Reposted Content

Ten reasons not to talk – or listen – to CSIS

By People’s Commission Network.  Posted on rabble.ca

Over past months, reports have multiplied of Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) visits to the homes and even workplaces of people working for social justice. In addition to its longstanding and ongoing harassment and intimidation of indigenous peoples, immigrant communities, and others, the spy agency has become much more visible in its surveillance of movements for social justice.

The People’s Commission is aware of dozens of such visits in the Montreal area alone. People visited range from writers and artists to staff at advocacy organizations and anarchists living in collective houses. Unannounced, in the morning, the middle of the day or the evening, CSIS agents knock at the door of private homes. Their interest is far ranging: from the tar sands, to the G8, to indigenous organizing, Palestine solidarity, Afghanistan; who you know and what you think. Their very presence is disruptive, their tone can be intimidating, and their questions intrusive, manipulative and inappropriate. They guarantee confidentiality — “just like in security certificate cases” — and invariably ask people to keep quiet about the visit.

The People’s Commission Network advocates total non-collaboration with CSIS. That means refusing to answer questions from CSIS agents, refusing to listen to whatever CSIS may want to tell you, and breaking the silence by speaking out whenever CSIS comes knocking.

If you are in immigration proceedings, or in a vulnerable situation, we strongly advise you to insist that any interview with CSIS be conducted in the presence of a lawyer of your own choosing.

Here are 10 good reasons not to talk — or listen — to CSIS: Continue reading “Ten reasons not to talk – or listen – to CSIS”

Reposted Content

Four main issues to be debated in the International Communist Movement

Revolutionary Initiative is reposting this piece from the (new) Communist Party of Italy [(n)PCI] for the significant questions and debates it raises concerning the reconstitution of genuine communist parties in the imperialist countries. The translation is not perfect, but none of its essentials points are lost in translation.

The (n)PCI has made some rather original contributions, if not creative developments, of MLM in the area of: (1) conceptualizing the nature of the state in the imperialist countries, which they refer to as the Preventive Counter-Revolutionary Regime; and (2) their understanding of Protracted People’s War, namely, its universal significance and its particularities as a strategy for revolution in the imperialist countries, which they refer to as Protracted Revolutionary People’s War..

This posting does not express an endorsement of the lines in this document, but rather an intention to more deeply explore the question of revolutionary strategy in the imperialist countries at a time when revolutionary communists are regrouping in the imperialist countries. The Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada / Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (Canada) also upholds PPW as a strategy (click here and here for their documents on this debate) for the imperialist countries, but we believe that it is a rather distinct conception from the one upheld by the (n)PCI.

In unity and struggle, Revolutionary Initiative

Four main issues to be debated in the International Communist Movement
15 March 2010
(new) Communist Party of Italy

This document deals with:

1. The issues we think important for carrying out the struggle for getting a higher unity in the International Communist Movement,
2. Our positions about those issues,
3. The documents in common languages (English, French, Spanish) where our position are explained in a thorough way.

Issues about which to carry out the discussion

The issues about which we think it is necessary to carry out the discussion in the ICM are four:

1. The evaluation of the communist movement (first wave of proletarian revolution and first socialist countries, crisis of the communist movement and modern revisionism, new birth of the communist movement on the basis of Marxism Leninism Maoism);

2. The theory of the (first and second) general crisis of capitalism in imperialist epoch and the connected developing revolutionary situation;

3. The regime of preventive counter-revolution established by the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries;

4. The strategy of the protracted revolutionary people’s war. Continue reading “Four main issues to be debated in the International Communist Movement”

Reposted Content

The term ‘NGO’ is a misnomer

By Yves Engler

They’re called NGOs — non-governmental organizations — but the description is misleading at best, or an outright lie generated by intelligence agencies at worst.

In fact, almost all development NGOs receive most of their funding from government and in return follow government policies and priorities. While this was always true, it has become easier to see with Harper’s Conservative government, which lacks the cleverness and subtlety of the Liberals who at least funded some “oppositional” activity to allow NGOs a veneer of independence.

