Remembering supporters and leaders of the Maoist Sarbedaran, martyred in the struggle against Iran’s reactionary mullah regime
An important debate has unfolded among communists over how to understand and evaluate the Islamist forces that are now in conflict with the U.S. It is an important component for understanding the so-called “War on Terror” and what the stakes are in the various attacks and measures the U.S. has unleashed around the world.
I think that it is extremely superficial to assume that Islamic fundamentalist forces are “objectively anti-imperialist” based on merely their opposition to the U.S., and based on some mechanical assumptions about a “united front against U.S. imperialism.” The experience of the Iranian revolution (1979) and the Afgani war against the Soviet Union (during the 1980s), and the experience in the current struggles in Algeria, Pakistan and many other places — underscore that significant Islamist forces are highly reactionary and utterly opposed to everything associated with communism and progressive thought.
“The RCP has also painted political Islam generally with single big brush. Avakian says (in a quote published by itself):
‘What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these “outmodeds,” you end up strengthening both.’
“Is there really only one “Jihad” that we “see in contention” with the U.S.? Is it all really so monochromatic? Though Islamic forces haven’t created political programs that can liberate people from imperialism, are there really only “historically outmoded” strata involved (presumably meaning: the entrenched comprador, bureaucrat capitalist and feudal elements)? Aren’t there places where political Islam has gained influence among other strata, or where its politics may reflect other programs? What would a serious and dialectical class analysis of the different Iraqi movements show? Shouldn’t the inter-imperialist contradiction also be seen as a considerable part of the U.S. ‘war on terror’ and its consolidation of its hegemonic status, so that ‘what we see in contention here’ is something more complex and many sided than colliding ‘universalisms.’
“These issues are beyond the scope of these letters, but obviously demand further engagement.”
With that as an introduction, here is a commentary of the debate that has unfolded on the Maoist Revolution Yaahoo group. I don’t vouch for the accuracy of its characterizations, but I do believe it can help get us further into these issues. Read the rest of this entry »
The Nakba: Ethnic cleansing and the birth of Israel
A World to Win News Service.December 10, 2007 Palestinians call what happened to them in 1948 the Nakba – Arabic for catastrophe. It was perpetrated by Zionist leaders looking to form the state of Israel on Palestinian land without the Palestinians.During the Nakba almost a million Palestinians (half the population at that time) were brutally forced from their land, villages and homes, fleeing with only the possessions they could carry. Many were raped, tortured and killed. To ensure that there would be nothing for the Palestinians to return to, their villages and even many olive and orange trees were so well razed that few visible remnants remain. When the Nakba ended, there had been 31 documented massacres and probably others. Some 531 villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods were emptied of their inhabitants.
Former Arabic village and road names were Hebrewized. Ancient mosques and Christian churches were destroyed. Theme parks, pine forests (trees not native to the region) and Israeli settlements sit atop many of the old Palestinian villages. All this was to wipe out any physical evidence that the land belonged to Palestinians and give finality to the Nakba.
How many times have you had a discussion about the plight of the Palestinians with supporters of the existence of the Israeli state and met the argument that the problem arose from Palestinian intolerance of Jewish settlers? How many people know – or admit – that from the beginning Zionism had planned to permanently expel the Palestinian people from their land? In many Western countries, Nakba denial is as obligatory as Holocaust denial is condemned. How did this happen? Read the rest of this entry »
En febrero de 1848, se publicó en Londres un nuevo folleto comunista, escrito en alemán, titulado Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. Se imprimió en un pequeño taller y se despachó con toda urgencia al continente europeo, a la sazón convulsionado por levantamientos y disturbios en la mayoría de las ciudades importantes. Allí lo esperaban pequeños núcleos de revolucionarios, quienes necesitaban una declaración de alto calibre como guía para su trabajo y como toque de clarín para movilizar a las masas a un movimiento rotundamente revolucionario.
