Left Turn :: Virage a Gauche

Global rebellion: The coming chaos? Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into a quagmire of their own making, says author. William I. Robinson: 30 Nov 2011

2011-12-01T07:13:00.001-06:00

Source: Al Jazeera Opinion

Global elites have managed to capture the financial system, managing it to their own benefit [EPA]

As the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to proposal viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarised police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes are unable are to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and must resort to ever more generalised repression.
Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.
To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context. Global elites had hoped and expected that the "Great Depression" that began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has become clear that this is a structural crisis. Cyclical crises are on-going episodes in the capitalist system, occurring and about once a decade and usually last 18 months to two years. There were world recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century.
Structural crises are deeper; their resolution requires a fundamental restructuring of the system. Earlier world structural crises of the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s were resolved through a reorganisation of the system that produced new models of capitalism. "Resolved" does not mean that the problems faced by a majority of humanity under capitalism were resolved but that the reorganisation of the capitalist system in each case overcame the constraints to a resumption of capital accumulation on a world scale. The crisis of the 1890s was resolved in the cores of world capitalism through the export of capital and a new round of imperialist expansion. The Great Depression of the 1930s was resolved through the turn to variants of social democracy in both the North and the South - welfare, populist, or developmentalist capitalism that involved redistribution, the creation of public sectors, and state regulation of the market.
Globalisation and the current structural crisis
To understand the current conjuncture we need to go back to the 1970s. The globalisation stage of world capitalism we are now in itself evolved out the response of distinct agents to these previous episodes of crisis, in particular, to the 1970s crisis of social democracy, or more technically stated, of Fordism-Keynesianism, or of redistributive capitalism. In the wake of that crisis capital went global as a strategy of the emergent Transnational Capitalist Class and its political representatives to reconstitute its class power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation. These constraints - the so-called "class compromise" - had been imposed on capital through decades of mass struggles around the world by nationally-contained popular and working classes. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, globally-oriented elites captured state power in most countries around the world and utilised that power to push capitalist globalisation through the neo-liberal model.
Globalisation and neo-liberal policies opened up vast new opportunities for transnational accumulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolution in computer and information technology and other technological advances helped emergent transnational capital to achieve major gains in productivity and to restructure, "flexibilise," and shed labour worldwide. This, in turn, undercut wages and the social wage and facilitated a transfer of income to capital and to high consumption sectors around the world that provided new market segments fuelling growth. In sum, globalisation made possible a major extensive and intensive expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of accumulation worldwide that offset the 1970s crisis of declining profits and investment opportunities.
However, the neo-liberal model has also resulted in an unprecedented worldwide social polarisation. Fierce social and class struggles worldwide were able in the 20th century to impose a measure of social control over capital. Popular classes, to varying degrees, were able to force the system to link what we call social reproduction to capital accumulation. What has taken place through globalisation is the severing of the logic of accumulation from that of social reproduction, resulting in an unprecedented growth of social inequality and intensified crises of survival for billions of people around the world.
The pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation have generated social conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding it more and more difficult to contain. The slogan "we are the 99 per cent" grows out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation took off in the 1980s. Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility in recent decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century".
Global social polarisation intensifies the chronic problem of over-accumulation. This refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so that the global market is unable to absorb world output and the system stagnates. Transnational capitalists find it more and more difficult to unload their bloated and expanding mass of surplus - they can’t find outlets to invest their money in order to generate new profits; hence the system enters into recession or worse. In recent years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to militarised accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of over-accumulation.
While transnational capital’s offensive against the global working and popular classes dates back to the crisis of the 1970s and has grown in intensity ever since, the Great Recession of 2008 was in several respects a major turning point. In particular, as the crisis spread it generated the conditions for new rounds of brutal austerity worldwide, greater flexibilisation of labour, steeply rising under and unemployment, and so on. Transnational finance capital and its political agents utilised the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, to squeeze more value out of labour, directly through more intensified exploitation and indirectly through state finances. Social and political conflict has escalated around the world in the wake of 2008.
Nonetheless, the system has been unable to recover; it is sinking deeper into chaos. Global elites cannot manage the explosive contradictions. Is the neo-liberal model of capitalism entering a terminal stage? It is crucial to understand that neo-liberalism is but one model of global capitalism; to say that neo-liberalism may be in terminal crisis is not to say that global capitalism is in terminal crisis. Is it possible that the system will respond to crisis and mass rebellion through a new restructuring that leads to some different model of world capitalism - perhaps a global Keynesianism involving transnational redistribution and transnational regulation of finance capital? Will rebellious forces from below be co-opted into some new reformed capitalist order?
Or are we headed towards a systemic crisis? A systemic crisis is one in which the solution involves the end of the system itself, either through its supersession and the creation of an entirely new system, or more ominously the collapse of the system. Whether or not a structural crisis becomes systemic depends on how distinct social and class forces respond - to the political projects they put forward and as well as to factors of contingency that cannot be predicted in advance, and to objective conditions. It is impossible at this time to predict the outcome of the crisis. However, a few things are clear in the current world conjuncture.
The current moment
First, this crisis shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises of the 1930s and the 1970s, but there are also several features unique to the present:
The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. We face the real spectre of resource depletion and environmental catastrophes that threaten a system collapse.
- The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. Also unprecedented is the concentration of control over the mass media, the production of symbols, images and messages in the hands of transnational capital. We have arrived at the society of panoptical surveillance and Orwellian thought control.
- We are reaching the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism. De-ruralisation is now well-advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Like riding a bicycle, the capitalist system needs to continuously expand or else it collapses. Where can the system now expand?
- There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a planet of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to crises of survival - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This raises in new ways the dangers of a 21st-century fascism and new episodes of genocide to contain the mass of surplus humanity and their real or potential rebellion.
- There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a "hegemon", or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. Nation-states cannot control the howling gales of a runaway global economy; states face expanding crises of political legitimacy.
Second, global elites are unable to come up with solutions. They appear to be politically bankrupt and impotent to steer the course of events unfolding before them. They have exhibited bickering and division at the G-8, G-20 and other forums, seemingly paralysed, and certainly unwilling to challenge the power and prerogative of transnational finance capital, the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and the most rapacious and destabilising fraction. While national and transnational state apparatuses fail to intervene to impose regulations on global finance capital, they have intervened to impose the costs of the crisis on labour. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital and their disposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular classes.
Third, there will be no quick outcome of the mounting global chaos. We are in for a period of major conflicts and great upheavals. As I mentioned above, one danger is a neo-fascist response to contain the crisis. We are facing a war of capital against all. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as the most aggressive and prone to seek neo-fascist political arrangements to force forward accumulation as this crisis continues: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy sector. Capital accumulation in the military-industrial-security complex depends on endless conflicts and war, including the so-called wars on terrorism and on drugs, as well as on the militarisation of social control. Transnational finance capital depends on taking control of state finances and imposing debt and austerity on the masses, which in turn can only be achieved through escalating repression. And extractive industries depend on new rounds of violent dispossession and environmental degradation around the world.
Fourth, popular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces from below. The juggernaut of capitalist globalisation in the 1980s and 1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide in favour of transnational capital. Although resistance continued around the world, popular forces from below found themselves disoriented and fragmented in those decades, pushed on to the defensive in the heyday of neo-liberalism. Then the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the transnational elite, under the leadership of the US state, to sustain its offensive by militarising world politics and extending systems of repressive social control in the name of "combating terrorism".
Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes. On the other hand, the "empire of global capital" is definitely not a "paper tiger". As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to - organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.
In my view, the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st-century democratic socialism in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.

William I. Robinson is a Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Latin America and Global Capitalism.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Social Democracy, Soviet Socialism and the Bottom 99 Percent, by Stephen Gowans, in M-L Today

2011-11-10T20:26:00.000-06:00

http://mltoday.com/subject-areas/marxist-theory/social-democracy-soviet-socialism-and-the-bottom-99-percent-1237.html

A measure of just how far to the right US electoral politics are is that the country doesn’t have a mainstream social democratic party.
This absence prompted Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks to write It Didn’t Happen Here (1), the “it” being a social democratic party that could count on the ongoing support of a sizeable fraction of the working class population.

By contrast, Western Europe and Canada have long had such parties, and social democratic parties have formed governments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Canada as well as in Scandinavia and other places.

Many left-leaning US citizens are envious of countries that have strong social democratic parties, but their envy is based mainly on romantic illusions, not reality. Western Europe and Canada may be represented by mass parties at the Socialist International, but the subtitle of Lipset and Marks’ book, Why Socialism Failed in the United States, is just as applicable to these places as it is to the United States.

For socialism—in the sense of a gradual accumulation of reforms secured through parliamentary means eventually leading to a radical transformation of capitalist society–not only failed in the United States, it failed too in the regions of the world that have long had a strong social democratic presence. Even a bourgeois socialism, a project to reform (though not transcend) capitalism, has failed.

This essay explores the reasons for this failure by examining three pressures that shape the agendas of social democratic parties (by which I mean parties that go by the name Socialist, Social Democrat, Labour, NDP, and so on.)

These are pressures to:
• Broaden the party’s appeal. 

• Avoid going to war with capital. 

• Keep the media onside.

These pressures are an unavoidable part of contesting elections within capitalist democracies, and apply as strongly to parties dominated by business interests as they do to parties that claim to represent the interests of the working class, labour, or these days, ‘average’ people or ‘working families’. The behaviour and agenda of any party that is trapped within the skein of capitalist democracy and places great emphasis on electoral success—as social democratic parties do–is necessarily structured and constrained by the capitalist context.

As such, while social democratic parties may self-consciously aim to represent the bottom 99 percent of society, they serve–whether intending to or not—the top one percent.

So how is it, then, that egalitarian reforms have been developed in capitalist democracies if not through the efforts of social democratic parties? It’s true that social democrats pose as the champions of these programs, and it’s also true that conservatives are understood to be their enemies, yet conservatives have played a significant role in pioneering them, and social democrats, as much as right-wing parties, have been at the forefront of efforts to weaken and dismantle them.

Contrary to the mythology of social democratic parties, the architects of what measures exist in capitalist democracies for economic security and social welfare haven’t been social democrats uniquely or even principally, but often conservatives seeking to calm working class stirrings and secure the allegiance to capitalism of the bottom 99 percent of society against the counter-example (when it existed) of the Soviet Union.

Pressure to Broaden the Party’s Appeal
Social democratic parties are usually made up of core supporters drawn from the bottom 99 percent of society who are committed to an underlying set of principles that they are unwilling to move away from, and an opposing faction, also drawn from the 99 percent, that is ready to compromise on principle to make the party more popular and increase its chances of electoral success.

The latter group is typically made up of the party’s candidates and elected officials, who have a direct personal interest in expanding the party’s base of support to win public office and secure its attendant perquisites. Owing to this interest, they are often willing to sacrifice principle for immediate electoral gain.

On the other hand, supporters of core principles tend to be non-elected members. Their role is to furnish the party with cash and volunteer labour. Without a direct personal interest in sacrificing principle to broaden the party’s appeal, they insist that principle be adhered to, even at the expense of limiting the party’s popularity. To these party members, politics is about changing popular sentiment to match the party’s principles, not changing the party’s principles to match popular sentiment.

Of course, these are only tendencies. Some elected members are uncompromisingly committed to principle, while some grassroots members are prepared to sacrifice principle for electoral gain.

