KATHMANDU, AUG 31 – In a major breakthrough in the peace process, the UCPN (Maoist) on Wednesday agreed to hand over keys to arms containers to the Special Committee on Thursday.
The decision to acquire the arms containers installed at cantonment sites was formalised by the Special Committee led by newly-elected Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai. The Maoist party’s consent to detach itself from its weapons comes four days after the Maoist vice-chairman was elected the PM.
“The Maoists were tied to this decision according to the Interim Constitution. It came late, but it is certainly a positive move,” said Nepali Congress member in the Special Committee Ram Sharan Mahat. “The agreement has helped us enter the real issues on integration and rehabilitation that are still unresolved.”
The handover of the weapons has been a bone of contention between the NC and the Maoists, the key stakeholders in the peace process. The NC has set “complete disarmament” of the Maoist party as a precondition for the formation of a national unity government under the Maoists.
Till date, PLA commanders hold the control of the keys of the containers that have weapons belonging to the former rebels. The weapons were registered by UNMIN in 2007.
The road forward involves a necessary summation of the past. This becomes particularly poignant whenever people propose strategic plans today that echo things attempted (once, twice, several times?) in previous decades.
How do we regroup communist forces? What was the experience of dividing the previous communist movement into warring mini-parties? What were the important “lines of demarcation” that divided people? And which ones were important to observe and fight out?
Paul Saba has (together with many others) created the EROL (Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online). It is exploding with previously unavailable information — documents, memoirs, articles, and increasingly graphics/cartoons.
I have been participating (to the extent I can) by suggesting materials, critiquing some of the intros, and writing blurbs on experiences I was close to.
Each time I go to the EROL i’m stunned at the materials now available — and a bit overwhelmed by its complexity and detail. It is a case where some things are really trivia (not relevant then or now) while other things are truly gems being made available to a new generation. (And where I assume there will be debate over which is the trivia and which is the gem!)
I am hoping we can all help promote these materials — and help each other identify specific parts that remain relevant today.
I plan (over time) to share links that strike me…. and to give brief explanations of their relevance. Here is a first installment.
“Something important is happening here. Especially around the question of US imperialism, Mexico’s role in the abolition of slavery, generally, and the relationship between these two communities.”
There has been brewing (after years of Black military recruitment and especially after 9/11) the problem of American patriotism emerging among African American people. And here it breaks out… openly. And part of the resolution is the discussion of the relationship of Black people to the United States (to belong? to aspire to belong? to defend? to adopt the USA-USA rant of the mindless ones?)
“The revolutionary worker doesn’t swagger or boast and has little sense of ego. He or she is serious-minded and self-disciplined. The revolutionary knows that like a strike, the revolutionary struggle must be a united mass struggle, and that it will take quite some time to succeed….
“In contrast to the proletarian’s practice and outlook, the lumpen schemes and preys upon others to acquire survival needs and personal wealth, which renders him or her indifferent to the effects visited upon others and society as a whole….
“Translated into the revolutionary movement, the lumpen tendency has some thinking that militant swaggering, posturing, and ”talking shit,” is acceptable behavior for revolutionaries, which is very wrong and demonstrates political immaturity and lack of a true proletarian outlook.”
“Democracy and Class Struggle publishes this paper of Comrade Kevin “Rashid” Johnson because a lot of the message in this article is relevant to the struggle in Britain in 2011. The question of a Vanguard Party and its engagement with the Lumpen Proletariat is addressed in this article,these are key questions in the current Uprising in Britain in 2011.”
Kasama is sharing this essay here without (as usual) endorsing this specific analysis. We are not previously aware of this organization, New Afrikan Black Panther Party. On Rashid’s own site the original name of this essay is “The New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter: Our Line.” More on Rashid and his writings can also be found on kersplebedeb‘s valuable website.
By Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson (Defense Minister, NBPP-PC)
Introduction
In this paper, we outline the political and ideological line of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter.
The NABPP-PC, an all Afrikan people’s revolutionary party, proposes through its work and example to spread its line to the general NABPP on the outside, and to all revolutionary-minded New Afrikans, and Ultimately to expand the Party into a broad international vanguard of all Afrikan people the world over. We are in full accord with the analysis set forward in ‘The Panther and the Elephant,” which this paper intends to further illuminate..
