forces that captured him then began their assault, dragging him from his hiding place and beating the former Libyan leader. Video footage clearly shows Gaddafi grimacing in pain, being humiliated, shoved, beaten and bludgeoned. A dazed Gaddafi is then paraded around in the streets of the city to the sound of the baying mob of rebels, shortly before being shot several times in the head and stomach. Some claim he was shouting, “Don’t shoot!” before he was killed, but no one has verified that claim.

Images from Al-Jazeera show his body being dragged on the ground and paraded through the streets before being taken to a morgue, where rebels flocked to take photographs of the body. Afterwards, his body was taken to Misrata, a rebel stronghold, to be displayed in a freezer. Most reports say he was shot in the head with a 9mm while helpless after being captured and severely beaten. News sources are now changing their story, saying Gaddafi was shot while trying to flee.

Gaddafi’s son Mutassim was given a similar treatment by the “freedom fighters” of Libya. The news is now claiming he was killed in a “firefight” in Sirte, but pictures and video have already emerged of Mutassim lying on a sofa, injured and bloodied after his capture but still alive. Pictures of his executed corpse emerged hours later. Gaddafi’s Defense Minister Abu Bakr Jaber Younes was also killed during the capture, as was Abdullah Senussi and about fifty others.

Mohammed el-Bibi, a 20-year-old rebel fighter who is reportedly the one who pulled the trigger, has been hailed as a “hero,” brandishing a gold-plated gun said to have been owned by Gaddafi. Fittingly, he also donned a baseball cap with the New York Yankees logo. After the shooting, he was hoisted up by rebels, who fired volleys of bullets into the air and loudly chanted, “Allah Akbar.”

Mohammed el-Bibi (right) and another rebel waving a golden pistol allegedly taken from Gaddafi

The barbaric condition of Gaddafi’s death is symbolic, showing the nature of the rebels and giving indications of what life for the Libyan people will be like under their regime. Widespread destruction, poverty, dependence and humiliation, not “freedom” or “democracy,” will be the result of this aggressive attack and occupation of Libya.

Rebels celebrating Gaddafi's death

Lies & Propaganda in the Attack on Libya

Much like other wars the United States and NATO have waged, particularly the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the war on Libya began with lies. Much like the media told us the war on Iraq was because Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and was going to attack the U.S., they have insisted this is a war to protect innocent civilians. In fact, recent events have shown that the Libyan rebels are not nonviolent, unarmed civilians, and many of the stories of Gaddafi’s atrocities were highly exaggerated.

To begin with, the media ceaselessly compared the Gaddafi government’s actions to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, where ethnic Hutu militia murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Since then they have accused Gaddafi of “genocide.” As if that was not enough, accusations of “war rape” and “mass rape” by troops loyal to Gaddafi were spread by mainstream news, backed up by frivolous stories of Gaddafi distributing Viagra to his soldiers to encourage them to rape women.

Months into the civil war and NATO’s campaign, no evidence of a governmentally-sanctioned campaign of genocide or mass rape has been found. In fact, Time Magazine printed a retraction of the Viagra story soon after, and many other news sources admitted there was no evidence of such an action – it was pure warmongering propaganda.

The imperialist coalition of NATO has violated all international laws by waging aggressive and destructive war for their own economic self-interests in the name of “humanitarianism,” as they did in Yugoslavia, as they did in Afghanistan and as they did in Iraq.

Libya and the Arab Spring

Western leaders have tried to say that the revolt in Libya is exactly like the ones happening across the Middle East, including the successful popular revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, seamlessly integrating the events in Libya into the “Arab Spring” of revolutions and uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

The uprisings of the “Arab Spring” began in Tunisia, where protests led to the overthrow of pro-US dictator Ben Ali after twenty-four years in power. In neighboring Algeria, the people also flared up in resistance. Soon after, protests erupted in Egypt against the autocratic neo-liberal Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted from office by the revolution. After these events, the “Arab Spring” expanded in the region, and none of the ruling governments could stop them. In this context, Gaddafi took an opportunist position, claiming that the revolts in Egypt were led by Mossad, the Zionist secret service, and announcing that if he were in Tunisia at the time of the revolt, he would have supported Ben Ali. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen and many others have since been the scene of protests and riots by opposition groups.