The conflict between the two factions is hardly an equal one. Since social democratic parties exist to select candidates and get them elected, the party’s parliamentary caucus, and its aides and advisors, wield outsize influence. The party leader and key advisers determine the party’s electoral platform, its strategy in opposition, and its agenda in government. The grassroots members of the party have little or no influence over the party’s parliamentary agenda. Except for electing candidates and a leader, they play an indirect and very limited role in setting the party’s direction.

Hence, social democratic parties are dominated by a stratum whose direct personal interests are defined by the electoral successes of the party. Since electoral success depends on the degree of overlap between party principles and popular sentiment—and since it is often easier to change the party’s platform than public opinion– this faction will often find itself ready to compromise on principle as the easiest way to expand the party’s popularity. And since it is this stratum that sets the party’s parliamentary and electoral agenda, it is almost inevitable that founding principles will be sacrificed to electoral expediency.

Avoiding War with Capital
If that weren’t enough, even a social democratic party that comes to power with undiluted reformist ambitions will find that compromise is necessary for political survival. Social democrats believe that it is possible to reform society in egalitarian directions within the context of capitalism. Even democratic socialists, who favour a radical socialist transformation of capitalist society, pledge to bring this about in a gradual, parliamentary fashion. This means working within the political institutions of capitalist society.

But egalitarian reforms are never in the direct interests of capital, although they may be it its indirect, defensive, interests, if its dominant position in society is threatened. Under these circumstances, banks, corporations and major investors—the top one percent—may, either directly, or through the governments they dominate, offer concessions and reforms to the bottom 99 percent as a necessary sop to preserve their place at the top. This only happens, however, in the face of impending revolutionary upheavals, or where an alternative system threatens to illuminate the failings of the capitalist system and undermine its legitimacy.

But absent an inspiring counter-example or threat of insurrectionary disturbance, compromises are unnecessary. And social democratic parties are nothing if not adverse to revolutionary upheavals and alternatives that operate outside a capitalist framework. Consequently, members of the top one percent have no fear that social democratic parties will seek to topple them from their privileged position at the apex of society.

On the contrary, social democratic parties are more likely to strive to demonstrate that they can be relied upon to act as trustworthy guardians of the capitalist economy (and therefore of the interests of the one percent who own and control it.) The action of Greece’s Socialist government to protect the investments of lenders at a considerable cost to the Greek working class, and over the class’s fierce resistance, is a case in point.

Meaningful efforts to transfer part of the profits of capital to funds for improving the economic security and social welfare of the bottom 99 percent (that is, efforts to reclaim part of the surplus the 99 percent produce) never get very far before meeting determined resistance. And capital’s ability to combat threats to its profits and property is formidable. Its control over the media and interests in public relations firms allow it to launch public opinion assaults on egalitarian reforms to bleed them of popular support. A social democratic government might back off its reforms, reasoning that its chances of future electoral success are unpromising in the face of a harshly negative media climate.

More significantly, capital may relocate to other, more accommodating jurisdictions, or threaten to do so, thereby touching of or threatening to touch off an economic crisis, in turn destabilizing the rule of any government that challenges it. Corporations may also curtail investments, either as a punitive measure, or because reforms have attenuated returns on investment. In either case, a social democratic party that seeks to undertake reforms within a capitalist framework must bend to the logic of capitalism–and the logic is hardly friendly to egalitarian reforms.

Egalitarian reforms, however, have been achieved over the years in Western capitalist societies, despite these obstacles, and this reality would seem to call my argument into question. Yet the number and nature of the reforms have fallen short of the original ambitions of social democracy, and in recent decades, have been abridged, weakened and sometimes cancelled altogether, often by social democratic governments themselves.

The first social insurance schemes were developed in Germany, not by social democrats, but by Prince Otto von Bismarck, a conservative who understood the value of social insurance in pacifying a restive working class. The British Liberal governments of 1906-1914 followed with their own ambitious schemes of pensions and health and unemployment insurance to calm working class stirrings. (2)

In the United States, the idea of social security didn’t come from unions or the Democrats but from the Rockefellers, who were searching for ways to avert labour unrest and avoid unionization. Likewise, collective bargaining wasn’t the brainchild of unions, but of corporate leaders who wanted to reduce the violence and uncertainty of labour relations. (3) Social democracy often claims credit for these gains, but it was conservatives who conceded them to protect the tranquil digestion of the profits, interest and rents of the top one percent from the disturbances of the bottom 99 percent.

Many reforms were introduced after World War II, at a time Western Europe lay in ruins, and was struggling to pick itself up from the devastation of the war. Liberal democracy had lost its sheen, and in the face of economic tribulations and the rising star of the Soviet Union, socialism had gripped the popular imagination. There was a very real possibility that Western Europeans would turn away from capitalism, and the United States, and the new Western European post-war governments, laboured to inoculate Europe against the threat of socialism. Part of the effort involved the introduction of major social welfare reforms, such as the National Health Service in Britain. True, the NHS was introduced by a Labour government, but conservative governments in Western Europe introduced similar programs at the same time—and for the same reasons. (4) It was the need to secure the allegiance of Western Europeans to capitalism against the threat of socialism, not social democratic parliamentary activism, that brought forward important concessions to the majority.

Thus, conservatives seeking to eclipse threats to the stability of capitalist society posed by extra-parliamentary agitation and the counter-example of the Soviet Union have been the principal architects of ambitious schemes of social insurance. Social democrats may have been involved, however not as instigators, but as participants in essentially conservative schemes aimed at safeguarding the top one percent from the potential revolutionary action of the bottom 99 percent.

With labour largely quiescent in recent decades and far from revolutionary, and the demise of the Soviet Union (and China’s taking the capitalist road) leaving the world with few living counter-examples to capitalism, capital has been able to revoke reforms it conceded in more restive times. The Occupy Wall Street movement, and anti-austerity agitations in Europe, are early signals of a possible reversal of tide.

The Soviet Counter-Example
It is instructive to consider Soviet social welfare, to understand what capitalist democracies once competed against, and to appreciate its breadth and depth. Although it is certainly unfashionable in capitalist democracies to say so, it is true all the same that the Soviet Union was organized to serve the interests of the mass of its people, and not to enrich an elite of bankers, major investors and corporate titans, as is true in our own societies, and in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union today.

Some will object that the USSR was organized to serve the interests of the Community Party elite, and that it too was divided between the 99 percent and the one percent. To be sure, the Soviet Union was not built along anarchist lines. There was an elite, but the advantages the elite enjoyed were picayune by the standards of capitalist democracies.

The elite lived in modest apartments and had incomes relative to the average industrial worker that were no greater than the incomes of physicians in the United States relative to the average US industrial wage. Top Communist Party officials did not own productive property and therefore could not transfer it, and neither could they transfer position or privilege, across generations to their children. Moreover, the very mild level of income disparity in the Soviet Union was mitigated by the reality that many necessities were available free of charge or at highly subsidized rates. (5)

Employment in the USSR was guaranteed—indeed, obligated (an important point to correct one of the cruder misconceptions that socialism amounts to the unemployed collecting welfare cheques.) Work was considered a social duty. Living off of rent, profits, speculation or the black market – social parasitism – was illegal. Education was free through university, with living stipends for post-secondary students. The USSR had a lower teacher to student ratio than the United States.

Healthcare was free, and drugs prescribed in the hospital or for chronic illness were also free. The Soviet Union had the greatest number of doctors per capita of any country in the world and had more hospital beds per person than the United States or Britain. That US citizens have to pay for their healthcare was considered extremely barbaric in the Soviet Union, and Soviet citizens “often questioned US tourists quite incredulously on this point.” (6)

Soviet workers received an average of three weeks of paid vacation per year. Necessities, such as food, clothing, transportation and housing were subsidized. By law, rent could exceed no more than five percent of a citizen’s income, compared to 25 to 30 percent or more in the United States. Women were granted paid maternity leave as early as 1936.

The constitution of 1977 guaranteed that “The state (would help) the family by providing and developing a broad system of childcare…by paying grants on the birth of a child, by providing children’s allowances and benefits for large families.” All Soviet citizens were eligible for generous retirement pensions—men at age 60, women at 55. Concerning women’s rights: “The Soviet Union was the first country to legalize abortions, develop public child care, and bring women into top government jobs. The radical transformation of women’s position was most pronounced in the traditionally Islamic areas, where an intense campaign liberated women from extremely repressive conditions.” (7)

The work week was limited to 41 hours and overtime work was prohibited except under special circumstances. Night-shift workers worked only seven hours per day (but were paid for eight), and people who worked at dangerous jobs (coal miners, for example) or jobs that required constant alertness (physicians, for example) worked shorter shifts but received full pay. (8)

To be sure, life could be harder in the Soviet Union compared to what it was for middle- and upper-income citizens of the rich capitalist democracies (but not the poor of these countries nor the millions of Blacks and Hispanics in US ghettoes nor the denizens of the capitalist global south, i.e., the bulk of humanity.) Housing was guaranteed and rents extremely low, but the housing stock was limited. The Nazis had destroyed much of the country’s living accommodations, and the USSR’s emphasis on heavy industry slowed the building of replacement stock. Incomes, too, were lower, but the Soviet Union had started at a particularly low level of economic development, and despite rapid gains, had not caught up to the West at the point of its demise.

Still, life was more certain. And on such human development measures as infant mortality, life expectancy, doctors per capita, adult literacy, daily calories per person, and educational attainment, the Soviet Union and other communist countries performed at the same level as richer, industrialized capitalist countries, and better than capitalist countries at the same level of economic development. (9)

But didn’t the Soviet Union come to an end because its publicly-owned and planned economy broke down? Not at all. Excluding the war years, the Soviet economy grew every year from the point socialism was introduced in 1928 until the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began to dismantle it in the late 1980s. And for most of those years it grew much faster than the capitalist economies of North America and Western Europe. (10) Indeed, by the mid 1970s, there was serious concern in Washington that the Soviet economy would soon surpass that of the United States. (11)

The Soviet Union’s demise is more aptly described as a capitulation (some say suicide (12)) rather than an economic collapse. The torrid pace of Soviet economic growth began to slow in the 1970s, for a variety of reasons. An exhaustive examination of all the reasons would require more space than is available here. But there is one reason worth quickly mentioning.

The country’s efforts to keep pace militarily with the United States and NATO monopolized research & development, depriving the civilian economy of the fuel it needed to innovate to overtake the US economy. (13) (Complaints may have frequently been made about the quality of Soviet consumer goods, but no one complained about the quality of Soviet military hardware. (14)) If the Soviets failed to surpass capitalism, or worse, fell behind, the commitment of Soviet citizens to socialism would weaken. What’s more, the country’s ability to defend itself would either atrophy, or the country would be called upon to allocate increasingly large proportions of its budget to defence. Neither option was sustainable.

To address these looming problems, Gorbachev formulated a two-prong solution. First, he would yield to the Americans on a number of foreign policy fronts. Second, he would reduce the role of planning in the economy in favour of enterprise autonomy and markets. The first prong would reduce military tension with the United States and lessen the burden on the Soviet economy of military spending and aid to national liberation movements and socialist allies. The second, it was hoped, would kick the economy into a higher gear.

