The Role of the CIA: Behind the Dalai Lama’s Holy Cloak

Michael Backman
Global Research
March 23, 2008

Global Research Editor’s note

This incisive article by Michael Backman outlines the relationship of the Dalai Lama and his organization to US intelligence.

The Dalai Lama has been on the CIA payroll since the late 1950s. He is an instrument of US intelligence.

An understanding of this longstanding relationship to the CIA is essential, particuarly in the light of recent events. In all likelihood US intelligence was behind the protest movement, organized to occur a few months prior to the Beijing Olympic games.

M. C. 23 March 2008

THE Dalai Lama show is set to roll into Australia again next month and again Australian politicians are getting themselves in a twist as to whether they should meet him.

Rarely do journalists challenge the Dalai Lama.

Partly it is because he is so charming and engaging. Most published accounts of him breeze on as airily as the subject, for whom a good giggle and a quaint parable are substitutes for hard answers. But this is the man who advocates greater autonomy for millions of people who are currently Chinese citizens, presumably with him as head of their government. So, why not hold him accountable as a political figure?

No mere spiritual leader, he was the head of Tibet’s government when he went into exile in 1959. It was a state apparatus run by aristocratic, nepotistic monks that collected taxes, jailed and tortured dissenters and engaged in all the usual political intrigues. (The Dalai Lama’s own father was almost certainly murdered in 1946, the consequence of a coup plot.)

The government set up in exile in India and, at least until the 1970s, received $US1.7 million a year from the CIA.

The money was to pay for guerilla operations against the Chinese, notwithstanding the Dalai Lama’s public stance in support of non-violence, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

The Dalai Lama himself was on the CIA’s payroll from the late 1950s until 1974, reportedly receiving $US15,000 a month ($US180,000 a year).

The funds were paid to him personally, but he used all or most of them for Tibetan government-in-exile activities, principally to fund offices in New York and Geneva, and to lobby internationally.

Details of the government-in-exile’s funding today are far from clear. Structurally, it comprises seven departments and several other special offices. There have also been charitable trusts, a publishing company, hotels in India and Nepal, and a handicrafts distribution company in the US and in Australia, all grouped under the government-in-exile’s Department of Finance.

The government was involved in running 24 businesses in all, but decided in 2003 that it would withdraw from these because such commercial involvement was not appropriate.

Several years ago, I asked the Dalai Lama’s Department of Finance for details of its budget. In response, it claimed then to have annual revenue of about $US22 million, which it spent on various health, education, religious and cultural programs.

The biggest item was for politically related expenditure, at $US7 million. The next biggest was administration, which ran to $US4.5 million. Almost $US2 million was allocated to running the government-in-exile’s overseas offices.

For all that the government-in-exile claims to do, these sums seemed remarkably low.

It is not clear how donations enter its budgeting. These are likely to run to many millions annually, but the Dalai Lama’s Department of Finance provided no explicit acknowledgment of them or of their sources.

Certainly, there are plenty of rumours among expatriate Tibetans of endemic corruption and misuse of monies collected in the name of the Dalai Lama.

Many donations are channelled through the New York-based Tibet Fund, set up in 1981 by Tibetan refugees and US citizens. It has grown into a multimillion-dollar organisation that disburses $US3 million each year to its various programs.

Part of its funding comes from the US State Department’s Bureau for Refugee Programs.

Like many Asian politicians, the Dalai Lama has been remarkably nepotistic, appointing members of his family to many positions of prominence. In recent years, three of the six members of the Kashag, or cabinet, the highest executive branch of the Tibetan government-in-exile, have been close relatives of the Dalai Lama.

An older brother served as chairman of the Kashag and as the minister of security. He also headed the CIA-backed Tibetan contra movement in the 1960s.

A sister-in-law served as head of the government-in-exile’s planning council and its Department of Health.

A younger sister served as health and education minister and her husband served as head of the government-in-exile’s Department of Information and International Relations.

Their daughter was made a member of the Tibetan parliament in exile. A younger brother has served as a senior member of the private office of the Dalai Lama and his wife has served as education minister.

The second wife of a brother-in-law serves as the representative of the Tibetan government-in-exile for northern Europe and head of international relations for the government-in-exile. All these positions give the Dalai Lama’s family access to millions of dollars collected on behalf of the government-in-exile.

The Dalai Lama might now be well-known but few really know much about him. For example, contrary to widespread belief, he is not a vegetarian. He eats meat. He has done so (he claims) on a doctor’s advice following liver complications from hepatitis. I have checked with several doctors but none agrees that meat consumption is necessary or even desirable for a damaged liver.

What has the Dalai Lama actually achieved for Tibetans inside Tibet?

If his goal has been independence for Tibet or, more recently, greater autonomy, then he has been a miserable failure.

He has kept Tibet on the front pages around the world, but to what end? The main achievement seems to have been to become a celebrity. Possibly, had he stayed quiet, fewer Tibetans might have been tortured, killed and generally suppressed by China.

In any event, the current Dalai Lama is 72 years old. His successor — a reincarnation — will be appointed as a child and it will be many years before he plays a meaningful role. As far as China is concerned, that is one problem that will take care of itself, irrespective of whether or not John Howard or Kevin Rudd meet the current Dalai Lama.

Source

How the CIA helped Dalai Lama to end up in exile

It is widely believed that the Dalai Lama fled Tibet once Chinese troops gained control over the region. Actually, these two events have nine years between them.

Tibet’s self-proclaimed independence in 1913, after the fall of Qing Empire of China, was never recognised legally by any country. So, once China sorted out the Civil War, it saw it only as natural to claim the territories succeeded from the state of Qing.

Once the Chinese People’s Liberation Army forces defeated Tibet’s army on October 7, 1950, Beijing started a campaign of re-integrating Tibet into the People’s Republic of China.

The US became interested in the region as a new ground to counter Communist China. It promised to encourage and support Tibetan resistance to Communist control and provide financial help to Tibetan insurgents, says Peter Harclerode in his book, “Fighting Dirty: The Inside Story of Covert Operations From Ho Chi Minh to Osama Bin Laden”.

For the US State department, the Dalai Lama was of more use in active opposition to Beijing. That is why the CIA actively encouraged the Tibetan leader to go into exile to any nearby state, such as India, Ceylon or Thailand, to become the symbol of Tibet resistance to Communist China.

In 1951 the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, preferred to stay in Lhasa and formally accepted “The 17 Point Plan” peace treaty uniting Tibet and the People’s Republic of China.

Three years later the Dalai Lama was elected vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s National Assembly, thus entering China’s ruling elite.

In 1956 Tibetan tribal alliance “National Army of the defenders of the Faith” tried to urge locals to fight Chinese and asked Dalai Lama to give a “spiritual support and leadership” for the resistance, which he refused.

The alliance nevertheless obtained aid from the CIA without the Dalai Lama’s knowledge. Six Tibetans were handpicked to be trained in using small weapons, demolition, mine-laying and sabotage at the American military base on Saipan Island so they could participate in a secret CIA operation codenamed “Saint Circus”.

In autumn 1957, two of these freshly-trained Tibetans were parachuted in to Tibet to deliver a secret message from the US government to the Dalai-Lama, offering assistance if His Holiness requested any. Again, the Dalai Lama turned it down.

Then, in early 1958, CIA agents in Lhasa delivered a new secret message from the US urging the Dalai Lama to make a formal request for American assistance, which he declined despite the fact it would have been backed by the newly-formed Chushi Gangdrug (Four Rivers, Six Mountains) tribal alliance. The Dalai Lama was consistent in avoiding foreign help to spare his compatriots from a possible war with China – but he did not succeed.

On June 16, 1958, Chushi Gangdrug’s military wing formed a National Volunteer Defence Army which began a full-scale insurgent warfare a whole year before the famous Tibetan uprising started (on March 10, 1959).

Also in 1958, the CIA began a new training programme for future Tibetan guerrillas. Codenamed “The Colorado program” it lasted for seven years at Camp Hale in Colorado and neighboring the Butts Field Air Force Base. No fewer than 200 Tibetans were trained during these years.

At the same time, the CIA made sure the Tibetans were armed by dropping weapons and equipment for their guerrillas.

In total, from July 1959 till May 1960, about 362 tonnes of weapons, ammunition and equipment – as well as 85 trained guerrilla warfare specialists – were dropped into Tibet,

The US State Department closed down the Tibet project fifteen years later when, in 1974, it officially ceased to aid the Tibetan government in exile.

Following the 1959 uprising, the Dalai Lama fled to India where he stays in exile to this day.

Source

Left Anticommunism: the Unkindest Cut

BY MICHAEL PARENTI

Despite a lifetime of “shaming” the system, NOAM CHOMSKY, America’s foremost “engagé” intellectual, remains an unrepentant left anticommunist.

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Genuflection to Orthodoxy

Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about “left intellectuals” who try to “rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements” and “then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We’re seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans” (Z Magazine, 10/95).

Chomsky’s imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of “communist thugs” who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communists did not “very quickly” switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union’s waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsin’s violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993.

Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power’s sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.

For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.

Adam Hochschild: Keeping his distance from the “Stalinist Left” and recommending same posture to fellow progressives.

Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they “weaken their credibility” (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in the Cold-War condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters. Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.

The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.

Even when attacking the Right, the left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that “when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts.” While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism “both of the Right and Left,” individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.
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Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish–while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.

Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words).

Slinging Labels

Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as “Soviet apologists” and “Stalinists,” even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did.

Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.

That many U.S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin’s writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the “Leninist” label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: “Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.” Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power’s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right.

At the time of the 1996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: “Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize.” U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disapproving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.

Lenin constantly dealt with the problem of avoiding the two extremes of liberal bourgeois opportunism and ultra-left adventurism. Yet he himself is repeatedly identified as an ultra-left putschist by mainstream journalists and some on the Left. Whether Lenin’s approach to revolution is desirable or even relevant today is a question that warrants critical examination. But a useful evaluation is not likely to come from people who misrepresent his theory and practice.

Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations to be morally unacceptable because of the “crimes of communism.” Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic Party in this country, either as voters or members, seemingly unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist Party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic Party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism

The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party “state capitalism” or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries “socialist” is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world–as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.

First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West [even more so when compared with today's grotesque compensation packages to the executive and financial elites.—Eds], as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess.

The “lavish life” enjoyed by East Germany’s party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the “lavish” consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.

Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.

Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.

Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.

All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundamentals as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism–not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience–could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92.)

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.

Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe–and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them–all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. . . .

These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make]. (Guardian, 11/13/91)

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

Decentralization vs. Survival

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party. “The time has come,” he told an enthusiastically concurring Tenth Party Congress, “to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition.” Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.

Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party’s Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution–like every other–that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way.

By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more political diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organizations, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small businesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base.

The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more comfortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only problem is that the country would have risked being incapable of withstanding the Nazi onslaught. Instead, the Soviet Union embarked upon a rigorous, forced industrialization. This policy has often been mentioned as one of the wrongs perpetrated by Stalin upon his people. It consisted mostly of building, within a decade, an entirely new, huge industrial base east of the Urals in the middle of the barren steppes, the biggest steel complex in Europe, in anticipation of an invasion from the West. “Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered but the construction went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history.”

Stalin’s prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide. The cost of this survival included 22 million Soviets who perished in the war and immeasurable devastation and suffering, the effects of which would distort Soviet society for decades afterward.

All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not “make inevitable” the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of “suspect” nationalities.

The transforming effects of counterrevolutionary attack have been felt in other countries. A Sandinista military officer I met in Vienna in 1986 noted that Nicaraguans were “not a warrior people” but they had to learn to fight because they faced a destructive, U.S.-sponsored mercenary war. She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda. As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands–the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the suppression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society.

The overthrow of Eastern European and Soviet communist governments was cheered by many left intellectuals. Now democracy would have its day. The people would be free from the yoke of communism and the U.S. Left would be free from the albatross of existing communism, or as left theorist Richard Lichtman put it, “liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China.”

In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.

In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. “Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.” As Richard Levins put it, “So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay” (Monthly Review, 9/96).

Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don’t get it.

International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO): On the International Situation

The most significant development in the world capitalist economy, since the last meeting of our Conference is undoubtedly the intensification of the symptoms that prove the trend toward a new recession in all fields, after a certain rise in the second quarter of 2009, followed by a period of stagnation. Despite the trend towards a rise in the second quarter, world industrial production shrank 6.6% in 2009 and rose 10% in 2010. The industrial production of June 2010 exceeded its previous level before the crisis of 2008. But starting from the first quarter of 2011, the growth lost momentum and fell to 0.4% in the last quarter of that year. In 2011, world industrial production declined by half (5.4%) compared to the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, after a weak rise, the growth declined. The growth was 1.8% in the first quarter, 0% in the second and 4% in the last quarter of 20l2. All the data show that, despite fluctuations, a decline persists that began in the first quarter of 2011, which led to zero level in the middle of this year [2012] and is heading for a new period of decline.

Industrial production in the European Union, which is a larger economic power than the U.S.; in Japan, which is third largest world economic power; in India, one of the largest economies in Asia, have had consecutive declines in the third quarter of 2011 and in the first two quarters of 2012 compared to the same period last year. Industrial production in Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America, has also entered into decline in the last two quarters. North African countries like Tunisia and Egypt, and other countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Peru, are in similar situations.

The rate of growth of industrial production in China, in the first and second quarters of 2012, was 11.6% and 9.5%, while it was 14.4% in 2010 and 13.8% in 2011. The downward trend continued in July, 9.2% and in August, 8.9%. China, which grew by 12.9% and 12.3% in the crisis years (2008 and 2009), was, along with India, one of the factors that prevented a further sharpening of the crisis and that allowed the world economy to enter into a new period of growth. The situation in that country has changed considerably. Now it is a country that is accumulating stockpiles in the steel industry, which is facing a slowdown in the construction sector, which has important holes in the financial sector. Those countries that saw lower growth rates despite the stimulus measures to revive the domestic market, are now unable to play the same role as before. The industrial production of Mexico and the Confederation of Independent States (CIS), including Russia, continues to grow. However, while the industrial production in the major countries and the volume of international trade are falling, for these countries also, a decrease is expected.

Unlike simple commodity production, a more rapid growth in the production of the means of production, compared to consumer goods, is a condition for expanded reproduction. But with the capitalist mode of production producing for an unknown market, with the sole purpose of obtaining profits, a consistent development of the two sectors is impossible and this is one of the factors that makes crises inevitable. In the last three years, as well as before, these two sectors have not developed consistently. In the first sector, demand has fallen, the volume of growth has fallen, stockpiles are accumulating and capacity utilization has fallen. In 2010 and 2011 the steel industry, an important component of the production of means of production, grew faster than the consumer goods sector. According to data from the World Steel Union, the growth rate in production was 15% in 2010 compared to the previous year, but in 2011 the figure fell to 6.2%. In January raw steel production saw a sharp drop to 8%, and it has stayed at 0.8% in the period from January to May of 2012. In August of 2012 raw steel production fell 1% in relation to 2011. In the same period, raw steel production rose 3.3% in Japan (a significant increase if one takes into account the major fall due to the tsunami) and 2.6% in India. It has fallen by 1.7% in China, 3.8% in the U.S., 4.4% in the EU, 7.1% in Germany, 15.5% in Italy and 3.8% in the Confederation of Independent States (CIS). The iron stockpiles in Chinese ports reached 98.15 million tons (an increase of 2.9%) belonging to the steel complexes. And stockpiles of Chinese coal are at their highest level in the last three years.

In manufacturing, a very important element of the production of the means of production, production and demand have declined in many countries. This decline has been one of the reasons for the cooling of industrial production in Germany, for example. In the capitalist mode of production, the agricultural sector, by its level of development and its technical basis, is always behind industry. Agricultural production is largely affected by the natural conditions, climate changes, droughts, storms and other natural catastrophes. Agricultural production is increasingly under the control of the monopolies and the speculative maneuvers of finance capital. In 2010 world agricultural production, including the production of cereals, has shrunk due to various factors such as bad weather or the expansion of plots reserved for bio-fuel production. On the other hand, in 2011, agricultural production has progressed thanks to better weather conditions, and also to increased demand and higher prices due to speculation. For example, wheat production increased by about 6%.