The Vanguard Party
As a vehicle for coordinating masses of people for action, organization is necessary. Planning is necessary, and so is assigning roles and tasks to those most capable of performing them, and holding them accountable for performing their assigned tasks completely and to the best of their abilities. Coordinating the activities of the active forces of the Afrikan Nation in America towards the achievement of full democracy and national liberation requires a genuine vanguard party based among the masses. No revolutionary or genuine national independence struggle has ever succeeded without a party to organize and coordinate the energy of the struggling people into focused result-oriented action.
Danny’s essay first appeared on his News Dissector site. (Salute to Danny for his many decades of tireless resistance and excavation.) This article tracks the illusion and the disillusion in personal detail.
Is it accurate on the “lessons we can’t deny” or is there more to extract?
By Danny Schechter
Journalists are not supposed to have political opinions, and yet we all do. Our “biases” are usually disguised, not blatant or overtly partisan, and can be divined in what stories we cover and how we cover them,
Even ‘just the fact’s ma’am,’ journos for big Media have to decide which facts to include and which to ignore.
Our outlooks are always shaped by our worldviews, values and experience, not too mention the outlets we work for.
Which brings me to the challenge of seeking truth and recognizing it when you see it.
I have to admit that I was seduced by the idea of Barack Obama.
The idea of a black President, the idea of a young President, the idea of an articulate President, and the idea of a man married to such a stand up women from a working class family was hard to resist.
Interview with Vice-commander in the Nepal Peoples Liberation Army. His nom de guerre is Tarzan.
“If we were to integrate the Peoples Liberation Army and Nepal Army under the terms and conditions of the bourgeois army, then we believe the revolution will not be completed.”
This video interview first appeared on the blog of the Winter Has Its End team for revolutionary journalism.
The reporters wrote:
“While on our journey to Thawang, the village where Nepal’s people’s war began, we had the great opportunity to visit with Binprasad, (party name: Tarzan), a People’s Liberation Army member out on break from the cantonments (sites where the revolutionary army has been confined during the period of Nepal’s ceasefire).
“Tarzan spoke with us about his concerns about the future of the People’s Liberation Army, and the future of the revolution itself.”
Watch the video interview and read its transcript here >>
Radical Eyes suggested the following piece for posting on Kasama. It first appeared on Counterpunch.
Philadelphia’s Declaration of War on Black Youth
Flashmob Hysteria
by GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
The character of our present moment is undeniable, and the tangled web of causes and consequences is the same from London to Cairo to Santiago: budget cuts in the name of “austerity,” rising unemployment, increasing popular resistance, and an upsurge in racist violence and policing measures like “stop-and-frisk.” The failure of an economic system in the short and long term has generated an entire class of undesirables, living proof of that failure who must be contained, controlled, and silenced.
But even those who recognize the roots of distant rebellions are far more hesitant about upheavals closer to home. Philadelphia is currently in the grips of a bout of mob hysteria at least as virulent and far more racist than the backlash underway in London, to which the media, the police, the city government and the public have all contributed, and yet few have dared to call it what it is.
Jay Rothermel suggested we post the following essay from New Left Review.
by Kees van der Pijl
The shockwaves of popular rebellion reverberating across the Arab world since the start of 2011 have put to the test the West’s dominion over the region; a rule that has long aimed at securing access to the Middle East’s oil and gas, while supporting Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine.
The means by which imperial control is exercised were vividly exposed to public view, as Western officials scrambled to ‘stabilize’ the states that had long served as their clients in the region. In Egypt, a favoured destination for cia rendition flights, the annual subsidy of $1.3bn in us military aid since 1979 has famously bought the Pentagon a direct line to the Army high command, giving Washington a control panel from which to manage the handling of the mass protests. The us Defense Secretary Robert Gates was on the phone to Cairo ‘every few hours’. Daily exhortations from the Obama Administration urged, first, ‘an orderly transition’ with Mubarak stepping down in September; then, as mass pressure grew, ‘an orderly transition now’, to the spymaster, Omar Suleiman; finally, a seizure of power by the Supreme Military Council (smc), an outcome announced to Congress by Leon Panetta, then head of the cia, on February 10, the day before it happened. All pointed to the urgency of American actions in stabilizing the 80-million-strong centre of gravity of Arab discontent, through the mechanisms of the post-colonial state.
In the last months the EROL archives has posted a rich new body of past communist writings. (EROL is the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-line) We extend special thanks to Paul Saba, whose work is so important to our ongoing project of communist summation.
The following is one of the few existing histories of the RCP,USA. It is that organization’s own history — though this document has been buried and forgotten by the organization that wrote it.
We will now make it available for critical summation.