Neither worked. Gorbachev’s capitulations on foreign policy and abandonment of socialist allies emboldened counter-revolutionary forces in Eastern Europe and dispirited Communist parties on the USSR’s western borders. Eastern Europe’s governments fell. The successor governments reoriented their economies to the West, disrupting the Soviet economy, which had been tightly integrated with them.

At the same time, the abrupt transition to enterprise autonomy and markets sent the Soviet economy into a tail-spin. GDP fell sharply—not because the socialist economy had broken down, but because it was being torn apart. Gorbachev’s conciliation with US foreign policy and steps toward market socialism transformed a manageable difficulty into a catastrophe. As one wag put it, Stalin found the Soviet Union a wreck and by building socialism left it a superpower. Gorbachev found it a superpower and by abandoning socialism left it a wreck.

The point, however, isn’t to explore the reasons for the Soviet Union’s demise, but to show that while it existed, the USSR provided a successful counter-example to capitalism. The ideological struggle of the capitalist democracies against the Soviet Union entailed the provision of robust social welfare programs and the translation of productivity gains into a monotonically rising standard of living.

Once the ideological struggle came to an end with the closing of the Cold War, it was no longer necessary to impart these advantages to the working classes of North America, Western Europe and Japan. Despite rising productivity, growth in household incomes was capped, and social welfare measures were systematically scaled back.

Social democracy did nothing to reverse or arrest these trends. It was irrelevant. When strong social welfare measures and rising incomes were needed by the top one percent to undercut working class restlessness and the Soviet Union’s counter-example, these advantages were conferred on the bottom 99 percent by both social democratic and conservative governments. When these sops were no longer needed, both conservative and social democratic governments enacted measures to take them back.

Keeping the Media Onside
Capitalist domination of the mass media also acts to pressure social democratic parties to move toward the right. This happens because:
• The mass media define the legitimate range of policy options, and public opinion settles within it.

• Ambitious social democratic leaders shift the party’s agenda to the right to intersect with mass media-shaped public opinion.

• Party leaders keep the party’s agenda within the confines of the legitimate range of policy options to avoid negative, or no, media coverage during elections.

Since capitalist forces would use the high-profile and visible platform of their mass media to vilify and discredit any party that openly espoused socialism or strongly promoted uncompromisingly progressive policies, social democratic parties willingly accept the capitalist straitjacket, embracing middle-of-the-road, pro-capitalist policies, while shunting their vestigial socialist ambitions to the side or abandoning them altogether.

Conclusion
When social democratic parties espoused socialism as an objective, even if a very distant one, the socialism they espoused was to be achieved with the permission of capital on capital’s terms–an obvious impossibility. It is perhaps in recognizing this impossibility that most social democratic parties long ago abandoned socialism, if not in their formal programs, then certainly in their deeds. That social democratic parties should have shifted from democratic socialist ambitions to the acceptance of capitalism and the championing of reforms within it, and then finally to the dismantling of the reforms, is an inevitable outcome of the pressures cited above.

But the outcome is ultimately traceable to what history surely reveals to be a bankrupt strategy: trying to arrive at socialism, or at least, at a set of robust measures congenial to the interests of the bottom 99 percent, within the hostile framework of a system that is dominated by the top one percent. The best that has been accomplished, and its accomplishment cannot be attributed to social democratic parliamentary activism, is a set of revocable reforms that were conceded under the threat, even if unlikely, of revolution and in response to capitalism’s need to compete ideologically with the Soviet Union.

These reforms are today being revoked, by conservative and social democratic governments alike. The sad reality is that social democracy, which had set out to reform capitalism on behalf of the bottom 99 percent, was reformed by it, and acts now to keep the top one percent happy in return for every now and then championing mild ameliorative measures that conservative forces would concede anyway under pressure.

There are three lessons to be drawn from social democracy’s failure.
• Measures of economic security and social welfare within capitalism come not from social democracy but from militant, extra-parliamentary activity which threatens business’s tranquil digestion of profits.

• These measures—granted by conservative forces, not taken by the bottom 99 percent–remain revocable within capitalism, and are munificent as the degree of working class stirrings and presence of counter-examples allow. 

• In absolute terms, the Soviet system of public-ownership and economic planning proved to be as successful and often more successful than the capitalism of the richest countries in providing employment and secure access to health care, education, housing and child care and was more successful relative to its level of economic development.

What social democrats claimed to achieve (but didn’t), Soviet socialism did achieve. And what Soviet socialism did achieve was lost the moment the last Soviet leader steered his country along the path of social democracy.

October 30, 2011

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/social-democracy-soviet-socialism-and-the-bottom-99-percent/

Endnotes
1. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. W.W. Norton & Company. 2000.

2. Eric Hobsbawm. The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. Abacus. 1987. P 103.

3. G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power & Politics. Fourth Edition. McGraw Hill. 2002. pp 164-169

4. Albert Szymanski. The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class. Winthrop Publishers, Inc. 1978. p .268

5. David Kotz and Fred Weir. Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System. Routledge, 1997, pp. 26-28

6. Howard J. Sherman. The Soviet Economy. Little, Brown and Company, 1969.

7. Albert Szymanski. Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Zed Books Ltd, London, 1984.

8. I’ve drawn from numerous sources on Soviet social welfare and employment policy. Albert Szymanski. Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union Today, Zed Press, London, 1979; Michael Parenti. Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. City Light Books, 1997; Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny. Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, International Publishers, New York, 2004; David Kotz and Fred Weir. Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System. Routledge, 1997.

9. Shirley Cereseto, “Socialism, Capitalism and Inequality,” The Insurgent Sociologist. Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring 1982.

10. David M. Kotz. “The Demise of the Soviet Union and the International Socialist Movement Today”. Paper written for the International Symposium on the 20th Anniversary of the Former Soviet Union and its Impact, Beijing, April 23, 2011.11.

11. David M. Kotz. “Socialism and Capitalism: Are They Qualitatively Different Socioeconomic Systems?” Paper written for the symposium “Socialism after Socialism: Economic Problems,” sponsored by the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, December 6-8, 2006.

12. ”Socialism,” Castro said, “did not die from natural causes; it was a suicide.” Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny. Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, International Publishers, New York, 2004. P 222.

13. On the role of R&D in the slowdown of the Soviet economy see: Robert C. Allen. Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, Princeton University Press, 2003; Peter Schweizer. Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1994; and Howard J. Sherman. The Soviet Economy. Little, Brown and Company, 1969.

14. David M. Kotz. “What Economic Structure for Socialism?” Paper written for the Fourth International Conference “Karl Marx and the Challenges of the XXI Century, Havana, May 5-8, 2008.

HOLLYWOOD IN WASHINGTON, D.C. vol. 4, no. 4, by Daniel Paquet, September 1st, 2011

2011-11-04T19:46:00.000-05:00

HOLLYWOOD IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

vol. 4, no. 4, September 1st, 2011

Si vous désirez lire en français: http://www.laviereelle.blogspot.com/

Don’t miss the latest show! Let’s have first a look at the scenario: the story of a US President in quest for an agreement that will allow his administration to spend more money; well, to increase the debt ceiling. According to the mass media, he needs the support of members of both factions of the Congress, Republicans and Democrats. At first glance, it could give the impression that they are enemies, are they?

“One of America’s strengths immediately following the war (WW2, Ed.) was a degree of domestic consensus surrounding foreign policy. There might have been fierce differences between Republicans and Democrats, but politics usually ended at the water’s edge; professionals, whether in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, or the CIA, were expected to make decisions based on facts and sound judgment, not ideology or electioneering.” (Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, 2008, p. 338).
(Photo Internet: President Barack Obama at the US Congress, 2010)

Would the plot of this play have been different nowadays? Mr. Obama delivered a statement on July 29, 2011 and said: “What’s clear now is that any solution to avoid default must be bipartisan. […] And today I urge Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to find common ground on a plan that can get support –that can get support from both parties in the House – a plan that I can sign by Tuesday (August 2nd, 2011, Ed.). Now, keep in mind, this is not a situation where the two parties are miles apart.” (BREAKING: President Obama’s Statement on Debt Negotiations, The White House, Washington, 2011).

He added for US citizens’ purpose: “… let your members of Congress know. Make a phone call. Send an email. Tweet.” (Idem). (The White House can be reached at: info@messages.whitehouse.gov)

What was the answer of the organized labor movement? At the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a 9 million strong trade-union, the leadership, without questioning the US government spending – for instance the military budget- walked in the President’s footsteps and invited its members and asked them: “Can you write polite but firm messages on some or all of these Facebook pages (for example Sen. Scott Brown, Ed.), asking for key Republican senators to pass a clean increase in the debt ceiling so America doesn’t default on its debts?” (ref.; http://www.aflcio.org/)

The U.S. CEOs and representatives of Big Capital can just applaud to this initiative. Let’s recall that war on Afghanistan costs $ 450 billion so far and the recent war on Libya swallows $ 1 billion, even though that the so-called “rebels” were practically in total rout, if it wouldnot have been the support of NATO.

One can understand that US workers need a new type of trade-union movement: a movement for peace, a movement for real jobs'creation. That’s what the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) is all about. Born after WW2 in Paris (France), this 80 million members union is now based in Athens (Greece). They just hold their last Congress in April 2011. They want to deepen their relations with workers of USA and Canada; it won’t replace the AFL-CIO, but give a new impetus to US working people in their struggles on one hand and also reinforce the movement abroad in the fight against US monopolies and multinationals; in a nutshell, the battle against US imperialism. (Photo Internet: Spanish-speaking trade-unionists with George Mavrikos, second from the right, General Secretary of the World Federation of Trade-Unions, WFTU)

A lack of leadership in the labor movement

The Communist Party USA made a fair appreciation of some aspects of the arrangement, “the budget cuts reportedly included in the deal appear to be, thankfully, heavily weighted towards cuts in the military as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ‘draw down’. This is a sign that the economic crisis has finally helped force a long overdue retrenchment in the U.S. global military profile”. However, their People’s World electronic newsletter wrongly concludes: “It is no doubt true that a Democratic president and Senate prevented a much worse outcome than the current deal. Many have criticized the president for being too soft and weak in negotiations with the Republicans. I (John Case, Ed.), had nearly 20 years’ experience in the labor movement which proved me it’s hard to judge from the outside what is really possible, and what is not, in such bargaining. The balance of forces is hard to evaluate if you are not at the table. Maybe the president gave too much; maybe this is the best outcome possible to avert disaster for now.” (http://peoplesworld.org/debt-ceiling-disaster-postponed-but-not-for-long/ )

The cherry over this opportunist “coating” is the political stand of the General Secretary of the CP USA, Sam Webb: “The president boxed himself into a corner, not because he is a bad negotiator, but because he and his aides made the calculus on the heels of the 2010 elections that his appeal to independent voters, and thus his reelection, depend on his credentials as a ‘responsible fiscal manager’. […] Paul Krugman reminds us that President Roosevelt pursued this course of action in 1937 to disastrous results. Let’s hope that president Obama fares better.” (http://www.peoplesworld.org/debt-deal-is-bad-for-america/) .

Now, what does that mean?! It is in fact the rubber stamp of the US “communists” on capitalist policies. And there is no question of struggling for socialism in USA, of ending ruinous and unfair wars abroad. The Webb and Co.’s so-called communists are not ready to give people- in USA and abroad-, a “break”. Of course, opposition is growing among the rank-and-file members and they are better and better organized; in New York City, they publish a paper bulletin, Ideological Fightback, which talks to the workers and calls for a new leadership in the US communist movement.

