Author: Revolutionary Initiative

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Liu Bai: The Trial of Zhao Dong-min and China’s Political Reform

[This article was published by Revolutionary Frontlines and details the struggles of contemporary Maoist activists in China. – RI Ed.]

[Update: On October 20 Zhao was sentenced to three years in jail for “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order”]

The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party has been challenged from both the Right and the Left. These challenges have become more open and vocal. The Right has been pushing for political reform that will change China’s Constitution to allow a multi-party Western style democracy. This is the movement behind the 08 Charter. Liu Xiao Bo, who was recently given the Nobel Peace Prize, is one of the leaders of this movement.

The Left has rallied to support Mao Zedong Thought. The growing number of memorials held in September in many parts of the country on the 34th anniversary of Mao’s death demonstrated their strength. In these memorials the masses and their leaders demanded that Yuan Teng-fei be stripped of his Party membership. Yuan has been openly denouncing the Chinese Communist Party, socialism, and viciously attaching Chairman Mao. The Communist Party is trying to find a way out through some kind of political reform. The arrest and recent trial of Zhao Dong-min has led to support from the Left and has further intensified the crisis faced by the Communist Party.

Mourners follow the coffin of Deng Yongxia, wife of detained labor activist Zhao Dongmin. Deng Yongxia died of the auto-immune disorder lupus on Aug. 31, never having been allowed to visit Zhao in the detention center.

Zhao Dong-min is a Communist Party member and has a law degree from a corresponding school (of the Party School) in Shaanxi. Before his arrest in August 2009 he worked for many years providing legal services to many workers to resolve issues such as unpaid pensions and loss of other benefits. He did this as a volunteer without any compensation. Zhao also served as the temporary coordinator of the Mao Zedong Thought Study Group in Xian, Shaanxi until his arrest.

Continue reading “Liu Bai: The Trial of Zhao Dong-min and China’s Political Reform”

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Arundhati Roy: The crisis of Indian democracy (part 2)

Over the past few months, the government has poured tens of thousands of heavily armed paramilitary troops into the forest. The Maoists responded with a series of aggressive attacks and ambushes. More than 200 policemen have been killed. The bodies keep coming out of the forest. Slain policemen wrapped in the national flag, slain Maoists, displayed like hunter’s trophies, their wrists and ankles lashed to bamboo poles; bullet-ridden bodies, bodies that don’t look human any more, mutilated in ambushes, beheadings and summary executions. Of the bodies being buried in the forest, we have no news. The theatre of war has been cordoned off, closed to activists and journalists. So there are no body counts.On 6 April 2010, in its biggest strike ever, in Dantewada the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) ambushed a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) company and killed 76 policemen. The party issued a coldly triumphant statement. Television milked the tragedy for everything it was worth. The nation was called upon to condemn the killing. Many of us were not prepared to – not because we celebrate killing, nor because we are all Maoists, but because we have thorny, knotty views about Operation Green Hunt. For refusing to buy shares in the rapidly growing condemnation industry, we were branded “terrorist sympathisers” and had our photographs flashed repeatedly on TV like wanted criminals. What was a CRPF contingent doing, patrolling tribal villages with 21 AK-47 rifles, 38 INSAS rifles, seven self-loading rifles, six light machine-guns, one Sten gun and one two-inch mortar? To ask that question almost amounted to an act of treason.

Days after the ambush, I ran into two paramilitary commandos chatting to a bunch of drivers in a Delhi car park. They were waiting for their VIP to emerge from some restaurant or health club or hotel. Their view on what is going on involved neither grief nor patriotism. It was simple accounting. A balance sheet. They were talking about how many lakhs of rupees in bribes it takes for a man to get a job in the paramilitary forces, and how most families incur huge debts to pay that bribe. That debt can never be repaid by the pathetic wages paid to a jawan, for example. The only way to repay it is to do what policemen in India do – blackmail and threaten people, run protection rackets, demand payoffs, do dirty deals. (In the case of Dantewada, loot villagers, steal cash and jewellery.) But if the man dies an untimely death, it leaves the families hugely in debt. The anger of the men in the car park was directed at the government and senior police officers who make fortunes from bribes and then so casually send young men to their death. They knew that the handsome compensation that was announced for the dead in the 6 April attack was just to blunt the impact of the scandal. It was never going to be standard practice for every policeman who dies in this sordid war. Continue reading “Arundhati Roy: The crisis of Indian democracy (part 2)”

Second Wave Anti-Revisionism and the Native Liberation Struggle
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Second Wave Anti-Revisionism and the Native Liberation Struggle

[This 1975 article by the Bolshevik Tendency/Bolshevik Union was republished by the Encyclopedia of anti-Revisionism here and by Rowland Keshena of Speed of Dreams here.  Keshena’s introduction to the article is also included below.]