The example of the NGO called Alternatives illustrates these points well. This group, which has ties to the progressive community in Canada and Quebec, has done some useful work in Palestine and Latin America. But, at the end of 2009, the Canadian International Development Agency failed to renew about $2.4 million in funding the Montreal-based organization. After political pressure was brought to bear, Ottawa partly reversed course, giving Alternatives $800,000 over three years.

Alternatives’ campaign to force the Conservatives to renew at least some of its funding and CIDA’s response tell us a great deal about the ever more overt ties between international development NGOs and western military occupation. After the cuts were reported, the head of Alternatives, Michel Lambert, tried to win favour with Conservative decision makers by explicitly tying the group’s projects to Canadian military interventions. In an article in French for Le Journal Des Alternatives [1] in which he claimed Alternatives was “positive[ly] evaluated and audited” by CIDA, Lambert asked: “How come countries like Afghanistan or Haiti that are at the heart of Canadian [military] interventions [and where Alternatives operated] are no longer essential for the Canadian government?”

After CIDA renewed $800,000 in funding, Lambert claimed victory. But, the CIDA money was only for projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti — three countries under military occupation. (The agreement prohibited Alternatives from using the money to “engage” the public and it excluded programs in Palestine and Central America.) When western troops invaded, Alternatives was not active in any of these three countries, which raises the questions: Is Alternatives prepared to follow Canadian aid anywhere, even if it is designed to strengthen military occupation? What alternatives do even “leftwing” NGOs such as Alternatives have when they are dependent on government funding?

Continue reading “The term ‘NGO’ is a misnomer”

Reposted Content

The Ten Declarations of the Maoist Communist Party of China (MCPC)

Thanks to Kasama Project for making this document available.

22 March 2009

1. We strongly condemn the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party and its policy of secretive suppression of our party!

On 26 December 2008, our party gave out the pamphlet “To all the people of China” that declares that “the peoples of China have the right to rise up against the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party” in the central districts of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. By doing this we have “dared to touch the tiger’s ass”!

Afterwards we engaged in more propaganda online and in other cities. This revolutionary action of our party has resulted in a strong political wave against the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc of the Chinese Communist Party, and managed to beat down the arrogant air of the revisionist ruling bloc.

Smash Revisionism!

This is the clarion call for a great revolutionary movement among the Chinese proletariat against capitalist restoration; this is the signal flare to mobilise the people to strike against the crimes conducted by the traitorous revisionist ruling bloc; to peel away the false skin of the revisionists, and to engage in a people’s revolutionary war through both words and actions.

The pamphlet of our party “To all the people of China” not only received great attention within China, and to a great extent served to wake up and stimulate the Chinese proletarian class, but it also triggered a lot of international political responses. “Radio Free Asia” and “Voice of America” all made reports about us. Reactionary forces both inside and outside of China immediately felt threatened by our pamphlet, and started to attack our party and offered strategies to the ruling regime of China. Continue reading “The Ten Declarations of the Maoist Communist Party of China (MCPC)”

Reposted Content

Veteran Maoist Resigns from Communist Party of China

My declaration of withdrawal from the Party
A letter from July 19, 2001.

My name is Zhang Laushi, born in 1928 April to a common peasant family on Gaozhou Peninsula, Shandong Province. At age 14, as a youth brigade leader, I joined the war to resist Japanese aggression and in the mid of the Huihai campaign when I was 20, I joined the Chinese Communist Party.

It has been more than half a century now. In the eyes of today’s young generation, I also can be counted as an old revolutionary.

After the Huihai campaign, I again participated in the Cross Yangzi River Campaign (Against KMT forces). At that time I was a corporal. In the Anti-US-Help-Korea War, I served in the 68th Army as a communication corporal, got wounded, transferred to western Henan Province a mountainous county to be Director of Post and Telephone Department and Party Secretary. I held that post for 20 years and retired as a technical category cadre.

Several decades of life in revolution and war have allowed me to do a little work for the people and the Party. The Party and the people gave me more than a little honor. During the liberation war and the Korea War I have several times served with distinction and merit, received commendations and military medals which decorated my chest of my uniform. Even now I treasure my uniform of war, often taking it out to reminisce with deep emotion.