There is a lot to say about the real strengths and real weaknesses of the previous communist movement. To even start to understand them, we all need a common sense of what that history was, and how it was viewed (at that time) by those involved.
This essay was written in the wake of the RCP’s split with the RWH — over an economist view of work in the working class, and over a (relatedly) conservative view of what constitutes socialism and our revolutionary goals.
There are many levels on which to approach this document, and many ways in which to assimilate it. For now, we in Kasama are simply offering it for study and discussion — as part of the appropriation of previous communist history, and as part of the reconception based on that experience.
(We would like to make this available in pdf format. If you create such a pdf, share it with us, and we will post it as a pamphlet.)
Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA
by Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas, leading members of the Central Committee of the RCP
This history is written in the light of the struggle against the Jarvis-Bergman clique, opportunists (led by Mickey Jarvis and Leibel Bergman) who attempted a revisionist coup to seize leadership of the RCP, and failing that tried to wreck, and then led a split from, the Party in the winter of1977-78. In the course of this struggle, it became clear that a summation of not only the current struggle, but of previous line struggles that went into forging a vanguard of the U.S. proletariat would be extremely valuable. This summation was originally written as an internal document of the RCP and on the basis of discussion within the Party, it has been rewritten in some parts for publication.
Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end. (Mao Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 317.)
This painting “Mao Returns” appeared on the radical Chinese site named Utopia “Wu You Zi Xiang.” We heard about this painting when it appeared on Revolutionary Frontlines.
Details on this painting have been provided by a reader:
“The rise and fall, decolonization and neocolonization, of Libya, has been turned into a farce, not only by the absurd propaganda of the coup leaders and of the Gaddafis, but also by the equally absurd phrase-making of those leftists who, as mentally decrepit as Muammar himself, didn’t know enough to distinguish revolution from regime change.
“Cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
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Jay Rothermel suggested posting this piece, which first appeared on Monthly Review. The original title of this piece is “The Rise and Fall of Libya.”
by Yoshie Furuhashi
Upon the US capturing Saddam Hussein out of a “spider hole” and parading his abject person on TV, Tariq Ali wrote:
“My first reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein was both anger and disgust. Anger with the old dictator who could not even die honourably. He preferred to be captured by his old friends than to go down fighting, the one decent thing he could have done for his country.”
Will Muammar Gaddafi, refusing to follow the precedent set by Saddam, be willing and able to do “the one decent thing” left for him to do for Libya?
After all, in the bloom of his youth, Gaddafi was a better man than Saddam, and the early years of his political career were not without genuine achievements: overthrowing King Idris’s monarchy, eliminating the UK and US military bases from Libya, nationalizing the country’s natural resources, building a welfare state. Libya under Gaddafi was also the country that initiated the oil embargo against the US support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war.
These are the last days of Black August 2011…. remembering George today and forever.
I can still taste my own tears on the moment we heard the terrible news. I remember our meetings where we asked each other how we could fill his place.
Gina climbed on a table in the factory, stopped the line, and explained to fellow workers the bitter killing that had gone down. In darkness across our city (and many cities) people worked to spread the word — with posters, spray-painting….. And more. There was more.
Baburam Bhattarai at a meeting with the International Monetary Fund. photo credit: Washington Post
While everyone is assessing this development, we will simply publish a news account for now.
The following report first appeared on Nepal Everest News, an English language publication aligned with the Prachanda faction of the Maoist Party. We will have further analysis as soon as possible. In the meanwhile, we urge reader to explore this analysis of the stakes and opposing lines within Nepal’s Maoist movement.
Kathmandu, Aug.28: Vice-chairman of the UCPN (Maoist), Dr. Baburam Bhattarai has been elected the Prime Minister of Nepal. In the elections held today at the meeting of the Legislature-Parliament, Dr. Bhattarai won with 340 votes. His only contender, Nepali Congress Vice-president Ram Chandra Poudel garnered 235 votes. A total of 575 votes were cast today out of the total 594 members present in the Legislature-Parliament.
The United Democratic Madhesi Front’s support played a decisive role in Dr. Bhattarai’s win, based on a four-point agreement reached earlier today between the UCPN (Maoist) and the Front on matters relating to peace, constitution and a coalition government.
Voting in favour of Dr. Bhattarai today were the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum Nepal, the CPN (ML-Socialist), the Rastriya Janamorcha, the CPN (Unified), the CPN (United), the Samajbadi Janata Dal, the Nepal Pariwar Dal, the Nepal Sadbhawana Party (Giri), the Rastriya Janamukti Party and the Nepal Democratic Socialist Manch, besides his party the UCPN (Maoist).
