Author: Revolutionary Initiative

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Lawful Access Bills Would Reshape Internet in Canada

More information disclosure, more surveilance, new police powers

By Michael Geist.

The push for new Internet surveillance capabilities goes back to 1999, when government officials began crafting proposals to institute new surveillance technologies within Canadian networks along with additional legal powers to access surveillance and subscriber information.  The so-called lawful access initiatives stalled in recent years, but my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that earlier this month the government tabled its latest proposal with three bills (C-50, C-51, C-52) that received only limited attention despite their potential to fundamentally reshape the Internet in Canada.

The bills contain a three-pronged approach focused on information disclosure, mandated surveillance technologies, and new police powers.
Continue reading “Lawful Access Bills Would Reshape Internet in Canada”

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New Book by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter

Defying the Tomb

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson featuring exchanges with an Outlaw

Overview from the publisher:

Follow the author’s odyssey from lumpen drug dealer to prisoner, to revolutionary New Afrikan, a teacher and mentor, one of a new generation rising of prison intellectuals. This book consists primarily of letters between Rashid and Outlaw, another revolutionary New Afrikan prisoner, smuggled between the segregation wing and general population over a period of months. These comrades educate themselves – and us as well – on Marxism and Maoism, the Five-Percenters, Dialectical Materialism, Dead Prez, Capitalism, Racism, Imperialism, Class Struggle, Revolutionary Nationalism, New Afrikan Independence, Psychology, and a host of other subjects, as they grapple with how to promote revolutionary consciousness in the most hostile of environments.

Rashid has been in prison for twenty years – the past eighteen of which in segregation (solitary confinement). Shortly after this correspondence between himself and Outlaw, he and his comrade Shaka Sankofa Zulu founded the New Afrikan Black Panther Party–Prison Chapter. The NABPP-PC has since  developed branches in various prisons across the u$ empire and has its own newsletter, Right On!
Continue reading “New Book by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter”

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Student Rebellion in London, England

Inside the Millbank Tower riots

Posted by Laurie Penny on The New Statesman– 11 November 2010 11:41

“This is scary but not as scary as what’s happening to our future.”

It’s a bright, cold November afternoon, and inside 30 Millbank, the headquarters of the Conservative Party, a line of riot police with shields and truncheons are facing down a groaning crowd of young people with sticks and smoke bombs.

Screams and the smash of trodden glass cram the foyer as the ceiling-high windows, entirely broken through, fill with some of the 52,000 angry students and schoolchildren who have marched through the heart of London today to voice their dissent to the government’s savage attack on public education and public services. Ministers are cowering on the third floor, and through the smoke and shouting a young man in a college hoodie crouches on top of the rubble that was once the front desk of the building, his red hair tumbling into his flushed, frightened face.

He meets my eyes, just for a second. The boy, clearly not a seasoned anarchist, has allowed rage and the crowd to carry him through the boundaries of what was once considered good behaviour, and found no one there to stop him. The grown-ups didn’t stop him. The police didn’t stop him. Even the walls didn’t stop him. His twisted expression is one I recognise in my own face, reflected in the screen as I type. It’s the terrified exhilaration of a generation that’s finally waking up to its own frantic power.

Continue reading “Student Rebellion in London, England”

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Indian poll: People Support Maoists

From Times of India:

58% in AP say Naxalism is good, finds TOI poll

India’s biggest internal security threat, as the Prime Minister famously described it, may be worse than you thought. That’s because even in Andhra Pradesh, where the battle against the Maoists has apparently been won, it turns out that the government is losing the battle for the minds and hearts of the people.

Continue reading “Indian poll: People Support Maoists”

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Finance Capital Turns Parasitic

By Bruce Livesey of Progressive Economics Forum.  Originally posted here.

In an announcement that largely went unnoticed last week, U.S. Steel said it plans to close down the blast furnace at Stelco’s Hilton Works in Hamilton, Ontario.

Hilton Works was once the main steelmaking operation of what was once Canada’s largest integrated steelmaker. Its demise exposes how Stelco has been reduced to a mere shell of its former glorious self. Indeed, since purchasing Stelco in 2007, U.S. Steel has strived to shutter the Stelco factories, even forcing the Harper government to sue the American company for reneging on promises to keep Hilton Works open and for selling American-made steel in the Canadian marketplace.