Las primeras líneas del folleto eran audaces: “Un fantasma recorre Europa: el fantasma del comunismo. Todas las fuerzas de la vieja Europa se han unido en santa cruzada para acosar a ese fantasma… ya es hora de que los comunistas expongan a la faz del mundo entero sus conceptos, sus fines y sus aspiraciones; que opongan a la leyenda del fantasma del comunismo un manifiesto del propio Partido”. Read the rest of this entry »
John Bellamy Foster: “the human relation to nature lies at the heart of the transition to socialism”
From Monthly Review, November 2008.
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism By John Bellamy Foster
This article is a revised version of a keynote address delivered at the “Climate Change, Social Change” conference, Sydney, Australia, April 12, 2008, organized by Green Left Weekly.
“This ecological understanding arose from a deep materialist conception of nature that was an essential part of Marx’s underlying vision. “Man,” he wrote, “lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”
“Capitalism therefore required for its development a new relation to nature, one which severed the direct connection of labor to the means of production, i.e., the earth, along with the dissolution of all customary rights in relation to the commons. The locus classicus of the industrial revolution was Britain, where the removal of the workers from the land by means of expropriation took the form of the enclosure movement from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Under colonialism and imperialism an even more brutal transformation occurred on the outskirts or the external areas of the capitalist world economy. There all preexisting human productive relations to nature were torn asunder in what Marx called the “extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population” — the most violent expropriation in all of human history.”
“Yet, the root problem of socialism goes much deeper. The transition to socialism is possible only through a revolutionizing practice that revolutionizes human beings themselves. The only way to accomplish this is by altering our human metabolism with nature, along with our human-social relations, transcending both the alienation of nature and of humanity. Marx, like Hegel, was fond of quoting Terence’s famous statement ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ Now it is clear that we must deepen and extend this to: Nothing of this earth is alien to me.”
December 6 is Student Day in Iran . This is a day when the students’ struggle often takes on a momentum that can continue up to the end of the academic year and beyond. This academic year in Iran has also been one of high tension between Iranian students and the Islamic regime.
In early December, the regime’s Ministry of Information arrested between 30-50 women and men leftist students who were preparing to commemorate Student Day in Tehran and other cities, including Ahvaz and Mazendaran. While the authorities have released no information concerning the whereabouts of those arrested, it is believed that they are being held in Section 29 of Evin Prison (built for political prisoners during the Shah’s rule and still in use by the Islamic regime). This section is notorious for horrific conditions and torture.
Despite the harsh warning these arrests were intended to deliver, a reign of terror by the security forces and other threats and obstacles from the authorities, thousands of students at Tehran University and others all over Iran (such as Alammeh University in Tehran, Isfahan University, Ahvaz University, BuAli University in Hamadan and many others) held events commemorating Student Day marked by anti-government slogans. At Tehran University, students gathered in front of the Engineering Faculty. A message from “student seekers of equality and freedom lovers” was read. Then speakers discussed the situation of the student movement and the suppression it faces. All demanded the immediate release of the imprisoned students. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently reading Richard Dawkin’s atheist manifesto (“The God Delusion”) I came across a simple statement:
“There is nothing wrong with being agnostic in cases where we lack evidence one way or another.”
Dawkins then quotes Carl Sagan,
“I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”
I think there is a lot to learn from these simple statements of scientific methodology (from these two controversial and deeply respected scientists).
A brief digression: The word agnosticism was coined by Prof. Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869. He took it from the Greek agnostos, a = without, gnostos = knowledge – and he used this term in scientific warfare against notions of spiritual or mystical insight (i.e., hunches from the gut). This did not mean that Huxley was wishy-washy: on the contrary, he is famous as “Darwin’s bulldog” because on matters where there was sufficient emergent knowledge he fought so fiercely for the most advanced understanding.
We need to be like Huxley in ferociously fighting for what is scientifically known, and cautiously identifying what is not. Read the rest of this entry »
This historical sketch was written fourteen years ago for the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. It has since been published in many places and languages.
This is the story of how the revolutionary communist movement first emerged from the fusion of deep theoretical work and fearless revolutionary practice. And we are sharing it to inspire the work for a fresh fusion of revolutionary theory and practice that is so urgently demanded today.
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by Mike Ely
In mid-February 1848, a new communist pamphlet rolled off the presses of a small printshop on London’s Bishopsgate. It was written in German and entitled Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei.