On the other hand, AFL-CIO’s general board and executive council members met with President Obama urging him to focus on jobs for the remainder of this first term. “The president, on national television, shifted discussions away from the debt ceiling deal and declared that the priorities for Congress are passage of measures that will stimulate the sputtering economy, including extending the payroll tax suspensions for workers, beefing up benefits for the unemployed and investing in infrastructure projects. […] The recession, which began during presidency of George Bush, saw the economy shrink at an annual rate of 8 percent in the last three months of 2008, just before Obama was sworn in. It shrunk by another 7 percent during his first three months in office.” (http://www.peoplesworld.org/labor-leaders-at-white-house-press-obama-on-jobs/).

At Jobs with Justice’s national conference that took place Aug. 5-7 in Washington, D.C. “workers, students, religious leaders, community activists and many others planned strategies to build a powerful movement of working people to defeat the corporate agenda.” (http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/08/01/join-jobs-with-justices-national-conference-and-fight-back-against-corporate-agenda/).

"When Republican House leaders forced a shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration -FAA, last week (2011-08-05, Ed.), they not only forced the layoff of 4,000 FAA workers, they also put at risk nearly 90,000 construction jobs at airports around the country. […] Republicans blocked temporary funding in an effort to overturn a new rule making union elections among rail and airline workers more democratic.” (http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/07/25/republican-faa-shutdown-costs-4000-jobs-threatens-90000).

Meanwhile, “the unemployment rate for young workers between ages 16 to 24 has skyrocketed as millions of young people have lost jobs and school enrollment has steadily increased over the past decade. The jobless rate nearly doubled among young workers to a peak of 19 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and has remained high, averaging 17.4 percent in the second quarter of this year, compared with 6.7 percent for older workers and 9.1 percent for all workers.” (http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/08/01/jobs-crisis-hits-young-workers-hard/print/).

The New York City daily Metro newspaper reported on August 3rd, 2011, a story about veterans going from deployed to unemployed. “Abbas Malik guarded the Green Zone in Iraq, but he can’t get hired as a mall security guard in Staten Island (New York City, Ed.). […] Like Malik, 13 percent of the 17,000 New York City war veterans are now unemployed. That’s higher than the national unemployment rate of 9 percent. […] Malik is considering returning to war just to pay the bills.”

Communists must address the issue and raise the level of political consciousness. Founders of modern communism once said: “We must not make too many concessions to gain popularity; we shall not underestimate the intellect and level of culture of our workers. […] If the working class is not organized well enough to wage a campaign against the collective power, e.g. the ruling classes’ political power, we must, anyway, lead it through continuous agitation against the political attitude of the ruling classes, an attitude hostile to us.” (Marx-Engels, Critique des programmes de Gotha et d’Erfurt, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1966, pp. 92-93, 119).

“American efficiency, on the other hand, is an antidote to ‘revolutionary’ Manilovism and fantastic scheme concocting (we searched the meaning in several textbooks, but we could not find the exact definition; obviously, ”manilovism” is not a compliment, Ed.). American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles, which with its business-like perseverance brushes aside all obstacles; which continues at a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is inconceivable. But American efficiency has every chance of degenerating into narrow and unprincipled practicalism if it is not combined with Russian revolutionary sweep.” (Joseph Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1975, pp. 111-112). (Photo Internet: The Yalta Conference during WW2, when Soviet Union, USA, Great Britain and France were Allied against Nazi Germany)

Anyhow, the American workers will never remain isolated from the rest of the world. Already, we spoke about the orientation of the WFTU. But we cannot cast away the efforts of many communists around the world (France, Greece, Canada, and USA…) who are on the road to rebuild the Communist International (Comintern), which is the association of communist parties worldwide, to support the struggle of the working class movement to replace capitalism with socialism. Probably several US workers will nod and say: “I’ll drink to that!” Yes, it deserves an honest beer…

danieleugpaquet@yahoo.ca

Iranian 'assassination plot': Cooked up to further U.S. aim of regime change? by Mazda Majidi, Liberationnews.org. Oct 15, 2011

2011-10-17T12:18:00.001-05:00

http://bit.ly/onu5vf

Iran has nothing to gain, but much to lose

By Mazda Majidi

October 15, 2011

The plot publicized by Attorney General Eric Holder reads like the script of a bad Hollywood spy movie. An evil force, the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, decides to carry out an assassination of a Saudi diplomat. Instead of doing it on Iranian soil, where Saudi Arabia has an embassy, or in dozens of much more accessible countries in the Persian/Arabian Gulf region, the Quds Force chooses to assassinate a diplomat, Adel Al-Jubeir, in the United States. The Quds Force has never carried out operations on U.S. soil and has no cells there, so it employs the services of Manssor Arbabsiar, the cousin of a Quds Force member, who will head the entire operation.
The cousin, a 56-year-old Iranian-born U.S. citizen living in Texas, has no military or intelligence background and over the years has been an automobile salesperson and small restaurant owner. Having no capability to carry out the assassination on his own, Arbabsiar decides to outsource the job to a Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, which operates primarily in Mexico and bordering areas.
But the people Arbabsiar thought were with the Los Zetas cartel turn out to be heroic U.S. government agents, who turn in Arbabsiar. Hence, a secret assassination plot is exposed and the free world is saved from another murderous plan by an evil force. Hollywood made movies pitting James Bond against evil forces—the Russians, the Chinese, the Arabs—that had more believable plots than this one presented by the Obama administration.
While rarely questioning the authenticity of the U.S. government claim, mainstream analysts and commentators have characterized the alleged plot as “bizzare,” “outrageous” and even “preposterous.” Foreign Policy magazine calls it “the worst plot ever.” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually uses the outrageousness of the “plot” as evidence that it must be true, saying: “Nobody could make that up, right?”
Since none of the published evidence can be independently verified, it is not possible to determine whether a plot existed or if the whole story was concocted by U.S. secret services. There have been several instances when FBI agents, rather than discovering actual plots planned by others, have planned an operation, coaxed unstable or disgruntled individuals into joining in, and then implicated those individuals—perpetrators in operations that would not have existed had it not been for U.S. government agents. If what is being announced as a plot ever existed, it is possible that it was the result of a similar frame-up by government agents
What would the Iranian government gain?
What can be established more definitively is whether this plot could have been ordered by the Iranian government. When analyzing political assassinations, in fact when analyzing crimes of all sorts, an elementary starting point is to establish the motive. Why would the alleged perpetrator have wanted to carry out the crime? In this case, what would the Iranian government gain from this plot, had it been carried out successfully?
While the relationship between the two countries has never been cordial, Iran has for years attempted to normalize diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, and has met some success in this regard. After Saudi Arabia sent troops to Bahrain to help the Khalifa monarchy violently repress the mass movement, the relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran deteriorated. Still, the Islamic Republic was careful not to escalate the conflict.
Surrounded by U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. client states including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Oman and others, Iran is in no position to seek confrontation with these states. Even if Iran were to escalate its conflict with Saudi Arabia, how would the assassination of one Saudi diplomat help its cause? And even if somehow Iran had decided that killing a Saudi diplomat would be in its interests, why would it want to carry out the assassination on U.S. soil?
Iran is now under four rounds of international sanctions. Since the years of the Bush administration, the U.S. has threatened Iran with everything, including bombings and refusing to rule out a nuclear attack. On Oct. 13, President Obama offered a slight variation of “All options are on the table,” the Bush-era mantra. Obama said, “No options are off the table.”
Iran's military budget less than 1 percent of U.S. outlays for war
The military budget of Iran is a little over $9 billion, 1.8 percent of its GDP. This is only 1.3 percent of the U.S. military budget of nearly $700 billion, and more accurately less than 1 percent of the real U.S. military budget, which should include the costs of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a slew of military outlays under other headings.
Why would Iran pick a fight with a country that has a military 60 to 100 times its own? Even if for some reason Iran were dead set on assassinating a Saudi official, why would it provide the United States a perfect tool with which to ratchet up the pressure on Iran in the U.N. Security Council?
Looking at the motives Washington has makes the matter more clear. As the Washington Post noted, the plot has “handed the United States an opportunity to undermine Tehran at a moment when U.S. officials believe the Iranian regime is especially vulnerable.” On Oct. 13, Obama stated, "We're going to continue ... to mobilize the international community to make sure that Iran is further and further isolated and pays a price for this kind of behavior."
The reality is that Washington badly wants to further tighten the sanctions against Iran. Four rounds of sanctions have been anything but “crippling” to the Iranian economy. In early summer of this year, a team of IMF economists visited Iran and compiled a report. Among other things, the report indicated that Iran’s economic growth had accelerated to 3.2 percent in 2010-2011, up from a 0.6 percent growth the previous two years.

There is no question that, as a result of the alleged plot, Washington gains and Tehran loses. The extent of Washington’s gain and Tehran’s loss will be determined by whether allegations can be turned into new sanctions.

Washington's real agenda: regime change
It is more than the nuclear issue. Washington’s real agenda is regime change in Iran. In the absence of a viable military option, Washington is hoping to make Iran’s economy collapse, possibly opening the path for a color revolution led by the privileged sectors of society, the same sectors that anchored the 2009 anti-government demonstrations.
Washington needs to pressure China and Russia into going along with a fifth round of sanctions against Iran. Already, the U.S. has sent agents to Beijing and Moscow to present “evidence” of Iran’s alleged terror plot.
In the ongoing confrontation between Tehran and Washington, there is no question that, as a result of the alleged plot, Washington gains and Tehran loses. The extent of Washington’s gain and Tehran’s loss will be determined by how much Washington can succeed in turning the story of the alleged plot into another round of harsher sanctions against Iran. So, again, why would Iran take part in an assassination plot that, successful or not, would hand Washington a victory and Tehran a defeat?
Serial assassinations of Iranian scientists
Washington knows a thing or two about political assassinations. On July 23, Iranian nuclear physicist Dr. Darioush Rezaie was shot in the throat and killed in front of his daughter's kindergarten in Tehran. On Nov. 29, 2010, nuclear scientist Dr. Majid Shahriari was assassinated on his way to work, while another scientist, Dr. Fereidoon Abassi, narrowly escaped a simultaneous assassination attempt. In January 2010, another nuclear scientist, Professor Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, was murdered with an improvised explosive device. In 2007, nuclear scientist Ardeshir Hassanpour was killed by poison.
These assassinations have all been carried out professionally, leaving no solid evidence behind. However, one does not need the benefit of forensic evidence to know who is behind them. The fact that there have been a series of assassinations, including simultaneous attempts, rules out the possibility of personal or family motives for the murders. The fact that no faction of the Islamic Republic is opposed to the nuclear energy program rules out the possibility of a factional conflict leading to assassinations. The only force that would have the motive and the capability to carry out such a systematic campaign of assassinations is the United States, possibly aided by its junior partners, including Israel.
While the business media propagate the bizarre story of the alleged Iranian terror plot, they fail to mention the very relevant story of the serial murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, more than likely victims of U.S./Israeli hit squads.
It remains to be seen whether Washington will be successful in turning this alleged plot into a concrete victory in further pressuring Iran. The one thing that is clear is that the U.S. government, whether headed by Republicans or Democrats, has pursued a variety of tactics to weaken and overthrow independent states in the Middle East and elsewhere. Conversely, the people continue to struggle against Washington’s invasions, occupations, coups, sanctions and softer methods aimed at bringing the region’s resources and markets under imperialist control.

