Mike, it's weird that you accuse me of "very little investigation into the actual power relations and decision-making" in the UCPN (Maoist), just as TNL routinely accuses me of not wanting to learn, when I am the one driving the discussion toward these substantive issues. Indeed, if we relied on WHIE's lead, we'd be stuck discussing vital questions like old poems and Uday's opinions on Troy Davis.

I think your post hits on the core difference between us. Although we both advocate "power to the people," you dismiss and minimize the use of democratic procedures through which people can set social policies. What matters to you is not what people actually say but rather THE PEOPLE as an abstraction. You think that Maoists represent "the people" even if the actual people in question--men, women, and children—reject Maoist views. This does not trouble you because Maoists, as Maoists, represent "the people."

I regard this as profoundly arrogant, dangerous, and one of the reasons why groups like the RCP could spend decades fighting for "the people" while doing nothing to improve real people's lives (and developing dozens of compensatory mechanisms to explain their irrelevance).

For my sake, I believe that mass movements should have the capacity to set their movements' policies and also revoke and recall their leadership. I believe that they should be able to do these things through binding, durable, and transparent democratic procedures. At the broadest level, I also believe that people--real people, not THE PEOPLE abstractly—should be able to determine the course of the society in which they live.

Obviously, the operation of any movement is complicated and full of tendencies and counter-tendencies that need to be explored and sorted out but, regardless of these complexities, you and I have a major difference of principle when it comes to the issue of democracy.

What does this mean for Nepal? I know little about the country and, like you and the WHIE people, don't speak Nepali, but, at the most basic, I can say that I believe that the Nepalese people should have the capacity to determine the fate of Nepal—not abstractly through a party that magically divines their needs, but concretely through stable democratic structures.

Mike says:


<blockquote>
'Nepal’s revolution rests on a revolutionary people, a revolutionary communist core and a still-existing revolutionary army. Each of these things is precious and the result of great work and sacrifice. And the existence of each is now under attack.'</blockquote>



This sounds like a fantasy. The revolution ended years ago when the CPN(M) embraced bourgeois democracy and decided to dissolve the revolutionary governments.

It's nonsensical to keep pretending that a revolution in Nepal is going to happen despite the fact that the leadership of the erstwhile revolutionary party long ago gave up on revolution. It's nonsensical to argue that a 'revolutionary army' exists when it has given up all its weapons.

Where is this 'revolutionary communist core'? People like Kiran who raised a few hair-splitting objections to the course pursued by Dahal and Bhattarai since 2005? Sometimes people just have to admit that they were wrong...

CWM writes:

<blockquote>"I think your post hits on the core difference between us.”</blockquote>

Yes, that's why I wrote it, of course. And because it hits (hopefully) on issues that engage other people.

The value of studying revolutionary movements -- including the ones that are defeated -- is that we can learn a great deal about how radical programs grip sections of the people, how (as Mao says) "ideas can become a material force."

We live at a time when (unfortunately) whole generations have emerged who have never seen actual communist movements first hand -- and so the revolutionary dreams we embrace are often resting on a rather fragile and romanticized view of how change happens.

The fusion of revolutionary ideas with sections of the people is a precious thing -- and there emerges a powerful back and forth of mutual transformation as movements are created and as they mature -- and as "the struggle" changes from being a mere idea to being an actual clash of contending forces fighting (in different direction) to influence the direction of society.

While we agree that we have differences, I have to say, however, that you seem to distort (or misread) what those differences are.

<blockquote>"Although we both advocate “power to the people,” you dismiss and minimize the use of democratic procedures through which people can set social policies."</blockquote>

On the contrary, I neither dismissed nor minimized them. I pointed out that the lack of such procedures is not the problem in the current line struggle.

And I pointed out that the last twenty years have seen an explosion of popular struggle for power, and the establishment of numerous new institutions for creating popular power -- and that the Maoist movement has been at the core and the forefront of that struggle.

And further I pointed out that the current line struggle is over <em>how</em> and <em>for whom</em> power will be exercised -- and that it doesn't lie (fundementally) in the invention of new procedures within the revolutionary movement -- but in what goals and programs that movement adopts.