Copies were rushed off to the mainland of Europe. Uprisings and disturbances had broken out in most of the main population centers of the continent. Small cores of revolutionary activists were waiting for a high-powered declaration that could guide their work and rally the masses of people to a thoroughgoing revolutionary movement.
The bold opening lines of this pamphlet threw down a challenge: “A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre…. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”
This work was quickly translated into many languages of Europe and the Americas. In English it became known as the Communist Manifesto. In one early English version, published in 1850, the previously unknown authors were listed for the first time: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
While countless other documents and manifestos of those days lie forgotten and dust-covered in library archives, this Manifesto lives, studied intensely in ghettos, jungle base areas, and even classrooms all over the world–still inspiring and training one new revolutionary generation after another.
The Communist Manifesto is the visionary founding document of the modern communist movement. It is the opening statement of that scientific ideology now known as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. In honor of its 150th anniversary, here is the story of how the Manifesto came to be. Read the rest of this entry »
Between Dec. 12 and 20, ICE arrested 31 people in the area of Springfield, Tennessee. The roundup came after Nashville television station NewsChannel 5 aired a Dec. 5 story charging Electrolux Home Products with hiring undocumented immigrants at its factory in Springfield, which employs about 3,500 people and produces electric and gas stoves.
Within a few days after the television report, the company began reviewing the paperwork of existing employees at the plant. As many as 800 workers lost or walked away from Electrolux jobs, said Tommy Vallejos, executive director of HOPE, a Tennessee immigrant advocacy group. “There are people who are so afraid, they have not collected their final paycheck,” Vallejos said. According to a NewsChannel5 source, Electrolux dismissed 120 employees on Dec. 13 and another 52 on Dec. 14. An Electrolux spokesperson said the company has begun to use the Department of Homeland Security‘s E-verify system (formerly known as Basic Pilot) to check the authenticity of documents provided by new hires.
On Dec. 12, ICE arrested two people accused of selling identification to immigrants who used it to get jobs at Electrolux. The two have been charged by a grand jury of the US District Court. Also on Dec. 12, ICE arrested 14 suspected undocumented immigrants, New Orleans-based ICE spokesperson Temple Black confirmed. On Dec. 19, ICE arrested four immigrant workers at the Electrolux facility; by the end of the day onDec. 20, ICE had arrested 11 more immigrants at homes and apartments in and around Springfield. The raids spread fear through the area, with some people estimating that as many as 1,000 residents have since fled the city or gone into hiding. [The Gannett and Robertson County Times (Springfield, TN) 1/9/08, Robertson County Times 12/19/07; NewsChannel5.com 12/15/07]
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It is now estimated that about 1,000 people have fled Springfield, Tenn. or gone into hiding in the wake of the raids and the terror they have caused.
Immigration News Briefs is a weekly supplement to Weekly News Update on the Americas, published by Nicaragua Solidarity Network, 339 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10012; tel 212-674-9499; weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Subscribe by sending an email to immigrationnewsbriefs@gmail.com with the words “subscribe” in the subject header.
The Special Revolution Issue on Bob Avakian, a concentrated expression of A.P.& P.
I urge you to read Bob Avakian’s own public argument in favor of his cult of personality in the January 13 issue of Revolution.
Avakian has previously talked openly about his cult of personality, including the following from his 2005 memoir:
“I remember, for example, being challenged by someone interviewing me — I believe this was on a college radio station in Madison, Wisconsin — who asked insistently: ‘Is there a “cult of personality” developing around Bob Avakian?’ And I replied: ‘I certainly hope so — we’ve been working very hard to create one.’” (page 393)
More recently this cult of personality is referred to by an Avakian formulation: as the “culture of appreciation, promotion, and popularization around the leadership, the body of work and the method and approach of Bob Avakian.” (This tongue-twister is understandably shortened to “A.P.& P.” in RCP jargon).
Some of Avakian’s own thinking on the need for this “culture of appreciation” is now more publicly elaborated. Read the rest of this entry »
In April 2006, after long years of Maoist peoples war in Nepal’s countryside, a powerful mass movement broke out in the country’s urban areas demanding an overthrow of the hated monarchy. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) initiated a series of political shifts, seeking to deepen its political connection with the rebelling urban masses — moves which the party describes as a part of its creative approach toward the seizure of power.
