Category: Reposted Content

A New Wave of Unity Among Revolutionary Communists
Reposted Content

A New Wave of Unity Among Revolutionary Communists

[From Arsenal-Express newsletter, a publication of the Revolutionary Communist Party (Canada). – Ed.]

It is with great pride and a deep sense of responsibility in front of the Canadian proletariat and the international communist movement that we announce the rallying of the Social Revolution Party (SRP) to the Parti communiste révolutionnaire – Revolutionary Communist Party (Canada).

The Social Revolution Party is an Ottawa-based communist group founded in 2009. Created two years earlier, the Revolutionary Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party that fights for a revolutionary change in Canada, for workers power and socialism, as part of the world revolution.

Following the historic anti-capitalist mobilization against the G20 Summit in June 2010 in Toronto, the Social Revolution Party came into contact with the RCP. During the fall, members of the SRP studied and discussed the program of the RCP. The comrades of the SRP also took part in the Second Canadian Revolutionary Congress organized by the RCP, which was held December 11, 2011 in Toronto. The RCP was then able see the quality of the revolutionary commitment of the SRP and its activists and their willingness to move forward on the path of communism and revolution. Despite being a young organization, members of the SRP already have a rich experience in organizing, especially among the working class.

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‘The Trouble With Trotskyites’

Trotskyites claim to be revolutionary, but what does Trotskyism practice objectively?

R.I. EDITORIAL COMMENT: The following statement from the MLM organization in Britain, ‘Revolutionary Praxis’, bears so much in common with the role and function of Trotskyism in Canada that we are reproducing it below with our own additions in parentheses, so as to illustrate the identical function of Trotskyism in Canada. Everything that appears in [ ] parentheses is an addition from Revolutionary Initiative.

It is no accident that the imperialist centres have served as headquarters for the Trotskyists, one species of reformist and revisionist ‘Marxism’. It is also no accident that the semi-colonial countries, like Peru, Turkey, India, Philippines, Nepal, have played a leading role in keeping a revolutionary Marxism alive, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and in deed, developing it.

A component of our work as revolutionary communists, as a basis for the refoundation of a proletarian revolutionary Party, is to expose all revisionist ideas, be they borne out of Trotskyism or the revisionist CPs. That said, thanks to Revolutionary Praxis for this statement.

In Britain [and Canada], today there are a number of political organizations which base themselves on the teachings of Leon Trotsky, the counter-revolutionary renegade who defected from and opposed the Soviet Union. These include the Socialist Workers Party [International Socialists in Canada], the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Workers Liberty and a multitude of splinters from these organizations [Socialist Action, the ‘Socialist Caucus’ of the New Democratic Party; Fightback, also trying to transform the NDP into a true ‘workers’ party’; etc.]. Continue reading “‘The Trouble With Trotskyites’”

Prof. Jose Maria Sison: The Marxian Critique of the Neoliberal Economic Agenda
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Prof. Jose Maria Sison: The Marxian Critique of the Neoliberal Economic Agenda

[More video and text after the break.]

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Street art and revolution: “It’s beautiful. It’s spreading everywhere.”
Reposted Content, RI Articles & Statements

Street art and revolution: “It’s beautiful. It’s spreading everywhere.”

By Simon of Revolutionary Initiative.

In his Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Mao said that revolutionaries and specialists in the arts should pay attention to the art  produced by the masses, whether it be literature, drama, music, visual art or reporting in village level newspapers.  Street art would be no exception.

The importance of street art to the people comes through in the following film about revolutionary graffiti in Egypt.  Contrary to the view promoted by the state and the bourgeoisie that street art is vandalism and a threat to public safety, an artist describes how revolutionary murals gives oppressed communities a sense of pride and solidarity.

More revolutionary Egyptian street art can be found on the facebook group Revolution Graffiti.

Street art is also not limited to traditionally painted murals.  Street artists around the world are also constantly innovating new practices to communicate with the people.  Let’s look at some examples.

Continue reading “Street art and revolution: “It’s beautiful. It’s spreading everywhere.””

Reposted Content

Alain Badiou – Tunisia, Egypt: The universal reach of popular uprisings

The wind of the east carries away the wind of the west

Until when the idle and crepuscular West, the “international community” of those who still believe themselves to be the rulers of the world, will continue to give lesson in good management and good behavior to the rest of the world? Is it not laughable to see some well-paid and well-fed intellectuals, retreating soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that serves us as a moth-eaten Paradise, offering their services to the awe-inspiring Tunisian and Egyptian people, in order teach these savages the ABC of “democracy?”