In 2009 the volume of world trade has declined 12.7%. According to data from the World Trade Organization (WTO), that volume registered a growth of 13.8% in 2010, and only 5% in 2011 (according to figures from the CPL, the growth was 15.2% in 2010, and 5.8% in 2011). The volume of world trade has grown by 0.5% in the final quarter of last year, and by 0.9% and 0.5% in the first and second quarter of 2012 respectively. During the first two months of the third quarter (June and July), the volume of world trade recorded a negative growth of -1.5% and -0.2% compared to the previous months.

World industrial production reached and surpassed the pre-crisis level of 2008, in June 2010, while the volume of international trade did not surpass this until November 2011. If we compare the data of July 2012 with the level reached before the crisis of 2008 (that is, April 2008), we see an increase of 9.5% in world industrial production and an increase of 5% in the total volume of growth in world trade.

The data on the increase of the volume of world trade is one of the most important that shows an evolutionary trend, although it does not exactly reflect the volume of growth of world trade. These data show that for the last three years, the world capitalist production has increased rapidly and that the capitalist world is once again facing the problem of overproduction, which is the source of all its crises. Decreased production, closing or reduction in work capacity of enterprises, rising unemployment and poverty; needs in abundance and the restriction of markets are the inevitable consequences of overproduction. The sharp slowdown in world industrial production has been shown above. The events in North Africa and the austerity measures taken in countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc., are factors that are aggravating this process and its consequences.

Towards a New Financial Crisis

The crisis of 2008 broke out as a financial crisis, at the same time as the crisis deepened in other sectors, such as industry and trade, it developed with contacts in the finance sector with serious consequences for the following period. The most destructive consequences for the monopolies and the eventual collapse of the financial sector were avoided by transferring of billions of dollars into the coffers of the monopolies by the capitalist States. This rescue operation was only possible by accepting a debt to financial markets with very high interest rates, and the issuance of money into the markets. The end result is an extreme State debt, an increase in the debt and interest burden, a rise in the price of gold and the loss of value (devaluation) of almost all currencies.

Countries at different levels have entered a vicious circle that has elements of new currency and financial crises, in which they can finance their budget deficit, their debts and interests, having to borrow again. The capitalist world began a period of growth starting in the second quarter of 2009, with the weight inherited from the 2008 crisis. However, this period of growth has enabled recipient countries to breathe a little, turn the wheel that was on the verge of suffocating them. The growth of the world economy stopped and even lowered the price of gold for a moment. In some countries, such as China that had a significant growth rate, the ratio of the public debt to GDP decreased. But in other countries, such as Japan and the U.S., a substantial debt has continued, even during the period of growth of the capitalist world economy. The U.S. public debt represents the sum of $16 billion (the debt of Germany, which grew until the second half of this year, is 8 billion). Other capitalist countries are in a similar situation. The increasing debt is almost the condition of financial sustainability and economic growth. And this is the path that is leading directly to a new financial crisis that may profoundly affect all sectors of the economy.

The highly indebted countries have not been able to achieve a period of growth after the financial crisis and the fall in world industrial production that took place between the second quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009; this period has led to a financial crisis that has affected the other sectors of the economy that has led them to bankruptcy. The first example of this process was in Greece, where the weakness was such that the industry, very weak, was largely liquidated when it joined the EU. After the 2008 crisis, in 2009, the economy of this country did not grow, and by the end of the year it was on the verge of bankruptcy. This country, followed by others such as Portugal, Spain, Hungary, etc., has not been able to get out of the crisis and stagnation. However, important differences should be noted in its debt in relation to the GDP.

Austerity measures never seen before, except in times of war or crisis as deep as 1929, have been imposed on the indebted countries. The result of these measures has been to impoverish the people, destroy the economy and reduce the internal market and foreign trade. These austerity plans have been applied (despite the opposition and struggle of the working class and peoples) under the control of the creditor imperialist powers, the international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and European Union, and above all with the support of the collaborator monopoly bourgeoisie and its representatives, these enemies of the people. They have transferred billions of dollars to foreign banks, completely betraying the national interests. The national pride of the people, their right to sovereignty and independence have been trampled upon. A country like Britain that had a strong financial sector, but since mid-2011 has seen its industrial production and its economy reduced, has been forced to march along with the countries implementing austerity measures.

The significant decrease in the volume of growth of world industrial production, which began in the second quarter of 2011, is developing the elements of a new international financial crisis and is contributing to the degradation of the situation of the highly indebted countries. They failed to enter a period of growth parallel to the process of growth of the world capitalist economy following the crisis of 2008-2009. While the debate over the future of the Euro and the European Union is sharpening, the communiqués on the economic trends of the advanced capitalist countries and the indebted countries have sown confusion in the stock markets, barometers of the capitalist economy. Although world industrial and agricultural production and the volume of international -trade have exceeded the highest level before the crisis of 2008, the indices of the most influential stock markets remain below that level.

Although we are not yet experiencing the outbreak of a financial crisis of major proportions, everything makes it appear that the process is advancing towards such an eventuality. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (FED) has announced that it will not raise interest rates and that it will start a process of purchasing bonds for an amount of $2,000 billion dollars, at the rate of $40 billion per month. Japan has announced a similar measure and has begun a program of buying bonds to the tune of $695 billion.

Germany has had to relax its rigid policy towards the indebted countries and the European fund for the intervention in countries facing difficulties has increased. China, along with measures of revival that it has already applied, announced a new investment package to renovate its infrastructure. The price of gold is rising again. In 2008, the intense intervention of the capitalist States began after the outbreak of the crisis. Now, however, the capitalist States have gone into action before the shocks and bankruptcies at the same level as in 2008 start in the major capitalist countries and worldwide. However, these interventions, which can have some influence on the process of development, cannot change the orientation and the inevitable outcome.

The Sharpening of the Inter-Imperialist Contradictions and the Growing Danger of Conflicts

Uneven, unbalanced development is the absolute law of capitalist development. This process after the crisis of 2008 was not balanced, it deepened the antagonistic contradictions in the evolution and development of the relations between sectors, countries, regions, production and markets, etc. The industrial production of the advanced capitalist countries, including the U.S. and Japan, except Germany (ignoring the high level of 2008), did not reach the level of 2005. Germany, which has exceeded the pre-crisis level and has had a growth in industrial production of 11.5% in 2010 and 9% in 2011, has consolidated its position within the European Union and the Euro zone. Without separating itself from the bloc led by the United States, it has penetrated into new markets, new fields of investment, sources of raw materials, basing itself on its economic and financial strength, and above all, on its technical superiority in the industry of machine construction.

As in previous years, China, both because of its industrial production and its economy in general, was the country that had the most significant growth among major economies. It has modernized and increased the technical basis of its industry, and it continues to reduce the difference in its level of development with the other imperialist powers. Russia is going through a similar process. For the United States and its allies, these two countries, one considered as a vast market and production area with a trained and cheap work force, and the other a solid country, appear today as their main rivals to fight against.

The inevitable result of the change in the balance of power is the great demand for a piece of the pie by the emerging forces, using all means to get it and a new redivision of the world according the new balance of power. The recent development of the world economy is another factor that exacerbates the contradictions and the struggles among the major imperialist powers. Last year in the Middle East, in Africa and the whole world, the rivalry and struggle to expand their sphere of influence has accelerated. The production of weapons, the arms race is intensifying. China and Russia have renewed the technical basis of their arms industry. According to a report by the Congress of the United States, arms sales by these countries have tripled in 2011.

China, which increasingly needs more raw materials, energy and fields of investment for its growing economy, and Russia, which is slowly recovering, are intensifying their expansionist desires and their efforts to get their piece of the pie. Therefore, it is a top priority for the U.S. and its allies to prevent China, a young imperialist power in full development, and Russia, from achieving new markets in the field of energy and raw materials. When the Obama administration states that beginning next year the priority strategic objective for the United States will be Asia, and that the deployment of the U.S. military will be renewed according to the new situation, this is merely affirming that reality. The crisis of the archipelagos shows the level of tension between Japan and China; Japan has declared its intention to improve its military capability. The military maneuvers in the region have intensified.

The consequences of the change in the balance of power in the world have been clearly visible since last year. Russia and China were forced to accept Western imperialist intervention in Libya, even though that intervention was contrary to their interests. The intervention ended with the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, the near collapse of the country, the destruction of its economy, the degradation of working and living conditions, the transfer of the country’s wealth into the hands of the Western imperialist States, etc. Russia and China lost a good part of their positions, including their oil agreements. After the fall of the Gaddafi regime, Mali has been dragged into war and divided. But the main objective is Syria. The attempts by the Western imperialist powers to topple the Syrian regime and put in a puppet government to fully control the country are intensifying. The United States and its allies have mobilized all their forces within Syria and outside of it in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They are stirring up the religious contradictions, they use and manipulate the popular discontent towards the regime and they try to prepare the ground for a military intervention as in Libya. Meanwhile Russia is arming Syria, strengthening its military base located in that country and sending more warships to the Mediterranean.

To bring down the Syrian regime, put in place a puppet government, dominate the oil-rich Middle East, control the eastern Mediterranean, block the expansion of China and Russia in the region and expel them as they did in Libya, to encircle Iran, weaken its influence and liquidate its closest allies, are very important objectives. Syria is the only country in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean where Russia has a military base. This small country has become a place of intense struggle between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. The Middle East is a powder keg on the verge of religious conflicts.

Contrary to what they did in Libya, Russia and China are opposing a military intervention that would alter the balance in the Middle East and result in the domination of the United States and its allies over Syria. But they have left the door open for a possible compromise that would guarantee their interests and renew the Syrian regime which is having more and more difficulties to survive.

As the case of Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Ivory Coast and Libya show, the imperialist interventions that have had the support of the liberal “defenders” of freedom and democracy, of the pseudo-socialist parties that emerged from the former revisionist parties, have resulted in increased military budgets at the expense of the workers, in the destruction of the productive forces of those countries, in many disasters, the impoverishment and decline in all social aspects. The aspiration of the peoples for the right to sovereignty and national independence, democracy and freedom has never been the concern of the occupiers. Their objective was to further prolong their system maintained by the defeat inflicted on the working class in the middle of the last century, a defeat that guaranteed their super-profits, the expansion of their spheres of influence and the weakening of their rivals. The imperialist powers, which are using all means to achieve this goal, do not lack in demagoguery and low maneuvers to disorient the people’s anger.

Now a period of sharpening of inter-imperialist contradictions is beginning, which economic-financial and political-military interventions will multiply. It is increasingly important to fight against such intervention, to develop the united fight of the workers and peoples, in both the advanced and backward countries,.

Organize the Resistance of the Workers in the New Stormy Period

The army of unemployed is growing on the world level, especially in countries in total-debt crisis, in the countries in which the economy is declining, stagnating or is in crisis. In Greece and Spain, unemployment has reached 25%. In these countries, unemployment among the youths, including college graduates, reached 50%. In the Euro zone in the second quarter of 2012, the level of unemployment reached 11.2%, according to official figures. In countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where manufacturing has fallen from 9.6% to 7.5% in the first quarter of this year (2012), the number of unemployed continues to grow. In South Africa, the most developed country on the continent, the unemployment rate exceeds 25%.

In the current period, in almost all fields, from education to health care, drastic measures have been taken, the retirement age has been delayed and pensions have fallen. The gains of the working class worldwide are targeted for cuts or elimination. While direct taxes on the workers are increasing, no measures are taken to disturb the local and international monopolies, when even within the framework of this system one could increase taxes on the banks and the local and foreign monopolies. Wages continue to fall, etc. Many countries are suffering from a process of absolute impoverishment.

In recent years practices have been imposed worldwide such as sub-contracting labor, precarious and part-time work, an increase in the age for retirement, etc. In Germany, for example, one of the most developed countries in the world that has had significant growth rates in industrial production, according to the Federal Administration of Statistics, 15.6% of the population lives below the poverty line, a figure that rises to 26% among the immigrant population.

Last year, on a world scale and in each country, the workers and peoples movement has developed with various demands, in different forms and also at different levels. The struggles carried out in those countries with a “debt crisis” have been outstanding for their broad social base, for their responses and the experiences gained. The miners’ strike in South Africa, the youth movement and the strikes in Chile, the popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt, etc. are powerful examples of the workers and peoples struggles.

Starting with Greece, Spain and Italy, in various countries with a “debt crisis,” strikes, general strikes and huge demonstrations have taken place. In Greece and Spain, hundreds of thousands of people have expressed their anger in front of the parliaments on the days when these were voting for austerity measures. But the workers and peoples movement, despite some more advanced attempts, has remained within the framework of peaceful demonstrations, general strikes of one or two days and limited resistance. The strikes of long duration, the resistance or occupation of factories, have been limited to one enterprise or one sector.

The austerity measures have affected not only the proletariat and semi-proletarian masses of the cities and countryside; they have also affected the petty bourgeoisie and non-monopoly bourgeois strata. Even the less dynamic strata, the traditional base of the bourgeois parties, have been mobilized given the current situation. The social base of the struggle against the bourgeoisie in Power and against imperialism has expanded, to the point where in some dependent countries the mobilization has taken the character of a movement of the whole nation, except for a handful of monopolists. The conditions are maturing for the working class and its revolutionary parties, as representatives and the vanguard of the nation, to decide to organize and advance the movement and the united front of the people.

But despite the great movement, the groups of international finance capital and the local monopoly bourgeoisies have not given in (except in the recent delay of the austerity measures in Portugal). They have decided to implement these measures even at the cost of demeaning the image of the parliaments and weakening their social base. However, the masses are realizing through their own experience the impossibility of repelling the attacks with one or two day strikes or through peaceful demonstrations. Sharper forms of struggle and unlimited general strike are beginning to be considered by the more advanced strata.

It is clear that the bourgeoisie in Power, with their hostile character towards the people, is assuming a position of national betrayal. The traditional parties of the bourgeoisie and parliaments have lost credibility and the mass support for those parties is weakening (especially toward those in government that are implementing austerity measures). The social basis of monopoly capital is weakening. Among the masses who have felt their national pride hurt by the imperialists, the discontent, anger and will to struggle against the major imperialist powers, beginning with the United States and Germany, against institutions like the IMF or the EU, and against the local monopoly bourgeoisie that is collaborating with them, is developing.

The trade union bureaucracy and reformist parties and social trends are following a backward line of “least resistance,” not only in their forms of organization and struggle, but also at the level of political demands and platform. Clearly, this attitude is contributing to weakening their influence among the workers. The attacks and harshness of the social conditions are also affecting the lower strata of the labor bureaucracy and aristocracy and are sharpening the contradictions within their ranks.

The struggles in the countries with “debt crisis” are being developed on a program of protest against the bourgeois governments and parties, against institutions such as the IMF and the EU that are imposing draconian measures and they are demanding their withdrawal. At first this was natural and understandable in the context of a spontaneous movement. But the inability to go beyond those narrow limits is one of the major weaknesses of the movement. This weakness can be overcome with the work of agitation that shows the masses the way out of this difficult situation in which the people and the country find themselves, denouncing the social forces that are an obstacle to that way out. This work of agitation is reinforced by putting forward appropriate demands, slogans and forms of struggle among the masses.

Especially in Greece, certain small groups (that also have weaknesses) have proposed relatively advanced demands and platforms. But the forces capable of influencing the movement are not even concerned with organizing the work necessary to promote the fight on all fronts. The absence or great weakness of a revolutionary class party, has been felt strongly, as it cannot influence the movement.

Linked to the evolution of the world economy, the period that is beginning will be one of further degradation of the living and working conditions for the workers and peoples, a period of intense economic and political attacks, of discontent, anger and militancy among workers, as well as sharpening of inter-imperialist contradictions and conflicts. We must draw lessons and conclusions from the recent developments and the historical experience of the working class and peoples; we must advance, renewing our work and reorganizing our parties.

Tunisia, November 2012

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International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations: Resolution on the West African Region and Mali

Since 2010, the West African region and particularly the sub-Saharan zone has been marked by the armed interference and intervention of the imperialist powers. The objectives of those actions are:

* Political, geostrategic and military, related to the struggle for the redivision of the world and of the African continent.

* Economic (access to the petroleum of the Gulf of Guinea and the Ivory Coast; to the uranium of Niger and the precious metals that abound in the region; to solar energy; cacao, coffee, etc.

* The struggle of the Anglo-Saxon (U.S. and Great Britain) and French imperialists to prevent the penetration into the region by new actors such as China, India, Brazil, etc.

* The will of the imperialist powers to crush any type of protest by the popular masses, who are condemned to misery and lacking in political freedom, as well as the repression that they suffer carried out by the corrupt puppet powers, and their desire to crush any revolutionary insurrectionary movement.