This is from the magazine Canadian Revolution (No. 4, Novemeber / September 1975), which was part of the second wave of Canadian anti-revisionism, a period in the development and history of Canadian Marxism-Leninism analogous to the New Communist Movement in the United States. It was written by two unnamed members of the Bolshevik Tendency, which would soon after this piece’s publication go on to consolidate themselves as the Bolshevik Union.

The BT/BU began its life as part of the worldwide pro-Chinese movement in the 1960s and 70s, following the rise of revisionism in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Following the death of Mao and the coming to power in China of Deng Xiaoping, the BT/BU would go on to side with the Party of Labour in Albania and its leader Enver Hoxha. However, after the Albanians recognized the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), whom the BT/BU saw as revisionist, to be their fraternal party, they broke with mainstream anti-revisionism.

This article comes from the period of their alignment with the Maoist movement.

Continue reading “Second Wave Anti-Revisionism and the Native Liberation Struggle”

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Arundhati Roy: India in Crisis

The law locks up the hapless felon
who steals the goose from off the common,
but lets the greater felon loose
who steals the common from the goose.
– Anonymous, England, 1821

In the early morning hours of the 2nd of July 2010, in the remote forests of Adilabad, the Andhra Pradesh State Police fired a bullet into the chest of a man called Cherukuri Rajkumar, known to his comrades as Azad. Azad was a member of the Polit Bureau of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), and had been nominated by his party as its chief negotiator for the proposed peace talks with the Government of India. Why did the police fire at point-blank range and leave those telltale burn marks, when they could so easily have covered their tracks? Was it a mistake or was it a message?

They killed a second person that morning — Hem Chandra Pandey, a young journalist who was traveling with Azad when he was apprehended. Why did they kill him? Was it to make sure no eyewitness remained alive to tell the tale? Or was it just whimsy?

In the course of a war, if , in the preliminary stages of a peace negotiation, one side executes the envoy of the other side, it’s reasonable to assume that the side that did the killing does not want peace. It looks very much as though Azad was killed because someone decided that the stakes were too high to allow him to remain alive. That decision could turn out to be a serious error of judgment. Not just because of who he was, but because of the political climate in India today. Continue reading “Arundhati Roy: India in Crisis”

Baloney Detection Kit
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Baloney Detection Kit

Inspired by some recent posts on Kasama Project, we thought we would share a video version of Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit.  One of the great advancements of Marxism over previous forms of utopian socialism was its insistence on the use of the scientific method in the examination of social and material reality and the development of revolutionary theory.  Many previous Party-building movements forgot this principle and instead relied on inherited theories, issued polemics and promoted strategies disconnected from concrete conditions and made gross errors in logic and rhetoric in their criticisms of other groups.  In this round of struggle we need to do better.

Also, from carlsagan.com:

Continue reading “Baloney Detection Kit”

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ILPS Condemns Rise of Fascist Current in the US & Urges the American People to Fight Back

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison

Chairperson, International League of Peoples’ Struggle

October 5, 2010 Press Statement

At the center of the world capitalist system, the current of fascism is running high.  It  is whipping up the  terrorism scare, racism, xenophobia, anti-migrant prejudices and religious bigotry.  The Republican and Democratic parties keep moving towards the Right, egged on by ultra-Rightist groups and sections of the corporate mass media.

The finance oligarchy and the military-industrial complex are deliberately generating the fascist current and its various ingredients in order to conceal the root cause of the financial and economic crisis, to cover up their criminal culpability, to shift the burden of crisis to the proletariat and the people and to scapegoat the anti-imperialist and peace activists, the immigrants, the people of color, the Arabs and Muslims.

The fascist current took a new ugly turn when on Friday, September 24, 2010 the FBI raided at least six houses in Chicago and Minneapolis and began a US-wide intimidation campaign of activists who work with organizations such as the Palestine Solidarity Group, Students for a Democratic Society, the Twin-Cities Anti-War Committee, the Colombia Action Network, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera (a Colombian political prisoner).

