Basanta: The Volcano of Revolution in South Asia Today
Reposted Content

Basanta: The Volcano of Revolution in South Asia Today

The following talk was given on July 2, in Istanbul, during the European Social Forum’s seminar on South Asia’s revolutions.

By Basanta (Indra Mohan Sigdel)
member, Politburo of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

Dear comrades and delegates, revolutionary greetings!

I would like to take this opportunity to extend our revolutionary salutation on behalf of our party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), to the organiser, the European Social Forum, who invited our party to attend this august programme in Istanbul, Turkey.

In addition, I would like to extend our revolutionary greetings to the entire delegates participating in this seminar. I feel honoured to be here with all the delegates from around the world.

But, more than that I would like to utilise this opportunity to share experiences that the working class all across the world has gathered through their valiant struggles against imperialism and its anti-people and neo-colonial policies like privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation, and as well the ruling classes subservient to it.

Dear comrades,

Our party has assigned me to speak here on the revolution in South Asia as requested by the organisers. It is a vast course, a very difficult task to cover in a few minutes. However, I will try my best to be brief but certainly I will focus on the key points to help you reach to the basic understanding of the possibilities and challenges, the revolution in South Asia is confronting now.

South Asia consists of seven countries namely Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. More than one-fifth of the world’s population inhabit in this region. It is the most populous and densely populated geographical region in the world. Agriculture, which contributes to only 22% of the total GDP of the region, employs 60% of the labour force. Next to Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia is the poorest region on the earth. As per the information provided by the World Bank, in 2008, more than 40% of the people dwelling in this region earn less than 1.39 dollars per head per day. On the other, the total wealth of the 25 richest Indian capitalists is equivalent to 192.3 billions of dollars. [Source: http://www.forbes.com]. It is equal to the total yearly earnings of more than 379 millions of the lowest poor people from this region, which is about 31.6% of the total population of India alone. Around 2.1 million of children die of malnutrition every year in this region as per the report published by UNICEF in 2008. This gives a short glimpse of class composition in the South Asian countries. Continue reading “Basanta: The Volcano of Revolution in South Asia Today”

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Haiti six months after the earthquake – the deadly realities of imperialist aid

(Esteban Felix/Associated Press)19 July 2010. A World to Win News Service. Following is an abridged version of an article that appeared in the issue dated 25 July 2010 o f Revolution, newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (revcom.org).

It has been six months since a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in January. The city of Port-au-Prince is still literally buried in rubble, making transportation difficult and rebuilding nearly impossible. There is little recovery and rebuilding. Why?

First of all, this reflects the fact that Haiti is an impoverished country that has been economically and politically stunted because it has been dominated by imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism. Experts estimate that it would take 1,000 trucks three years to remove all the rubble. So far only 2 percent has been cleared. But the media reports that Haiti only has 300 trucks [working on clean-up].

And then there are the rules of capitalism – in which nothing gets done unless there is a profit to be made. So millions of trucks and other heavy equipment in the U.S., including tens of thousands of pick-ups and SUVs sitting unsold on car lots because of the depressed economy, are not used to help hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti who are suffering. Continue reading “Haiti six months after the earthquake – the deadly realities of imperialist aid”

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BBC Global Poll: Wide Dissatisfaction with Capitalism — Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall

Originally post and full report available here.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC World Service global poll finds that dissatisfaction with free market capitalism is widespread, with an average of only 11% across 27 countries saying that it works well and that greater regulation is not a good idea.

In only two countries do more than one in five feel that capitalism works well as it stands–the US (25%) and Pakistan (21%).

The most common view is that free market capitalism has problems that can be addressed through regulation and reform–a view held by an average of 51% of more than 29,000 people polled by GlobeScan/PIPA.

An average of 23% feel that capitalism is fatally flawed, and a new economic system is needed–including 43% in France, 38% in Mexico, 35% in Brazil and 31% in Ukraine.

Furthermore, majorities would like their government to be more active in owning or directly controlling their country’s major industries in 15 of the 27 countries. This view is particularly widely held in countries of the former Soviet states of Russia (77%), and Ukraine (75%), but also Brazil (64%), Indonesia (65%), and France (57%). Continue reading “BBC Global Poll: Wide Dissatisfaction with Capitalism — Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall”

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Harpal Brar on Khrushchevite Revisionism and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Brar is the Chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). The rest of the videos are continued after the break.

Continue reading “Harpal Brar on Khrushchevite Revisionism and the Collapse of the Soviet Union”

RI Articles & Statements

On Violence: Reactionary vs. Revolutionary

Street fighting in Paris, 1968

A statement of Revolutionary Initiative.

[Note: A Norwegian translation of this article by Serve The People is available here.]

Regardless of what people want, political violence is a factor in social and class struggle. Despite the fear mongering of the monopoly corporate media, almost all political violence is not carried out by black clad demonstrators, but by the state against the people. It is heaped upon proletarians on a daily basis, most especially the racialized, lower strata of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, and even more so upon the people of the colonial and neo-colonial nations living under the boot of imperialism. It should be no surprise then that the people forcefully defend their rights and sometimes engage in open fighting. Violence is a reality. The question is what form must revolutionary violence take?

Continue reading “On Violence: Reactionary vs. Revolutionary”

RI Articles & Statements

G20 and the Crisis of Imperialism

Leaders from the G20 have descended upon Toronto, turning much of the downtown core into a high-security police state, in an effort to manage an unprecedented crisis that has shaken the very foundations of the global capitalist system. Composed of the major imperialist powers (US, EU and Japan), second tier imperialists such as Canada, Australia and Russia, and various “middle power” countries that while still oppressed and exploited by imperialism have developed into regional powers with large economies (Brazil, India, China, Turkey, etc), the G20 was formed in an effort to stabilize the global economy in the interests of monopoly capitalism.

G20: Symptom of a System in Crisis

Monopoly capitalism has gone through multiple phases of expansion, each inevitably followed by stagnation and crisis. After the Great Depression, capitalism was able to save itself through massive military buildup and the expansion of industrial production during the Second World War. The military confrontation devastated much of Europe and Japan, creating areas for profitable investment through the rebuilding of Europe during the 1950s and 60s. However, by the 1970s, capitalism was again in crisis, this time because of “stagflation”. The reintegration of the former socialist countries into the imperialist world system and the neo-colonization of Third World bought a little more time, as new markets were created for the dumping of surplus production and the super-exploitation of Third World labour. However, once this process reached its point of saturation, monopoly capitalism again ran out of new areas for expansion in the real economy.

Continue reading “G20 and the Crisis of Imperialism”

RI Articles & Statements

First Statement from the Central Committee of Revolutionary Initiative

In dedication to the revolutionary class struggle of proletarians everywhere Revolutionary Initiative (RI) announces the formation of its Central Committee to lead our pre-Party formation in its great historical task of reconstituting a genuine Communist Party in Canada. It is a small step forward in our effort to create a Party to lead the revolutionary upsurge of the multinational proletariat in Canada, but an important one given the proletariat has been without a revolutionary vanguard since the triumph of revisionism in the Communist Party of Canada in the late 1930s. The establishment of our Central Committee is grounded in years of ideological, political, and organizational work, guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as applied to the conditions of proletarian class struggle in Canada and utilizing the principles of democratic centralism, criticism and self-criticism, and the mass line.

Over the course of the next five years, Revolutionary Initiative will lay out the ideological, political, and organizational bases for the refoundation of a proletarian revolutionary movement and vanguard in Canada. Continue reading “First Statement from the Central Committee of Revolutionary Initiative”