The military-political crisis after the military coup d’état of the National Committee for the Defense and Restoration of the State (CNRDE) of March 22, 2012, as well as the military occupation of the North of Mali, begun January 22, 2012, which covers two thirds of the national territory, an occupation carried out by the National Movement for the Liberation of AZAWAD (MNLA) and the “jihadists” (AQMI, ANSAR, DINE, MUJAO, BOKO, HARAM…) must be put in this context

The military-political crisis in Mali has grave consequences for the neighboring countries, particularly Algeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, etc. and the group of the countries of the west African region (destabilization of States, proliferation of arms, massive displacement of populations towards the South of Mali, and thousands of refugees in other neighboring countries).

The military-political crisis in Mali is also a threat to the interests of imperialism, particularly French imperialism, in that country and the whole region. That is why there are preparatory maneuvers for an open military intervention that the troops provided by the members countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) can carry out, with the consent and logistical support of the great imperialist powers (France and U.S.A.) and of the UN under the pretext of “making a secure transition,” of “restoring constitutional life” and of “restoring Mali’s territorial integrity.” This is a reactionary plan by the imperialist powers and their allies in the region to maintain and reinforce their domination.

Faced with this serious situation, the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO):

* Denounces and condemns the puppet powers that have opened their territories (particularly in Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Mauritania and Senegal) to the troops of imperialist aggression.

* Denounces and condemns the proclamation of independence of the State of AZAWAD by the MNLA, instrument of French imperialism.

* Denounces and condemns the crimes perpetrated against the peoples of the North of Mali by terrorist group AQMI and the Islamist groups ANSAR-DINE, MUJAO and the MNLA.

* Supports the brave resistance of the peoples, particularly of the youth, against oppression and medieval and obscurantist practices.

* Denounces and condemns the reactionary plan of the ECOWAS in Mali.

* Calls on the proletariat and peoples of the imperialist countries, particularly France, to support the Malian people in their struggle for a revolutionary solution of the military-political crisis.

* Calls for solidarity and support for the struggle of the peoples of the West African region against imperialist domination and their African lackeys.

Tunisia, November of 2012.

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The killing of US ambassador to Libya: who is to blame?

Washington sticks to the stupid policy of using Islamic fundamentalists for its own self-serving agenda. The Islamists who stormed the US embassy in Cairo carried Bin Laden portraits.

The founder of the Al Qaeda terrorist network began his murky career in Afghanistan, where he worked as a CIA agent fighting against the country’s legitimate government and Soviet forces deployed there.

America’s image suffered a major blow following the killing of US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in an attack against the American consulate in Benghazi on Tuesday. Throughout time, killing an ambassador has been regarded as a grave insult to the state he represented and has served as a pretext for many wars.

This time, however, there is no one to go into battle against. Ambassador Stevens was killed by those who came to power with American help not long ago. “I keep asking myself,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, in confusion, “how could this have happened in a country that the US helped to liberate?” Apart from asking questions, Washington is sending warships to Libya and neighboring countries and is hastily moving SEAL forces to protect US consulates in troubled countries.

However, US marines will hardly be able to do anything about what can well be described as an unprecedented anti-American uprising which has swept all countries of the Middle East and North Africa and had spread to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, countries of Central Europe, and even faraway Australia.

The shallow and poorly made film denigrating prophet Muhammad became but a tiny spark triggering an explosion of a devastating force. It’s clear to any sober-minded individual that the “masterpiece” which was definitely watched by no more than a handful of Internet surfers couldn’t have set off millions of people in countries scattered all over the world.

The current unrest is the result of years-long discontent over the US doggedness in forcing American values on the rest of the world. On top of that, Washington sticks to the stupid policy of using Islamic fundamentalists for its own self-serving agenda. The Islamists who stormed the US embassy in Cairo carried Bin Laden portraits.

The founder of the Al Qaeda terrorist network began his murky career in Afghanistan, where he worked as a CIA agent fighting against the country’s legitimate government and Soviet forces deployed there. Given that the US continued to adhere to this tactic in subsequent years, the current lamenting over the unthankful Libyans in connection with the killing of Ambassador Stevens, who participated in person in the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi and was linked to Islamists, is either hypocrisy, or political short-sightedness.

I once asked 16th World Chess Champion Anatoly Karpov how many moves ahead he saw in chess and he answered that depending on the circumstances he calculated two or three, or sometimes six or seven moves ahead. It looks like the unfortunate “grandmasters” from Washington never see more than one move ahead. After invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein, the Bush-Cheney team stopped planning any further. As a result, the country has plunged into chaos and has become a terrorism hub and Al Qaeda base, thus being on the brink of falling apart.

Current developments in Europe, which was a US stronghold until now, have thrown Washington into outright confusion. The same is true regarding countries that have seen the Arab Spring, which hopefully, will not grow into an ‘Arab Winter’.

Intrigue-prone Republican candidate Mitt Romney is trying to cash in on the current state of affairs by lashing out at Barack Obama with accusations. Even though the current mess was started by the Bush-Cheney administration, the incumbent leadership will have to sort it out, no matter who comes to power in January next year.

And it will be years before this mess is sorted out eventually.

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Bloodbath mars anti-Maoist ‘success’

By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE – India’s anti-Maoist operations are under fire again.
It appears that 19 “hardcore Maoists” who the government claimed were killed in an encounter with the Chhattisgarh police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on the night of June 27-28 were in fact unarmed civilians. About a dozen of those killed were below 16 years of age, and at least one of them just 12.

What officials jubilantly declared at first to be one of the biggest successes of India’s war against Maoists was described by a social activist, Swami Agnivesh, who has acted as a government-appointed interlocutor with the Maoists, as “cold-blooded murder”, the worst massacre of civilians in the nation’s post-independence history.

The incident happened at Sarkeguda, 400 kilometers from Raipur, the state capital, in Bijapur district in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh, which is the epicenter of the ongoing military operations against the Maoists. Chhattisgarh is rich in minerals but the tribals who live there are among India’s poorest. They have borne the brunt of the war between the security forces and the Maoists.

There are different versions of what happened that night.

In the early hours of June 28, the CRPF said, “19 hardcore Maoists” were killed in an encounter in Bijapur’s dense jungles. But soon after, accounts – quite at odds with the police narrative – began trickling out of those dense jungles. These accounts drew attention to the horrific killing of villagers by the police that night.

Realizing that their “encounter” was snowballing into a major controversy, the CRPF quickly revised its version, claiming that “Maoists and their sympathizers” had been killed in the “encounter”.

Sarkeguda, Kottaguda and Rajpeta are three small tribal settlements consisting of fewer than a hundred huts altogether. These were among the villages that suffered terrible violence in 2006 when government-created local militias called Salwa Judum killed people and looted and burned down their homes. More than 600 villages were emptied out as terrified tribals fled into neighboring states. It is only after the Supreme Court ordered the disbanding of Salwa Judum – it continues to exist in other forms and different names – that the villagers slowly returned. They were rebuilding their lives – constructing their homes, cultivating their land and sending children to school – when terror returned in the form of the CRPF to Sarkeguda, Kottaguda and Rajpeta.

The three villages are separated from one another by a small clearing. It was in this clearing that the villagers had assembled at around 8pm that night for a meeting. The meeting began late. At around 11pm, the villagers say, they were surrounded by police who began firing at them. The firing went on for hours.

CRPF sources say they had come to know of a Maoist meeting that was to be held on the night of June 27 at Silgerh near Sarkeguda. An operation was planned to strike at the Maoists. According to the plan, about 800 troops stationed at Basaguda, Chintalnar and Jagarmunda would converge from three directions at Silgerh.

Troops from the CRPF camp at Basaguda are reported to have set off that night at around 9pm. As they advanced toward Silgerh, they came upon a congregation of people at Sarkeguda.

According to the CRPF, Maoists at the meeting opened fire and the police retaliated. An encounter ensued in which “Maoists and their sympathizers” were killed. Six CRPF personnel were wounded, four of them suffering gunshot injuries.

CRPF director general Vijay Kumar told the media that the police had been ambushed by the Maoists and that they had retaliated as per the standard operating procedures.

“We had to protect ourselves after so many [police] were injured in open fire,” he said. Expressing concern that the Maoists had used the villagers as human shields, he claimed that twice his troops “retreated on seeing women and children in the front”.

Villagers insist there were no Maoists at the gathering; neither had the Maoists called the meeting. They say they had gathered to discuss an upcoming festival related to the sowing of crops.

However, 12-year-old Chhotu Hakka of Sarkeguda, who was shot in the knees, told news channel NDTV correspondent Sreenivasan Jain that there were three or four Maoists present at the meeting that night. In hospital and isolated from others in his village, Chhotu appears in the news clip to be unaware of the line his village has taken – or was made to take by the Maoists – that there were no Maoists around that night.

CRPF officials have pointed to bullet injuries sustained by their personnel as evidence of an encounter. While The Hindu has reported one villager as surmising that the police might have accidentally shot one another when they surrounded the village, the latter have countered that by pointing out that the bullets that caused injury were of the kind the Maoists use.

Piecing together the various accounts, it seems that the CRPF operation was based on faulty intelligence. When troops from Jagarmunda reached Silgerh that night, they found no Maoists there.

It does seem that Maoists called a meeting of villagers at Sarkeguda and lay in ambush there. When troops from the Basaguda camp passed Sarkeguda, the rebels fired at them, knowing well that the trigger-happy CRPF would retaliate and end up shooting into a crowd of innocent villagers. The CRPF walked into a Maoist trap that night.

What followed was a massacre.

It is hard to understand why the CRPF fired as it did. Surely it was aware that village meetings here are often of “indeterminate nature”, writes Shoma Chaudhury in the Tehelka newsmagazine. “They know villagers are often summoned by Maoists for public hearings: These are orders that cannot be refused. If they didn’t know whom they were firing at that night, why did they not retreat rather than shoot to kill at random?”

Had the government simply admitted the terrible mistake the next morning, it might have limited the damage. Instead, a cover-up operation followed, adding salt to wounds.

The manner in which serious charges appear to have been fabricated and slapped on some of the dead to prove that “Maoists” were indeed killed that night has fueled outrage.

Home Affairs Minister P Chidambaram, under whose charge the CRPF falls, has defended the operation, as has the chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh. Interestingly, the two belong to rival political parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) respectively.

Chidambaram has come under criticism not just from activists and civil society but also from his own colleagues in the Congress party. Federal Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo has described the operation as a “fake encounter”, and Congress politicians in Chhattisgarh have described it as a “botch-up”. A report by the Congress’ Chhattisgarh unit has listed and named seven children among those killed. No Maoists figure in this report. This is in sharp contrast to the statement issued by the home minister last week wherein he claimed that three Maoists were killed and, barring one 15-year-old boy, the dead were all adults.

Neither the state nor the Maoists have come out looking good from the incident at Sarkeguda. Clearly, both have little regard for the tribals they claim to be liberating or for the young lives they have snuffed out.

Two of the “top Maoists” who were killed that night were Kaka Nagesh, 15, and Madkam Ramvilas. They lived in a government hostel for schoolchildren and had come home for the summer vacation. Being among the villages’ few educated boys, they were tasked with the responsibility of figuring out how much each villager had to contribute for the seed festival. Nagesh and Ramvilas were present at the meeting to share those figures.

Earlier this year the two were among three students of Kottaguda village selected to visit the port city of Visakhapatnam for an educational tour. Their experiences at Visakhapatnam left a deep impression on the boys. It fired in Nagesh a dream to become mariner. As for Ramvilas, “He wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up,” his sister says.

Given their excellent performance in the government school they attended – the two were said to be the brightest in the school – they might have indeed achieved their dreams.

On the night of June 27-28, the CRPF and Maoists ensured that those dreams died young.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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Communist Ghadar Party of India: On the Presidential Elections, 2012

The selection of a suitable candidate for the President of India, to be elected in July 2012, has been one of the major preoccupations of the ruling circles of our country in recent weeks.

The issue has gained in importance because of the critical nature of the present political situation, and because of the important role and powers of the President especially in times of political instability, crisis and potential “emergency” situations.

Present Situation

The Presidential election comes at a time of all-round crisis of the existing system. The big bourgeoisie is impatient to move ahead with its program of reforms, which have stalled in the face of very broad and growing resistance among the people, along with opposition within the ruling coalition.

The anger of workers has been steadily rising against the soaring prices, violation of labour rights and intensification of their exploitation. A united workers’ opposition is gaining strength against the privatisation and liberalisation program. Workers in diverse sectors are opposing the proposed new law on pensions aimed at robbing the savings of the working class for the benefit of the capitalists. Bank workers are contesting the need for banks in our country to be driven solely by profit maximisation and “global competitiveness”.

Peasants and tribal peoples have been up in arms against the attempts of big capitalist corporations to grab their land, and the proposed new Land Acquisition Act that is designed to assist this land grab.

There is widespread opposition among workers, peasants and small traders to allowing foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail trade.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, after returning from the G-20 meetings, has hinted at tough measures ahead, to end the “policy paralysis”. There is already much talk about the deterioration of India’s balance of payments and fiscal situation, alongside the economic downturn. There are calls for “austerity measures”, meaning further attacks on the living standards of the toiling majority so as to rescue corporate profits.

The mass resistance to the capitalist-imperialist program is fuelling the further intensification of inter-capitalist contradictions. Rivalry among the big monopoly groups fuelled the exposure of one scam after another. Conflicts have intensified between the big monopoly capitalists and various regional bourgeois groups. Regional bourgeois groups are demanding their share and resisting the overriding dictate of the biggest monopoly companies. Various state governments are resisting the imposition of central dictate on many fronts.

The entire system of democracy and its political process is extremely discredited at this time, as are the principal parties in Parliament. In this context, the Communist Ghadar Party of India has been consistently pointing out that the fundamental flaw is that the supreme power, or sovereignty, is vested in the hands of a tiny clique. The Constitution proclaims it as rule by the people, while actually legitimising Cabinet Rule.

The necessity to end the self-serving rule of an exploiting minority and vest sopvereignty in their own hands is being recognised by more and more sections of workers, peasants and progressive intelligentsia.

Faced with all-round crisis and discredit of their much touted democracy, the big bourgeoisie is keen to select a tried and tested politician for the post of President during 2012-17, one who could restore some credibility to the existing system. The big business houses want a President who would facilitate the pursuit of their imperialist aims, help resolve internal conflicts within the capitalist class and also be able to justify fascist measures to suppress the people’s resistance.

Presidential Powers

The Constitution of India vests a wide range of powers in the hands of the President, including executive, legislative, judicial, financial and emergency powers. The exercise of these powers are subject to the overriding condition that the President is bound to follow the advice of the Council of Ministers (the Cabinet) headed by the Prime Minister. The President may return a proposal to the Cabinet once, for reconsideration. If the same proposal is submitted again, he is bound to approve.

It would be wrong to conclude from this that the President is merely a rubber stamp. If the President returns a major Cabinet recommendation for reconsideration, such as the imposition of President’s Rule in a state or the proclamation of a National or Financial Emergency, it would precipitate an acute political crisis.

There are also particular times when the President exercises decision-making power on vital matters. When elections to Parliament results in no clear majority and there are contending claims, the President uses his judgment to decide which party to invite first to demonstrate its majority. If there is a deadlock between the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on any legislation, the President has the power to summon a joint session to resolve the dispute.

Conclusions

Taking into account the present situation and the turbulent times ahead, the big bourgeoisie has selected Pranab Mukherjee as the preferred candidate for the post of President. This is the reason that in spite of the initial hesitation of the Congress Party and the various alternative names proposed by regional parties, Mukherjee has emerged as the favourite in the race. This is not the result of the activities of political party leaders alone, as presented on TV news channels. It is primarily the result of the guiding hand of the big capitalists that operates behind the curtain.

As far as the working class, peasants and other working people are concerned, there is nothing to cheer in the selection of Mukherjee. He may be well educated and wise, but his knowledge and wisdom are not for the benefit of workers and peasants. He has a proven track record of having consistently served the capitalist monopoly houses of our country.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is playing a harmful role in this situation by responding positively to the call of the big bourgeoisie, and canvassing support for Mukherjee among its friends and allies.

Communists must strive to utilise the instability and crisis of bourgeois rule to the advantage of the working class and the cause of the revolution.