As revealed by the warrants and line of questioning by the FBI agents, the activists are being targeted and pilloried for their solidarity work with the people’s struggles for national self-determination abroad as well as for their work within the US to build a movement to oppose US imperialism, crisis and war.  The intimidation campaign has included FBI raids, visits and Grand Jury subpoenas.  It is obviously inspired by the reactionary ruling of the US Supreme Court in Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project on June 22, 2010.

The said Supreme Court ruling has made it a crime to provide support, including humanitarian aid, literature distribution, legal advice, and political advocacy to any entity that the government has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, even when such support is intended solely to promote the lawful and non-violent activities of a designated organization.

Civil rights advocates and a section of the mainstream media have condemned the Supreme Court ruling and have denounced the decision as violative of the US constitution by criminalizing free speech and imposing guilt by association.  On July 26, the Washington Post began publishing an investigative series critical of the extensive counterterrorism and intelligence network put up by the US government in reaction to the 9/11/2001 attacks.

In an interview on Democracy Now, the Washington Post reporters discussed how the top-secret world of US intelligence agencies has become “so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work”.   Among the findings:  about 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances; and  more than 1,200 government organizations and nearly 2,000 private companies work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in 10,000 locations.  The US has practically become the biggest police state in the world.

Continue reading “ILPS Condemns Rise of Fascist Current in the US & Urges the American People to Fight Back”

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The Pakistan flood, economic damage and the truth about foreign aid

6 September 2010.  World to Win News Service.

The immediate loss of life due to the continuing flooding in Pakistan is tragedy enough, but the long-term impact may cause even greater disaster.

The devastated fields long the Indus and other rivers, some still under  water and others waterlogged and filled with mud and stones, constitute Pakistan’s agricultural heartland and the foundation of its economy. This season’s maize, cotton, rice and wheat, the main crops, as well as mango, banana and citrus fruits, have been lost. Worse, tens of millions of people have lost their future livelihoods, some for at least one or two seasons and others forever.

The Indus Valley stretches along approximately 650 kilometres in Sindh province, where it represents about 85 percent of the land under cultivation. People like Nizam Nathio, who had 10 acres of land and now lives in a refugee camp in Sukkur, lost all their cultivated land in the flood. “All my resources are gone and the next crop will be harvested in six months,” he says. “Will my family eat mud till then to survive?” Hakeem Kalhoro, a resident of the Naushero Feroz district, had a farm with 50 buffaloes. Now he has only one left. The floodwater has taken the rest. ”I used to sell 500 litres of milk a day, now I’m living on handouts.” (BBC Website, 19 August 2010)

Now Sindh is being hit by fresh flooding.  It is raining again, and previously contained flood lakes have broken through.

Pakistani officials say that about 3.6 million hectares of crops have been washed away, much of that in Sindh and Punjab provinces, and 1.2 million livestock killed, including ploughing animals. The World Bank estimates that crops worth $1 billion have been ruined. The UN World Food Programme says that almost ten million people are already short of food. Little clean water is available.

There is fear the number of people facing what these agencies call “food insecurity”  will mount and the whole country will face a massive food shortage and inflated prices in the coming years. Shortages of agricultural raw materials may also undermine textile and apparel manufacture, the country’s two main export sectors, and the food processing industry. In terms of this broader impact, no region in Pakistan remains untouched by the flood.

Millions of people no longer have a home to live in or land to till. As thousands more take up residence in the already overcrowded camps, hundreds of thousands of displaced people have moved to urban centres in Punjab and Sindh. Many are already making their way towards Karachi and Hyderabad. The people taking refuge in the camps were mostly tenant farmers. Many of them may become wage workers, at best, because they have little or nothing to go back to in their native villages, and some will not be allowed to go back.

At least one in ten of the country’s 166 million people have been directly affected, or even one in eight according to other estimates. Further, if there is much reconstruction, with the kind of projects and programme the capitalists of the world’s dominant imperialist countries have in mind, rural life and the whole national economy may become more dependent on the needs of world capitalism. Continue reading “The Pakistan flood, economic damage and the truth about foreign aid”

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Flood control and social transformation in revolutionary China – “Teaching water to climb mountains”

6  September 2010. A World to Win News Service.  Following are excerpts from an article that appeared in issue 13 (1989) of A World to Win  magazine. It was originally published in the Revolutionary Worker (now called Revolution), voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, 10 June 1985.