<blockquote>"What matters to you is not what people actually say but rather THE PEOPLE as an abstraction."</blockquote>

Let me suggest that exactly the opposite is true. The illusions of mechanical democratic procedures precisely treat the people as an abstraction, and treats the specific movement and its conflicts as irrelevant.

For you, the formality of democracy is the issue -- as if formal precedures of base democracy will lead to liberation.

<blockquote>"You think that Maoists represent “the people”..."</blockquote>

Well actually, if you think about it, the issue is that the Maoists are not monolithic and do not simply or automatically represent the people.

And the people themselves are not monolithic, don't have a single will (that can be heard, obeyed or thwarted in some simplistic way). there are different classes among the people, There are different programs and views. There are people who are engaged and conscious, and others who are relatively less engaged and conscious.

And the emergence of liberation from that is not simple (now or ever) a matter of procedures -- or simply letting people in large numbers "decide" -- since as we know from U.S. experience, people can formally "decide" (in formally democratic ways) over and over in many ways, and end up with oppression and a society utterly outside their control.

You accuse me of believing that the communists "represent the people"

<blockquote>".... even if the actual people in question–men, women, and children—reject Maoist views. This does not trouble you because Maoists, as Maoists, represent 'the people.'”</blockquote>

Well i think this is a distortion and obviously so.

Take the situation in the U.S. I think that radical programs of change represent <em>the interests</em> of the people, even if they are not aware of it. It is common (especially in "normal" times) for radical politics to be embraced by a minority -- and for many people to embrace politics that doesn't serve them. You know this, and everyone reading this knows it.

It is the case today in the U.S.

Many historic and necessary actions started with a small minority -- there is nothing wrong or undemocratic about that.

Radical changes would never have started at all if they had required an affirmative vote from everyone affected at every step of the process.

Do you imagine that the Freedom Rides weren't very controversial <em>even among the Black people of the South</em>? Do you propose that we cannot initiate campaigns and put forward programs that don't (somehow) emerge spontaneously from below?

There is an objective process by which the struggles of the oppressed are able to serve their own highest interests. It is not automatic, and sometimes doesn't happen at all. Some mass movements <em>don't</em> represent the interests of the people -- even if they represent the <em>will</em> of some of the people.It involves an interaction between political representatives of various kinds with the most active among the people -- it involves a dynamic process (up and down) within political movements (including both concentrated policies proposed by leaders, and accountability enforced by ongoing struggle and organizational means).

It is not as simple as simply taking a poll at every point, and then simply doing whatever the popular mood of the moment suggests.The people are precisely <em>not</em> an abstraction -- that monolithicly know what it wants, and where what it wants is naturally what it needs, or when the people (as some abstracted whole) can automatically and inherently know the way forward.

To argue naively that formal procedures are key is (unintentionally perhaps) to accept the present status quo forever -- since no radical change has ever emerged that way.

Those racial actions that were developed mass support (the urban rebellions of the 60s, the days of May in France 1968, the Paris Commune, the Spanish resistance to Franco's fascist coup, and many others we could mention) were all controversial in their time (not just among the actual oppressors, but among the people themselves), and were never dependent on first gaining some fixed and clear majority of the people before the advanced could act.

It would be a far different world if the <em>only</em> obstacle to liberation was the denial of a popular voice.

Actual liberation involves a far more complex process -- where alternative programs and proposals have to be consciously and creatively formulated (through investigation, and even trial and error) and then fought for politically (including among the oppressed themselves). And where political forces need to learn from the people in a dynamic process. It is a process where the people themselves (in all their complexity) have to be won over (from one politics to another), where people (in large numbers) have to learn difficult truths about reality (that are often obscured or denied them in "normal" times.)

And the communist approach is not hardly to assert "fuck the people, we are the people" in such situations... tho that is what you claim.

Look at the history of any significant revolutionary movement (as it goes from small to influential) -- and you will see the real life process and difficult work of creating partisan political support, developing allies, exposing the old system, engaging in a process where false roads are exposed.... and more.