Likewise, NC leader Poudel received votes from the CPN-UML, the CPN-ML, the Rastriya Prajatantra Party, the Rastriya Janashakti Party, Independent MP Baban Singh and other fringe parties, including his own party NC. Nepal Workers and Peasants Party and the Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal did not take part in the voting today.
This lengthy Minimum Security sequence, which ran May 31- June 29, occurs after Kranti, Javier and Bunnista blow up a power relay station as an attempt to damage the system’s infrastructure and slow down the destruction of the planet. Electricity is soon restored, and those in power are pleased to have this new excuse to institute more intense police-state measures.
This is the second of four parts we’ll be running. The first can be found here.
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Victoria Guinea Pig and Bunnista discuss what to do next, and the difference between tactics, strategy and goals. They talk about why the right can have militias right now but the left can not, and the primacy of consciousness over arms. They discuss organizing, hope, and the nature of humans. Plus there’s an interspecies romantic moment.
Mao Zedong's road of protracted peoples war emerged in opposition to the Comintern's strategy of basing revolution on urban workers and using rural base areas to seize urban areas.
In the last months the EROL archives has posted a rich new body of past communist writings. (EROL is the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-line)
We wish to extend special thanks to Paul Saba, whose work has been tireless and extremely important to both our common ongoing project of communist summation and coming project of communist regroupment.
In the next few days, we will point out some of the remarkable documents now available online.But for the moment we will start here:
Over and over, we have received requests (on Kasama) for reposting a particular document: the Revolutionary Communist Party’s sharp and extensive critique of Hoxhaism.
This 1979 piece on Mao and Hoxha was one of the more effective and powerful polemics made on a number of key questions dividing the international communist movement in the late 1970s — in the wake of the counter-revolutionary events engulfing China after Mao’s death.
We have gotten these requests because the dispute between Maoism and Hoxhaism is one of the sharp historic collision points between creative Marxism and dogmatic Marxism — and because Hoxhaism concentrated a number of arguments for Comintern-era thinking that have maintained power within parts of the international communist movement.
This document is extensive, and we will simply make it available here. It was first published in the RCP’s theoretical journal The Communist #5.
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Beat back the dogmato-revisionist attack on Mao Tsetung Thought
Comments on Enver Hoxha’s Imperialism and the Revolution
by J. Werner
Introduction
Upon first examining Enver Hoxha’s new book, Imperialism and the Revolution, one is tempted to dismiss it as a petty and shallow hatchet job and refer the reader to the works of Mao Tsetung, which make clear that most of the charges hurled at Mao are simply the worst type of blatant misquotations, distortions and downright lies, and also refer the reader to the many Soviet criticisms of Mao which, while sharing the same method and most of the same arguments as Hoxha, at least have the virtue of a more systematic and well-rounded presentation of the revisionist line.
Hilda Erickson, Joe Hill's love, wrote a letter that might explain what really happened the night of the killing.
August 26, 2011–At Woodstock, Joan Baez sang a famous folk ballad celebrating Joe Hill, the itinerant miner, songwriter and union activist who was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915. “I never died, said he” is the song’s refrain.
Hill’s status as a labor icon and the debate about his conviction certainly never died. And now a new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36.
The book’s author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union, as well as his own desire to protect the identity of his sweetheart.
A Salt Lake City jury convicted Hill largely because of one piece of circumstantial evidence: he had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest on the same night — Jan. 10, 1914 — that the grocer and his son were killed. At the trial, prosecutors argued that he had been shot by the grocer’s son, and Hill refused to offer any alternative explanation.
Mr. Adler uncovered a long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said that he had been shot by a rival for her affections, undermining the prosecution’s key assertion. The book, “The Man Who Never Died,” also offers extensive evidence suggesting that an early suspect in the case, a violent career criminal, was the murderer.
Hill, who bounced around the West as a miner, longshoreman and union organizer, was the leading songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, a prominent union that was widely feared and deplored for its militant tactics. He penned dozens of songs that excoriated bosses and capitalism and wrote the well-known lyric “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
“Here’s an interesting article by a labor leader about why he opposes the Tar Sands pipeline. Though he’s very much part of the establishment unions, he seems to be honestly grappling with the false conflict between labor and the environment that has been set up by the ruling class. I don’t see things the same way he does (like his advocacy of “green jobs” within a continued framework of capitalism, or participating in a protest of orchestrated arrests that appeals to Obama), but he makes some good points and, I think, eloquently expresses the real anguish of the worker trapped in a bind — of balancing the immediate need to feed one’s family while realizing that the only options we’re offered for doing so are destroying their future.”