Great Struggle Against Crooked Valleys and Rivers, 1974

For hundreds of years, floods and droughts had been the “twin scourges” of China. A major flood or drought hit large parts of the land at a pace of almost once a year, destroying crops or making it impossible to plant and thus leading to terrible famines that took the lives of hundreds of thousands at a time.

With the defeat of the U.S.-backed Koumintang (KMT) reactionaries in October 1949, the revolutionary regime led by Mao and the Communist Party of China faced an immensely difficult situation. U.S. imperialism and its reactionary allies surrounded and blockaded New China in an attempt to smother it to death. The land and the people had been ravaged by the decades of Japanese imperialist invasion and occupation and the rampages of the KMT army, which compounded the devastation from flood, drought and famine.

As a 1974 Peking Review article titled “Harnessing China’s Rivers” recalled, “What did the Koumintang reactionaries leave behind 25 years ago when New China was born? With all the waterways, dykes and embankments long out of repair, the peasants were completely at the mercy of nature. Flood and drought were common occurrences, wreaking havoc alternately or concurrently and taking a heavy toll on millions of people, with tens of millions more rendered homeless. Such being the plight of old China, certain imperialist prophets gleefully awaited the collapse of New China in the grip of these twin disasters which all past governments had failed to cope with.”

For the infant revolutionary

regime, the task of taming the great rivers – the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Huai (flowing in the central coastal plains between the Yangtze and the Yellow), and others – was a crucial aspect of transforming China from a dependent neocolony into an independent socialist country. Without protection from floods and new irrigation systems to fight droughts and open up new farmland, the peasantry – making up the overwhelming majority of the population – would continue to suffer. The worker-peasant alliance would be adversely affected and the ability of China to withstand the attacks of the imperialists and contribute to world revolution would be weakened.

In 1951 and ’52, Mao declared that the Huai River and the Yellow River “must be harnessed”. These calls were made amidst, and were very much a part of, the fierce two-line struggles within the Communist Party itself over China’s direction after liberation. Continue reading “Flood control and social transformation in revolutionary China – “Teaching water to climb mountains””

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Letter of Resignation from Freedom Road Socialist Organization

by Patrick Ryan

[Note: Revolutionary Initiative does not have a position on Freedom Road Socialist Organization and cannot vouch for the accuracy of the author’s criticisms of that particular organization.    However, the letter raises many important issues for people and organizations committed to making revolution in imperialist countries, particularly regarding how engaging in mass work relates to building a revolutionary movement.]

[Edit: This letter has been responded to by a supporter of FRSO here.  That response was criticized by a supporter of the FIRE Collective here.]

“All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.”
— Alain Badiou.

This is a letter to all those who genuinely want to build a movement to overthrow oppression and establish a new society that aims for the transition to communism.

At present Freedom Road Socialist Organization is not on the path to accomplishing these goals, but rather finds itself focused tightly on partial demands, base building and Democratic Party politics that do not ultimately help organize and lead a movement to overthrow this capitalist and imperialist system. It leads us and the people deeper and deeper into the logic and rationalizations of bourgeois democracy.

After two years of being an active member, I have concluded that the current political trajectory of FRSO will only yield further from the goal of liberation and I now resign from that organization.

At the heart of this trajectory exists a bundle of assumptions about how fundamental radical social transformation can occur, and how we understand the role of the liberal-capitalist Democratic Party. This line promotes only structural reforms and defense of the capitalist welfare state, while obfuscating line differences within the organization. In practice this has meant concentration of cadres in NGOs, as board members in progressive nonprofits, and as union bureaucracies. This line is encapsulated in the statement:

“If the people don’t vote it [socialism] in or bring it about through mass national strikes and other popular forms, it will not happen!” 1

This political line cannot imagine rebellions, insurrections, and protracted conflicts that would make the old system ungovernable. Instead, stubbornly insists that voting or mass strikes will be the only possible methods for achieving state power. In a revisionist CP-style politics, we are told to “beat the far-right,” when in practice we know this always meant that we capitulate to liberals and surrender any radical or revolutionary aims. The enemy is defined as the far-right Republicans and Tea Party drones, and not the capitalist system and its empire. Continue reading “Letter of Resignation from Freedom Road Socialist Organization”