The Communist Ghadar Party is striving to utilise the present crisis to build unity around the aim and program of replacing the existing capitalist democracy with a superior system and political process. That superior system is proletarian democracy – a system in which supreme power will be in the hands of the working people, who will control those they elect, and who in turn will control the executive power. The relation between the Union and its constituents will be redefined on the basis of recognising the right of every nation, nationality and people to self-determination.

CPI(M) is doing exactly the opposite of what a Communist Party is duty bound to do. It is rushing to the assistance of the ruling bourgeoisie when it is in crisis. It is pursuing the treacherous road of embracing the capitalist-imperialist program and at the same time claiming to be defending workers’ and peasants’ interests.

The task of communists is not to help the bourgeoisie to stabilise its rule. It is to lead the working class and people to take supreme power out of the hands of the Cabinet and the President in Parliament, and vest it in their own hands, so as to bury capitalism and build socialism.

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The Comintern on Colonial Countries & National Liberation

In the colonial countries with an oppressed native peasant population the national liberation movement is composed either of the entire population, as for example in Turkey, in which case the struggle of the oppressed peasantry against the landlords inevitably begins after the victory of the liberation struggle; or the feudal landlords are allied with the imperialist robbers, and in these countries, for example India, the social struggle of the oppressed peasants takes place at the same time as the struggle for national liberation.

  — Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International: 1919-1943 Documents London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd, 1971, Vol. 1, p. 396. 

Communist Ghadar Party of India: Women must organise and wage united struggle to affirm their rights as women, as workers and as human beings!

Call of the Central Committee of Communist Ghadar Party of India, 1 March, 2012

International Women’s Day, on 8 March, 2012, comes at a time when more and more women are coming out on the streets, in our country and all over the world. They are protesting against their conditions and demanding their rights as women, as working people and as human beings.

Women of India are raising their voices against the increasing economic insecurity and super-exploitation of working women. They are protesting against the growing corruption and violence against them in daily life. Reports of rapes are a daily phenomenon in our country, showing that women do not even enjoy the right to walk on the streets without being threatened with harassment and violence.

Countless numbers of girl children are denied the right to life itself; they are killed before they are born. Those who survive face numerous obstacles to participating in economic and political affairs on an equal footing with boys and men.

Women are denied the right to decide when and whom to marry, how many children to bear and when to bear them. Millions of childbearing women lack access to basic trained care to ensure safe childbirth.

Women and girls in our country continue to be burdened by the weight of the Brahmanical caste system and various religious strictures that limit their role in social life. The growth of capitalism, while drawing large numbers of women out of their homes and into factories and BPOs, has brought forth new forms of exploitation and oppression. It has raised the degree of insecurity, of violence and crimes against women.

The Constitution of the Indian Republic in 1950 did not make a clean break with the legacy of the colonial state erected by the British imperialists for plundering our land and labour. While it extended the right to vote to all adult women and men, it retained the basic foundations of the British Indian state as legalised by the Government of India Act of 1935. The communal definition of the polity was retained, with separate personal laws for Hindus, Muslims and others. Caste based reservation of electoral constituencies, communal organisation of the army and a top-down colonial centralised bureaucracy have all been retained and further perfected by the Indian bourgeoisie.

The Congress Party promised whatever the people wanted while implementing strictly what benefited the big capitalists and big landlords. Nehru declared that a socialistic pattern of society was being created, while in fact the biggest capitalist houses grew rapidly and monopolised the domestic market. They used the State to suppress the toiling masses and take the place of the white man in carrying out the plunder of our land and labour.

A woman in our country cannot seek legal protection for any right by virtue of being a woman and a human being. She first has to specify her religion and caste.

In the process of creating the illusion that a socialistic pattern of society was being created, various laws were passed including some relating to basic rights of women. However, no enabling provisions or enforcing mechanisms were created, leaving the laws to remain a dead letter. For instance, the Maternity Benefits Act of 1961 entitles every woman who has worked for 80 days to maternity leave with pay of at least 6 weeks; but very few women actually enjoy this in practice. On average, women earn only two-thirds of the income paid to men for the same quality and quantity of work, even though there is an Equal Remuneration Act, 1976.

Women’s organisations were among the first to declare that the Nehruvian ‘socialistic pattern of society’ had not delivered on its promises. They pointed to the yawning gap between promise and reality, between various laws and the conditions on the ground.

The ruling capitalist class responded to the rising expectations and demands of working women and men by unleashing the program of globalisation through liberalisation and privatisation. Rather than taking measures for the State to fulfil its duty to all citizens, they advocated the opposite – that the State should withdraw from providing goods and services and leave everyone to fend for himself or herself in the so-called free market. The failure of the Nehruvian model of capitalist growth was presented as being the failure of socialism. The international capitalist propaganda was pushed, that there is no alternative to market oriented economic reforms. Women have been in the forefront of the resistance to this all-round offensive.

Women have played an active role in the struggle against the anti-social offensive of the past 20 years, pursued under the banner of globalisation through liberalisation and privatisation. The economic drive of Indian monopoly capital towards global domination has been accompanied by growing criminalisation of politics, institutionalisation of state terrorism, repeated acts of communal and sectarian violence of all kinds. Women have been vocal opponents of this all-round fascistic offensive.

The life experience of women and their struggles has brought home the realisation that the fundamental reason for the blatant violation of the rights of the vast majority of women and men lies in their exclusion from political power. The key to advance the struggle for the realisation of women’s rights as well as the rights of others lies in the political empowerment of women and men of the toiling majority.

The promise of 33% reservation of seats for women in Parliament and state legislative bodies was made out to be a great concession to women in their struggle for political empowerment. The point, however, is that the existing State is an instrument of capitalist rule. Increasing the number of women in the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies will not change this class nature of the existing political system.

The numerous scandals, from the Radia tapes to the 2G-Spectrum scam, have exposed the fact that what exists in the name of the “largest democracy in the world” is in fact a form of dictatorship of a minority class of capitalists, headed by big monopoly houses. It is a political system designed to ensure that the Tatas, Ambanis, Birlas and other monopoly houses control decision-making power and use it to enrich themselves as rapidly as possible. The monopoly houses finance the major political parties and their electoral campaigns. They select the Ministers for important portfolios and dictate the economic policies.

The Communist Ghadar Party of India believes that women need to fight for a new economic and political system, rather than focusing their energies on getting a few women into legislative bodies in the existing unrepresentative system.

The first practical step in the political awakening of women is to get together, as women, to discuss their common problems and their common struggle. Women need their own fighting organisations to strengthen their political participation, and to articulate and defend their rights, as women and as human beings.

Communist women must actively participate in the effort to build and strengthen women’s organisations, setting an example of uncompromising defence of the rights of women. They must clarify the perspective and vision of that society where women will be emancipated.

Working women have an important role to play in the struggle of the organised working class and in the struggle of women. One-third of all wage workers and salaried employees are women. With the experience of organised struggle of workers’ unions, they have an important role to play in organising women, as women.

There is an urgent need to build the foundations of the new state power, in the form of people’s samitis in the mohallas, bastis and villages. Women have a key role to play in building and strengthening such organs of people’s power.

Women have to be part of leading society out of its present morass. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from the revolutionary transformation of society from capitalism to socialism. Socialism is a system in which class exploitation is eliminated, along with private property in the means of social production. The process of social production and reproduction will be socially planned, so as to fulfil the rising needs of the population and the need for investments to enhance productive capacity. Such a system of society would be geared to ensure healthy living and working conditions for all women, including guaranteed safe childbirth. Social planning will recognise the necessity for the emancipation of women and their equal participation with men in all affairs of society and the family.

On the occasion of International Women’s Day 2012, the Communist Ghadar Party of India salutes the women of all lands who are fighting to defend and affirm their rights. We call on women to strengthen their organised struggle and unite firmly in defence of their rights as women, as workers and as human beings.

Location
New Delhi

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J.V. Stalin on the Peoples of the East

“What has happened has been that the socialist revolution has not diminished but rather increased the number of languages; for, by stirring up the lowest sections of humanity and pushing them on to the political arena, it awakens to new life a number of hitherto unknown or little-known nationalities. Who could have imagined that the old, tsarist Russia consisted of not less than fifty nations and national groups? The October Revolution, however, by breaking the old chains and bringing a number of forgotten peoples and nationalities on to the scene, gave them new life and a new development.

Today, India is spoken of as a single whole. But there can scarcely be any doubt that, in the event of a revolutionary upheaval in India, scores of hitherto unknown nationalities, having their own separate languages and separate cultures, will appear on the scene. And as regards implanting proletarian culture among the various nationalities, there can scarcely be any doubt that this will proceed in forms corresponding to the languages and manner of life of these nationalities.”

— J.V. Stalin, May 18, 1925, “The Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East: Speech Delivered at a Meeting of Students of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East,” Works Vol. 7, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), p. 141.

Lenin on the Revolutionary Potential of the Colonies & Neo-Colonies

“I should also like to emphasize here the importance of the movement in the colonies. In this respect we witness in all the old parties of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals the survivals of old sentimental conceptions–there is much sympathy for the oppressed peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies. The movement in the colonies is still regarded as an insignificant national and completely peaceful movement. However, that is not the case. For great changes have taken place in this respect since the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, millions and hundreds of millions — actually the overwhelming majority of the world’s population — are now coming out as an independent and active revolutionary factor. And it should be perfectly clear that in the coming decisive battles of the world revolution, this movement of the majority of the world’s population, originally aimed at national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and will, perhaps, play a much more revolutionary role than we have been led to expect.”

–Lenin, “Tactics of the Russian Communist Party, Report to the Third Congress of the Communist International” (July 5 1921)

“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe.”

–Lenin, “Better Fewer, But Better,” March 2, 1923

Lenin on Colonialism

“For example, if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be ‘just,’ ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first, and every socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory ‘great’ powers.”

 – Lenin, Socialism and War

“Socialists must not only demand the unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensation—and this demand in its political expression signifies nothing else than the recognition of the right to self-determination; they must also render determined support to the more revolutionary elements in the bourgeois-democratic movements for national liberation in these countries and assist their uprising—or revolutionary war, in the event of one—against the imperialist powers that oppress them.”

  — Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination

“We welcome the close alliance of Moslem and non-Moslem elements. We sincerely want to see this alliance extended to all the toilers of the East. Only when the Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish workers and peasants join hands and march together in the common cause of liberation—only then will decisive victory over the exploiters be ensured.”

 – Lenin, To the Indian Revolutionary Association

“From these fundamental premises it follows that the Communist International’s entire policy on the national and colonial questions should rest primarily on a closer union of the proletarians and the working masses of all nations and countries for a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and the bourgeoisie. This union alone will guarantee victory over capitalism, without which the abolition of national oppression and inequality is impossible.”

 – Lenin, Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions

“[...] the Communist International should advance and theoretically substantiate the proposition that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, the backward countries can pass over to the Soviet system and, through definite stages of development, to communism, without going through the capitalist stage.”

 – Lenin, Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions

Marx & Engels on Colonialism in India

“The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked”

The Future Results of the British Rule in India
New-York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853

“However infamous the conduct of the sepoys [the native Indian troops rising up against colonial rule, who were accused of atrocities], it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.”

The Indian Revolt
New-York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857

“We have here given but a brief and mildly-colored chapter from the real history of British rule in India. In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects. And if the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindus [Indians] should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of the crimes and cruelties alleged against them?”

Investigation of Tortures in India
 New-York Daily Tribune, September 17, 1857

Marx and Engels opposed colonialist "justice," shown suppressing the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (or "Sepoy Mutiny") in this Punch cartoon

“I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication.[...] The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindus [Indians] are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labor, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery.[...] Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?

The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus [Indians] themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.”

The Indian Revolt
New-York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857

By and by there will ooze out other facts able to convince even John Bull [Britain] himself that what he considers a military mutiny is in truth a national revolt.

Indian News
New-York Daily Tribune, August 14, 1857

[T]he cheapness of the articles produced by machinery, and the improved means of transport and communication furnish the weapons for conquering foreign markets. By ruining handicraft production in other countries, machinery forcibly converts them into fields for the supply of its raw material. In this way East India was compelled to produce cotton, wool, hemp, jute, and indigo for Great Britain. [...] A new and international division of labour, a division suited to the requirements of the chief centres of modern industry springs up, and converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field.

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt in New York
April 9, 1870

In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, is in store for the British government. What the English take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hindus, pensions for military and civil service men, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc. – what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, speaking only of the value of the commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually to send over to England – it amounts to more than the total sum of income of the sixty millions of agricultural and industrial labourers of India! This is a bleeding process, with a vengeance! The famine years are pressing each other and in dimensions till now not yet suspected in Europe! There is an actual conspiracy going on wherein Hindus and Mussulmans co-operate; the British government is aware that something is “brewing,” but this shallow people (I mean the governmental men), stultified by their own parliamentary ways of talking and thinking, do not even desire to see clear, to realise the whole extent of the imminent danger! [...] Tant mieux! [So much the better!]

Marx to Nikolai Danielson in St. Petersburg
February 19, 1881

You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies. In my opinion the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by a European population, Canada, the Cape, Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand the countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated, India, Algiers, the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, must be taken over for the time being by the proletariat and led as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India will perhaps, indeed very probably, produce a revolution, and as the proletariat emancipating itself cannot conduct any colonial wars, this would have to be given full scope; it would not pass off without all sorts of destruction, of course, but that sort of thing is inseparable from all revolutions. The same might also take place elsewhere, e.g., in Algiers and Egypt, and would certainly be the best thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. Once Europe is reorganised, and North America, that will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilised countries will follow in their wake of their own accord. Economic needs alone will be responsible for this. But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organisation, we to-day can only advance rather idle hypotheses, I think. One thing alone is certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing. Which of course by no means excludes defensive wars of various kinds.

Engels, Letter from Engels to Karl Kautsky In Vienna
London, 12 September, 1882

Stop Killer Coke!

Carlos Castaño and members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing Colombian paramilitary group.

Death squads have assassinated eight trade union leaders in Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia. The Stop Killer Coke campaign holds the beverage giant responsible.

MADELEINE BARAN

This article is from the November/December 2003 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.

On the morning of December 5, 1996, two members of a paramilitary gang drove a motorcycle to the Carepa Coca-Cola bottling plant in northern Colombia. They fired 10 shots at worker and union activist Isidro Segundo Gil, killing him. Luis Adolso Cardona, a fellow worker, witnessed the assassination. “I was working and I heard the gun shots and then I saw Isidro Gil falling,” he said in a recent interview. “I ran, but when I got there Isidro was already dead.”

A few hours later, paramilitary officials detained Cardona, but he escaped, fleeing to the police office, where he received protection. Around midnight that night, the paramilitaries looted the local union office and set it on fire. “There was nothing left. Only the walls,” said Cardona. The paramilitary group returned to the plant the next week, lined up the 60 unionized workers, and ordered them to sign a prepared letter of resignation from the union. Everyone did. Two months later, all the workers—including those who had never belonged to the union—were fired.

Gil, 27, had worked at the plant for eight years. His wife, Alcira Gil, protested her husband’s killing and demanded reparations from Coca-Cola. She was killed by paramilitaries in 2000, leaving their two daughters orphaned. A Colombian judge later dropped the charges against Gil’s alleged killers.

Paramilitaries, violent right-wing forces composed of professional soldiers and common thugs, maintain bases at several Coca-Cola bottling facilities in Colombia, allegedly to protect the bottlers from left-wing militants who might target the plants as symbols of globalization.

Activists say at least eight union activists have been killed by paramilitaries at Colombian Coca-Cola facilities since 1989. And plaintiffs in a recent series of lawsuits hold Coca-Cola and two of its bottlers responsible for the violence, alleging “systematic intimidation, kidnapping, detention, and murder of trade unionists in Colombia, South America at the hands of paramilitaries working as agents of corporations doing business in that country.”

The murders of Coke bottling workers are part of a larger pattern of antiunion violence in Colombia. Since 1986, over 3,800 trade unionists have been murdered in the country, making it the most dangerous place to organize in the world. Three out of every five people killed worldwide for trade union activities are from Colombia.

Suing Coke and its Bottlers

The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) and the United Steel Workers of America filed four lawsuits in Federal District Court in July 2001 on behalf of Sinaltrainal (a union representing food and beverage workers in Colombia), five individuals who have been tortured or unlawfully detained for union activities, and the estate of murdered union activist Isidro Gil. The plaintiffs contend Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained, or otherwise silenced trade union leaders.”