Blasted Sirte hospital crammed with the dazed and the dead, Globe and Mail, 09 Oct 2011

2011-10-09T18:03:00.001-05:00

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=462951&version=1&template_id=37&parent_id=17
orig story from Globe & Mail

Triumphant fighters bearing Kalashnikovs marched up and down shouting “Allahu Akbar” yesterday as dazed and frightened patients in Sirte’s main hospital lay crammed into a ground floor corridor.

“It was a holocaust, not a hospital,” said Dr Nabil Lamine as he fought his way through the crowd. Lamine headed upstairs to check on the only two patients left on the upper floors. “We have to bring them all down because of the days of shelling” that preceded the capture of the Ibn Sina hospital by National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters, he said.

He picked his way through shattered glass and turned right into the intensive care unit, where two semi-naked men lay amid the stench of excrement in a room strewn with rubbish and broken medical equipment. One needed brain surgery and the other had to have a leg amputated, said Lamine as artillery fire rocked the building from the fighting nearby as NTC forces tried to push Gaddafi loyalists back towards the city centre.

“We can’t help them. We don’t have the proper doctors. They may die,” said Lamine as he rushed back downstairs, leaving the men alone in the unit where a torn poster of Gaddafi lay on the filthy floor. One of the two tried feebly to sit up, before falling back again onto stinking bedsheets.

On the ground floor most of the patients in the corridor were frightened-looking young men, some with horrific burns to their faces. “Say ‘Libya Hurra’ (Free Libya),” one young fighter ordered a patient, who meekly obeyed. Three gun-toting fighters gathered around another young man, shouting at him and accusing him of being a Gaddafi loyalist. An older combatant tired to calm them down.
“Some are civilians, but most of these are Gaddafi men,” said Hesham Ali Harba, an NTC fighter who said he was a doctor.

Libya, the Lie, By Murray Dobbin, Sept 12, The Tyee

2011-09-12T13:23:00.000-05:00

What we're not being told about Gadhafi, and the real reason the US wanted him gone.
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/09/12/LibyaLie/

Cartoon by Greg Perry.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq riding a pack of lies and monstrous manipulation, the entire U.S. elite, including major news services, academics, and politicians from both "sides" of the spectrum, lined up to cheerlead and off they went to war. It was one of the most shameful chapters in the long history of shameful acts of U.S. imperial foreign policy.

But it actually didn't take too long for dissenting voices to come out of the woodwork. The lies were exposed, the liars identified, the manipulation denounced.

Watching the sorry spectacle of media coverage of the tragic farce unfolding in Libya, one has to wonder if anyone will ever expose the lies and hubris that have run throughout this faux Arab spring.

To be sure, as more journalists, aid workers and human rights representatives arrive in the country the more some of the obvious facts trickle out. The "freedom fighters" -- more like soccer hooligans with guns -- have looted dozens of arms depots of the Libyan military. According to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, "Every time a city falls, they end up being looted. . . Every facility we go to where there were surface-to-air missiles, they're gone."

Just what will these lovers of democracy do with these weapons? The U.S. and E.U. might just start to worry that no matter who buys them on the black market, they will eventually end up in the hands of al Qaeda or other militant groups. As NATO knows full well, some of the so-called rebels have ties to al Qaeda. Or perhaps the missiles will end up in the hands of the Taliban where they will be used to shoot down U.S. helicopters. Talk about blowback. Too bad the Americans have never quite grasped the meaning of irony.

The photos of the revolutionaries give any thoughtful observer pause. Virtually every photo of the victorious rebels show aggressive, undisciplined, young men armed to the teeth holding their guns high in the air (often firing randomly). I haven't seen a single photo or video clip with even one woman portrayed -- and hardly any men over 25.

And while the western media repeatedly imply that the Nation Transitional Council is in control of these dangerous thugs and thieves the truth lies elsewhere. Several rebel groups have denounced the NTC and said they don't recognize its authority. So not only does the council not represent anyone, it doesn't even control its own "army." The NTC is little more than a group of greedy opportunists salivating at the thought of getting its hands on the billions in state funds that NATO is now handing over to them. Only with the constant disciplinary efforts of its NATO handlers does the council manage to maintain a semblance of decorum and credibility.

Romantic notions of NATO

No one in the media mentions that Gadhafi didn't have billions of dollars stashed in vaults around the world for his personal use as others such as Mubarak did. To be sure, Gadhafi and his family and closest associates lived in luxury. But the tens of billions illegally seized by Western countries was money belonging to the Libyan state and its national bank. NATO has effectively destroyed the Libyan government -- not just Gadhafi's regime. Tens of thousands of foreign workers have left the country, many of whom were critical to the running of the country. Rebels have been accused of randomly executing blacks, many of them students and workers. The contributions of these foreign workers are likely gone forever.

But none of this bothers the Canadian political elite and its intellectual hired guns. One of the most shameful examples -- there are countless -- is Lloyd Axworthy, the "highly respected" former foreign affairs minister under Jean Chretien. He penned an op-ed for the Globe and Mail which could have been written on contract for the cabal now in power in Tripoli. A more simplistic and deliberately obfuscating piece is hard to imagine. Axworthy's article waxes on romantically about how the NATO bombing of Libya is a huge advance for the principle of Responsibility to Protect. This principle is NATO's ideological weapon that permits it to do whatever it likes. Axworthy was a key figure in getting it established at the United Nations in 1999-2000.

According to Axworthy, "We are seriously engaged in a resetting of the international order toward a more humane, just world." I predict that NATO's grotesque manipulation of the UN mandate to impose a "no fly" zone to protect "civilians" (a violation Axworthy doesn't even mention) will in fact do more damage to the responsibility to protect principle than any similar action to date. It will tarnish the UN, too, which has allowed its mandate to be used for imperial gain. The unseemly rush by France, Britain and Italy in particular, to get their hands on Libyan oil will soon be too obvious to cover up. The revolutionaries are no doubt busy signing deals handing over that previously nationalized resource to the neo-colonialists who put them in power -- robbing the real civilians of their birthright.

Dealing with the new gang

Who will take the "responsibility to protect" Libyans from this new gang? Who will protect the people of Libya so that they continue to enjoy a literacy rate above 90 per cent, the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy of all of Africa, free medicare and education and the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent? Do the boys firing their guns in the air even have a clue that their living standards -- subsidized by nationalized oil -- were among the highest in Africa? Who will they blame when medical care disappears and their kids have to pay to go to school? Western, free-market democracy will come to Libya at a very high price when designed and delivered by the neo-colonial powers.

It's hard to know if the brain trust at NATO actually believed this whole thing would be over in a few weeks, but what they did know, and what the Canadian media refuses to tell us, is that Libya was the biggest obstacle to the continued super-exploitation of Africa and its vast resources. On a whole number of fronts, Libya was using its oil wealth to gradually close the doors to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar in the economic domination of Africa.

If you want to paint a picture of the back rooms of NATO before the genuine Arab spring burst forth, imagine the power brokers sitting around oak tables trying to figure out a way to stop Gadhafi from ruining their decades long -- centuries, actually -- bonanza. Then imagine the surprise arrival of the Arab spring. What a gift and delivered just in time.

Removing an obstacle to neo-colonialism

Africa's role as a giant pool of cheap resources was being threatened just as the U.S. and E.U. faced economic catastrophe because of their own financial deregulation policies. China is investing billions in Africa -- and not just in resource extraction. It is helping African countries industrialize, the surest way to economic independence.

There's nothing NATO can do about China. But the other side of the independence coin was Gadhafi's determination to sever Africa's oppressive ties with Western financial institutions. Gadhafi was not only in the process of creating the African Investment Bank (providing interest-free loans) and the African Monetary Fund (to be centred in Cameroon) eliminating the role of the IMF, it was also in the planning stages of creating a new, gold-backed African currency that would seriously weaken the U.S. by undermining the dollar. All the Libyan funds set aside for these Pan-African projects were frozen by NATO and will now be handed over -- carefully, no doubt -- to the neo-colonial puppets installed in Tripoli.

Gadhafi was also instrumental in killing AFRICOM, a new U.S. military command and control base intended to add military intimidation to American economic domination. Look for that initiative to be revived.

The implications of the conflict in Libya are thus just beginning to unfold. NATO will be mired in Libya for years to come to ensure its oil objectives are met and to manipulate "democratic elections" so its friends on the NTC can maintain control. While there has been a muted response so far from African countries and the African Union it will come sooner or later. They cannot fail to recognize that regime change in Libya was all about sabotaging pan-African unity.

LAYTON, TURMEL AND QUEBEC - Editorial: People's Voice Editorial

2011-09-04T10:54:00.000-05:00

The sudden death of Opposition Leader Jack Layton has shocked Canadians. While we frequently disagreed with Mr. Layton, he was seen by millions of NDP supporters as a voice for working people in a Parliament dominated since Confederation by the parties of big business. We extend our condolences to his family and colleagues at this difficult moment.

A review of the NDP's record under Jack Layton may come later, but this is a suitable time to comment on the reaction to his final decision - the appointment of popular Québec trade unionist Nicole Turmel as interim NDP leader. The election of 59 NDP MPs in Québec did not reflect a truly fundamental shift in the outlook of working people, since the NDP and the Bloc Québecois have long shared many elements of a social democratic approach. Coming on the heels of the NDP's remarkable gains in Québec, Layton's move showed a desire to hold these advances in the next campaign.

However, some of the response to Turmel's appointment in English-speaking Canada has been appalling, to be blunt. Even as the NDP grapples with the "national question" - the reality that Québec constitutes a nation within the Canadian state - narrow-minded Anglo chauvinism has reared its ugly head. Turmel is a "closet separatist", howls the corporate media, pointing to her former memberships in the BQ and the left-wing Québec Solidaire party. The fact that Turmel also held an NDP card for many years is ignored, as is the complex debate within the QS, which is home to a wide range of views on solutions to the national question.

Such McCarthy-style attacks against those who do not share the Tory/Liberal federalist view of Canada have no place in a genuine, democratic debate; those screeching the loudest are selling out Canadian sovereignty to Yankee imperialism. The people of Québec (and the Aboriginal peoples) have the right of national self-determination - and also the democratic right to take part in Canadian political struggles. Period.

(The above article is from the September 1-15, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint84/06%29%20LAYTON,%20TURMEL.htm

Refugee Blues by W H Auden

2011-07-25T18:50:00.002-05:00

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew;
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said:
'If you've got no passport, you're officially dead';
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
'If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread';
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: 'They must die';
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

BOOK REVIEW. Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History. McKay, Ian. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006. Reviewed by Mauricio Martinez

2011-07-21T18:15:00.000-05:00

Source: The Spark (Online Ed)
http://thesparkjournal.blogspot.com/search/label/Book%20Reviews

There’s an old joke (told more or less famously by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek1), that goes something like this: a man thinks he is a grain of seed. He is promptly taken to the mental institution where the doctors eventually convince him that he is not a grain of seed but a man. But, just when he’s apparently cured – convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man—and permitted to leave the hospital, he comes back instantly, trembling with fear: there is a chicken outside and he is afraid the chicken is going to eat him. “Come now,” says the doctor, “you know full well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “You and I know that,” the patient says, “but does the chicken know?”