Yet the tragedy of Stelco highlights an alarming trend in the development of finance capital. In many respects, Stelco fell victim to the parasitic phenomenon of investment and hedge funds preying upon manufacturing companies and, basically, raping them of their capital. As witnessed by the credit crisis, finance capital has become less about investing in the productive capacity of the economy, and more about sucking out whatever profits exist in often vulnerable and shaky industrial sectors. Continue reading “Finance Capital Turns Parasitic”

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How Imperialists Fight: CPP Reviews COIN Strategy

US Counterinsurgency Guide 2009: Guide to imperialist intervention and aggression and counter-revolutionary war

Executive Committee-Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines

The US COIN Guide was issued by the US government in January 2009. It  presents US imperialism’s current official doctrine in fighting revolutionary armed struggle in colonial and semicolonial countries.

It is allegedly the product of summed-up experiences in implementing “counterinsurgency” in various parts of the globe for the past 40 years and was the result of collaborative efforts of nine US government agencies and/or offices led by the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Department of State.

The agencies involved in writing the US COIN Guide 2009 are the Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of The Treasury, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the US Agency for International Development.

Through the document, the US government speaks as a sole superpower and self-appointed international policeman. It unabashedly presents the various types and levels of interference and intervention, which are undertaken with or without the permission of the targeted subject of ‘assistance’ or client government, in the name of fighting “insurgency.”

US imperialism estimates that it is armed revolutions that pose major and growing threats to the US’ international power in the 21st century. With the crash of the international capitalist system in the Long Depression since 2008, the US anticipates the explosion of widespread people’s dissent, armed revolutions and upheavals. US planners also anticipate only a remote possibility that the US will be embroiled in a thoroughly conventional war against other governments in the immediate future.

Continue reading “How Imperialists Fight: CPP Reviews COIN Strategy”

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Rebellion Against Austerity Measures In France

From Telegraph.co.uk:

Marseille close to standstill as worst strikes in 15 years cause French chaos

By Harriet Alexander, Marseille

The cars abandoned along the stretch of motorway leading to Marseille Airport made it look as if the inhabitants of France’s second city had fled some terrible disaster.

Their owners had in fact parked as neatly as they could and dragged their suitcases to the terminal on foot to catch flights to holiday destinations and business meetings – the only way to get past the barricades that were thrown up by protesters on Thursday morning.

Observant meme is observant

Marseille has been crippled by strikers. A fleet of huge ships cruises offshore, unable to dock, their lights reflecting against the still waters of the port at night. From the air it looks like a giant game of Battleships.

In the city centre, streets are still piled high with rubbish after the refuse collectors joined dock workers, train drivers, students and airport staff who have brought the city almost to a standstill. Continue reading “Rebellion Against Austerity Measures In France”

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Dongping Han interviewed on “The Unknown Cultural Revolution – Life and Change in a Chinese village”

[From A World To Win News Service.  A video of a lecture given by Dongping Han can be found here.  His book can be purchased from Monthly Review Press. – RI Ed.]

Dongping Han grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and now teaches in the U.S. He is the author of the book The Unknown Cultural Revolution—Life and Change in a Chinese Village. Following is an abridged version of the session at the end of a speech he gave in December 2008 at the New York symposium “Rediscovering the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Art and Politics, Lived Experience, Legacies of Liberation,” sponsored by Revolution Books, Set the Record Straight Project and Institute for Public Knowledge-New York University. The full version appeared in the 6 September 2009 issue of Revolution, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. (revcom.us)

Question: You went back to China in 1986. When did you and others like you start to see that things were different, that China had become very different than what it had been during the Cultural Revolution?

Dongping Han: I think people realized right away. The land was privatized in China in 1983. Many people tend to think that farmers are stupid and ignorant. But I think the farmers are very intelligent people. Many of them realized the implications of private farming right away. That was why they resisted it very hard in the beginning. And in my village and in other villages I surveyed, the overwhelming majority of people, 90 percent, said the Communist Party no longer cares about poor people. Right away they felt this way. The Communist Party, the cadres, no longer cared about poor people in the countryside. The government investment in rural areas in the countryside dropped from 15 percent in the national budget in 1970s to only 3-4 percent in the ’80s. So the Chinese public realized that the Chinese government no longer cared about them by disbanding the communes. But I was in college at the time and I didn’t start to think about the issue very hard until 1986.

Q: Can you explain a little bit more how the Cultural Revolution came to your village?

Continue reading “Dongping Han interviewed on “The Unknown Cultural Revolution – Life and Change in a Chinese village””