In addition to demanding that Coca-Cola take responsibility for the murder of Colombian union activists, the plaintiffs are asking for compensatory and punitive damages, which by some estimates could range from $50 million to $6 billion.

Coca-Cola’s legal defense “is not that the murder and terrorism of trade unionists did not occur,” according to an ILRF press release. The company argues that it cannot be held liable in a U.S. federal court for events outside the United States. “Coca-Cola also argues that it does not ‘own,’ and therefore does not control, the bottling plants in Colombia.”

In late March, a judge dismissed Coca-Cola from the lawsuits—on grounds that the firm does not have control over the labor practices of its bottlers—but allowed the case against the bottlers to go forward. A request for an appeal is pending.

According to Daniel Kovalik, assistant general counsel for the United Steelworkers of America and co-counsel for the plaintiffs: “In the short run, [the court decision] means that we can’t proceed against Coke, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that in the long run. I am absolutely confident that we’ll win the appeal.”

Kovalik maintains that Coca-Cola is liable for its bottlers’ actions. For one thing, the 20 Colombia bottlers are deeply entwined in Coke’s core economic activities. Coca-Cola provides syrup to the bottlers, who mix, bottle, package, and ship the drinks to wholesalers and retailers throughout Colombia. The bottlers are integral to the beverage giant’s operations in the country.

Moreover, Coca-Cola and its bottlers have deep financial links. In May, Coca-Cola FEMSA, a bottling company, acquired Pan American Beverages, Latin America’s largest bottler and a defendant in the case. In the year before it was acquired, sales of Coca-Cola represented 89% of Pan American’s $2.35 billion net sales. The acquisition made Mexico-based Coca-Cola FEMSA the largest Coca-Cola bottler in Latin America. The Coca-Cola Company owns a 30% equity stake in Coca-Cola FEMSA, according to the bottling company, and several of its executives also work for Coke.

The plaintiffs are now considering whether to add Coca-Cola FEMSA as a defendant in the lawsuits. If they do, Coca-Cola will be put in the uncomfortable position of trying to prove that Coca-Cola FEMSA and the Coca-Cola Company—despite their shared name, shared executives, and Coke’s part-ownership of FEMSA—are completely independent from one another.

Coca-Cola did not return calls for comment, but has stated in the past that Pan American Beverages was an independent company. More recently, Coca-Cola has denied allegations that its bottlers tolerate or assist in acts of violence against union activists. In a statement released in July, Coca-Cola said the allegations are “nothing more than a shameless effort to generate publicity using the name of our Company, its trademark and brands.”

Kovalik argues that the corporation’s communications with shareholders contradict these public statements and suggest that the firm in fact can, and should, investigate and put a stop to the killings. He plans to submit Coca-Cola documents as legal evidence, including a letter to a shareholder that reads: “We require that everyone within the Coca-Cola system abide by the laws and regulations of the countries in which they do business. We demand integrity and honesty in business at the Coca-Cola Company.…”

“They can’t be able to profit from these bottlers and say that they don’t have control over these situations,” says Kovalik.

Taking Down a Corporate Giant

The Stop Killer Coke campaign may prove to be the biggest test yet of the corporate campaign model pioneered by labor consultant Ray Rogers (see “Ray Rogers’ Corporate Campaign Strategy”). As the public face of the ILRF lawsuits, the Stop Killer Coke campaign aims to put public pressure on Coca-Cola to acknowledge its role in the killings and to persuade the company to stop collaborating with violent paramilitary organizations.

It’s one part of a massive coalition gearing up for a multi-front attack on Coca-Cola. The anti-Coke effort, launched by the lawsuits against Coca-Cola and its bottlers, has grown to include the Stop Killer Coke campaign, consumer and student groups, and labor organizations like the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO. These various groups share the same primary goal: to damage the soft-drink giant’s reputation in order to force the company to acknowledge its role in the Colombian killings. With the launch of the Stop Killer Coke campaign this summer, the movement is picking up momentum.

Rogers plans to expand the campaign far beyond the plaintiffs’ allegations to encompass “at least a dozen issues” including the lack of health care for Coca-Cola workers in Africa; the corporation’s water use in India, which causes groundwater destruction; and more. He has spent the last several months researching Coke’s corporate structure and intricate financial dealings.

Rogers often refers to his strategic style as “divide and conquer” because it aims to isolate companies from investors, creditors, politicians, and consumers. In the most successful corporate campaigns, the target corporation’s relationship with the business world breaks down, as other companies, banks, and executives decide that the benefits of the business relationship are not worth the risk of being the target of a high-profile campaign. Eventually, the company, isolated and weak, caves in to the campaign’s demands in order to end the media blitz and restore its position in the business world.

“A corporation is really nothing more than a coalition of individual and institutional economic and political interests, some more vital and vulnerable than others, that can be challenged and attacked, divided and conquered,” Rogers said. “I know enough now to know exactly where the Achilles heel of Coca-Cola is. I’m so confident about where we’re going with this thing.”

That Achilles heel appears to be Coke’s relationship with SunTrust Bank, its main creditor. Many of Coca-Cola’s top shareholders own significant amounts of SunTrust stock, and their boards overlap—three current or former Coke CEOs sit on SunTrust’s board of directors and two current or former SunTrust CEOs sit on Coke’s board. “In almost 30 years of studying corporate structures, I have never seen a more intimate or incestuous relationship,” said Rogers.

Rogers plans to expose the relations between SunTrust and Coca-Cola, then use information on Coke’s human rights and environmental practices to drive SunTrust into a financial and public relations disaster. If the plan works, investors will lose confidence in SunTrust; key executives will resign rather than face negative media attention; and unions, progressive groups, and consumers will close their accounts. Given the deep ties between the two companies, whatever hurts SunTrust will hurt Coke. Backed into such a position, Coca-Cola would be forced to acknowledge and end its ties to paramilitaries in order to stabilize its main creditor and regain investor and consumer confidence.

The campaign faces an uphill battle. Coca-Cola has virtually unlimited resources to fight lawsuits and conduct its own media blitz. Also, Coca-Cola, like most major companies, now has years of experience fighting high-profile consumer campaigns. The beverage giant has a truly global reach, producing over 300 brands in more than 200 countries, with more than 70% of its income coming from outside the United States. If the campaign hopes to damage Coca-Cola financially, it will have to attract international support.

Despite these serious obstacles, Rogers is optimistic. “We’re going to move very quickly on this thing,” he said. “I think they’re going to find themselves involved in something that they’re going to find a total nightmare.” Terry Collingsworth, executive director of the ILRF, is also confident. “Ray’s like the classic pit bull,” he said. “Once he bites into you, he won’t let go. Ray’s not going to walk away from this until he’s won.”

The battle is already heating up, with activists in Latin America, Turkey, Ireland, and Australia leading anti-Coke campaigns with Stop Killer Coke materials. Student organizations like United Students Against Sweatshops are starting campaigns to ban Coke from campuses. University College Dublin, Ireland’s largest university, voted recently to remove all Coca-Cola products from the campus. Meanwhile, Bard College in New York has decided against renewing Coke’s contract with the school when it expires in May. At Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, students staged a “Coke dump,” spilling soda into the streets to call attention to the plight of Colombian union activists. Union involvement is also growing. United Auto Workers Local 22 in Detroit, recently ordered 4,000 “Coke Float” flyers, which explain the campaign. The union will hand them out to workers as they leave their plant.

In the meantime, violence against union activists in Colombia continues. On September 10, 2003, David Jose Carranza Calle, the 15-year-old son of Sinaltrainal’s national director, was kidnapped by paramilitaries. According to Sinaltrainal, four masked men forced the younger Carranza into a truck and tortured him, asking for the whereabouts of his father. At the same time, his father, Limberto Carranza, received a phone call from an unidentified individual who said, “Unionist son of a bitch, we are going to break you. And if you won’t break, we will attack your home.” The kidnappers freed Carranza Calle over three hours later. But unionists in Colombian bottling plants, including Coca-Cola facilities, are far from safe.

Source

Grand Celebration of 31st Birth Anniversary of Communist Ghadar Party

The 31st birth anniversary of the Communist Ghadar Party of India was celebrated in grand and colourful style in Delhi on 25th December 2011. The entire program was managed from beginning to end by the youthful comrades of the Party.

The auditorium was overflowing. Many had to stand or sit in the aisles. The vast majority of the audience consisted of high school and college students and young workers between 20 and 25 years of age. There were youth who have become candidate members of the Party and many more who were aspiring to do so.

The program began with a beautiful summary of the history of the Communist Ghadar Party, using narration interspersed with acted out scenes and accompanying music. The inspiring and moving presentation depicted the troubled times the communist movement went through and the conditions in which a small group of staunch Marxist-Leninists initiated the preparatory work in 1977 to reconstitute the vanguard party in which all revolutionary communists can militate. The Communist Ghadar Party was born in 1980, and has since then grown and matured as a party that all genuine communists take seriously, and which speaks and acts consistently in the common interest of the working class. It is today boldly spearheading the struggle to restore the unity of Indian communists, around the aim and program of the working class to become the ruling class and reorganise society to get rid of all forms of exploitation.

There were numerous group dances performed by girls and boys from working class families from different areas. They combined traditional folk art forms and modern group dancing with communist revolutionary content. There were Bhangras, Bhojpuri folk songs and cultural items from different regions of the country.

Brief speeches were delivered by several leading comrades of the Party in between the colourful and exciting cultural program. They called on the youth to rally around the program for the Navnirman of our state and society, to usher in a new India where workers, peasants, women and youth shall be the masters.

The atmosphere was extremely militant throughout the 4-hour long celebrations, inspiring the entire audience with revolutionary optimism about the future. It was a powerful expression of the strength and maturity that Communist Ghadar Party has gained over the years, and of the irresistible attraction of the youth to its revolutionary outlook and political line.

The celebration was a visual treat and a powerful proof that the youthful working class of our country is indeed capable of ruling and running all affairs, if only it is provided with communist education and political training.

The celebrations ended with the singing of the Internationale.

Location
New Delhi

Source

Forty years of African Liberation Day! Time to build the Party to complete the struggle

Published Dec 2, 2011

When the first African Liberation Day (ALD) demonstration was held in 1972, the U.S. front of the African liberation movement was reeling from deathblows being delivered by the U.S. government in a counteroffensive that had littered the international landscape with the bodies of murdered black freedom fighters around the world.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others were rounded up at gunpoint and herded into concentration camp jails and prisons in the U.S.

This was the U.S. response to the changing world that was reducing the list of hosts that U.S. and European parasitic capitalism relied on for its existence.

Since the bloody carnage of the second imperialist world war between the U.S. and European powers to re-divide the world, the struggles of the peoples beaten down by imperial white power had escalated to an alarming degree.

The independence of India, which occurred in 1947, was followed by the success of the Chinese revolution in 1949.

Peoples of all countries were demanding freedom from white power.

And although the 1950s saw the temporary success of imperialism in overturning progressive governments in Iran and Guatemala, and defeating the revolutionary resistance movement of the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army, the Mau Mau resistance in Kenya and the successful 1959 Cuban revolution set off a chain of events in South America, Africa and elsewhere that presaged a bleak future for imperialism.

The struggle of African people in the U.S. had seen the ebbs and flows being experienced by freedom movements worldwide.

The second imperialist world war gave impetus to mass movements that were first characterized as democratic or civil rights struggles, eventually shedding their pacifist and reformist skins to raise the true anti-colonial demand for power, Black Power!

It was bloody.

Mobutu Sese Seko and other neo-colonial leaders were installed by the West to undermine proletarian revolution and African liberation

Patrice Lumumba was overthrown and murdered in the Congo in 1961, and Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in Ghana by U.S. imperialism in 1966. In the U.S. Malcolm X was murdered by U.S. agents in 1965.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton both were assassinated in 1968, and in Bolivia, Che Guevara was murdered by CIA-led mercenaries in 1967.

Nevertheless, the 1960s held out the promise of a liberated future for African people worldwide.

Algeria won its independence in 1962 and in Ethiopia, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), a distorted, diversionary response to Kwame Nkrumah’s call for a united continental African state was created in 1963.

It was on May 25, at the founding of the OAU, that it was resolved to make that date African Liberation Day.

Despite that historic declaration, however, liberation struggles of African people remained unresolved in Africa and elsewhere.

At the time of the OAU founding, the struggle within the U.S. was shaking the ideological and political fabric of the country to its core.

Liberation movements were blazing in Rhodesia, southwest Africa, Guinea Bissau, South Africa, Mozambique and Angola. These struggles continued to illuminate our possibilities, even after we had suffered some of our most serious setbacks.

On May 27, 1972, the first ALD mobilizations took to the streets as a direct response to the call of the liberation struggles being waged on the continent of Africa.

It was while organizing for this momentous event that the African People’s Socialist Party was founded, through unification of three mainly Florida-based organizations that came together to participate in the May 27 ALD mobilization.

African People’s Socialist Party Chairman, Omali Yeshitela, was a founding and participating member of the ALD’s coordinating committee, which organized the initial ALD mobilization.

African Liberation Day 2012 occurs on the 40th anniversary of the first ALD mobilization.

It is also the 40th anniversary of the founding of the African People’s Socialist Party.
These are two of the reasons for its historic significance; however, there are other reasons.

Our movement for the liberation and unification of Africa and African people has suffered many setbacks since the heady days of the founding of the OAU and the presumed victories of the 1960s.

The first 1972 ALD mobilization obscured the defeat that had been dealt to the organized African resistance in the U.S. and some other places.

The imperialists succeeded in installing neocolonial puppets in power throughout the world to preside over the looting that keeps a parasitic imperialist world system alive at the expense of the resources, dignity and sovereignty of Africans and others.

Even today the U.S. and NATO, almost the entire organized white world, are wreaking bloody havoc to install a neocolonial government in Libya in North Africa.

But the tables have surely turned, and the future of our people looks brighter than ever, as a desperate imperialism fights for its very life.

White power is on the ropes and nothing it can do will save it.

Not even the ploy of attempting to hide its face behind the black mask of an African president in the U.S., headquarters of worldwide imperialist white power.

Today, a haggard, gun-wielding imperialism staggers through its shrinking domain, weakened by its loss of extorted colonial sustenance and increasingly isolated in a world being changed by the growth of free and rebellious peoples who are declaring that the days of colonial slavery are over.

Today, because of its growing losses, the imperialist world economy is severely broken.

Imperialist “economists,” blinded by characteristic arrogance and unable to admit imperial white reliance–that is to say, dependence–on the resources of the oppressed, cannot correctly diagnose the problem as the resistance of the people.

The imperialists are facing a crisis, the likes of which they have never experienced.

The assumption that this is a typical cyclical capitalist crisis that can be resolved by shifting the burden of the crisis onto the backs of the colonial peoples is a form of whistling in the graveyard.

Precisely, the struggles of the colonial peoples are responsible for the crisis and, hence, the inability of the imperialists to turn to this solution of the past.

And while it is possible the U.S. and its allies will succeed in replacing the current government of Libya with pliant, neocolonial quislings, the crisis of neocolonialism is a part of the overall crisis of imperialism.

Indeed, the existence of Barack Hussein Obama in the U.S. White House is the greatest evidence of the general unreliability of neocolonialism around the world that the U.S. would have to deploy an imperial neocolonialism.

Today, facing the 40th anniversary of the first African Liberation Day mobilization, we do so under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, which has accumulated 40 years of experience and achieved the ideological clarity, political maturity and organizational breadth to lead us to victory, to the liberation and unification of Africa and African people worldwide.

Victory is Imminent!
Forward to ALD!
One Africa! One Nation!

Source

Communist Ghadar Party of India: Condemn the murder of Gaddafi and the re-colonisation of Libya!

Statement of the Central Committee of Communist Ghadar Party of India, 6th November, 2011

The Communist Ghadar Party of India condemns the cold blooded murder of the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi by the US-led NATO forces, as part of their unjust and criminal aggression and re-colonisation of that country.

The right to judge, reward or punish a political leader belongs to the people of that country and not to any foreign power. The murder of Gaddafi is an act of blatant violation of the right of Libyans to determine their own destiny.