CWM doesn't care what you say, or what communists actually do. He has a doctrine, he is wed to it and the facts will fit. That's why he insists Maoist claim "they are the people" when this has nothing to do with any actual Maoism, now or historically.

Mike, you are remarkably charitable in your arguments. It's hard to talk with dogmatists. [moderator snip] Thank you.

<strong>Joseph Ball:</strong> Nepal has had a revolution. They have overthrown a monarchy and are, right now, establishing a federal democratic republic. What they have not done is what you have insisted on: establish a militarized party-state that rules over the people of Nepal (in their name), much as CWM insists is the communist program.

So, I think Joseph should be commended in arriving to THIS discussion, as the position he argues for (without an army to back it up, of course) is that "the people" are simply fodder for and ideological priest-cadre class to rule over, with all the symbols and rhetoric of liberators.

The arguments of anti-communism don't come from nowhere. No doubt there were millions who lived and died in alienated "socialist" states, as apparachiks and ideologues — and they've left libraries filled with their doctrines. Of those who have gone through such experiences, of being ruled in the name of the working class by state capitalists — it's only fair that many have summed up "there is no alternative" to the meat grinder of capitalism.

From the responses here, I think CWM and Joseph are more or less arguing the same thing: that any living political process involving the masses of people is at best a mirage, and more likely a fraud. They've just retreated to their respective orthodoxies for cold comfort. Neither of which has any realizable way to move forward outside the realm of dismissing everyone else who isn't caught in the same cynical traps.

[moderator snip of personal snarkiness]

Mike, I can think of many cases in which a group voted democratically to do something I abhor (for instance, some racist act) as well as cases in which a group decided undemocratically to do something that I support (for instance, shut down a freeway to protest a war). Like I said, there are all sorts of complexities. Of Course.

I nonetheless believe that democracy--in a formal and substantive sense—-is a supreme, normative value and that it must be the guiding principle in organizing opposition and social reconstruction. That is a statement of principle on my part. Obviously it doesn't negate all the relevant complexities, but I think it is here that you and I differ on the most fundamental level.

slightly confused asking for clarification.been reading kasama and other places for news about nepal maoists, and the following things are unclear to me.
are the Kiran left wing calling for insurrection/revolution or just for some minor changes to the constitution, a bit more left than Prachanda and bhattarai but substantially the same?

has there been a revolution in Nepal? is there still a revolution in Nepal? ( hard to say for me because we can ask if there has been a revolution in Egypt? depends on what we mean by revolution)
there is also a suggestion of a kind of 'sell out' and a 'historic compromise', of Bhattarai as 'gravedigger of the revolution'. what do people think on these issues?

Mike, if you see revolution not as an event but as a process—charactered by the fact that revolutionaries are active in it—then there is also a revolution in the United States, Iceland, Russia, Baltimore, etc. After all, revolutionaries are active in those places too and could one day be victorious. . . . The term becomes too broad.

CWM,

There is a both a qualitative quantitative difference between the sad state of the left in the United States and a (once) living breathing revolutionary mass movement (in this case of revolutionary China, and Nepal). I don't think Small, isolated, sectarian, and ultimately insignificant groups in the case of the United States, can be compared to political movements that (and have) drawn in the active involvement of millions of people to reshape both the economic and social relations of a country.

For the record, I too "believe that democracy–in a formal and substantive sense—-is a supreme, normative value and that it must be the guiding principle in organizing opposition and social reconstruction." The problem, and it is right there between the hyphens, is that the formal and the substantive meanings of democracy are not fixed and are in fact frequently in contradiction with each other, for all of the reasons that Mike describes. The relationship between the formal and substantive content of democracy in a revolutionary process is dialectical in the sense that it is always developing. The formal procedures of democratic functioning -- voting, electing leadership, processes of discussion, etc... -- are not trivial. They are real conquests of struggle. Building a mass revolutionary political party, for instance, through which millions of people historically excluded from any exercise of political power at all, the whole process of putting in place and making real the formal mechanisms through which that happens is critically important. There is however an inherent tension between the substantive and formal aspects of democracy at any particular moment precisely because living democracy is always developing. Formal procedures are, by their very definition, a crystalization of prior struggles that inevitably come up against what is new and emerging and therefore not yet crystalized in formal procedures.

