Adrienne suggested we post the following piece. Her reasons are obvious. It appeared in BBC News.
Free market flawed, says survey
By James Robbins
Diplomatic correspondent, BBC News
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.
In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.
Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.
There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.
Economic regulation
In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, it was a victory for ordinary people across Eastern and Central Europe.
It also looked at the time like a crushing victory for free-market capitalism.
Twenty years on, this new global poll suggests confidence in free markets has taken heavy blows from the past 12 months of financial and economic crisis.
20 millian yuan, in waterproof oilskins, retrieved from a pool where it had been hidden by former Chongqing Justice Dept. director Wen Qiang, a corrupt element exposed by Bo Xilai.
Capitalist restoration in China has unleashed the kinds of massive and systemic corruption that are typical in societies with powerful bureaucratic capitalist classes. It is hated by the people — who see the often shocking results, including when shoddy school buildings collapsed during earthquakes killing large numbers of children.
By contrast, the revolutionary days of Mao Zedong are widely remembered as being free from corruption, and as being a time when people felt the spirit of “serve the people” operating as a guiding principle.
It is not surprising, then, that various reform forces among the bureaucrat capitalists themselves repeatedly wrap themselves in that memory — and portray themselves as the inheritors of this or that feature of the earlier socialist society. Such people are not Maoists in any real or deep sense — but their adoption of that symbolism shows the many powerful ways that the Maoist legacy lingers — in the memory and desires of the ordinary people — and how the figure of Mao rises up (again and again) in many ways to indict and challenge the reckless and unrestrained capitalism of today’s society.
The following piece appeared on the blog “Serve the People” under the original title, “Bo Xilai and China’s Maoist Party.”It includes a report on a new party called the Communist Party of China (Maoist) — accompanied by a wise warning that it may be a hoax.
Saadia Toor is an assistant professor at Staten Island College, author of a forthcoming book on Pakistan from Pluto Press, and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan.
The Pakistani Army has launched a major offensive against Taliban forces in the province of Waziristan. What is behind this assault, and what impact will it have on the people there?
The Army had been warning ever since it attacked in Swat earlier this year that its next move would be in South Waziristan. This area is incredibly undeveloped and has become a stronghold of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (or TTP), which had been led by Baitullah Mehsud until he was killed in drone attack conducted by the U.S. earlier this year
In the run-up to this assault, there was a series of attacks and suicide attacks on state facilities across Pakistan as a warning to the Army to back off from the incursion. The TTP took responsibility for most of these.
However, under a lot of pressure from the U.S., and with full U.S. military support, the Pakistani Army has unleashed its terror in South Waziristan.
Just as we witnessed in Swat, the Army is causing another humanitarian catastrophe. It has already driven 150,000 people from the area, and experts estimate that at least 250,000 people — over half the population — will be forced to flee from the fighting. The government has stated that it is not going to make any arrangements to accommodate the refugees, because they supposedly all have families they can stay with! Read the rest of this entry »
“A présent nous nous concentrons sur le mouvement de masse… Nous pouvons maintenant vraiment pratiquer ce que nous avons enseigné. Cela signifie la fusion de la stratégie de GPP [Guerre Populaire Prolongée] et de la tactique d’insurrection générale. Ce que nous avons fait depuis 2005 est le chemin de préparation pour l’insurrection générale par notre travail dans les zones urbaines et notre participation dans le gouvernement de coalition.”
- Leader Maoïste Baburam Bhattarai, entretien avec le Mouvement de Résistance Populaire Mondial basé en Grande-Bretagne, le 26 octobre 2009
As the U.S. military honors itself in Fort Hood over the bodies of more dead, and as the new President considered his next escalation of unjust wars, we offer this beloved song by the Irish band Fureys. (It was originally called “No Man’s Land” by songwriter Eric Bogle.)
It reports a discussion with Baburam Bhattarai in which he says “contradictory statements from our leaders is one of our weaknesses.”
This is an acknowledgment of an obvious fact: That for a long time, the public remarks by leading Maoists in Nepal have contradicted each other, pointing in different directions and giving different explanations for policy. It is true of individual leaders (including Bhattarai himself) that their remarks (to put it mildly) vary.
This fact has produced quite a bit of debate among those of us who follow the Nepali revolution closely. It has caused controversy. Some forces internationally have seized on this or that phrase to justify their views (often their dismissal) of the Nepali Maoist strategies — as the rest of us repeatedly discover that other phrases are used at other times and create a more textured complexity to that party’s public expression.
What explains this?
Is it the case that the Nepali Maoists have “loosened” the hold of public discipline — allowing different leaders to act as individual public political players expressing their individual views?
Is it the case that the line struggle within the Maoist party has become sharp enough that different factions are publicly making their case and fighting for adherents?
Is it the case that the Maoists are expressing both tactical slogans in the politics of each moment (especially to the daily press), while also expressing long range strategic goals (especially in more formal documents)?
Kasama’s regular commentator Green-Red recently wrote that while the immediate upsurge is over, the question of Iran continues sharply on the U.S. left — and captures larger issues about whether we should embrace any forces in the Third World that (one way or another) run afoul of the U.S. Green-Red described his frustration meeting people who “think that since Ahmadinejad shakes hand and makes deals with Chavez, he’s gotta be a great progressive guy!”
Green-Red suggested that we post the following polemical piece (which he describes as “a very nice and SIMPLE article”). It appeared in International Socialist Review (Sept./Oct. 2009) as part of a column called “Critical Thinking.”
Why are some U.S. leftists siding with the repressive Iranian regime against pro-democracy protesters?