In a psychoanalytic sense, the joke has some instructive value: it’s not enough to convince a patient that a certain delusion is not “real,” or to make them conscious of their delusion; one must tap into the unconscious itself or the patient will never be truly “cured.” We can probe a bit deeper still; one might say that the joke conceals a certain statement on the nature of reality. The patient, who in delusion thinks he is a seed and in the hospital is convinced that in reality he is a man, emerges from the hospital to the “outside” world, and is immediately thrown back into his delusion. Why? When convinced of the “reality” that he is indeed a man and not a seed, the patient had simply swapped one delusion for another. The lesson? Our conception of reality is always framed by certain “fictions” which sustain that reality. Fictions that are, in many ways, just as arbitrary as delusions.

This problem is also illustrative of a central dilemma of contemporary historical inquiry, namely, “Is that the way things really were, or only how we think they were?” Since its beginnings, history has endeavoured to provide the “definitive” record of a certain historical event – the Second World War, the fall of the Roman Empire, and so on. But more recently – especially since the 80s – many historians have rebelled against that view, the most fervent of them embracing the post-modern view that objective reality as such simply does not exist and never has. Left historians as well have had to come to grips with this problem in their own way.

Case in point: Ian McKay’s Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History. As the title suggests, the book is an attempt to “rethink” the history of the Canadian left, to look at it and understand it in a radically new and innovative way. The book is impressive in how it takes this task of “rethinking” to heart. Billed as an introduction to a multi-volume history of the Canadian left (forthcoming), the bulk of its 217 pages is an amalgam of analytical frameworks and conceptual schemas.

McKay begins by proposing that the experience of the left has always been one of “living and reasoning otherwise.” This “otherwise,” McKay argues, following the Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, is ultimately a “utopian” project – not fanciful or far-fetched, but rather a vision of the future that radically breaks from the thinking and conditions of the present reality.

McKay then borrows from Marx the concept of the “realm of freedom,” a life unconstrained by necessity (which is in fact less a Marxist concept than an Aristotelian one2; Marx’s innovation was to assert that this realm of freedom was only truly possible through the emancipation of social production), and adds to it Gramsci’s notion of “objective possibility.” In short, the experience of the left is precisely in proposing alternative futures of freedom, of real utopia, and to connect these futures to objective possibilities inherent in the present that point the way towards their realization.

So what is the left, beyond the notions of freedom and possibility that it seeks to realize? McKay cautions us against trying to reduce the left to a core “essence,” which is as fruitless as trying to distil a core “essence” of Marx. There have been many ‘lefts,’ just as there have been many ‘Marxes’: “each period, in complex ways,” McKay writes, “makes its own practice of leftism”; “leftists in each period invent distinctive conceptual systems through which they grasp the world,” and each constructs its own “dialect of the general language of socialism.”3

For each generation, or “cohort,” there are many “paths” to socialism; McKay provides eight: “proletarianization,” or general working-class experience, so-called “diaspora leftisms,” Canada’s various national questions, and movements of gender liberation, spiritual awakening, intellectual inquiry, “global awareness,” and finally, generational concerns, such as those of the generations returning from the First and Second World Wars. McKay’s emphasis on a plurality of “leftisms,” each evolving through different paths, is crucial to McKay’s “strategy of reconnaissance,” a way of looking at left history that avoids the “sectarianism” and “sentimentality” that, McKay argues, have plagued histories of the Canadian left for too long. A reconnaissance approach, McKay argues, avoids partisanship and is geared towards new insights, rather than just reinforcing what we already know and believe.

Using McKay’s approach, the history of the Canadian left emerges as a series of “left formations,” influenced by objective “matrix events,” moments that destabilize the status quo and have ripple-effects within social institutions and popular consciousness. Matrix events (like the Great Depression, for example) are characterized by “moments of refusal” that upset conventional ways of thinking and being; moments of “supersedure,” in which consciousness itself heads forth in radically new directions; and finally, “systemization,” which occurs when society returns to “business as usual.” At this point, left formations tend to retreat into themselves, developing specialized languages and in effect preparing the way for new formations that will recreate the process again on a new political and conceptual terrain.

In response, each formation creates its own conceptual models (i.e. Marxism-Leninism, the Social Gospel, etc.), its own forms of organization (the trade union, the Leninist “party of a new type”), its own forms of education, its own sense of belonging, and so on: its own way of living and thinking “otherwise.” From this understanding of how the left has functioned throughout history, the rest of the book outlines a way in which new models of historical analysis can be formed on McKay’s conceptual basis and generate new knowledge about where the left came from, where it is going, and its relationship to capitalism and the “Liberal Order” that has defined Canada’s consciousness and social institutions throughout its history.

McKay’s book can certainly be lauded for its intent, and it does succeed in breaking with convention and boldly proposing new ways of understanding left history. And most would agree that an understanding of history free from partisanship is a noble aim. And McKay’s “reconnaissance,” given its ostensibly leftist commitment, seems to present itself as more or less politically neutral. But the assertion that such a methodology is free from the sectarianism and sentimentality of previous histories comes across as, in some ways, almost false and self-serving. In his final chapter, “Mapping the Canadian Movement,” McKay takes care to give all of the various “leftisms” (Communists, Social-Democrats, New Leftists, etc.) their due, but does so by tying them to particular historical stages and matrix events: first, the old Socialists (late nineteenth century), then the CPC (1917 – 1945), the CCF-NDP (1945 – 1960s), then the New Left (1960s – 1970s), and ending with the NDP and the global justice movement (1980s to the present day).

McKay ultimately reveals himself as emerging from the tradition of radical democracy, which has gained popularity within the global justice movement and has found its expression within the NDP through the short-lived New Politics Initiative. McKay, consciously or unconsciously, culminates his analysis by describing the new “left formation” of our time as basically his left formation, with each previous one having more or less conveniently departed the historical stage, leaving—at best—residues which will be consciously or unconsciously appropriated by the formations to come.

Much is revealed in McKay’s use of the theories and ideas of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. McKay employs a great number of Gramscian concepts, including “hegemony,” “supersedure,” “historic-bloc,” and “war of position.” McKay cautions against interpreting left history in “tragic” or “ironic” terms, but if there is one thing that is tragic or ironic about left history, it is the fact that Gramsci has become the poster-boy for this new radical democratic current. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri state in a footnote to their famous book Empire (by no means an “orthodox” Marxist work, but one that, if you ask me, has some strong Marxist-Leninist undercurrents):

“Poor Gramsci, communist and militant before all else, tortured and killed by fascism and ultimately by the bosses who financed fascism – poor Gramsci was given the gift of being considered the founder of a strange notion of hegemony that leaves no place for a Marxian politics (See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [a key text in radical-democratic theory – M.M.]…. We have to defend ourselves against such generous gifts!”4

It is thus telling how McKay adopts Gramsci’s dialectic of “war of position”/ “war of manoeuvre,” tossing out the second in favour of the first. True, dramatic wars of manoeuvre – general strikes, revolts, revolutions – are few and far between in Canada, and gradual, grinding wars of position, leading to more modest structural changes, are more common. But then again, the same goes for most of the world. But it is rather silly to turn vice into virtue and presume – as McKay seems to – that the success of the left, in the past and in the future, should be measured by its ability to penetrate the “crevices of the liberal order,”5 or that “left wing effectiveness in Canada comes down in large part to how skilfully and subtly liberal order is pushed to its definitional limits.”6 Such a one-sided interpretation of Gramsci’s thought leads to an ultimate privileging of reform and glorification of parliamentary opposition, akin to Jack Layton’s 2006 promise that “electing more New Democrats to the house,” would somehow strengthen the left’s position against Harper, or the idea that passing a Private Member’s Bill on the labelling of trans fats is in some way more than a very small part of a wider emancipatory project. (We’re back to the old joke again: “didn’t you know that Gramsci was a revolutionary?” “You and I know that,” the Gramscian says, “but does Gramsci know?”)

But far more than the use of Gramsci, which is not particular to McKay by any means, it is the use of the phrase “Canada’s Left History” that ought to be rendered problematic. McKay admits that left formations usually come with an attendant “internationalist” or “world” outlook, but shouldn’t the historian of Canadian left history have a world outlook as well? For example, shall we view the decline in prominence of the CPC after 1945 as its effective exit from the historical stage, or rather as its effective relegation to a frontier outpost of a global movement that was, in many respects, just gaining steam? Or, for that matter, why is it that the left has never been in power in Canada? McKay suggests that the reasons are intrinsically Canadian: a “Liberal order” that co-opts and digests leftist energies, blunting their revolutionary edge, and smoothing over the contradictions of the capitalist system.

But capitalism, at least since 1492, has always been a world system, and could it not be said that beyond the primary contradiction of capitalism – the intrinsic contest between workers and capitalists – there exists a secondary contradiction, that of imperialism – between imperial countries and colonial or neo-colonial countries, in which all classes in the imperialist countries benefit – that distorts, or better, refracts, the primary one? (“Didn’t you know that Canada’s history has been shaped by imperialism?” “You and I know that, but does Canada know?”)

Again, we are faced with the very contradiction between the subjective position of the historian and the objective “reality” that the historian seeks to describe. McKay’s reconnaissance, which aims to describe events in some ways “as they really are,” in all of their apparent complexity and plurality, removes the subjective element, and as such is ultimately untenable. Like, how, in light of the recent re-founding convention of the Young Communist League last March, are we to interpret the decision to disband the YCL in 1991? Was the decision to disband an example of colossal hubris and even an absurd arrogance (to put it mildly)? Or maybe it was just a “formation” that had had its day and no longer served any historical purpose. (“You and I know that,” the YCLer said, “but does the YCL know?”)

“But, oh,” the reader might object, “you are really just a partisan, sectarian and sentimental!” You bet! And card-carrying! And, in fact, I would rather live in a world full of partisan histories where the CPC is described in vitriolic, dismissive, or otherwise irreverent terms than one that lauds its contributions while at the same time maintains a cynical distance from it as a relic in a museum. A cynical distance that is everywhere in our popular ideology, where nobody believes in Santa Claus yet you would be hard-pressed to find a public place without a Christmas tree in late December. “Yes, it’s a religious ritual, but I don’t really believe in it.” You and I know that, but does Christmas know? One thing about having a partisan viewpoint is that there’s just no denying the ignorance of chickens.

_________________

Notes:

[1] - Slavoj Zizek, in a talk entitled “The Ignorance of the Chicken, or, Who Believes What Today?” April 12, 2006, posted on the Critical Inquiry website, http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/media/zizek.html. I have to thank and credit Dr. Zizek with the inspiration for the tenor of this review.

2 - “Aristotle distinguished three ways of life (bioi [bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation, i.e. the philosopher; bios apolaustikos, the life of art and pleasure; and the bios politikos, the political life – M.M.]) which men might choose freedom, that is, in full independence of the necessities of life and the relationships they originated. This prerequisite of freedom ruled out all ways of life chiefly devoted to keeping one’s self alive – not only labor, which was the way of life of the rule of his master, but also the working life of the free craftsman and the acquisitive life of the merchant.” See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd. ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998, 12.

3 - McKay, 35.

4 - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. New York: Harvard University Press, 2000, 451, ff. 26.

5 - McKay, 79.