The NATO forces rained death and destruction on Libya and its people from the air for over seven months. They have ruthlessly destroyed the economic infrastructure of Libya, — the schools, hospitals, highways, telecommunication networks, the irrigation and drinking water network. Countless people have been killed in these seven months. The imperialists of NATO armed their agents in Benghazi. They guided mercenary forces through their intelligence agents on the ground and bombings from the air to crush the people’s resistance to the capture of Libya. The final act of the murder of Gaddafi was also masterminded by the NATO forces. They bombed with sophisticated drones and fighters a cavalcade of vehicles of Colonel Gaddafi, which was leaving his home town of Serte. The NATO forces ensured the capture of Colonel Gaddafi followed by his brutal execution by their agents, without any trial of any kind.

For over seven months, Obama of the United States, Cameron of Britain, Sarkozy of France and Merkel of Germany have been calling for the blood of Gaddafi. They arrogantly rejected the proposals of the African Union and various Latin American governments to assist in a negotiated settlement of the Libyan crisis. They have now declared that the murder of Gaddafi marks a “new beginning” for a “democratic” Libya. The peoples of the world can have no illusions on this score.

The peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq have direct experience of the “regime changes” carried out in their countries in the name of promoting “democracy”, through brutal aggression, assassinations and wars of occupation. They have seen the rape and plunder of their land, labour and resources, and the murder of countless patriots in the course of the aggression and occupation. What has happened to Iraq and Afghanistan is what is being promised to the Libyan people under the signboard of democracy. What is going to be implemented is the cold-blooded colonial and imperialist plan to recolonise Libya and establish foreign imperialist control over its rich natural resources, particularly oil. This recolonisation will be carried out through the offices of a puppet regime that is being put into place.

The actions of the US-led NATO coalition in Libya confirm that these imperialist powers do not respect the fundamental premise of the foundation of the UN in the course of the Second World War in which the fascist aggressors were defeated — that the sovereignty of each people and country is inviolable, and each country has the right to follow its own economic and political system, free from outside dictate. The US-led imperialist coalition of NATO has arrogated to itself the right to refashion a new global order in which all countries and peoples must accept their unquestioned dictate.

The imperialist powers are trying to make people accept that the right of nations to self-determination, a principle established and agreed upon internationally in the 20th century, can be violated for “humanitarian” reasons. They use their control over the media to paint whosoever they select as being the biggest threat to humanity, so as to justify blatant aggression and violation of national sovereignty. All political parties and organisations of the working class and peoples must unite in defence of the right of nations and peoples to self-determination. We cannot and must not accept any violation of this right under any pretext.

The murder of Gaddafi and the recolonisation of Libya are a message to the African peoples that the Anglo-American imperialists and other European powers are initiating a new scramble for the recolonisation and redivision of Africa. It poses a grave threat to the freedom and independence of all the African countries.

The peoples and governments in our subcontinent must wake up to the reality and threats to peace and independence in our region, where US imperialism has violated the sovereignty of Iraq and Afghanistan, and is openly threatening Iran and Pakistan.

We must resolutely defend the sovereignty of every state, nation and people, and contribute to the struggle to stay the hands of all imperialist aggressors. An attack on one is an attack on all!

Let us demand that the Government of India must not give legitimacy to the re-colonisation of Libya by western imperialist powers in the guise of building democracy.

Source

Communist Ghadar Party of India: Working Class View of Twenty Years of the Liberalisation and Privatisation Program

The monopoly corporate houses of our country called it a historic day, the 24th of July, 1991. It was the day when Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister in the Narasimha Rao government, unveiled in his budget speech the program of globalisation of Indian capital through liberalisation and privatisation. The monopoly capitalists have been propagating through the media that Manmohan Singh must be applauded for initiating this golden period for India.

The working class has an entirely different view of this so-called reform program and its results over the past 20 years. So do the peasants and other sections of the toiling and excluded majority. The views of this toiling majority are neglected by the corporate media.

Starting with this issue, Mazdoor Ekta Lehar will publish interviews with representatives of the working class, of the peasantry and other oppressed sections, to elaborate their views on the past two decades of globalisation of Indian capital; and on their vision for the next two decades.

We begin the series with an interview of Comrade Lal Singh, General Secretary of the Communist Ghadar Party of India. The following issues will carry more interviews with representatives of the working class, peasants and other small business people.

MEL Correspondent: What has been the result of the two decades of the so-called economic reform program since 1991?

Comrade Lal Singh: “The result of implementing this program has been highly uneven and lopsided economic growth. It has led to the intensification of class contradictions within our society.

“If we look at who has benefited the most, we find a miniscule proportion of the population that has amassed enormous wealth in this period. The turnover of the Tata group jumped from Rs. 14,000 crore to Rs. 3,50,000 crore over the past 20 years. That of the K.M. Birla group grew from Rs. 3,100 crore to Rs. 1,35,000 crore. The turnover of the Reliance Group was Rs. 2,300 crore twenty years ago; now it has split into two groups, and the turnover of the Mukesh Ambani group alone is over Rs. 2,00,000 crore.

“Several new names have joined the top circle of monopoly groups, such as the Sunil Bharti Mittal group and Gautam Adani group. The combined wealth of the 10 richest capitalists in our country reached the astronomical level of Rs. 8,40,000 crore in 2008, more than one-fifth the national income. At the other pole, more than 80% of the rural population spent less than Rs. 900 per head every month, according to the National Sample Survey of 2006/07. This is equivalent to just 30 rupees per day. Over 80% of the urban population spent less than Rs. 1800 per month, or 60 per day.

“The monopoly capitalists naturally consider the liberalisation and privatisation program a great success because they have minted money. But India remains the land with the maximum number of poor people. It is the country with maximum number of victims of numerous diseases. Infant mortality and maternal mortality remain high in most parts of the country. Even safe drinking water is not assured for millions of our people. Enormous time is spent every day to fetch a pail of water.

“The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission makes the preposterous claim that a working person can live on 30 Rupees per day! It shows that the monopoly capitalists and their spokesmen have no clue about the actual conditions of life of the toiling majority, their needs and aspirations. By defining the poverty line absurdly low, they claim that poverty is being tackled in our country.

“The relatively rapid economic growth, which our rulers proudly applaud, is being achieved through the most ruthless exploitation of workers and robbery of peasants. To make sure that the workers and peasants do not fight back as a united force, all kinds of diabolical acts are carried out, to divert them and set them against one another.

“The economic offensive has been accompanied by a fascistic political offensive in the form of state terrorism, communal violence and other blatant forms of violation of the rights of nations, classes and individual human beings.

“We cannot forget that Manmohan Singh’s maiden budget was followed by the criminal act of demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by state-organised communal violence. Both the principal parties in Parliament collaborated in these monstrous crimes against our people and their unity. Our Party responded to those developments by taking a historic step in February 1993, of initiating a mass campaign along with numerous organisations, giving birth to a committee for people’s empowerment.

“If we look at the composition of the high rate of GDP growth, we find that the fastest growing sectors of the economy in this period have been services for export markets, banking and other financial agencies, the land market, stock market and commodity futures markets. None of these activities add even one paisa to the real wealth of our country. They do not contribute to the living standards of the workers and peasants. The growth of the stock market and futures markets have enable a few giant gamblers and profiteers to steal the value in the hands of smaller businesses and from the savings of working individuals.

“If we discount the fictitious value addition that is imputed to banking, trade, public administration and defence, etc., the growth rate in the production of material wealth in our country is not as high as our rulers claim. It is obvious, for instance, that not enough is being produced of the various essential food items that working people need, which is reflected in the soaring rate of food price inflation. Food price inflation is being further fuelled by speculative commodity trading and hoarding.

“Ensuring the prosperity of those who toil requires enhanced production of the articles of mass consumption and their adequate availability at affordable prices. This is not being assured at all by the present orientation of the economy and economic policy. Only exorbitant profits in the hands of monopoly capitalists are being assured, through highly lopsided growth.

MEL: What was the context and main thrust of the policy reforms?

Com LS: “By the end of the decade of the eighties, the monopoly capitalists of India had become big enough to handle competition with the biggest corporations of the world in various sectors. They were willing to open the doors to foreign capital in order to upgrade their technological base and to bargain for greater access to foreign markets.

“The old method of developing capitalism, the Nehruvian model, had reached a dead-end. It was no longer appropriate for the big capitalists. The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the bipolar division of the world meant that India had to redefine her position afresh in a newly evolving global scenario. The big capitalists used this as the occasion for embarking on an aggressive imperialist course.

“The program of globalisation, through liberalisation and privatisation, is aimed at enabling Indian monopoly capitalists to emerge as contenders for big power status on the global scale. It is based on intensified exploitation of labour and robbery of natural resources as the premise. It is an anti-worker, anti-peasant and anti-social program with imperialist aims.

“The Rupee has been devalued from Rs. 18 to Rs. 45 per US Dollar in this period. This has made production for foreign markets more profitable in comparison to producing for the domestic market. It has made investing in India more profitable for foreign companies and banks. Restrictions have been progressively removed from the path of domestic capitalist corporations to access financing from abroad and to acquire companies abroad. The path has been cleared for foreign companies to invest in diverse sectors of industry and services in our country. Speculation is rampant and so are land scandals and various forms of swindling of public funds.

“The capitalist propaganda claims that state control has been replaced by a free market. In actual fact, the competition in the market is highly uneven and monopolistic, with a few big players squeezing the small players dry. One form of control over the state by the monopoly houses has been replaced with another form of control by the same interests, at a higher level of domination and degree of monopoly.

MEL Correspondent: What is your assessment of Manmohan Singh’s role and contribution?

“Manmohan Singh did not design the liberalisation and privatisation program that has been pursued over the past 20 years. It is a program designed by a class of billionaire capitalists, who selected Manmohan Singh as a capable candidate to justify and market this program to the public.

“To justify and promote the program of big monopoly capital, Manmohan Singh claimed that once the wealthy start expanding their wealth at a rapid rate, it will trickle down to the toiling masses. When this did not happen, he claimed that further adjustments to the program would give it a ‘human face’. Then he further claimed that his party would make sure that rapid GDP growth does not enrich only a small minority but is ‘inclusive’.

“The actual results are the opposite of what he and other advocates of privatisation and liberalisation claim. The working class is suffering in all sectors. Wages are not keeping pace with the soaring prices of food and other essential consumption articles. Inflation is also much higher than the rate of interest received on bank deposits, so the savings of working families are falling in value alongside monthly incomes. Peasants are sinking into debt as their net income is not able to cover the debt servicing burden and also provide for health care, nutritious food and other needs of the family.

MEL: What is the alternative orientation and vision of the Communist Ghadar Party for the next two decades, i.e., 2010-30?

Com LS: “Our vision is that the creators of wealth must become the masters and the main beneficiaries of wealth creation. Who creates wealth? Manmohan Singh and other bourgeois economists claim that monopoly houses like the Tatas and Ambanis are creating wealth, and all restrictions must be removed from their path. The truth is that it is human labour, in interaction with nature and with past products of labour, which creates wealth. Workers and peasants create wealth through their toil. The capitalists pocket what others have created. They are the robbers of wealth and not its creators.

“The conditions in our country are crying out for a reorientation of the economy and reconstitution of political power. These together constitute the program for the Navnirman of India that our Party advocates.

“Only if workers and peasants become the decision-makers can they ensure that the economy works for them and not for the robbers of the wealth they produce. With political power in their hands, the workers, peasants and revolutionary intelligentsia will ensure that the economic system provides them with prosperity and stability, that is, it raises their living standard steadily without any crises or shocks.

“Fulfilling the ever-rising material and cultural needs of the population must become the overriding objective of social production, in place of the maximisation of private profits. A country of continental dimension like ours can be largely self-reliant. Imports and exports are needed only in a relatively small scale in some selected commodities.

“We agitate for the formation of a worker-peasant government to begin implementing the reorientation of the economy. We agitate for socialisation of finance, foreign trade and domestic wholesale trade on an immediate basis, to eliminate any scope for private profiteering in these spheres.

“To sort out the unresolved national question in our country and end the brutal violation of rights as in Kashmir, Nagaland and Manipur, we call for the reconstitution of the Indian Union on a voluntary basis, with every constituent enjoying the right to join or not join the union.

“We call for radical changes in the political process, so as to end party rule and establish rule of and by the people, organised in samitis in every constituency. The right to vote must be accompanied by the right to be elected, right to have a say in the selection of candidates and the right to recall the one who gets elected at any time.

“There is an acute clash that is developing between those who desire a radical change and those who want to preserve the status quo. The outcome of this great struggle will determine whether India will stumble along on its present crisis-ridden and dangerous imperialist course, or lift herself out of crisis and advance on the high road of civilisation.

“Our party represents the outlook and standpoint of the working class, which is interested in empowering the toiling majority of people so as to achieve the anti-colonial, anti-feudal, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolution that Indian society needs. Navnirman is the decisive stage of ending the legacy of the past, and laying the foundation for a bright future.”

Location
New Delhi,

Meeting to Commemorate 94th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution Held in New Delhi

Sitting from left: comrades Vijay Singh, Nirmalangshu Mukherjee, Kuldeep Singh, Jaya Mehta

The Workers’ Unity Trade Union (WUTU) organised a meeting to commemorate the 94th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution on 6th November, 2011 at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi. The meeting was well attended by a large number of participants including representatives from Janpaksh, New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), Marxist Communist Party of India-United (MCPI-U), Youth for Social Justice, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Manipur (CPDM), Nirman Mazdoor Shakti Sangathan and the journal Revolutionary Democracy. Many members of Workers’ Unity Trade Union were compelled by the management not to attend the meeting, by forcefully putting their name into those doing overtime.

The meeting was chaired by Professor Nirmalangshu Mukherjee of Delhi University. In his welcome note Prof. Mukherjee gave an outline of the contemporary world economic crisis which began in 2008 and spread from the developed countries to developing countries. He stressed the role of revolutionary organisations to lead the working class to mobilise the masses and expose the present crisis ridden system.

In his welcome address, Comrade Padam, General Secretary WUTU, gave the overview of trade union activity and its role in raising the consciousness of the working class. The October Revolution showed the oppressed people a new way of life and a socio-economic system free from the exploitation of man by man. He compared the present economic crisis with a disease that affects human beings which was difficult to diagnose. Comrade Padam further elaborated Lenin’s teaching on Trade Unions. The primary purpose of a Marxist trade union is to work to introduce revolutionary political awareness into the actions of the proletarian movement and for its transition to the next and higher stage. Lenin gave priority to the political demands sand forms of proletariat’s struggle but did not belittle economic struggle. Citing the situation in the Maruti Suzuki strike, he traced the root of betrayal by the leadership to a lack of political and ideological consciousness in the working class leadership and the confining of the struggle only to economic demands. About WUTU he elaborated that though the union membership is numerically relatively small but it has a tremendous impact in its area of work.

Comrade Shamsul Islam from Nishant Natya Manch, mentioned that the October Revolution was not only a change of regime, but represented a complete transformation of the socio-economic system which had never happened in the history of mankind. This event ended the exploitation of man by man. The capitalist system maintains its rule through the barrel of a gun. This system is not only confined to exploitation but the enslavement of women. The institution of marriage in bourgeois society sees the exploitation of women through the dowry system and lacks the free choice of partners. He exposed the CPI-CPI (M) rule in West Bengal for three decades that did not differ from the Congress-BJP rule and which implemented neo-liberal economic policies.

Comrade Gautam Modi, Secretary NTUI, congratulated WUTU for celebrating the Russian Revolution in the heart of the Indian state. He highlighted the role of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution. He stressed the need for the formation of a united front of the various trade unions, including the bourgeois trade unions, to fight against capitalism. The day to day struggle of working class should be seen as a tactic and not the strategy of the workers movement. He considered the economic struggle as being also a political struggle. The working class should also raise the demand of higher wages during the this period of high level of inflation. Comrade Modi regretted the reduction of membership in the trade unions though the number of organisations increased. The working class should utilise all the privileges provided by the bourgeois system. He stressed the WUTU should consider all possibilities in organising the workers in Gurgaon. Different trade unions, particularly those carrying the Red flag, have to be united on a common minimum programme.

Comrade Jaya Mehta, Economist, analysed the contemporary economic crisis and the various resistance movements in the world. She said that the Arab Spring from Tunisia to Egypt toppled the dictators but not the dictatorship which still prevails in their respective countries. Unlike the October Revolution, the Arab Spring though it mobilised hundreds of thousands of people but it still lacks a concrete political and economic programme. Since the fall of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, there was a setback to the working class movement. The ruling class declared the end of history and ideology, and the victory of market democracy under capitalism. This capitalism failed to provide real democracy and freedom which is only possible in Socialism. The development under capitalism is based on exploitation, forced displacement and the annihilation of indigenous people from their own lands whereas development under socialism is based on the people’s interest.