At the beginning of August, the government of Iran launched a trial against more than 100 of its most prominent opponents, claiming that they had conspired with foreign governments to overthrow the Iranian regime by organizing a campaign to discredit the legitimacy of the country’s presidential election in June. Among those accused were former vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, former deputy interior minister Mohammad Atrianfar, former deputy economic minister Mohsen Safai-Farahani, former deputy speaker of the Parliament Behzad Nabavi, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, as well as various Iranians living outside the country. That the conservative theocratic Iranian government, which has faced widespread street protests since the disputed election, should respond to its critics in this way was perhaps not surprising. Sadly, however, over the past few months, similar accusations have been leveled against the protesters by sections of the U.S. left.
This article appeared on the New York Times op-ed page on Nov. 9, 2009.
20 Years of Collapse
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the world suddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few months earlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president?
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn, as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist, nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.
The National Democratic Front (NDF)-Mindanao has received more information regarding the actual participation of US soldiers in combat operations in Mindanao. This time, the operations are not just in Basilan and Sulu, but in other areas of the island as well. According to confirmed reports, US military personnel have been playing an active role in combat operations against the NPA in the hinterlands of Bukidnon.
Four separate incidents were initially cited. Around mid-February and in early July, US soldiers were seen participating in combat operations in Quezon, Bukidnon. These troops, together with a unit of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), engaged an NPA unit in a firefight and committed fascist acts against the residents in the area. In April and again in September, US troops were also sighted with AFP soldiers in Valencia and Malaybalay asking local residents for possible NPA locations and even intimidating civilians in the area. Read the rest of this entry »
The diversity of the landscapes of the solar system are both beautiful in their own right and significant to our understanding of particularity and complexity. Before encountering them, we generally formed a mind picture that made them seem somewhat drab, uniform, and perhaps even similar from planet to planet. But the anticipated experience was gray compared to reality. And I suspect there is a general truth to this — including about our social future and the novelty of coming experiences.
* * * * * * *
From the original posting:
Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings – very cold, dry and distant, yet real.
Kasama has learned that the new EROL has been launched – as part of the larger, respected Marxist Internet Archives. It includes a history of anti-revisionist politics and an archive of anti-revisionist documents and newspapers. Salute to Paul and his co-workers for all their effort.
Here is the new site’s own description of its focus and purpose.
Anti-Revisionism and
the Anti-Revisionist Movement
by Paul Costello
Historically, in the Communist lexicon, the term “anti-revisionism” has been used to describe opposition to attempts to revise, modify or abandon the fundamentals of revolutionary theory and practice in a manner that was perceived to represent concessions to Communism’s adversaries.
Kasama received the following commentary from Jose the Red Fox.
Comrades,
It is exactly 15 years to the day, when the Clinton administration implemented its “prevention-through-deterrence” strategy along the U.S.-Mexico border. This past Monday, one of the chief architects of
that strategy, Gus De La Vina passed away. I generally respect the
dead but not this one, specially in the context of so many obituaries
praising his “work”.
Sorry, I won’t mourn the death of the Border Patrol chief who implemented a border control strategy–”Operation Gatekeeper” in 1994–that has lead to the deaths of over 5,000 migrants while crossing or attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Our solidarity is with the victims of imperialist globalization, not with the technocrats of empire and death.
“[N]ow we are focusing on the mass movement… [N]ow we [can] really practice what we have been preaching. That means the fusion of the strategy of PPW [Protracted People’s War] and the tactic of general insurrection. What we have been doing since 2005 is the path of preparation for general insurrection through our work in the urban areas and our participation in the coalition government.”
– Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai, interview with the Britain-based World People’s Resistance Movement, October 26, 2009
Today (November 1) Nepal’s Maoists initiate, with torch rallies in Kathmandu, a mass movement to bring down the regime. This is the regime that succeeded the one their chair Prachanda headed as prime minister from August 2008 to May 2009–a compromise arrangement, always understood to be temporary and transitional, that collapsed when the Nepali Army refused to take orders from the Maoist prime minister.
Prime Minister Prachanda, noting the obvious (that the Maoists’ suspension of the People’s War and participation in parliamentary processes had not really given them state power), might have then ordered the resumption of the war. Instead, the first elected Maoist national leader made a surprising (I think even shrewdly Gandhian) move of resigning his post, while his party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) redoubled its efforts to organize support among the urban masses of Kathmandu.
Supporters of the Maoist revolutionary movement staging a torch rally on the first day of the second round of protests against the President’s move to overrule the erstwhile government’s decision to sack the then army chief in Kathmandu, Sunday, Nov 01 09. nepalnews.com/rh
Maoists begin second round of protests against President’s move Sunday, 01 November 2009 20:13
The Unified CPN (Maoist) has begun its second round of protests against the President’s move to overrule the erstwhile government’s decision to sack the erstwhile Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) Rookmangud Katawal from Sunday.
The main tactic of the western media has been to ignore the growing Maoist revolutions in South Asia — to treat them as marginal events (and to treat their areas of strength as marginal territories). Now that is changing — the Indian army has decided to try to “encircle and suppress” a major Maoist base area inside the Red Corridor, and suddenly the world press announces that the Maoists are a “threat” (and in the opening paragraphs compare their strength to the Taliban of Afghanistan….. no subliminal message there?)
This is happening at the very same time that there are signs of a showdown between the Nepali Maoists and the royalist Nepali Army (and rumors of a rightwing coup in Kathmandu).
What is the relationship between the events in India and Nepal? Is this a joint military attempt to “mop up” the two revolutions together? Or is this a sign that the two movements, the Maobadi and the Naxalites, have together started to pose a discernable strategic challenge — not just to their local ruling classes but to the larger capitalist system.
BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.
“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.
Adrienne suggested we post the following piece. Her reasons are obvious. It appeared in BBC News.
A War of Terror in Pakistan: Interview with Saadia Toor 