In contrast to the various revolts however, it has become obvious since the NATO intervention that the revolt in Libya is not a popular revolution or progressive. It is primarily an attack by racist and reactionary elements of Libyan society against the government of the Libyan Jamahiriya. This uprising might have been legitimate at one point, but it has been hijacked by reactionary pro-imperialist factions.

The Gaddafi regime, before its destruction by the rebels, did promote such privatization and neo-liberal policies to the detriment of its people. However, the NTC has not arisen to combat this turn to the right, but to make Libya even more right-wing. Libya has one of the highest GDP per capita in Africa, as well as the highest Human Development Index. Libya under Gaddafi also had free education, as well as free studies abroad, free medical care, free water, almost free electricity and homes funded by the state. Libya under Gaddafi was the most developed nation in Africa and much of the Middle East.

The anti-Gaddafi forces formed a committee named the “National Transitional Council” on the 27th of February, consisting of defecting interior ministers, various neo-liberals and former justice minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil, who under the Gaddafi regime oversaw and promoted privatization and liberalization policies.

What really reveals the rebels as puppets of foreign powers however, is that they were completely unable to secure victory without the help of NATO. Up until March 7th of this year, the forces of Gaddafi held the rebellion at bay. On March 10th to March 19th, at the request of NTC leaders and with the approval of the Security Council of the United Nations, the imperialist powers imposed a “no-fly-zone” on Libya. As early as March 17th, the United Kingdom and France recognized the NTC as the legitimate government of Libya.

The events came to a head on March 22nd, when the United States, France and Britain deployed a major bombing force to attack pro-Gaddafi targets, afterwards involving all of NATO in the brutal bombing campaign. Since then, the Libyan “rebels” have shown themselves to be a dangerous, crazed hodgepodge of a mob at best, and a ruthless band of killers at worst. They have lynched black Libyans for their skin color and have ethnically cleansed entire cities, all the while waving monarchist flags. Recent reports have even suggested they are rounding up black Libyans and placing them in concentration camps, where widespread rape and executions have been reported.

Omar Mukhtar, led native resistance to Italian colonization of Libya for decades

History of Libya

Libya, a Saharan country located in the heart of North Africa which dared to defy the United States and the European powers, has a fascinating history that is not often reported in the media. The reason being that if they reported on Libya’s past, it would expose how Africa’s right to economic self-determination has continuously been taken away, politically and militarily.

The same NATO countries currently bombing Libya have a history of occupying the country. Libya was a colony of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. After its liberation from Ottoman forces, it became an Italian colony. By 1931, more than 750,000 Libyans had died fighting the Italian occupation. Ironically, both Turkey and Italy are NATO members participating in the attack against Libya.

During World War II, Winston Churchill sought rapprochement with Mussolini, whom he described as a “Roman genius,” claiming that he “rendered a service to the whole world,” calling him “the great law-giver among living men for his anti-Communist stand.”

King Idris the I of Libya

After the war, the Kingdom of Libya under King Idris the I proclaimed its independence on December 24, 1951. Libya became a pro-US and pro-British monarchy. During the reign of King Idris, the Allied powers of Britain, France and the United States (also current members of NATO) enjoyed de-facto control of Libya. The United States built its first air base in Africa, the Wheelus Air Base, on the outskirts of Tripoli for $100 million. The entire country was devastated by the Second World War, which had obliterated what little infrastructure there was in one of the poorest countries in the world. There was virtually no education system or medical care in the country, no stable government and no administrative services.

King Idris & Richard Nixon

In contrast, the West had unhindered access to Libya’s oil and resources. The Wheelus Air Base was used in the Korean War and became a strategic asset for the U.S. Libya was the only source of Middle Eastern oil that wasn’t shut down by the closure of the Suez Canal, and soon the country had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of foreign private investment.

Flag of the Kingdom of Libya under the King - the favorite flag of the rebels

The true nature of the rebellion is shown by the fact that they wave the flag of British and U.S. puppet King Idris the I. After years of poverty under the corrupt monarchy, which sapped the national wealth for the rulers of the Kingdom and not for the people, a bloodless coup was staged by the Free Unionist Officers on September 1, 1969, led by Muammar Gaddafi.