Let me offer an example from the history of the Zapatistas, Mike writes: "No armed attempt at power has been decided (or even launched) by first having a majority of the people (or even of the cadre) that can formally approve it in advance."

There is an exception to this claim. One of the most interesting chapters in the in the lead up to the Zapatista uprising occurred in 1992 when the EZLN, the existence of which was still a secret, organized village assemblies in probably around 400 Zapatista villages to discuss and vote on whether to declare war on the Mexican state and launch an armed uprising with the intention of overthrowing the government and installing a new and revolutionary government.

These assemblies were apparently the scene of lively debates. While Marcos and other leading members of the EZLN were travelling from village to village making the case for war, members of the pastoral staff of the Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas were visiting the same villages and arguing against the proposal. On at least one occasion Marcos debated the Dominican priest responsible for the parish that included most of the Lacandon jungle. Nonetheless the assemblies voted overwhelmingly in favor of directing the EZLN to prepare for and launch the uprising that they in fact launched on January 1, 1994.

This process of formal democratic legitimation had all sorts of consequences. First, of course, it did much to cement the communities together in their commitment to to carry out the uprising. As it became known in the aftermath of the uprising it also lent enormous moral weight to the uprising in the eyes of outside observers. So this would seem like an example that supports CWM's views and runs contrary to Mike's.

But on closer inspection things get a lot messier.

The first thing to note is that the assemblies were organized precisely in those villages that Marcos and other EZLN leaders believed in advance would approve the decision to go to war. Not every indigenous village in eastern Chiapas or in the Lacandon Jungle got to vote. In fact not even a majority of them did. The EZLN had different degrees of support in different villages and regions when all this happened. Some villages were 100% Zapatista and those were of course the most likely to vote (unanimously) to go to war. In others they had solid majorities but there were dissenting minorities. And in still others they were the dissenting or completely clandestine minority.

The second point concerns the rights of minorities. In village after village, the dissenting minorities who opposed the decision to go to war were expelled from their communities. They were forced to literally pack up and leave behind homes that they had built and land that they carved out of the jungle with their own sweat and blood. So before the uprising itself occurred the Zapatistas had already created thousands of political refugees. In this manner, of course, the communities could claim formal unanimity in support for the uprising, but only by undermining, at least at the level of the individual communities, a critical condition of substantive democracy -- the right to dissent.

A third point concerns the internal political regime of the EZLN itself. The EZLN was created by, and in 1992 still under the (non-indigenous) leadership of the Forces of National Liberation (the FLN). The FLN was a clandestine political-military organization with an organization presence in multiple cities and states across Mexico and the EZLN was supposed to be one of several regional armies under its command. In actual fact the attempts to establish other forces had failed where the EZLN had grown to the point where its ranks outnumbered considerably the rest of the FLN. The FLN had formal processes through which it made decisions. It was a thoroughly militarized organization, but people who joined it agreed to respect those rules. It also had certain principles, one of which was the subordination of the military apparatus of the organization to the political leadership which was a key component of the FLN's distinctive refusal of the fetishization of the gun and their recognition of the dangers of militarism.

The problem was that the FLN was deeply divided over the proposal to launch the uprising. The urban apparatus and much of the leadership was overwhelmingly opposed. They thought the international situation (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the negotiated end of armed struggles in Central America, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas) was inauspicious. They thought Marcos was confusing the political conditions in the indigenous communities with the conditions in Mexico as a whole. They thougt that the uprising would quickly be contained within one corner of the country and that the belief that it would win people across Mexico to join in was utopian. The village assemblies were, in effect an attempted end run around this opposition, and the FLNs formal procedures, what some have called a "military coup" led by Marcos within the FLN. The EZLN had three subComandantes who were supposed to answer to the FLN's comandancia. One of these, subComandante Daniel, opposed the uprising, was placed under arrest at Marcos's orders, and escaped to become the EZLN's highest ranking defector/snitch.

