Tag: imperialism

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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”

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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”

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.

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International situation: FAVOURABLE or UNFAVOURABLE?

by C. P. Gajurel ‘Gaurav’, Secretary of UCPN-Maoist

Communist Movement is an internationalist movement. Goal of all communists, provided they are truly communists, is communism. We should not be confused about vulgar distortions of communism whether it is ‘National communism’ or ‘Euro communism’. Internationalist nature of communists is characterized by the principle ‘either we all reach or none of us’. This is the basis of proletarian internationalism.

International situation is not same as proletarian internationalism.

Apart from the domestic situation, which is decisive, Communist movement is definitely influenced by international situation of the given time. Development of communist movement of a single country definitely depends upon the favourable or unfavourable international situation. Success or failure of revolution of individual country also largely depends on favourable or unfavourable international situation. In many cases, the question of ‘unfavourable international situation’ is being (mis)used by rightists or revisionists to justify their degeneration from a communist or revolutionary to a revisionist or a bourgeois politician. None of the revisionists of the world declare themselves as revisionists; rather they try to show that they are revolutionaries and are still communists. Capitalist class is an exploiter and oppressor class. So it is quite natural that the politicians openly representing the class interest of this class will not be able to garner support from the broad masses.
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RI Articles & Statements

Thoughts on the RCP Program

Statement of Revolutionary Initiative

Introduction

This document is a summation of our current assessment of the program of the Revolutionary Communist Party. It arises out of a series of discussions carried out within Revolutionary Initiative and with comrades from the RCP.

Our assessment must begin with the recognition that the purpose of Revolutionary Initiative is the formation of a single genuine Communist Party in Canada and that the RCP is currently the most advanced Party-building project in this country. It is guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, is sincerely committed to the revolutionary transformation of Canadian society and has overall made a positive contribution to the movement for revolution in Canada. As Maoists, we must analyse their program carefully, clearly assess it’s perceived strengths and weaknesses, and identify where our understanding of Canadian society and the path to revolution differs. Only in this way may we develop a better understanding of our own line, potential barriers to unity that must be overcome, and areas of study that require greater investigation. We must do this in the spirit of comradeship and revolutionary humility, with the understanding that in the end it will be the masses who decide which line is correct.

This assessment will take the form of a section by section analysis of the RCP program.

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Monthly Review: Seize the Crisis! by Samir Amin

The principle of endless accumulation that defines capitalism is synonymous with exponential growth, and the latter, like cancer, leads to death. John Stuart Mill, who recognized this, imagined that a “stationary state of affairs” would put an end to this irrational process. John Maynard Keynes shared this optimism of Reason. But neither was equipped to understand how the necessary overcoming of capitalism could prevail. By contrast, Marx, by giving proper importance to the emerging class struggle, could imagine the reversal of power of the capitalist class, concentrated today in the hands of the ruling oligarchy.

Accumulation, which is synonymous with pauperization, provides the objective framework of the struggles against capitalism. But accumulation expresses itself globally mainly by the growing contrast between the affluence of the societies in the center of the world system that benefit from imperialist “rent,” and the misery of the societies in the dominated peripheries. This center-periphery conflict becomes, therefore, the central axis of the alternative between socialism and barbarism.

Historically, “really existing” capitalism is associated with successive forms of accumulation by dispossession, not only at the beginning (primitive accumulation), but also at each stage of the unfolding of the capitalist system. Since the seventeenth century, Atlantic capitalism has sought to conquer the world, which it has remade on the basis of permanent dispossession of the conquered regions, transforming them into the dominated peripheries of the system. Continue reading “Monthly Review: Seize the Crisis! by Samir Amin”

RI Articles & Statements

Proletarian Internationalism: A Duty For All Revolutionaries

Fighters of the Mackenzie-Papineau brigades, organized by the Communist Party of Canada to train their members in armed struggle and contribute in the international effort to defeat the fascists in Spain.
Fighters of the Mackenzie-Papineau brigades, organized by the Communist Party of Canada to train their members in armed struggle and contribute in the international effort to defeat the fascists in Spain.

Statement of Revolutionary Initiative

Since the earliest days, proletarian internationalism has been a central pillar of the international communist movement.  Communists carry a line among the people that workers have no homeland, that national borders do not determine a community of interest.  The common interests of all workers is based on our class and all workers, regardless of their nation, have a common interest in the  struggle against capitalism and for a socialist future.

However, various counter-revolutionary ideologies, such as revisionism, petty bourgeois nationalism and cultural nationalism have attempted to obscure this basic truth.  They have in various ways hindered the development of internationalism amongst the working class and worked to prop up the imperialist ruling class.  As a collective operating in an imperialist country founded on settler colonialism, it is essential that Revolutionary Initiative understand its role in the international movement and work effectively to propagate internationalism amongst the working class and its allies.

This document will attempt to increase our understanding on this central element of revolutionary struggle by analysing how proletarian internationalism has been practised throughout the history of the International Communist Movement, the special duties for revolutionaries operating in imperialist countries, and the principles and priorities for the Canadian movement in particular.
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RI Articles & Statements

As Crisis Advances, So Will Movement for Revolution

Statement of Revolutionary Initiative.

Global capitalism has entered a crisis of historical levels, the worst seen since the financial collapse that lead to the Great Depression. This crisis has already resulted in widespread production slowdowns, a freeze in capital investment, job losses, and an increase in the oppression and exploitation of the proletariat world-wide. What sets this recession apart from the usual cyclical crises produced by capitalism is not only its severity, but it’s origins. Unlike previous bubble collapses such as the dot-com crash of the 1990s this crisis is occurring in the very heart of the imperialist system, within monopoly finance capital. It has begun to spread outward to infect other areas of the economy and will result in widespread destruction of the means of production as plants in various industries scale back production or close shop entirely, as well as an acceleration of the process of capital concentration in the hands of the surviving monopolies.

These developments have proven the correctness of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist understanding of the moribund nature of the capitalist system. Finance capital, the dominant faction of the imperialist ruling class, has used its monopoly position to heavily distort the overall economy, greatly increasing the anarchy of production in the system as a whole. They were able to heavily concentrate capital in their hands, using it to create a speculative bubble detached from the real economy or any legitimate measure of value and drawing capital away from productive sectors of the economy. This reliance on speculative bubbles arises out of the stagnancy of the imperialist system, with rates of profit from productive investment on a continuous decline.

Continue reading “As Crisis Advances, So Will Movement for Revolution”