Why I’m Marching with Bill McKibben to Protest the Keystone Pipeline Tuesday 23 August 2011
by Joe Uehlein, Labor Network for Sustainability
Sometimes a decision forces you to think deeply about what you believe in and how you act on those beliefs. It was like that when the climate protection leader Bill McKibben asked me to sign a letter calling for civil disobedience [4] to block the building of a pipeline designed to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. Opposing the pipeline might strain ties with unions that I’ve worked with and been part of for my whole adult life. And yet the pipeline might be a tipping point that could hurtle us into ever more desperate acceleration of climate change. Amid these conflicting pulls, what should I do? Having lived at the confluence of trade unionism and environmentalism, what’s the right course of action – what has my life’s work meant?
I was born into a union family. My dad worked in the steel mills in Lorain, Ohio and was a founder of the Steelworkers Union. My mom had been an organizer in the Clothing Workers Union in Cincinnati. I grew up near Cleveland and I walked the picket line with my dad during the 1959 steel strike.
Take Action for Rikers’ Island Prisoners! Demand the City Create an Emergency Evacuation Plan
Mayor Bloomberg has announced that in the event of a hurricane, that he will not evacuate prisoners at Rikers’ Island, claiming instead to have a “contingency plan” in place. The experience of prisoners in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina shows that city authorities will abandon the basic rights of prisoners in the face of disaster.
We can’t let Bloomberg get away with this!
(1.) Demand the city create an emergency evacuation plan by 5pm today to evacuate prisoners at Rikers Island in the event that other areas in Zone B or C around Rikers Island are evacuated.
Call NYC Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs at (212) 788-2485
lgibbs@cityhall.nyc.gov
Twitter: @NYCMayorsOffice
(3.) Submit evacuation plan demand to city’s website:
-Go to http://nycsevereweather.crowdmap.com/reports/submit/ –this is a website set up by the city for people to submit weather-related service problems. Locate Rikers Island on the map and drag the red marker there.
-Copy and paste this text (or write your own!):
Title: Evacuation plan needed
The city has no evacuation plan for Rikers Island, despite its low elevation and its nearly 13,000 prisoners. Please do not let these individuals, or the ones at the nearby floating Vernon C. Bain Correction Center, suffer.
According to the New York City Department of Corrections’ own website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island’s 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its ten jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness–not to mention pre-trial detainees who have yet to be convicted of any crime.
by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway
“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference this afternoon. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with more than a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.
New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.
“Create a society that values material things above all else. Strip it of industry. Raise taxes for the poor and reduce them for the rich and for corporations. Prop up failed financial institutions with public money. Ask for more tax, while vastly reducing public services. Put adverts everywhere, regardless of people’s ability to afford the things they advertise. Allow the cost of food and housing to eclipse people’s ability to pay for them. Light blue touch paper.”
The police killing of Mark Duggan resulted in four nights of rioting across England. The immediate trigger was the killing itself, and the disrespect shown by the police to Mark’s family and friends.
But the riots rapidly broadened to expressions of a more general anger and alienation; an anger that was all too often unfocused and striking out at the nearest target of opportunity. This resulted in widespread destruction of resources in already deprived neighborhoods and some anti-social attacks on bystanders.
Despite this, the roots of the riots lie in the economic and political conditions of these districts, and not in ‘poor parenting’ or ‘mindless criminality’. These conditions were created by the very politicians and business elite who now call for a return to normality and repression.
The riots happened at a particular moment, a moment when capitalism is in deep crisis. Indeed the riots occurred at the same time as yet another crash in global markets. The two competed with each other to be the lead story on the news. This is not a coincidence; the crash, and the cuts unleashed to impose it’s costs on ordinary people, mean not only rocketing unemployment but also the slashing of public services. And while the focus is on the estimated £200 million of destruction caused by the rioting, this pales into insignificance in comparison with the huge destruction of wealth taking place on the stock exchanges.
Likewise, while the media focus has been on the hundreds of workers and small business owners who will face unemployment because of the destruction of their workplaces, the system that bred the riot has refused work to millions – around one million people between the ages of 16 and 24 are unemployed in the UK today.
The following is being reported from Nepal. Kasama will carry more reports as events unfold. We urge you to read the analysis posted here on Kasama: Nepal’s Crossroads: Without a people’s army, the people have nothing