What pathetic persistence of colonial arrogance! In the situation of political misery that we’ve been living for the last three decades, is not evident to surmise that it is us who have everything to learn from the popular uprisings of the moment?

Don’t we have the urgency to give a close look to everything, that, over there, made possible, by collective action, the overthrow of oligarchic and corrupt governments, who — or maybe especially — stood in a humiliating position of servitude to the Western world?

Yes, we should be the students of these movements, and not their stupid professors. For they give life, with the genius of their own inventions, to those same political principles that for some time now the dominant powers try to convince us of their obsoleteness. And in particular the principle that Marat never stopped recalling: when it is a matter of liberty, equality, emancipation, we all have to join the popular upheavals.

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Mao: Problems of War and Strategy

Mao at Yenan.

[Final part of our series on revolutionary military strategy in imperialist countries.  While it mainly deals with revolutionary war in China, it contains many important insights into revolutionary strategy in general and how it’s application changes for different countries in particular.]

November 6, 1938

I. CHINA’S CHARACTERISTICS AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR

The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution. This Marxist-Leninist principle of revolution holds good universally, for China and for all other countries.

But while the principle remains the same, its application by the party of the proletariat finds expression in varying ways according to the varying conditions. Internally, capitalist countries practice bourgeois democracy (not feudalism) when they are not fascist or not at war; in their external relations, they are not oppressed by, but themselves oppress, other nations. Because of these characteristics, it is the task of the party of the proletariat in the capitalist countries to educate the workers and build up strength through a long period of legal struggle, and thus prepare for the final overthrow of capitalism. In these countries, the question is one of a long legal struggle, of utilizing parliament as a platform, of economic and political strikes, of organizing trade unions and educating the workers. There the form of organization is legal and the form of struggle bloodless (non-military). On the issue of war, the Communist Parties in the capitalist countries oppose the imperialist wars waged by their own countries; if such wars occur, the policy of these Parties is to bring about the defeat of the reactionary governments of their own countries. The one war they want to fight is the civil war for which they are preparing.[1] But this insurrection and war should not be launched until the bourgeoisie becomes really helpless, until the majority of the proletariat are determined to rise in arms and fight, and until the rural masses are giving willing help to the proletariat. And when the time comes to launch such an insurrection and war, the first step will be to seize the cities, and then advance into the countryside’ and not the other way about. All this has been done by Communist Parties in capitalist countries, and it has been proved correct by the October Revolution in Russia.

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The necessity to revise the experiences of the past and to work out the present experiences by the light of the theory of the long lasting popular revolutionary war

Article from La Voce del (nuovo) Partito comunista italiano, n. 18
mercoledì 19 luglio 2006.

R.I. Editorial Note:
Another article in our series on revolutionary military strategy in imperialist countries. This article from the (new) Communist Party of Italy reviews past experiences of armed struggle in the imperialist countries in light of their theory of Protracted Revolutionary People’s War for imperialist countries. The translation, like many from this organization, are not perfect, but the ideas are comprehensible. -R.I. -13 March 2011

Continue reading “The necessity to revise the experiences of the past and to work out the present experiences by the light of the theory of the long lasting popular revolutionary war”

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PPW, Italian style…

[An excerpt from the Manifesto Program of the (new) Italian Communist Party.  It lays out their strategy, which they call Revolutionary Protracted People’s War.  Despite the very similar terminology, it is quite different from the PPW strategy as laid out by RCP Canada.  See also the (n)ICP article “The necessity of distinguishing between the universal and particular laws of the protracted popular revolutionary war“.]

3.3. Our strategy: the revolutionary protracted people’s war

Our strategy, the way for making Italy a new socialist country, is the revolutionary protracted people’s war. This is the conclusion of the balance of the experience of the communist movement, of the struggle of the working class against the imperialist bourgeoisie, in particular during the first wave of the proletarian revolution. By its nature the struggle of the working class against the imperialist bourgeoisie for establishing socialism is a revolutionary protracted people’s war. The communist party has to recognize this reality, understand it through the end and utilize this consciousness for directing the revolution. At the conclusion of the balance of the experience of the struggles the communist movement carried out against imperialist bourgeoisie in the last 130 years we have to repeat, paraphrasing what Mao said in 1940 regarding the proletarian revolution in China: “For more than hundred years we used to do the revolution without having a clear and right conception of it. We acted blindly: this is the reason of our defeat”. (127)

Continue reading “PPW, Italian style…”