Dr. Mehta stressed the need for unity between the workers and peasants as propounded by Lenin. This unity includes the petty-bourgeoisie and all oppressed sections of the society under the leadership of the working class. She highlighted the need of small-scale industries and cooperatives wherever possible through voluntary means to organise and defend the attacks from Multinationals and the Special Economic Zones.

Comrade Kuldeep Singh, MCPI-U, congratulated WUTU for remembering and celebrating the Great October Socialist Revolution, he said that it is necessary to understand the significance of this revolution for mankind. Comrade Singh further stated that this revolution was the victory of workers, peasants and the oppressed nationalities in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin. The Great October Revolution succeeded in building a socialist society and its victory over fascism had an immense significance. In the latter period after the demise of J.V.Stalin the revisionist forces under the leadership of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachov distorted the basic fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and succeeded in the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

The world today is in deep crisis and it is the duty of trade union and other revolutionary mass organisations to mobilise and induce revolutionary consciousness among the masses and to establish close links between people and the party in their day to day struggles.

Comrade Shakir, Secretary WUTU, shared his experiences in organising and mobilising different sections of workers in Gurgaon and how the workers and WUTU are waging a struggle on behalf of the workers.

Comrade Vijay Singh, Revolutionary Democracy, concluded the meeting by summing up the views of all the speakers. He highlighted the model of socialist construction in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin and showed how they overcame the difficulties which the new Soviet society faced during invasion by imperialist aggression and fascist occupation. He pointed out that after the Paris Commune of 1871 it was the major example of working class rule. He highlighted the level of social security provided by the USSR which included health, education, pensions and the high standard of living under the Socialist system.

The meeting concluded by keeping a one minute silence in memory of the veteran dramatist Comrade Gursharan Singh who passed away on 27 September 2011.

The cultural group Nishant’s revolutionary songs spellbound the entire audience. The meeting ended with a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times.

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.

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.”

Book Review: “Social Democracy: the Enemy Within” by Harpal Brar

BOOK REVIEW
‘SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, THE ENEMY WITHIN’

Harpal Brar 1995; ISBN 1-874613-04-4

INTRODUCTION

This book is a valuable contribution to the critique of social democracy and its counter-revolutionary role. The first half of the text is concerned with an examination of the origins of the Labour Party (the main party of social democracy in this country) and its record both in government and opposition. Time and again the views of the Labour Party are shown to have coincided with those of the British ruling class on every important issue affecting British imperial policy at home and abroad.

The stance of various revisionist and Trotskyite organisations which, one way or another, take a pro-Labour standpoint are examined in detail. In So doing, Harpal Brar directs effective and withering fire upon those who, whilst styling themselves as ‘revolutionaries’, insist on misrepresenting the Labour Party not only as a party which objectively serves the interests of the British working class, but also as being capable of bringing about the socialist transformation of society.

The author amply demonstrates the truth that the Labour Party is in reality both an imperialist party, and a ‘bourgeois labour party’, as characterised by Friedrich Engels, to whom this work is dedicated on the 100th anniversary of his death.

The second half of the book is comprised of articles from ‘Lalkar’, the paper of the Indian Workers’ Association, which comment upon the coal strike of 1984-5, various other economic struggles over the past fifteen years, and the relationship between social democracy and imperialist war. These illuminate the reactionary role played by the Labour Party in recent battles fought by the working class.

THE LABOUR PARTY SERVES THE INTERESTS OF MONOPOLY CAPITAL

Founded to give the working class a ‘voice’ in Parliament, the Labour Party has never been a true party of the working class, for such a party has to be revolutionary socialist in ideology. Anti-Marxist from its inception, the Labour Party preached the reformist theory that the state was a neutral apparatus which the working class could control in its own interests by obtaining a majority in Parliament. This denial of Marxian teaching on the nature of the state as an instrument of class rule also lies at the heart of those revisionist and Trotskyite organisations which offer support to the Labour Party – for example through such electoral slogans as”…. kick out the Tories and elect a labour government committed to Left policies”.

The Fabian ideology of Labour governments has always led them to operate along lines calculated to make capitalism work profitably during the (infinitely long) period of gradual, piecemeal, social reform. This illusory promise of reform has gained credence through real gains made by the working class. These have been due primarily to the rise in the value of labour power and the fact that the adjustment of wage levels to approach the higher level of the value of labour power have, by and large, been carried out through the reformist negotiating machinery.

The material basis for these gains over the past hundred and forty years have been (indirectly) the exploitation of the working people of the colonial-type countries by the British capitalist class. From the mid-nineteenth century some of the vast super-profits flowing in from colonial-type lands were used to pay an upper stratum of skilled craftsmen above the value of their labour power. This produced unions which rejected class struggle and socialist aims and confined their activities to bargaining on questions of wages, hours etc. However, despite the rise in real wages of the British working class over this period, the rate of exploitation of the workers has significantly increased. Had it not been for the ‘unofficial’ militant class struggle outside the reformist negotiating machinery, the rate of exploitation would have increased still more.

It should be emphasised that at no time has the mass of the British working class shared directly in colonial super profits. ‘Bribery’ of this kind has never affected more than a small upper stratum of the working class, and today this ‘labour aristocracy’ consists principally of the bureaucracy of the labour movement,

Despite the fact that its members are drawn mainly from the working class, and trade unions are affiliated to it, Harpal Brar clearly demonstrates that the Labour Party objectively serves the interests of monopoly capital. The abolition of ‘Clause 4′, the self-description of the party no longer as ‘left of centre’ but as ‘centre’, and the repudiation of all ‘make the rich pay’ programmatic points clearly show that the party’s appeal is directed now to all sections of the people who want a change in government, particularly to sections of the capitalist class who have suffered from the Tory policy of serving financial branches of finance capital, and not the industrial branches. It provides at present the principal reserve party of monopoly capital, which can safely be permitted to form a government at times when the Conservative Party has lost its electoral support.

TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE?

There remains the question of what a worker with a socialist consciousness should do when it comes to bourgeois elections, and here we differ from Harpal Brar, who is opposed to participation in elections.

We believe this position to be both mistaken and dangerous. Despite its limitations, “parliamentary democracy” provides a more favourable terrain for preparing socialist revolution than would exist under a fascist dictatorship, or even a corporate state. It is therefore essential for the working class to defend the democratic rights associated with “parliamentary democracy” against attempts to abolish them.

The right to vote, limited though it is, is one of the democratic rights associated with “parliamentary democracy”. To advise workers not to use this democratic vote is to imply it is of no value, and so to play into the hands of the fascist elements who seek – as part of the ideological preparation for the attempt, when objective conditions require it, to abolish “parliamentary democracy” – to inculcate the view that democratic rights are worthless. Advice to workers not to vote is harmful and reactionary.

WHICH PARTY OF THE CLASS ENEMY MOST ADVANCES THE SITUATION OF THE WORKING CLASS?

Where there is a division over policy between different sections of the monopoly capitalist ruling class, a political Party serving the interests of monopoly capital tends to become the vehicle of one or other of these antagonistic sections to put forward a policy which serves the interests of that section.

In 1970, for example, a minority of British monopoly capitalists had become convinced that their economic future lay in breaking the dependence upon United States imperialism, which had been the dominant feature of the international position of British imperialism since the second world war, and in joining the alliance of Western European powers which had been set up in the form of the European Economic Community. One of the reasons for the “dismissal” of the Labour government in 1970 was that it was tied to what had become a minority section of British monopoly capital which wished to continue the “special relationship” of dependence upon US imperialism.

These differences in foreign policy were overshadowed in 1974 by a more urgent difference in domestic policy brought to a head by the refusal of the miners to surrender to the government’s wage restraints. A majority of monopoly capitalists, now represented by the Labour Party, wanted to move away from the existing system of rigid wage restrictions and towards the building of a corporate state in which trade unions would be incorporated within the machinery of the capitalist state.

Even though the working class was not directly represented in the 1974 general election it was still able to achieve a tactical advantage by influencing the result. When the Heath government resigned, the unity of the miners in rejecting wage restraint, together with the refusal of the rest of The working class to blame the miners for hardship caused by the three-day working week brought about a split in the monopoly capitalist ruling class on this issue and forced a majority of the monopoly capitalists to organise a “dismissal” of that government. The new Labour government then instructed the National Coal Board to reach a settlement with the miners which proved a considerable advance upon what the Heath government had been prepared to allow.

To argue that policy differences amongst the monopoly capitalist class not only exist but have concrete implications for the working class is to accept that it cannot be a matter of complete indifference to the working class which party is elected to government. This is so even if there are only minor disagreements such as that relating to Value Added Tax on fuel regarding which the Tory Party was in favour and the Labour Party opposed.

The increase in cost of fuel would certainly preclude a proportion of elderly people from being able to heat their homes adequately and would undoubtedly, in turn, add to the already huge number of deaths related to hypothermia in winter months, If this became an election issue, a ‘don’t vote’ stance would ignore an issue of literally life and death significance to some sections of the working class. There may only be a shade of difference between the Labour and Conservative Parties, but that ‘shade of difference’ could represent the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people.

All genuine socialists must advise workers to use their democratic right to vote in an election in such a way as to create the best conditions of the advance of the working class to positions of class struggle and ultimately of revolutionary struggle, which alone can bring about the establishment of a socialist society.

Since the government at the next election will be either Conservative or Labour, both of which parties represent the interests of monopoly capital, both of which represent the interests of the class enemy of the working class, correct tactics require an analysis of whether the situation of the working class would be more advanced by the election of a Labour government or by the election of a Conservative government.

Should, as for example in 1974, the advice be to vote Labour, it must be associated with the categorical statement that the Labour Party is the political tool of big business and can never be anything else. This fact is amply documented in ‘Social Democracy: The Enemy Within’, and we warmly recommend the book to all those who wish to see the social emancipation of the working class.

Series on Maoist Revisionism: Maoist China’s Foreign Policy: 1970s and 1980s

The Third World

Asia

(a) SOUTHEAST ASIA. Only in China’s traditional “sphere of influence” has the People’s Republic given consistent material support to powers abroad – to North Korea and North Vietnam – and verbal support to movements against governments with which it has friendly diplomatic relations.

In the case of VIETNAM extended recognition and material aid before the Soviet Union, and its artillery was an important factor in the final siege of Dien Bien Phu. However, at the Geneva Peace Talks in 1954, both the Soviet Union and China tried their utmost to persuade the Vietminh to accept partition and not to sweep the French out of Vietnam. [36] It was not clear whether this flowed from the same fear of extending the war as guided Stalin in his efforts to force the Chinese Communists to make concessions to the Kuomintang in the 1930s. However, the Vietnam problem remained unsolved and broke out in a much more massive form in the 1960s.

As we have seen, China’s role in the second war in Vietnam involved both an expanded flow of aid and a careful stabilization of its role with the United States. The détente with Nixon provoked a reaction in Hanoi, but perhaps the Vietnamese simply wished to keep both its powerful patrons at arm’s length. The new united State took over the claims of its southern half, including the Paracel (Hsisha) and Spratly (Nansha) islands in the South China Sea, both of them also claimed by the People’s Republic. It is said there may be oil reserves beneath the islands, and also that China fears the establishment of a Soviet base in the area which would dominate the far eastern shipping lanes. Whatever the reasons, China stated her position unequivocally: “All islands belonging to China must certainly return to the bosom of the motherland”, and “The archipelagos of the South Sea are our sacred territory and we have a responsibility to defend them.”. [37]

Perhaps this territorial issue became as sharp as it did because of the estimate of the Soviet threat, which also caused China to revise her attitude towards four countries hitherto seen as US clients – Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

In 1971, THAILAND, in the view of the People’s Republic, was ruled by the “Thanom clique” of American puppets. However, the first contacts between the two regimes were made in that year. They agreed to end hostile radio propaganda and open up trade. The Thai Prime Minister, Pramoj Kukrit, made a State visit, and signed an agreement with China, Article 8 of which instructed Chinese nationals in Thailand to “abide by the law of the Kingdom of Thailand, respect the customs and habits of the Thai people and live in amity with them”. [38] that is, not to “make revolution”. Mao, according to Kukrit, denied that any aid was given to insurgents in Thailand or to the clandestine Voice of the Thai People radio; he advised Kukrit not to be troubled by the insurgents of the Thai Communist Party – “since it is small, it should not be dangerous”. No protest was made when the Thai civilian régime was once more overthrown with great bloodshed in the autumn of 1976.

In the PHILIPPINES President Marcos was engaged in a four-year programme of establishing a civilian dictatorship, destroying all opposition, including both supporters of Mao Tse-tung thought (operating for several years as partisans in the Central Luzon province) and a Muslim rebellion in the south. In September 1974, Marcos’ wife, Imelda, was invited to China where she met Mao and was offered Chinese crude oil in a trading agreement. In June the following year, her husband followed her on a State visit. Marcos was overwhelmed by the hospitality, referring to China as the “natural leader of the Third World” (Chou reassured him that no material aid went to the Communist rebels in Luzon), and adopting the slogan of “self-reliance”. Indeed, the President, one of the closest allies of the United States in the east Pacific, despatched a stream of missions to China to learn how to copy certain institutions, and even set up a “Commune” in Leyte, Manila.

MALAYSIA made the same transition. In 1970, the NCNA reported that the “Rahman-Razak clique” was terrified by the guerillas of the Malaysian Communist Party and its power was crumbling. [39] Nonetheless, diplomatic relations were announced in 1974, and half of the “clique”, Tun Abdul Rahman, duly made the pilgrimage to Peking. He was assured no material aid was being given by the Chinese to the Malaysian guerillas. Later, in April 1975, the Prime Minister was upset by the Chinese Communist party’s greetings to the Malaysian party on the occasion of its forty-fifth foundation anniversary (the actual message was critical of the warring factions of the party, and urged it to stay away from the urban areas). No doubt the Chinese ambassador reassured the Malaysian Prime Minister that the message had no real significance. However, it could be used as a bargaining counter on some future occasion, much as Stalin tried to use the Chinese Communist party in bargaining with Chiang Kai-shek.

SINGAPORE’s opposition has been successively repressed by the régime of Lee Kuan Yew. On his State visit in 1976, Prime Minister Hua Kuo-feng assured him that Singapore’s treatment of rebels would evoke no protest from China (an assurance published in the Singapore press but not in the Chinese).

What were the contradictions the People’s Republic sought to exploit in these four cases? They were not utilizing any “major contradictions” at all, nor were they trying to compete with the United States, which was no longer seen as an enemy. It was a simple territorial security exercise, an exercise that in all but open expression consigned the domestic rebels to insignificance and permitted the regimes concerned to claim that they had Chairman Mao in their support.

INDONESIA remained, at the time of writing, the last country of the area (apart from Singapore) without diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. The régime under General Suharto originally came to power through a military coup in 1965. Up to that time, Indonesia was governed by President Sukarno, basing himself latterly on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the army. The PKI had followed a policy of creating a United Front, but without independent territories or armed forces. In practice, this meant sacrificing its radical policies – for example, land reform – to maintaining the alliance with forces that, in some cases, represented those liable to suffer in any land reform. It meant also that the PKI offered entirely uncritical support for Sukarno, calling for a strengthening of his government (his so-called “Guided Democracy”). Sukarno, on the other hand, needed a civilian counterweight to the powerful army, which the PKI provided. Sukarno therefore protected the party from the army and advanced its position in the government (although never in the decisive agencies governing the defence forces). Under Sukarno’s patronage the party became the largest Communist party outside the Eastern Bloc, with a claimed membership of three million, and between eight and ten million in party front organizations. But it was captive to Sukarno’s purposes, for it could raise radical demands for domestic change only at the cost of its position in the Indonesian government.

China gave strong support both to the PKI and to Sukarno, even though the PKI’s policy was one of united front without armed struggle. It was impossible to have the one with the other; had the PKI tried to create its own military forces, the army would have seized power.

In September 1965, a section of the palace guard launched a coup against the main leadership of the army. The army counter-attacked, alleging that the conspiracy was hatched by the PKI and China; it was further alleged that China had flown arms in to the leading air force base for use in the coup. The military rapidly won control, and there followed one of the most appalling massacres in modern history. More than half a million people were slaughtered by the army and its supporters; 200,000 PKI members lost their lives, including forty-five of the fifty central committee members. Many hundreds of thousands of others were gaoled.