I say this not out of self satisfaction or self aggrandizement. Thinking of my comrades in arms, half of whom were sacrificed. Their lively faces still fresh in my eyes, getting stronger as time passes. Erbi, Anxum, Yuedi and there was another one we called Older Brother, were all lost to us forever in one minor action. The Huihai campaign was victorious, but our minor action in it was very tragic and our sacrifice huge. During the Korea War, in the Battle of Flying Tiger Mount, our unit became lost from division headquarters because of dense fog and headed for the wrong direction and suffered over 50% loss. I was wounded in that battle. Compared to the sacrificed comrades, I was much more fortunate. I have lived 50 some years longer than they. Compared to them, I feel ashamed that I was not together with them. What good fortune it would be to be with my life death comrades, to talk about our aspirations, our beliefs, our struggles. What else do I have to be self satisfied? I only regret that I contributed too little to the Party and the people, unworthy of the sacrifice of my departed comrades. So why Am I withdrawing from the Party? Continue reading “Veteran Maoist Resigns from Communist Party of China”

RI Articles & Statements

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

A Statement to the Seventh National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party

From the General Secretary of Revolutionary Initiative

With our fists raised as high as our hopes for the future of the Pakistani revolution, Revolutionary Initiative, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist pre-party formation in Canada, offers a red salute to the comrades convening the August 2010 7th National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan Workers and Peasants Party).

We understand that the 7th Congress will mark a return of the PMKP to the Maoist origins of the party, as established by its founders Major Ishaq Mohammed, Afzal Bungish, Eric Sperian, and Ghulam Nabi Kaloo in the 1960s.

The new program of the PMKP will effect a decisive break with the pseudo-alternatives currently being presented to the people of Pakistan: the perpetuation of a backward semi-colonial, semi-feudal society maintained by the pro-imperialist military and civil bureaucracy, comprador bourgeoisie, and feudal ruling elite; versus the equally backward social program offered up by the Taliban of Pakistan. By breaking with the revisionist Left, which looks to U.S. imperialism for enlightenment through its brutal “War on Terror”, the PMKP is setting a course to truly rally the peasants, proletarians, and the progressive petty-bourgeois elements to the anti-imperialist cause. Further, by exposing the program of the Taliban as fascism in a different form, the PMKP has truly placed itself at the vanguard of all the toiling masses in Pakistan.

Continue reading “The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan”

Reposted Content

The Interpretation of the Nature of Current Crisis Decides Communist Parties’ Activity

(new) Communist Party of Italy – Central Committee

Article by Nicola P. member of the editorial staff of the magazine La Voce del (nuovo)PCI for N° 36 (February 2010) of International Newsletter, organ of ICMLPO (International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations)

Women lead demonstration of Italian workers against austerity measures

It is very important, indeed it is essential that we correctly understand the nature of the current crisis. In the 11th of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Marx says: “The philosophers have only given different interpretations of the world. But the question is to transform it. ” On the other side, in the Communist Party’s Manifesto (1848) Marx says that the Communists are distinguished from other proletarians because they have a more advanced understanding of conditions, forms and results of the struggle between classes and on this basis they keep pushing it forward. The interpretation of the world is not the goal of us Communists. Our goal is the transformation of the world. But people need to represent to themselves, to have an idea of what they do. The socialist revolution is not something instinctive. Lenin strongly taught (What Has To Be Done?) that the theory that guides the communist movement does not arise at all spontaneously from experience. It has to be elaborated by the Communists who, for this purpose, have to use the most sophisticated tools of knowledge that humanity has. The Communists took it to the working class that, for the position it occupies in capitalist society, is especially predisposed to assimilate and to take it as a guide for its actions. The practical communist movement can grow beyond a basic level only if it is guided by a revolutionary theory. Our action to transform the world, other things being equal, is all the more effective the more just and advanced is our understanding of the world. Only with a fairly good understanding of the nature of the crisis which we are involved in, we can make the socialist revolution, and the second wave of the proletarian revolution will bring humanity to finally overcome capitalism, to build socialism all over the world on the way towards Communism.
Continue reading “The Interpretation of the Nature of Current Crisis Decides Communist Parties’ Activity”

Reposted Content

Two Lines Struggle in the Communist Party

(new) Communist Party of Italy – Central Committee

Article from La Voce n. 35, July 2010

In the Statute approved by the 1st Congress of the (new) Italian Communist Party (paragraph 6) it is written that:

“The main organizational principles of the Party are the democratic centralism and the two lines struggle. The two principles are complementary: they are the two opposite terms of a dialectical unity. In some circumstances the first of the two terms is the principal. In some other circumstances the second of the two terms is principal.