After the coup, the new government assumed full control over oil production and refused to renew licenses for foreign military bases in Libyan territory. 51% of foreign banks and 51% of all oil companies such as Shell, Exxon, Texaco, Socal and Mobil were nationalized by 1973. Oil prices were raised for crude oil when Libya insisted on setting its own prices, and soon agrarian reform and social programs funded by oil revenue helped Libya build itself into the most developed country in Africa. The Western powers have never forgiven the Gaddafi Jamahiriya government for overthrowing their puppet monarchy, and since then Libya has been labeled as one of the “bad Arab states,” with Gaddafi being the lead “bad Arab.”

Where is Libya Heading?

Despite criticisms one might have of the Gaddafi government, NATO has no concern for the Libyan people. Its only mission is the hunger for its world domination.United States Vice President Joe Biden told the press that this invasion will set the stage for future military attacks. “This is more of the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past,” he said. With this statement, the brutal power of NATO to violate the sovereignty of states anywhere they want, and to make the law everywhere in the world as they see fit, is put plainly for all to see.

Gaddafi loyalists fight with the green flag standard of the Libyan Jamahiriya

The foreign policy of U.S. imperialism for years to come will be shaped by bloody invasions which back reactionary puppet governments and suit the Western power’s economic interests. Powers like the United States use humanitarian justifications like “human rights” and “democracy” to support local rebellions and portray them as democrats even if they are little more than terrorists, thugs, drug traffickers or worse. Foreign imperialist powers do not intervene in oil-rich countries for “humanitarian” reasons, for but self-interest, for territorial conquests, and to gain new access to markets and resources.

The fighters against reaction and domination, who struggle still against leaders backed by imperialism’s ambition, must now keep in mind that NATO is watching and waiting to strike. Imperialism is out for blood, out to restore the hegemony it has built all over the globe that enforcers like Ben Ali and Mubarak pushed onto their people for decades. This is imperialism’s response to cries for liberation.

The death of Gaddafi will no doubt have the West proclaiming its “victory” over the resistance, but the Libyan people’s heroic resistance to imperialist war has not been in vain, because the world has been watching and all the peoples of the world have learned from their example.

Source

ICMLPO General Resolution

International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations 17th Plenum

Madrid October 2011

The Plenary Session of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) was successfully held in Madrid with the participation of almost all the member parties and organizations from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

Throughout the sessions, and after reviewing the work of the parties in their respective countries, the Plenary took note of the inability of capital to resolve the general crisis with the various methods that it has used so far.

Unemployment and misery are affecting millions of workers, and particularly young people and women, both in the main imperialist economies as well as in the dependent countries. The neoliberal programs and policies have not resolved the great difficulties of the system much less the situation of the working class and the peoples.

New sectors of the workers and popular masses are joining the struggle for their rights: the youth, public employees, the unemployed, immigrants are defending the gains won through decades of combat and are trying out new forms of struggle and unity; they are learning precious lessons that raise the level of consciousness of the broad masses and are putting forward objectives of greater significance against capitalism; the advanced sectors are looking at the objectives of socialism.

The idea that the weight of the crisis should fall on the class that has caused it and not on its victims is already a widely shared objective, even an outcry. In Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, the workers are confronting the policies of privatization, cutbacks in social services and plundering; in sub-Sahara Africa, the peoples are resisting being made the battlefield of the imperialist looters; in Asia the workers are carrying out great strike movements and are heroically resisting the imperialist military occupation.

MPD: “Correa is not invincible”

Time Taken from the Journal
Interview with Luis Villacis National Director of the MPD

“We will form an alliance with other leftist parties and movements.”
Luis Villacis, who was reelected as national director of the Popular Democratic Movement (MPD) spoke with The Hour on the position to keep from the government of Rafael Correa. He also referred to the actions to be undertaken towards the elections of 2013.

What position will keep the MPD from the government?
We will intensify popular opposition to the Government undemocratic, authoritarian and arrogant president Rafael Correa.

What does this mean?
Fight for the vindication of the rights of workers and access to the health of the people, support to indigenous organizations in demonstrations to protest the large-scale mining, defend the right to education. Also, do not cease to punish the corrupt.