As part of this political offensive and accompanying negotiations, the Maoists agreed to move their armed forces into “cantonments” under international supervision and to store its weapons in nearby depots. This suspension of the armed struggle has been highly controversial among communists internationally — as have other tactics of the Nepali Maoists which depart from certain “models” of communist revolution rooted in previous revolutions.
Some forces have argued that these moves would inevitably lead to the dissolution or smashing of the revolutionary armed forces — i.e. to the disarming of the masses and the abandonment of the revolutionary struggle for a new society.
Because of that controversy it has been particularly interesting to read the following recent account of the Peoples Liberation Army forces in a canton located in the lowland areas close to the Indian border (and the Indian army).
I have been a frequent visitor to the PLA cantonment in Chitwan over the past five months, where I also give English classes to PLA commanders. There is much disinformation in the Nepali and international media regarding the PLA, based on ignorance and prejudice. Here are some of the things I have seen. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last year, there has been a mass movement of unapologetic youth posting their atheist views and (often humorous) renunciation of the Holy Spirit on youtube.
Here is a stunned report from Fox on this trend:
Here is the video that birthed this:
You can see the many heartfelt statements by searching youtube for the “blasphemy challenge.” Debate also raged as believers responded with their own videos.
7 January 2008. A World to Win News Service. Following are excerpts from “Coup within the Coup”, an article on President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan, in the December 2007 issue of Sholeh Javid (Eternal Flame), newspaper of the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan. Though written before the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, its information and analysis is still very relevant. The explanations in parentheses are ours. Overall, General Pervez Musharraf indicated three reasons for declaring a state of emergency in Pakistan:
Extraordinary terrorism intensified and expanded by political extremism, particularly Islamic extreme fundamentalism.
The collapse of governmental structures due to increased lack of coordination among governmental institutions, particularly a lack of coordination between the judiciary and executive branches.
People’s doubts about the country’s future cohesion.
General Musharraf did not mention anything about the regional and international factors behind this situation. However, it was not produced by factors internal to Pakistan alone; regional and international issues also play an important role.In fact, Pakistan was originally conceived by Moslem feudal lords, supported by Mohammad Ali Jinah and the Moslem League under his leadership, in opposition to the land reform proposed by the Congress Party of India. Therefore, feudalism has been one of the fundamental hallmarks of Pakistan right from its inception.
Based on the feudal class structure of the Pakistani state, the country has been marked by Islamism, militarism and pro-Western- ism. Pakistan is a country only 60 years old (founded on 14 August 1947, when Pakistan and India became independent from Great Britain). It foundation was based on the idea that “two nations exist in India”: one a Hindu nation and the other a Moslem nation. Generally speaking, both these regions of formerly British India lacked cohesiveness, and the areas inhabited mainly by Moslems that became Pakistan lacked even geographic coherence as well as any national unity. In this regard Pakistan and India are both considered multinational countries, not single nation countries. Pakistan was made up of five regions, each with its own majority nationality: Read the rest of this entry »
The following is a 31 December 2007 press release from Rajkishor, General Secretary of the Revolutionary Democratic Front of India. (rdfindia@gmail.com) We received the text from A World to Win News Service.
On 19 December, the Kerala police, under the orders of the Ernakulum Police Commissioner, raided the room of Govindan Kutty, 65, the editor and publisher of Peoples March – which is not a banned publication – and confiscated all his literature and computer hard disk. Govindan Kutty was arrested under the charges of spreading sedition and indulging in unlawful activities and was remanded in judicial custody by a lower court at Aluva in Kerala. He was implicated in a fabricated case under a number of clauses like section 134A and 163B of the Indian Penal Code and 13 of (1) b of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and sent to Aluva prison.
The Left Democratic Front (LDF) government in the state, under the close instructions of UPA Government at the Centre, resorted to this crackdown on the popular revolutionary magazine. Govindan Kutty, according to his lawyers, was harassed and psychologically tortured for a day in the name of interrogation before being sent to judicial custody. Ever since he was arrested he was on hunger strike protesting against the trampling down of his right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
He continues his protest within the four walls of the prison, demanding his unconditional release. His lawyer, who met him two days ago, said that his health condition was serious, given his age and chronic ailments he has been suffering. His life is under a serious threat.