(…)

The principle of the two lines struggles teaches us that in the Communist Party two trends are always existing, one pushing onwards and the other restraining. They are the joint effect of the class contradiction (of bourgeoisie’s influence and of the struggle against it), of the contradiction between the true and the false and of the contradiction between the new and the old. In some periods the two trends are complementary and both contribute to party’s development. In other periods they become antagonistic and incompatible. The left trend has to transform the right one. If the right trend proves to be unyielding, the left one has to expel it.”
This rule of our Statute arouses many kinds of objections, both in the Italian and in the International Communist Movement. It is in the nature of things that this takes place. The two lines struggle is a principle not universally accepted and applied in the communist movement.

Firstly, we have to apply (to learn to apply) the rule of our Statute inside us. We have to learn to use the two lines struggle in our Party’s life. We shall better and better understand the principle of the two lines struggle, we shall understand it in a more and more practical way the more we shall apply it.

Secondly, we have to make understand this principle in a just way, in the Party and among the comrades, in Italy and abroad, in the International Communist Movement (ICM).

Thirdly, we have to defend it against the objections and distortions, against the misunderstandings and the denigrations.

The two lines struggle is an indispensable organizational principle. Continue reading “Two Lines Struggle in the Communist Party”

Reposted Content

Killing Azad: Silencing the Voice of Revolution

by N Venugopal.  From Monthly Review zine, July 29.
Cherukuri ("Azad") Rajkumar, CPI (Maoist) spokesperson

To suppress the most articulate voice of the Indian revolutionary movement, the state indulged in the brutal assassination of Cherukuri Rajkumar, popularly known as Azad, spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with freelance journalist Hemchandra Pandey, on July 2.  Azad was supposed to meet a courier at Sitabardi in Nagpur, Maharashtra at 11 am on July 1, to go to the Dandakaranya forest from there.  The bodies of Azad and Pandey were displayed on a hillock in the forest between the Jogapur and Sarkepalli villages in the Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, about 250 kms from Nagpur.

Around 9 in the morning on July 2, the television channels in Andhra Pradesh started flashing that there was an “encounter” in which two Maoists were killed.  Within the next few hours it was speculated that the deceased were Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad and Pulluri Prasada Rao alias Chandranna, secretary of the North Telangana Special Zonal Committee.  By afternoon Gudsa Usendi, spokesperson of the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, came on air and told the channels that the second person might be Sahadev, an adivasi courier sent to fetch Azad.  Then, Usendi came on air again and told that Sahadev returned safely after not finding Azad at the rendezvous.  Meanwhile, friends of Hemchandra Pandey recognized the picture of his dead body that appeared in the New Delhi edition of the Telugu daily Eenadu, and Pandey’s wife Babita announced that at a press conference in Delhi.  For the first few days, Pandey was passed off as a Maoist; once he was identified, police started denying that he was a journalist.

The official version of the incident goes like this: On the night of July 1, police got information that there was some movement of Maoists in the Maharashtra-Andhra Pradesh border forests and a combing party consisting of police from both the states went in search of them.  Around 10:30 the police party identified the Maoists and asked them to surrender, but the intransigent Maoists, numbering around 20, started firing at them.  In order to defend themselves the police returned fire and the exchange of fire continued till 2:30 in the morning.  The police party could not search the area due to pitch darkness and came back next morning to find two unidentified dead bodies, along with an AK-47, a 9 mm pistol, two kit bags, and revolutionary literature.

However, newspaper readers in Andhra Pradesh are sceptical: they have been reading the same story over and over again for the last forty years with changes in proper names alone.  That nobody believed the official story was a commentary on the credibility of state machinery. Continue reading “Killing Azad: Silencing the Voice of Revolution”