Do you think this will matter to President Rafael Correa?
I think the President should review their attitude and look in the mirror of Evo Morales, indigenous organizations are planning marches against the actions of this government (…) only the mobilization and unity of the people of Ecuador will help the Regime change its course.

Why distanced themselves from the regime that initially supported?
Because we feel betrayed, he has not completed its offer to undertake a project of change.

What has caused the continued criticism of the president against the MPD and its leaders?

We are a political party with more than 220 thousand members, with representatives in 24 provinces and abroad elected democratically. We believe that this is a good time and we do not make a dent the slanders and insults issued by the Head of State.

However, the President must respect citizens so initiate criminal proceedings against him for criminal qualify for our members.

What is the strategy for the elections of 2013?
Let’s form an alliance with other movements and leftist parties to nominate a presidential candidate and assembly of the social sectors we represent. We will not accept strangers, or opportunistic, because he has given poor results (…) we will work to defeat this unit allows correísmo, because it is not invincible Correa was demonstrated in the last referendum.

Does optimism despite the competition authorities to appoint the National Electoral Council (CNE) highlights former officials support the regime?

Yes, but it envisions is intended not work properly and seek ways to stay in power forever. However, the unity of the people can defeat these actions intended to ignore the popular vote.

Left Debates After Fall of Ben Ali

Maite Mola and Claudia Haydt

Maite Mola and Claudia Haydt took part in a European Left delegation to Tunisia from February 10th to 13th and tell how the political and social situation is being dealt after the fall of Ben Ali.

Was it a revolution or an uprising which occurred in December and January in Tunisia? The people of Tunisia talk of revolt or revolution and if they give it a name at all, then they call it the ‘Sidi Bouzid revolt’ in reference to the city where it all began. ‘The revolution gives us the opportunity to dream,’ – the words of the Tunisian writer and former dissident, Taoufik Ben Brik. Whether the revolution is over and the priority should now be a transition to normality, or whether the Revolution – still far from complete – is a process, are questions which divide the various left-wing groups in Tunis.

Unity rather than division

In Tunisia in mid February, 24 political parties were officially registered; many of them are new and virtually unknown. It is still quite difficult to reliably forecast which one will play central role in the new Tunisia. If you ask people on the road about left parties, usually the PCOT (Communist Workers’ Party) is among the first they mention. Its leader Hamma Hammami has spent long years in prison and in hiding and is therefore respected by people from different political backgrounds for his consistent commitment to freedom and democracy. In contrast to other left-wing opposition parties PCOT was never officially recognised. The PCOT remained an active political force under Ben Ali’s regime and in spite of massive repression, imprisonment and torture, many members still remain active. As a result, they constituted an important force during the Tunisian Revolution. PCOT consciously worked together with various opposition forces, whether centre-left, liberal or Islamic. Only through this co-operation, was it possible to get rid of Ben Ali, who for years set the various opposition groups against one another. By unduly exaggerating the ‘fear of Islamists,’ Ben Ali convinced not only Western countries that his regime would be the lesser evil, but he also managed to paralyse parts of the Tunisian opposition. The ‘ruling minority’ could only stay in power by fragmenting and inciting them against each other, according to Hammami’s analysis.

The PCOT like other parties also started immediately after the fall of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to build new party structures. Everyone expects moderate success for the PCOT at the next parliamentary elections. The question of power in Tunisia however will be decided within a centre-left political spectrum.

Communist Ghadar Party of India: Petrol price hike is an attack on the living standards of millions of working families!

Withdraw customs and excise duties on oil and all its products, to bring down the retail price!

Statement of the CC of the Communist Ghadar Party of India, 23 September, 2011

The Communist Ghadar Party of India condemns the latest increase in petrol prices announced by the oil marketing companies.

This is the eighth hike since June 2010, when petrol prices were deregulated. In this period, the retail price of petrol in Delhi has risen from Rs 47.93 per litre to Rs 67, an increase of nearly 40 per cent in 15 months! Petrol costs more than Rs. 70 per litre in most other parts of the country.