6 - McKay 84

July 20, German Communists Answer theses of CPUSA's Sam Webb, by Dr. Hans-Peter Brenner writing in the Berlin socialist daily Junge Welt , July 20, 2011

2011-07-20T21:55:00.000-05:00

Coping with political defeat, July 20, 2011 by Hans-Peter Brenner

Source: 21stcenturymanifesto

Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism is a work of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In it he dealt with the consequences of the defeat of the first Russian revolution of 1905. At that time, many party members (including many recently enrolled intellectuals) left the revolutionary party in droves. Soon after that, the farewell to Marxism, which we too experienced in 1989-1991, became the fashion.

As a reflection of this change there occurred profound disintegration, confusion, shaking and swaying of all sorts – in a word, there appeared a very serious internal crisis of Marxism. The resolute defense against this decay, the determined and persistent struggle for the basics of Marxism, again came on the agenda.

That was Lenin’s diagnosis.

It was — and still is — important for us German Communists to examine what conclusions other Communist parties later drew from the defeat of socialism in Europe and the USSR.

First of all, I think about the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba, which had already adjusted to this disaster before the shameful end of Mikhail Gorbachev who drove to ruin Soviet socialism, his country, and his party. Cuba — the country and the Communist Party – understood this: the harsh “drought” of the Special Period would govern the 1990s and early 2000s. Without its revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist character, the Communist Party of Cuba would have given up its socialist goal.

Self-awareness or Self-doubt?

I recall one Communist leader, prominent but, unfortunately, less noted in Germany , Alvaro Cunhal (1913-2005), the longtime general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). At the time of the fascist Salazar dictatorship, Cunhal’s underground struggle, his inspiring and mobilizing role during and after the 1974 victory of the “Carnation Revolution,” as well as his shrewd leadership, are legendary.

The advance of the socialist stage of the revolutionary upheaval in Portugal was stopped by the united and coordinated actions of U.S. imperialism, NATO, the EU, the main European imperialist states, international social democracy, and domestic reaction.

Thanks to his personal resourcefulness, Cunhal embarked upon a strategic retreat. With a party united by a Marxist-Leninist program, he achieved the preservation of the PCP and its mass influence. He developed its clear profile, which it keeps today, as a revolutionary party of the working class, peasants and other working people.

To this day, his conclusions about the character of a Communist Party at the beginning of the 21st century are well worth reading. In his 2001 work, As Seis de Caracteristicas Fundamentais do Partido Comunista (The Six Basic Features of a Communist Party) Cunhal goes into the internal situation of the Communist movement at the beginning of the 21st century. He writes:

The international Communist movement, and the parties from which it is made up, were subject to profound changes as a the result of the collapse of the USSR and other socialist countries and capitalism’s success in its rivalry with socialism. There were parties who denied their militant past, their class nature, the goal of a socialist society, and revolutionary theory. In some cases, they were transformed into system-integrated parties, and they eventually disappeared from the scene.

In 2011 as well, this finding is relevant and correct.

Features of a Communist Party

The Communist movement as a whole – Cunhal went on – has achieved flexibility in its composition and reached new limits. Admittedly, though there is no model of a Communist Party, nonetheless “six basic features can reveal a Communist party, regardless of whether the party bears that name or another.

Briefly, their traits could include:

1. To be a party completely independent of the interests, ideology, pressure and threats of capitalist forces;

2. To be a party of the working class, the working people, in general, the exploited and oppressed;

3. To be a party with a democratic internal life and a unified central leadership;

4. To be a party which is both internationalist and which defends the interests of its country;

5. To be a party that defines its goal as the building of a society which knows neither exploited nor exploiters, a socialist society;

6. To be the bearer of a revolutionary theory, the theory of Marxism-Leninism, which not only makes the explanation of the world possible, but also shows the way to change it.

In its simplicity and plainness, the last point sounds like it is of little interest, just as the other five points appear to include too little that is new. And yet these “self-evident truths” are not self-evident truths – not even for Communists. But more of that later.

Classics Taken at their Word

Cunhal made available to us the following explanation for his six points. It is cited here, in more detail, because of its uniqueness and distinctiveness:

All the slanderous, punishing, anti-Communist campaigns are lies. Marxism-Leninism is a living, anti-dogmatic, dialectical, creative theory, which is further enriched by practice and by its responses to new situations and phenomena, which is its job. It drives the practice of enrichment and development, dynamically and creatively using the lessons of practice.

Marx in Capital and Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto analyzed and defined the basic elements and characteristics of capitalism.

In the second half of the 19th century, however, the development of capitalism underwent an important amendment. Competition led to concentration and monopoly. We owe to Lenin and his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism the definition of capitalism at the end of the 19th century. These theoretical developments are of exceptional value. And the value of research and systematization of theoretical knowledge is rated as high.

In a synthesis of extraordinary clarity and rigor, a famous article by Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism explains it. In the philosophy of dialectical materialism, historical materialism is its application to society. Political economy is the analysis and explanation of capitalism and exploitation, and the theory of surplus value is the cornerstone for understanding exploitation. The theory of socialism is the definition of the new society, the abolition of exploitation of man by man.

During the 20th century and the social transformations accompanying it, much new theoretical thinking was added. However, there also was scattered and contradictory thinking which made it difficult to distinguish what is theoretical development and where it is a question of revisionist deviation from principles. Hence the urgent need for debate without preconceptions and without making truths absolute. It’s not about the search for conclusions deemed to be final, but rather the intensification of joint reflection.” Quoted from: www.kommunisten.ch

Cunhal is now dead six years. His party, the PCP, however, considers him not an idol on a pedestal, a “historical figure” whose thoughts and ideas slowly but gradually have been forgotten. Today, his theoretical and programmatic conclusions determine the path and self-understanding of the PCP. But, unfortunately, it is quite different elsewhere.

On Slippery Ground

The current example of this is the thinking of the chairman of the CPUSA, Sam Webb. Political Affairs, the theoretical organ of his party, published in February this year under the title: “A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century: What It Looks Like, What It Says, and What It Does.” It has now appeared in German on the news portal of the German Communist Party’s website, www.kommunisten.de

Why are Webb’s theses of interest beyond the CPUSA?

For example, why did the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), despite the demands of the controversies and class struggles raging in that country, to which it devotes so much energy and combativeneness, send a really dramatic appeal To the members and cadres of the Communist Party USA! To U.S. militant workers! It was also addressed to all the Communist and Workers’ Parties, “in order to protest against these theses.”

And now, why do German Communists deal with the Webb theses too?

Sam Webb stressed at the beginning of his 29 theses, each different in detail and very different in theoretical significance, that he was on slippery ground. The publisher of the theoretical journal of the CPUSA, Political Affairs, also knew well what he was getting involved with by posting it. The preface that introduces the article makes this clear.

The following article represents only the views of its author. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the official views of any organization or collective…

Apparently, to avoid such criticisms [Editor: criticism of opportunism], Webb emphasized in the introduction that it was a “draft,” an unfinished manuscript, and that “readers will surely note inconsistencies, contradictions, silences and unfinished ideas.”

This is all too ostentatious modesty, and the ensuing fishing for compliments belies the altogether clear and complete implications of the theses.

Communists without Lenin

In the end Sam Webb delivers a very consistent idea, although it is not original. A letter in the German Communist Party weekly Unsere Zeit has already pointed out:

What is so exciting, new and important for us in these theses of Comrade Webb…? I cannot see it. Readers of Marxistische Blaetter already read and evaluated the core of his “Reflections on Socialism” in mid-2008 (In Focus: International Marxism, March 2008). And in our party, since the mid to late 1980s, we have discussed other theories (for example, the reduction of Marxism to a mere method, or the orientation to a “Marxism without Lenin.” Not only did we do this thoroughly, but we developed collective responses crowned with a new party program’. Lothar Geisler, “Theses Not New,” Unsere Zeit, July 1, 2011, p. 12)

In fact, most of the 29 theses do not contain much that is new. Though he writes of merely one in the article mentioned in Marxistische Blaetter from 2008, in its approaches, the quixotic intellectual journey already discernible in 2008 continues, but it now ends as a break with central points of Communist theory — socialism, and the doctrine of the Party. He runs aground on the shoals of a left–pluralist Marxism; or the earlier “Eurocommunism,” or the current democratic socialism of the German Left Party,European Left, respectively.

I mention particularly the rejection of the theory of Marx, Engels and Lenin as a unified, revolutionary theory of the working class.

What is original here is a hitherto less well-known chauvinistic undertone. As noted in his Thesis #2:

As for “Marxism-Leninism,” the term should be retired in favor of simply “Marxism.” For one thing, it has a negative connotation among ordinary Americans, even in left and progressive circles. Depending on whom you ask, it either sounds foreign or dogmatic or undemocratic or all of these together.

Granted, Lenin was no Russian exile finding safety in the U.S., taking out U.S. citizenship, and Americanizing his first or last name – perhaps to Sam Cook or Sam Smith.

But do ordinary Americans deem Karl Marx to be a fellow American?

And does Marxism really sound so terrifically American, that perhaps Sarah Palin herself, the icon of ordinary Americans, understands by Marxism a sweetness and innocence, causing her patriotic sentiment to peal like a church bell?

Webbism?

So the real test awaits Jim and Jane, ordinary Americans.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes to my mind, with its sigh, almost a curse:

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the meaning of Webb’s theses is more than noisy fury.

We long-suffering European Communists are quite accustomed to this counterposing of Marx and Lenin, and the elimination of the latter from what is coyly called “Marxism” or – even more subtly – “scientific socialism.”

A Diminished Picture of History

In the early 1980s, the German Communist Party grappled intensively with a forerunner of today’s “Webbism,” the idea of a Western “plural” Marxism, and a Marxism without Leninism. It arose in the study and seminar rooms of the West Berlin professor Wolfgang Fritz Haug.

At the same time, the highly relevant Marxist journal Argument was being published (compare Marxism. Ideology. Politics. Crisis of Marxism, or Crisis of the Argument? Frankfurt am Main, 1984. Editors: Hans Heinz Holz, Thomas Metscher, Joseph Schleifstein, and Robert Steigerwald.)

The second argument pushed by Webb for the amputation of Marxism-Leninism is even less original. And it is no less wrong. Back then it was also formulated by the Haug school. Allegedly, Marxism-Leninism is not “classical Marxism.”

Sam Webb’s allegation of “simplification” of the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other early Marxists in the form of “Marxism-Leninism” in the Stalin era is simply wrong.

In the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist International, after the death of Lenin and long before the nonsensical enthronement of Stalin as the “one true disciple of Lenin,” acknowledgement began of Lenin as the third classical author of Marxism.

The careful processing, safeguarding and development of Lenin’s theoretical legacy by many CPSU and Comintern theorists is hidden by the Webb theses in a way that ignores history.

The general assertion that “Soviet scientists under Stalin’s leadership systematized and simplified earlier Marxist writing,” not to mention adapting it to the needs of Soviet state ideology, is nothing more than repetition of the old anti-Soviet slogans.

There were, in the course of seventy years of Soviet party history and scientific history, numerous introductions to the academic and theoretical papers of Marx, Engels and Lenin. They were simplifications, just as in any scientific discipline there is simplification in all introductions, compendia, and so forth. They are merely introductions.

In no way was there systematic falsification of the inheritance. Even in the post-socialist era, the collected works of classical authors have still not finally emerged. This does not change the fact that, in a few texts of Lenin, there also was one or another politically motivated “editorial reworking” or omission, although this was justified and made transparent.

It is not true that Marxism-Leninism was — or is — an impoverished,simplified version of the true Marxism.