The arrest of Govindan Kutty and the police crackdown on the office of the publication was an attack on the freedom of press. Read the rest of this entry »
Street demonstrations in Nepal’s capital in September 2007 when the Maoists pulled out of the government coalition in protest over the refusal of other forces to overthrow the ancient and hated monarchy.
The second edition of RED STAR has just appeared. This is the new online English language newspaper reporting on the Maoist revolution in Nepal. I am printing it all out for a close read.
However I do want to call to attention a brief-but-significant passage in an interview with Netrabikram “Biplab” Chand, who is described as a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).
This passage acknowledges that the Nepali Maoists are facing criticisms from some forces internationally. Everyone has seen the criticisms of the Maoist of India (so that part is not a surprise). But Biplab also specifically mentions Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA as one of those doing the criticizing.
This too is not surprising — because almost anyone watching the RCP realizes that they simply stopped writing their own commentary on the Nepali revolution in the Spring of 2006. Such an abrupt end to their previous enthusiastic reporting was an obvious sign that they had differences with the CPN(Maoist) that amounted to a cessation of support.
I say “almost anyone” because one group of people may be surprised: Many supporters of the RCP seem unaware of such differences. This is because they have been on a rather strict information diet — in which many details of their own movement (including major parts of the RCP’s own political and ideological line, and major setbacks in the RCP’s work) are simply kept from them. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Moore in the letter below captures, like a snapshot, the misery and the logic of many progressive people. Believing that change can only come electorally, many are reduced to poring over the differences among the various establishment candidates, trying to find a reason to pick one over the other.
We all remember Michael’s muckraking films. And some of us (regretfully) remember his lowest moment, when (following his same logic) he denounced the movement to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal — as an insane diversion from the issues that “ordinary Americans” care about. And we all remember the way he threw himself into the Nader/Green 2000 presidential campaign, and then joined those who believed they had tragically helped elect George W. Bush.
Now firmly back among Democrats (as so many of Nader’s former supporters are), Moore confronts the core problem of this course: that the establishment of this party is fully and profoundly committed to empire and the system as it exists, while he and much of the Democratic political base is opposed to this Iraq war and genuinely motivated of many outrages and oppressions that fill people’s lives.
This schism within the Democratic Party is one of the hottest faultlines of U.S. society — and it is the one that needs to ignite in order for revolutionary change to have any chance. A partial rupture in that faultline over Vietnam (in 1968) brought the whole 1960s to its highest boiling point — as LBJ’s successor HHH proved incapable of bringing millions back into the system, and revolutionary sentiments burst into open contention within a whole generation.
How do we answer the Michael Moores of today? How do we grapple with their stubborn and deeply-seated illusions? What is it that we see and they don’t? And, what may they be focusing on that many of us choose to ignore? What are the places where their hopes collide with what is possible? What are the breaking points where they realize they CAN’T support one of the major parties, and MUST (however reluctantly) seek other means and movements for raising their demands? How and where do we speak to them in language that they can hear, and in a message that forwards the revolutionary change that the world truly needs?
Bill Dunne used to call out to me some afternoons and invite me to sit with him on his porch. We’d chew and spit, eat a little bit, and talk together, high on a hill overlooking the rest of the coal camp. We could see far up the valley where the murky Elk Horn River churned west toward its merger with the Tug Fork, and then toward Kentucky. As my smart-mouthed kid and his friends played in the yard, Bill and I would watch the mile-long trains of coal cars roll along the river’s banks.
The old man would sometimes stop, mid-thought, and cough till his body was bent in spasms. The dust was eating the last of his lungs away. Breath was hard to get. But on those days when he was feeling well, Mr. Bill could go on with stories of what he had seen and felt and never forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »
7 January 2008. 
Michael Moore in the letter below captures, like a snapshot, the misery and the logic of many progressive people. Believing that change can only come electorally, many are reduced to poring over the differences among the various establishment candidates, trying to find a reason to pick one over the other.