Communiqué of the III plenum of the Central Committee of CGPI – July 25, 2011

The III Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Ghadar Party of India was convened in the third week of July 2011.

The Plenum noted that the conditions prevailing in the US and Europe indicate further deepening of the economic crisis in these countries in the coming period. These conditions suggest that the imperialists will resort to further militarization of their economies and wars of aggression, further fascization and attacking the rights of the working masses. The Plenum noted the rising opposition of the working people in these countries to these attacks. The demand that their governments must stop paying the big banks and corporations which are responsible for the crisis, and invest in the well-being of the working masses is gaining support in every country that is facing the crisis.

The Plenum analysed, based on all the events on the world scale, that US Imperialism is preparing for more wars with the aim of getting out of the crisis. The Plenum condemned the savage bombing of Libya by a coalition of 27 imperialist powers headed by the US on “humanitarian grounds” and on the pretext of “danger to global security.” It noted that violation of Libya’s sovereignty is totally unacceptable. Self determination is a question of principle that must be defended.

In actual fact, it is the US which is threatening world peace. Its blatant violations of Pakistan’s sovereignty through its drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan pose grave dangers to peace and security in South Asia. The Plenum concluded that our Party must make our people aware of this threat and mobilize public opinion in our country against imperialist war, and in defence of the sovereignty of Pakistan.

Prachanda, Follower of Modern Revisionism

A Maoist analysis of Nepali revisionism led by Prachanda.
– E.S.

At the occasion of the 10th birthday of People’s War initiation in Nepal, Prachanda granted an interview to the reactionary newspaper “The Hindu”, which published it on February 10.

Prachanda explains there at length the new positions of the CP of Nepal (Maoist), which go against Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, as Prachanda himself recognizes : “ We feel we have contributed to the ideological development of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.”

This “development” consists of the conceptions that the guidance by the sole Communist Party must be abolished and that Socialism must yield the place to Democracy. Let’s study them.

***

1. According to Prachanda, the Communist Party does not have to lead and should compete with the other political parties.

“We want to analyse the experience of revolution and counter-revolution in the 20th century on a new basis.

Three years ago we took a decision in which we said how are we going to develop democracy is the key question in the 21st century. This meant the negative and positive lessons of the 20th century have to be synthesised in order for us to move ahead.

And three years ago we decided we must go in for political competition. Without political competition, a mechanical or metaphysical attitude will be there. So this time, what we decided is not so new.

In August, we took serious decisions on how practically to build unity with the parliamentary political parties. We don’t believe that the people’s war we initiated was against, or mainly against, multiparty democracy. It was mainly against feudal autocracy, against the feudal structure.”

This thesis opposes the communist conception. The communist ideology wants to abolish the State and its approach is scientific, there is no time for “competition”.

On the other hand, Prachanda’s thesis links with Thorez’s one in his revisionist interpretation of People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe:

“There was no abrupt nor brutal transition to another system. There is a phenomenon which we have to study and think about: the working class power, the power exerted in the name of the working class and of the people, by a Communist Party which would not be alone, but which could unite other parties; that also appeared in our Xe Congress theses.

Like in Poland, like in Yugoslavia, this power is exerted as the parliamentary forms remain.”

***

2. Acoording to Prachanda, the principle of “communist direction” is wrong.

“That when we go for state power and are in power, then we will not do what Stalin or Mao did. Lenin did not have time to deal with issues of power. Although Stalin was a revolutionary, his approach, was not as scientific as it should have been, it was a little metaphysical, and then problems came.

We also evaluated Mao in the plenum. If you look at his leadership from 1935 to 1976 – from when he was young to when he was old and even speaking was difficult – must he remain Chairman and handle everything? What is this?”

Prachanda explicitly blames Mao for having been a potentate. He denies that Lenin wrote great works about the Soviet power and denies any role to Stalin in the Socialism edification in the USSR. In an interview granted to the review Kantipur Publications on February 7, he repeats the same charge:

« The people started to become monotonous in the 20th century communist movement, especially after the demise of Lenin”.

All that is but complete revisionism, and complete submission to the bourgeoisie propaganda, as well as to the revisionist myth of a so-called « personality worship” among Communists.

***

3. According to Prachanda, the Communists in Nepal should not aim at the Democratic Revolution any longer, but only at « Democracy ».

“Earlier, we were saying people’s democratic republic but this does not mean we have dropped that goal either. It’s just that according to today’s power balance, seeing the whole situation and the expectation of the masses, and that there [should] not be bloodshed, we also responsibly believe that to get there too we will do so through peaceful means.”

In his interview to Kantipur Publications on February 7, he expresses the impossibility of revolution in one country:

“Since we belong to a communist party, our maximum goals are socialism and communism. Those are the maximum goals of all those accepting Marxism, Leninism and Maoism as philosophical and ideological assumptions. Given the international power balance and the overall economic, political and social realities of the country, we can’t attain those goals at the moment.

We must accept this ground reality. We have mentioned democratic republic and constituent assembly, with the understanding that we should be flexible given the balance in the class struggle and international situation. This is a policy, not tactics. This is a necessary process for the bourgeoisie and the national capitalists alike, let alone the middle-class.“

This conception is basically wrong; it is completely similar to the trotskyist thesis of the impossibility to carry out revolution in one country.

It is a capitulation, which opposes the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line, for which: « If the obstacle is not completely swept away, the war will have to continue till the aim is fully accomplished…. It can therefore be said that politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” (Mao Zedong)

Here again, Prachanda joins Thorez’s theses: “Democracy’s progress throughout the world, in spite of rare exceptions which confirm the rule, makes it possible to consider other ways to walk towards socialism than those followed by the Russian Communists”.

***

4. According to Prachanda, the sole establishement of “Democracy” is enough to be “revolutionary”.

“In the overall sense we feel that in Nepal there is going to be a great leap forward in the socio-economic condition because we are going to lead the country to a democratic republican structure.”

Maurice Thorez also said that “democracy, an ongoing realisation, will be completed within socialism.”

Prachanda’s thesis denies that, when the power is seized in all the country, the Democratic Revolution turns into a Socialist Revolution; “The party’s purpose is the establishment of the political power of the proletariat, even under New Democracy where it is the leading class, and principally the establishment, strengthening and development of the dictatorship of the proletariat so as, through cultural revolutions, to win the ultimate goal, communism. This is why the proletariat must lead in everything and in an all-around way.” (Gonzalo)

***

5. According to Prachanda, the Red Army does not prefigure the new State and must dissolve into a « democratic army ».

“In the multiparty democracy which comes – interim government, constitutional assembly and democratic republic – we are ready to have peaceful competition with you all. Of course, people still have a doubt about us because we have an army.

And they ask whether after the constitutional assembly we will abandon our arms. This is a question. We have said we are ready to reorganise our army and we are ready to make a new Nepal army also. So this is not a tactical question.”

This thesis completely opposes Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and People’s War principles. Besides, Prachanda affirms it also very clearly in his interview to Kantipur Publications:

“The weapons of both sides should be put together and both the armies should be transformed into one under the supervision of the United Nations or another reliable agency. (…)

The army will be formed according to the results of the election. This is what you should be clear about. We will accept it if the constituent assembly says we want monarchy. We are flexible even that far. We will accept it even if the people say we want an active monarch. “

***

6. According to Prachanda, People’s War originates from the parliamentary struggle.

“For three years we struggled inside Parliament. For three years we were there. Our 40-point demands were placed but there was not even any discussion on this. So the seeds of our armed struggle were sown inside Parliament, in a manner of speaking.

This is a very big difference between us and, say, those in India who say they are waging a people’s war. They didn’t begin from inside Parliament. We were inside Parliament, so we had good relations with the parliamentary parties for a long time.”

This thesis was inevitable, since Prachanda wants to seem the true democrat, just like Thorez did at his time: “Communists are democrats. They are, among all democrats, the most consistent democrats, because they intend to substitute for a still legally and actually limited democracy, a boundless democracy.”

***

7. According to Prachanda, the imperialist European countries can play a positive role.

“We also wanted to send a message to the international community that we were different from the way we were being projected ideologically. For example, right now we are having discussions with the European Union and with others, but among all the international forces, U.S. imperialism is the most dogmatic and sectarian element.

The U.S. ruling classes are dogmatic. They don’t understand what is happening. We are trying to look at the world in a new way, to change in a new way, and we wanted to send out this message. And in this regard, during the ceasefire, we were quite successful.”

Characterizing the US imperialists as “dogmatic” means nothing, neither do negotiations with others imperialist forces. Prachanda’s thesis clearly links with the Three Worlds theory, a Chinese revisionist theory stating that the Third World can lean on the Second World (the medium imperialist powers such as France, Canada, etc.) to oppose the First World made of the superpowers (the USA and, at its time, the USSR).

***

8. According to Prachanda, fascistic China and expansionist India are interested in democracy in Nepal, to oppose the USA.

“We are glad with the new situation that is emerging after Shyam Saran went to China, it seems the situation can change. Our movement is also going forward and I think in 2-3 months, if the struggle continues, then there is a real chance of ending the kingship once and for all and making a democratic republic in Nepal.

This is the best outcome for China and India, and everyone else. The U.S. does not want this. They want to maintain the monarchy at all costs.”

Prachanda thus considers that, instead of « resting on our own strength” and serving the world revolution, he would rather reassure India and China and have no revolutionary program. That is logical in regard to the Three Worlds theory.

***

9. According to Prachanda, the Maoists of India must negotiate with the old Indian State:

“And if you feel the Naxalite movement in India is a problem for you, we feel we are trying to deal with the problems in Nepal in a new way, so if you release our comrades and we are successful in establishing multiparty democracy in Nepal, then this will be a very big message for the Naxalite movement in India. In other words, the ground will be readied for them to think in a new political way.”

That is straightforwardly a proposal for an alliance with the Indian expansionism!

As we can see, Prachanda’s theses are in a direct line with the revisionism spread since a few time by the CPN(m); this revisionism, hiding behind “democracy”, had already been used by Thorez in France, and is now mainly embodied by the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA.

The RPCUSA, by means of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, certainly influenced the CPN(m).

The CPRUSA leader, Bob Avakian, defends more and more openly his revisionist and “democratic” theses.

According to him, Communism is one “possibility” among others, that is why he rejects the principle of “inevitability”, saying that “the world didn’t turn out the way Marx and Engels anticipated.” (January 2005, Revolutionary Worker n°1266).

He pretends that “in some instances, the Bolsheviks had a kind of « Mafia » approach in some areas, especially during the civil war that followed the October 1917 Revolution.” (December 2004, RW n°1262), that there was among Communists an “autocratic” tradition in a way.

That is why the RCPUSA focuses on Bush the “antidemocrat”, just like the Nepalese revisionists fight for a “genuine Democratic Republic”.

That is also why Avakian claims to found a “new internationalism « , which is actually but a pretext not to fight in one’s own country:

“There is a call to combine Lenin’s stance on and definition of internationalism with an approach of proceeding first and above all from the world level, and looking at the world as a whole at any given time to determine where it is that, through a combination of objective and subjective factors, the most important breakthroughs for the whole international struggle can be made—and for parties in particular countries to act accordingly, to give political support in relation to those « breakthroughs, » even at the cost of some sacrifice on the part of particular parties and in terms of the struggle in « their » countries.”

That is revisionism, no more no less, denying the fact that, as part of world People’s War, it is on the contrary necessary to open more battlefronts.

We understand, while seeing the RPCUSA revisionism, why the Canada RCP speaks so much about Nepal, whereas it is supposed to want People’s War in its own country, and as social contradictions within Canada are supposed to be the main aspect.

The “Democratic Republic” in Nepal became the new ideal of those who already rejected Stalin and who will tomorrow exchange even the usurped flag of Marxism Leninism-Maoism against an “ultrademocrat” flag.

Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist Maoist) February 2006

Information on the Communist Ghadar Party of India (CGPI)

Founded on December 25, 1980, the Communist Party of India Ghadar (CGPI) is the organized detachment of Communists who have dedicated their lives to the liberation of India and the emancipation of labor worldwide.

The CGPI doors are open to all those who wish to make the revolution of the mission of their lives – they agree to implement the program, the work of party organizations and pay monthly premiums.

The CGPI is committed to restoring the unity of all Indian communities.

The CGPI works to unite all communists, regardless of political affiliation, during a leadership class struggle and prepare the subjective conditions for an end to all exploitation of people by the people, for the victory revolution and communism on Indian soil.

The CGPI opposes all forms of social democracy and reconciliation with the idea of ​​a “middle way” between capitalism and socialism.

The CGPI is opposed to all dealers of hope on the State of the Union of India, which is neither democratic nor secular, but the stronghold of colonial heritage, an instrument of capitalist-feudal exploitation and imperialist plunder.

The CGPI opposes those who justify state terrorism in the name of defending “national unity and territorial integrity.”

The CGPI not seek political power for himself. It is organized around the objective of securing power in the hands of the working class and oppressed.

All members of the fixed line and tasks of the party in Congress, which is the highest. The Congress elects the Central Committee to implement the line and perform all the tasks until the next Congress is convened.

The foundation of the CGPI is in its grassroots organizations in factories, workplaces, Mohall, chawls, towns and college campuses – the essential components of the class struggle.

The leading Party organizations at all levels. Party work is carried out based on the principle of collective decision making and individual responsibility.

The CGPI is committed to developing India’s revolutionary theory, a theory that emerges from the conditions of India and suitable for the development of communism here. We invite all the communists and enlightened minds to contribute to this work of theory, based on material balance and rich Indian thought the experience of the labor movement, from the present.

CGPI work is based on the theoretical principles of Marxism-Leninism and guided by contemporary Marxist-Leninist thought. Contemporary Marxist-Leninist thought is the sum, taken generally, the experience of the application of Marxism-Leninism to the conditions of the socialist revolution and socialist construction, the fight against modern revisionism and capitalist restoration, against fascism, militarism, imperialism and medievalism. It is not the final form of Marxism-Leninism in the economy, empowerment of the people and democratic renewal of India.

Come all who are concerned about the fate of the people, our ancient civilization! We will raise the banner of liberation, of profound changes underway! We will build the RUF on this program to fight!

Revolution is our right and duty. To fight for democratic renewal of India is the immediate task.

Let us together take up this task so that the crisis may end and opened the door for the advancement of society!

Inquilaab Zindabad!

CGPI: Condemn state repression of farmers

The Communist Ghadar Party of India condemns the brutal repression unleashed by the state against the farmers of village Bhatta-Parsaul in Greater Noida, and in several other villages along the proposed expressway connecting Delhi via NOIDA to Agra and Aligarh.

Already four people have died, and dozens injured. A reign of terror unleashed by the UP PAC in these villages. Hundreds have been arrested. Entire villages have become empty of menfolk – (either because they have fled fearing repression, or because they have been arrested). The women in the villages are complaining of molestation at the hands of the paramilitary forces.

The farmers are protesting against the way their land has been acquired, and the rates they have been given. It is their right to protest, and the workers and peasants of the whole country are waging a long standing struggle against state terror as well as forcible acquisition of lands.

The question of acquiring land for the expressway is a political problem which needs to be solved harmoniously, through political means. There is no place for the use of state terror in addressing this question.

Location
NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh
India

Communist Ghadar Party of India (CGPI): Video of May Day 2011 Celebrations in Delhi, India

The Concept of the “Other” in Kim

Kipling seems to fancy himself as the first Eric Schlosser. In his story Kim, the presence of the concept of the “other” is scarce, even nonexistent, to the point of a noticeable, glaring omission. British, Indian and Tibetan cultures have minor contradictions with each other, but none is presented as particularly “domineering” over one another even within the context of colonial relations. No one is demonized; no one is more advanced or nobler than the other. Whatever ideologies might justify it, there is no particularly sharp mention of the destruction of previous forms of social organization (symbolized by characters such as the Lama), which seem merely dizzied rather than lost. Without realizing it himself, since this is the nature of ideology to fill the gaps and to consist on what the text hides, Kipling has constructed here a highly differentiated examination of pre-globalization before such a term existed. One cannot separate the full explanation of imperialism from late nineteenth-century colonialism and the necessary spread of capitalist production that comes from those particular stages. Such a spread, such as that from Britain to India, is globalizing, and imperialism has the ability to hide cultural and ethnic conflicts as much as it has the power to aggravate them for monetary and political gain. This is what we see a slice of in Kim.