This eighth hike in petrol prices comes on top of skyrocketing prices of vegetables, fruits, milk and milk products, cooking oil, cooking gas, food grains, pulses, meat and all other essentials of life. Lakhs of crores of rupees have been robbed from our working people through massive inflation in the past two years alone. The hike in petrol prices will hit the daily cost of living for millions of working men and women who travel to their place of work on a two-wheeler or a small car. It will also raise transportation costs and feed into the general rate of inflation.

Whenever the price of petrol or diesel is raised the government claims that it is because of the “unaffordable subsidy”. This is a blatant lie because petroleum product consumption is being heavily taxed in our country and not at all subsidized. The “subsidy” in the central budget is less than one-tenth the total taxes collected from petroleum products. In Rupees terms, petrol costs around 70 per litre in India as compared to 37 in China, 40 in the United States, 39 in Pakistan, 47 in Sri Lanka and 53 in Canada.

While the working class and large sections of our people are outraged by the frequent hikes in petrol prices, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, welcomed it with glee. He is reported to have said, “What has happened … is a good news. I regard that as a vindication (and) an increase in credibility of basic part of the reforms strategy.”

Revolusjon: The Arab Masses Have Had Enough!

The popular revolts for bread, democracy and national self-determination create despair among the imperialists and their Arab puppets.

The revolt in Tunisia was the spark that started a fire that is now spreading across North Africa and eastward into the core Arab countries. The popular masses and the youth in the more or less despotic Arab regimes have overcome their fear of state violence, and they will not settle for empty words and promises.

Now the battle is centred on the very pivot of the U.S. strategy for control of the Middle East region; Egypt.

The Tunisian people’s revolt against the regime of President Zine El Abidin Ben Ali has already harvested the first fruits; the old regime’s supporters at home and abroad are being pushed from bulwark to bulwark. Through the establishment of ‘Front of January 14th’, which consists of a number of progressive and national forces, including the Tunisian Communist Workers’ Party, the national and democratic Tunisian revolution has advanced its offensive.

Mubarak shaking

As these words are being written, the masses in Egypt are defying President Mubarak’s web censorship and curfews. Demonstrators have attacked police stations in Cairo, and Mubarak has warned that he will involve the army. That could be a serious mistake. Egypt practises universal conscription. The 340,000-strong Egyptian army is made up of the sons of the people. For the people in the streets it is mainly the police, not the army, they consider to be the enemy.

In the cities of Alexandria and Suez, thousands went into the streets after Friday prayers, and confronted a huge police presence. The mobilisation has been possible despite the fact that the regime has shut down the internet and mobile networks, frightened of the ‘twitter effect’.

Previously, people have poured into the streets of Algeria, Morocco, Yemen and in the Jordanian capital, Amman. All these regimes have been and are instruments of imperialism. They have been assured by the United States that they are safe if they put the neo-liberal dictates of the IMF and the multinational companies into effect, and as long as they openly or secretly contribute to the US-dictated policy of normalisation of relations with Zionism.

The Monetary Fund (IMF) and neo-liberalism

But it is precisely the hunger and mass unemployment that the neo-liberal policies have led to that has angered the masses, the youth in particular, and triggered the rebellion in Northern Africa. In Egypt, 75 percent of the population is under 30 years of age, and they are mostly unemployed – and without bread. Both demographic and social conditions are typical for countries in the Maghreb belt. Young people see no future and no hope without radical social change. Their despair makes the fear of the authoritarian regimes evaporate.

The IMF argues that Tunisia, by following the IMF prescriptions of structural adjustment and free market reforms, is showing ‘tremendous progress’ and prosperity, with only seven percent of the population living below the poverty line – far less than in the U.S. and Europe! This apparent manipulation of data falls to the ground when faced with reality. If 93 percent of Tunisians had a fairly good standard of living, of course there would not have been a popular uprising.

Price hikes and declining subsidies

The soaring price hikes on food and fuel result from a combination of speculation on the commodity exchanges and the elimination of government subsidies. In September 2010 an agreement between Tunisia and the IMF was signed, the latter instructed that the remaining subsidies must be abolished, as a means to achieve budget balance, and as a condition for new loans.