Personally (and with the benefit of hindsight that they did not have) I think the decision to launch the uprising was a good one, even though most of the concerns of the FLN's urban leadership were in fact correct. And because I think it was correct I think it was also good to give it as robust a formal democratic legitimation as possible. The organization of hundreds of assembles (the results of which were presented to the leadership of the FLN in January of 1993) to vote for an uprising in this manner, is a truly astounding -- if very risky -- accomplishment. I say that not because I think the vote actually fulfills any serious criteria of formal democracy. It was in fact highly irregular and problematic as I have indicated. It was the right thing to do nonetheless because on the substantive democratic question of the place of the millions of desperately poor indigenous campesinos within Mexico it served to force the question and to advance substantive democracy by giving them an army.

Marcos and the second and third tier indigenous military leadership of the EZLN represented the revolutionary aspirations of the vast majority of the Mexican people when they made the decision to rally the EZLNs core supporters to launch an uprising, even though it meant disregarding the formal procedures of the FLN, even though it excluded the many more non-Zapatista villages that were about to be dragged into a war, and even though carrying it out required, as a practical matter, silencing opponents under threat of making them internal refugees. And had they put the question of launching an uprising to the Mexican people they surely would have lost. At that critical moment this small advanced group of people represented the Mexican people, not in a formal way, but in their being attuned to a potential that was yearning to be born. This was not an act of treating the people as an abstraction, but it did involve -- as any genuinely revolutionary initiative must -- a judgement -- on their behalf and without their permission, but none the less grounded in the complex realities of their lives and struggles and an understanding of what was real but not yet realized. No formal democratic procedure can give the people of the future a vote and still it is necessary that they have a veto on the past.

TNL, the views you expressed in the comment above (#13) are very much consistent with mine. I would never argue that trying to build a democratic, mass revolutionary movement or trying to democratize society is a straightforward, simple process. Your examples from the Zapatistas are pertinent and I don't think it would be hard to come up with many others indicating how complicated all this can be. So, yes, I agree.

However, even given the complexities, I think that the Zapatista commitment to democracy is a significant achievement in the context of the history of revolutionary movements. That commitment helps (and helped) guide the goals of the movement and provides a vocabulary for criticizing anti-democratic machinations within it. In my view, it is an important premise of the Zapatistas and should be a premise of all revolutionary movements.

With respect to Nepal, it appears that the UCPN (Maoist) is largely run from the top down and there is only a very, very weak discourse of democracy within the party. I think that is a—perhaps THE—significant failing. If Eric's portrayal is accurate, it also appears that the lack of internal democracy was instrumental in allowing the leadership to undermine revolutionary momentum within the party.

CWM writes:

<blockquote>

"I think that the Zapatista commitment to democracy is a significant achievement in the context of the history of revolutionary movements. That commitment helps (and helped) guide the goals of the movement and provides a vocabulary for criticizing anti-democratic machinations within it."</blockquote>



Please point to an example of an open debate between identifiable trends within the EZLN or the Zapatista communities.

There is an assumption in your comments that the EZLN is more democratic in its internal practices than the Maobadi that I don't think withstands a close look at both. I think it is worth teasing out the differences.

The first thing that has to be noted is the very distinct histories of the countries in question. Mexico has had a republican constitution since 1824. Nepal only became a republic in 2008, in large measure a consequence of the actions of the Maobadi. This means that democratic rhetoric occupies a different place in each national culture. Every imaginable authoritarian current in Mexico claims the mantle of liberal democracy and they have been doing so for well over a century. The formal democratic processes of holding elections or even ratifying decisions in popular assemblies has long coexisted with substantively undemocratic processes. Many people with a superficial knowledge of the Zapatistas trumpet the supposedly democratic nature of indigenous village governance which makes extensive use of village assemblies. But such assemblies were a routine feature of the rule of PRIista caciques (local political bosses). I'm not suggesting that there aren't substantive differences between the Zapatista and PRIista communities in this regard. There are. But an important source of those differences was actually the work of Maoists who assisted in the construction of independent campesino organizations in the 1970s. The Maoists pushed hard against many of the substantively undemocratic features of village assemblies, fighting to make them more deliberative and pushing to include women and unmarried youth who had traditionally been excluded. In spite of this, progress was uneven and in the village where I did most of my work women and men met in separate assemblies and real political power still rested with the men. The role of the Maoists in Chiapas however was contradictory. An interesting aspect of this was the way that formal decentralization served to prevent the emergence of competing political lines with organized leadership, effectively concentrating power in the hands of a single leader, Adolfo Orive, who eventually made peace with the PRI and currently sits in the Mexican Congress as a representative of the Workers Party which is another story altogether.