Paradoxically, the IMF dictates and structural adjustment plans have removed the regimes’ opportunity to reintroduce subsidies as a measure to ease the simmering discontent. This option the IMF has overruled, and riots in Algeria and Tunisia were recently sparked by the announcement of the removal of subsidies on bread and necessities.

The imperialists are looking frantically for a way out

The despair among the Arab youth has its counterpart in a growing desperation among perpetrators and supporters of the reactionary Arab regimes.

Video: XVII Convenciòn of the MPD

The Sino-Albanian Split & Khrushchev’s Attempted Coup against Socialist Albania

“The spillover from the Sino-Soviet conflict into Eastern Europe was evident almost immediately. In late 1960 and early 1961 the Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, sparked a crisis with the Soviet Union by openly aligning his country with China, a precedent that caused alarm in Moscow. Quite apart from the symbolic implications of Hoxha’s move, Khrushchev had always regarded Albania as a key member of the Warsaw Pact because of ‘its superb strategic location on the Mediterranean Sea.’ The rift with Yugoslavia in 1948 had eliminated the only other possible outlet for the Soviet navy in the region. To ensure that Albania could serve as a full-fledged ‘military base on the Mediterranean Sea for all the socialist countries,’ the Soviet Union had been providing extensive equipment and training to the Albanian army and navy. In particular, the Albanian navy had received a fleet of twelve modern attack submarines, which initially were under Soviet control but were gradually being transferred to Albanian jurisdiction. Khrushchev believed that the submarines would allow Albania to pose a ‘serious threat to the operation of the NATO military bloc on the Mediterranean Sea,’ and thus he was dismayed to find that Soviet efforts to establish a naval bulwark on the Mediterranean might all have been for naught.

As soon as the rift with Albania emerged, the Soviet Union imposed strict economic sanctions, withdrew all Soviet technicians and military advisers, took back eight of the twelve submarines, dismantled Soviet naval facilities at the Albanian port of Vlona, and engaged in bitter polemical exchanges with the Albanian leadership. Khrushchev also ordered Soviet warships to conduct maneuvers along the Albanian coast, and he secretly encouraged pro-Moscow rivals of Hoxha to carry out a coup. The coup attempt was rebuffed, and the other means of coercion proved insufficient to get rid of Hoxha or to bring about a change of policy. In December 1961, Khrushchev broke diplomatic relations with Albania and excluded it from both the Warsaw Pact and CMEA. However, he was unwilling to undertake a full-scale invasion to bring Albania back within the Soviet orbit, not least because of the logistical problems and the likelihood of confronting stiff armed resistance.”

 – Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert & Detlef Junker (Ed.). 1968: The World Transformed. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. pp. 117-119.

ICMLPO: Cancel Tunisian Debt

The police regime of Ben Ali Tunisia has plunged into the spiral of debt, giving their human and material wealth to the voracity of the international financial oligarchy.

All these banks have issued loans to the “best student of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)” as the formula used by the former director of the IMF, because they knew that Ben Ali’s regime by force oblige to pay these loans and their interests Tunisian people. The “Tunisian miracle” is nothing more than the super-exploitation of farm workers and the city, privatization of public enterprises, the plundering of natural resources, mass unemployment, particularly youth, and misery for masses. The executor of this policy, the regime of Ben Ali, widely enriched, taking a part of the country’s economy.

The debt is now an essential tool in the hands of the imperialist powers of the financial oligarchy, to strengthen its economic and political domination.

To overthrow and expel Ben Ali, the Tunisian people has not only brought down a dictator also has been implicated in a revolutionary process in a fundamental change of political regime, democracy and the great satisfaction of social needs. In Tunisia a wind has blown up one after another of the peoples of the Maghreb and beyond.

The imperialist powers have been forced to abandon his ally, but refuse to have their own interests are touched. They try to smother the Tunisian revolution, and for that act together with the forces of counterrevolution. Tunisian want to strangle the revolution by requiring the payment of debts contracted by the Ben Ali regime, while imposing new debt.

However, the Tunisian people do not have to pay those debts.

Alongside the political and social forces struggling to Tunisia carrying the revolutionary process to the end we demand the cancellation of debts of the country.

Tunis, July 2011
Coordination Committee