The Maobadi, by contrast, are the product of very different histories including both that of Nepal and that of Maoism as political movement in Asia. This is a context with a much weaker tradition of formal democracy, but in the experience of the Chinese Revolution through its many phases, what I would argue was the greatest leap in substantive democracy in the history of humanity. If you haven't read Fanshen yet, you really should to properly appreciate this. The Leninist party form and its characteristic mechanisms of democratic centralism, all inherited by Maoism, has tended to be, at the very least formally and frequently substantively, far more centralized than democratic. And I think this is a serious problem (and part of why I don't call myself a Maoist). In Nepal however, there have been some striking innovations grounded in an analysis of the defeat of the Cultural Revolution. One of these has been the conduct of of open debates between competing lines within the the party. This is something completely absent in the practice of the Zapatistas where internal democracy on big matters of strategic orientation has taken the form of "consultations" with up and down votes that typically have approval rates similar to Alabanian election results under Enver Hoxha.

None of this meant as an atttack on the Zapatistas. I think that their experiments with autonomous municipalities and the regional Juntas de Buen Gobierno are important and valuable examples of the formal and substantive democratic administration of local affairs. But these are not the mechanisms through which the EZLN develops or decides on its political line in relation to the rest of Mexico or the world. Nor are the various encuentros and other gatherings through which the EZLN invites the thoughts of forces outside the communities but which never actually make decisions in a genuinely deliberative manner. No, the political line of the EZLN is developed between the CCRI-General Command and Marcos, neither of which, incidentally, were elected by the communities (though they would almost certainly win any election they decided to hold).

Contrast that with the meetings of thousands of UPCN(M) cadres where competing perspectives have actually been debated at length and put to a vote.

I make these observations not to simply suggest that the UPCN(M)'s fealty to formal democratic procedure is better than that of the EZLN, though I think it probably is. Rather my point is that Mike is correct here that these questions rarely come down to procedure. Formal democracy is made substantive first and foremost by the development of a political line that represents, brings forward, and unleashes the previously repressed revolutionary aspirations of the people. Such a line is not something obvious sitting around waiting to be picked up and applied. It is something that can only be forged through intense processes of struggle that may often appear lacking in terms of formal democratic procedure. In the context of such struggles, a fixation with procedure will as often as not be a marker of conservatism and the maintenance of arrangements that stand in the way of the advance of substantive democracy.

Just thought I'd throw in that I'm finding TNL's contributions on the EZLN here to be really fascinating. Can you recommend any pieces that explore this history in more detail?

Still a bit confused. let me ask more clearly-
are the left Kiran line getting ready for insurrection/revolution or not? if they are not calling for that, then I dont see how we can say there is a revolution.

Great to hear, count me in as a member of the chorus!

Ok, but how do you know about their secret plans? And if you know about them, then surely Prachand and Bhattarai do as well, and so do the Nepal army. Many people have gone with the Kasama secret revolution thing, but it is a bit unbelievable now. not necessarily wrong, but just seems extremely unlikely.

Am not at all sure if the following is in sync with this discussion, but would like to say that it seems to me that “democracy” and democratic forms have different aspects and it’s not some singular principle or form.

TNL said:

<blockquote> “Contrast that with the meetings of thousands of UPCN(M) cadres where competing perspectives have actually been debated at length and put to a vote.” </blockquote>

I was in Mexico City in January 1994, about a week after the Zapatista/Chiapas uprising. Little, if anything was known about the uprising in most of Mexico. The government and their controlled media (control such as people in the U.S. have only an inkling of) were burying the story as best they could. This was also an attempt to isolate the Lacandon people and the Zapatistas from the rest of the population...if there were any reports at all, the revolutionaries were portrayed as a tiny faction and the uprising an “isolated incident.”

Within a week of Jan. 1st,, representatives of the Zapatistas, and Lacandons went on the offensive, on another front, and took not only the event, but the politics to the Mexican people.. They set up plantones (a tent city) in the Zocalo in D.F., right in front of the Palacio del Gobierno, and were tireless in agitating, handing out leaflets, popularizing the uprising and revolution, talking with people, debating (although by the time they were better known there was little debate as to the righteousness of the uprising and struggle), connecting Chiapas with other mainly indigenous people in Mexico, etc.

The government was pretty freaked out. They closed off the Palacio del Gobierno, and other government buildings, for weeks. Tourists were met at the main door by soldiers with submachine guns, even if those same tourists just wanted to enter to see one of Diego Rivera’s murals.

And within a short period of time, the Zapatistas had become a household word, that is, in households that mattered.

I won’t go into my criticisms of the Zapatistas here, but what has always struck me about the UPCN(M), and the revolution in Nepal, is how overall transparent the revolutionary process has been, not just to the people of Nepal, but to people around the world.

I'm not able to touch on all the threads of the discussion here but I'll begin by saying that although I find the comparison between the UCPN and the Zapatistas instructive, it is not my analogy and I'm not arguing that the UCPN should become the Zapatistas. My main purpose in this discussion has been to ask questions about democratic practices within the UCPN (or lack thereof) and to defend the value of democracy generally. I want this to be unambiguous, given that my views are routinely distorted here and I am often subject to ad hominem attacks.

With respect to the UCNP (Maoist), I would be very interested in learning how different programs are debated by party members. Are there ballots? Does everyone have one vote? Are there study groups to prepare the debates on theses issues? Are study packets handed out? If so, what do they contain? All of this would be very interesting to me and, in my view, quite relevant to the types of political discussions that the left needs to have in the United States.

As far as the comparison between the UCPN and the Zapatistas, I do believe that there is a qualitative difference between the two when it comes to the issue of democracy and the turn toward democracy, toward being more democratic, is something I celebrate. At the most basic, ideological level, the Zapatistas fight for democracy—for inclusion, for an end to marginalization. They are fundamentally a democratic movement and have couched their identity very much in a critique of the undemocratic traits of the Marxist-Leninist left. The UCPN, on the other hand, is a Marxist-Lenininst group which is, obviously, oriented toward the proletariat and fighting for its class interests. Portraits of Stalin on UCPN banners tell me a great deal about the type of political culture advanced within the party.

I also think the Zaps emphasis on participation and discussion is totally unique in the history of the revolutionary left and, as I said, worth celebrating.

In my view, democracy, substantively and formally, IS the issue.

This discussion is bizarrely becoming a presentation that the Maobadi and the EZLN are engaged in some kind of authenticity contest. No. No. No.

<blockquote>'The simple fact is that preparations for insurrection/revolution (and formal organizational splits for that matter) are often not made publicly. Clearly public opinion is being made for pressing ahead for a seizure of power, for peoples democracy, for preserving (and using) the PLA.'</blockquote>


Again, we are in the realms of fantasy.

The UCPN(M) had revolutionary governments that ran most of the country. They gave all that up.

Kiran and Gaurav have never opposed the dissolution of the revolutionary governments. They always defended the turn towards bourgeois politics, although they had some non-signficant objections to how it was done.

Of course revolution might happen in Nepal, just as it might happen in, say, Botswana but there are no forces leading any large-scale revolutionary movement in Nepal at the moment. Given, fairly widespread sympathy for Left ideas in Nepal there might be a bit more potential here than in some places but at the moment there is no real leadership. The leadership that did exist have capitulated. For this reason a revolutionary upsurge anytime soon looks unlikely.

There's no point in trying to cling to things. The movement that groups like Kasama supported is now over.