Certainly there was and is, in every theory and in all science, phases of greater or lesser creativity and development. And undoubtedly there was and will be future phases, just as in any scientific doctrine, in which revolutionary Marxists/Communists do not evaluate promptly new social and/or natural scientific phenomena. Or they do so too late. Or in a way that is only partly correct. In general, it is the nature of science that it moves in a contradictory manner between faster and slower stages of development.

Webb’s more far-reaching conclusion is that even what he designates as his new “Marxism” is only a “scientific method.”

He thinks his altogether limited and schematic scientific-theoretical view surpasses the comprehensive legacy of the three classic founders of Marxism-Leninism.

A “method” which brings to light no apparent content, is worthless. And in the thesis of Sam Webb, the method goes straight to this “new-old” distinction and the rejection of content.

A German Version of Webb?

After the defeat of real socialism, the Left could not fail to weigh its previous relationship with Lenin and Leninism. The PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism] originating in a Marxist-Leninist party did this too. It broke with its Leninist heritage. In May 1990 at a closed meeting of the former PDS Executive Board, Gregor Gysi spoke about the new theoretical basis of his reform-socialism-turned-political-party. In this context, he explained both the departure from Marxism-Leninism and the move to an “ideologically pluralistic” party in which the Communist component would enjoy only a marginal existence, tolerated and allowed.

Thus far the statements by Sam Webb are nothing new. The same applies to his “new” concepts of organizational theory. They are in theory 27 ideas presented to remodel the party structure into an informal communication network, mainly Internet-based, whose members interact with each other primarily via e-mail.

Abolition of the unity principle and the commitment to the party program and decisions amounts to a vote for the open liquidation of the Communist Party.

Reassuring evidence that the huge distances between widely scattered individual U.S. Communists absolutely requires use of modern means of communication, in this context, is not completely convincing.

It’s clear Webb doesn’t mean to modernize the lines of communication. Such modernization, of course, is useful and necessary.

This is about something entirely different: the liquidation of a strong organizational structure, clear criteria for party membership, a common collectively developed program, binding revolutionary strategy and tactics, and in general decisions grounding the party in the working class, in working people, in the revolutionary youth and among oppressed women, in production enterprises and scientific institutions, and in the intelligentsia worn out by capital.

He also thinks joining this structure existing only in cyberspace should be slapdash – “no more difficult than joining other social organizations.” This is a logical consequence of the destruction of a party once in political struggle against the capitalist system – a party consisting of real, like-minded people coordinated with each other. The party is downgraded to a loose, small electoral force primarily concentrating on the support of the election campaigns of the Democratic Party.

Sam Webb has still provided the remnants of a party. “Teams” will be traveling around as “meet and greet” and support groups.

This is nothing more than window dressing.

Does the U.S. workers’ movement need such a party? I doubt it very much. But it has to decide for itself.

In any case, German Communists do not need it. Nor do we need an “open-ended and interesting” discussion of this plea for the end of Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party.

We have better and more important things to do.

Dr. Hans-Peter Brenner, a psychologist and psychotherapist, is a member of the national leadership of the German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, DKP) and co-editor of Marxistische Blaetter. This article appeared July 9, 2011 in Junge Welt, a Marxist daily newspaper published in Berlin.

www.jungewelt.de/2011/07-09/001.php?sstr=HansPeterBrenner

Translated by Bill Miller

Communist Party of Israel Raising a black flag over the destruction of democracy, 14 July 2011

2011-07-18T23:28:00.000-05:00

http://maki.org.il/en/component/content/article/11166-raising-a-black-flag-over-the-destruction-of-democracy

Decisions of the 14th session of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of Israel

July 8, 2011

The Boycott Law ("The Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott - 2011"), which has just passed in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), is an outrageous attempt by the Israeli right to silence every form of criticism of government policy and especially the policy of settlement in the occupied territories. By threatening to impose costly damages on offenders, even without proof of damage, the right wing is attempting to shut out the voices of those who resist the occupation, and call, for instance, for a boycott of consumer products produced in the settlements.

This law joins a full series of other discriminatory and racist laws that have been proposed by Netanyahu's right wing government in recent years - laws that trample upon democracy, but have been approved by the Knesset.

The CPI condemns the "Boycott Law" as a grave assault on the freedom of speech, the freedom of criticism, and the freedom of protest, and calls for the forces who would defend our democratic space to rally together to put a stop to the fascist threat and to put an end to the injustices of the occupation.

Calling for a public campaign in favor of the UN General Assembly's recognition of a Palestinian State in the 1967 borders

The Obama government and European governments are applying pressure on the Palestinian Authority, demanding that it retreat from its appeal to the UN General Assembly - due to convene in September - to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. These pressures are in service of the war-mongering policies of settlement and occupation pursued by the Netanyahu government, which are disastrous for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Central Committee raises an alarm against the catastrophe that the next war will bring upon Israel and the regions' nations. This war is being devised by the Netanyahu government in an attempt to prevent a political settlement, that would involve retreating from all of the occupied territories, and to block the anticipated vote in the General Assembly over the Palestinian issue.

The Central Committee of the CPI stresses that the only steps that can lead to a just and stable peace agreement which can guarantee the security of the two people and their futures are: the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside Israel; the evacuation of all the settlements; dismantling of the separation wall; and a solution of the refugee problem based on UN resolutions.

The CPI congratulates the residents of Bil'in and all those struggling against the separation barrier, for their important victory in removing the fence from part of Bil'in's lands.

The Central Committee calls upon members of the party to enlist in the public campaign, initiated by Hadash, for Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state within the June 4, 1967 lines. We send our blessings to TANDI (Movement of Democratic Women in Israel) and all of the Israeli women, who initiated a similar political action in collaboration with Palestinian women in the occupied territories.

Stop the blood bath in Syria and establish a democratic regime

The CPI's Central Committee reiterates its unambiguous stance against the killings, oppression, and mass persecution of the Syrian people, who are fighting for their freedom, for democracy and for social justice. The popular demands are legitimate and just demands.

We utterly reject any attempt on the part of the United States, Israel, and their allies to intervene in Syria by saying that they are taking the side of the people against the regime. The United States and its allies never intervened anywhere for the interests of the peoples it claimed to defend: it intervened only in the interests of the corporations and in order to establish imperial hegemony.

A regime that kills its own people, who are struggling by peaceful means, cannot be progressive and cannot claim any legitimacy. Our position is clear: we stand alongside the popular movement that is fighting for democracy, social justice and civil liberties, and which rejects any foreign intervention in the Syrian issue or dependency on imperialism, and which struggles against the Israeli occupation.

The voices that issued from the meetings with the Syrian opposition held in Turkey and France, as well as during the visit of the U.S. ambassador in the city of Hama, and which invited foreign powers to intervene, do not reflect the genuine interests of the Syrian people, and are at odds with the spirit of the masses' legitimate demands. We condemn the position voiced by various circles, both within the regime and within the opposition, who are pushing to resolve the question of the Syrian popular demands by means of an understanding with the U.S. and its allies that will create dependence on those foreign powers.

We call for an immediate end to the blood bath in Syria, and for the establishment of a democratic regime that strives for social justice, and that adheres to the principle of Syrian independence, and its national and geographical unity. We reject any attempt to divide the Syrian Arab people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or any other category.

We place a great deal of faith in the Arab-Syrian people, which carries a proud heritage of resistance to colonialism and occupation, and which fulfills an outstanding role in developing a progressive and enlightened culture. We are convinced that the Syrian people will not allow its wishes and its struggle to be hijacked, and will not allow its country to become a protectorate of the West.

We call upon all the elements of the society and people in Syria to attain full democratization and bring to an immediate end the bloodshed which is being carried out by the regime against the demonstrators who are using peaceful means while struggling for their rights.

Developments in Sudan

South Sudan has declared independence, and we honor the will of the Sudanese people both in the North and in the South. Sudan, as a country containing the sources of the Nile, is one of Africa's most important states. With its land and water resources, the country has untold possibilities for developing a thriving agricultural sector, as well as tremendous potential in terms of natural resources, especially in its southern part. Therefore, Sudan's status is of tremendous economic and strategic importance.

The West, and the United States in particular, is setting its sights on Sudan. The Western powers have worked for many years to keep Sudan divided, by fueling ethnic and geographic strife, while taking advantage of the crimes of the regime in Khartoum, and its denial of the legitimate demands of the Sudanese people in the south.

The division of Sudan was realized in wake of a referendum that took place in the south, whose results were also acceptable to the regime in Khartoum. This division was not a necessary step for solving the question of the south. It was advanced as part of Western intervention and the criminal policies conducted by the government in Kharoum, which ignored the desires of the country's inhabitants.

Rise in the cost of living and erosion of wages

During the past five years, the average real wage has risen by less than 3% while the prices of food have risen by 25%, the prices of fruit and vegetables by 36% and the cost of renting or buying a flat have doubled. The wave of price hikes, which have eroded the purchasing power of working families and senior citizens, is the product of a combination of monopolistic behavior on the part of the large corporations and the privatization policies of the government in support of capital.

The CPI calls upon the Histadrut (Labor Federation) to ensure that the workers receive immediate compensation for the recent price hikes by paying a one-time cost-of-living payment of 10% of the workers' wages.

Solidarity with the strikers

The CPI stands in solidarity with the workers of Haifa Chemicals, who have been on strike for three months now to demand a collective agreement and a fair wage for all the employees of the firm, and to protest against their degraded working conditions; with the doctors, striking to improve their working conditions and to save public medicine; with the nurses, who are implementing sanctions because of the lack of salaried positions and the abandonment of patients in the hospitals; and with all those fighting against factory shutdowns, layoffs, the privatization of government companies; and employment through temporary employment agencies.

An end to home demolitions

A year has gone by since the residents of Al-Araquib, joined by Jews and Arabs, began their resolute and courageous campaign to protect the village and villagers from the repeated demolitions of their meager homes at the hands of state representatives.

The CPI condemns the house demolitions in the Negev, which are an expression of the racist, anti-Arab policies that are attempting to uproot tens of thousands of Bedouin Arabs from their lands and villages.

The CPI's 26 Convention – in December
The Central Committee of the CPI has decided to hold the party's 26th convention on the 8-10th of December 2011, and has asked the relevant party institutions and organizations to begin preparations for the convention.

Nato’s Fascist War in Libya, in Cubadebate,by Fidel Castro Ruz, Mar 29th, 2011

2011-07-17T16:08:00.000-05:00

You didn’t have to be clairvoyant to foresee what I wrote with great detail in three Reflection Articles I published on the CubaDebate website between February 21 and March 3: “The NATO Plan Is to Occupy Libya,” “The Cynical Danse Macabre,” and “NATO’s Inevitable War.”

Not even the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy were so blatantly shameless regarding the Spanish Civil War unleashed in 1936, an event that maybe a lot of people have been recalling over these past days.

Almost 75 years to the day have passed since then, but nothing that has happened over the last 75 centuries, or even 75 millenniums of human life on our planet can compare.

Sometimes it seems that those of us who serenely voice our opinions on these issues are exaggerating. I dare say that we have actually been naive to assume that we all should be aware of the deception or colossal ignorance that humanity has been dragged into.

In 1936 there was an intense clash between two systems and ideologies of more or less equal military power.

The arms back then seemed more like toys compared with today’s weapons. Humanity’s survival was not threatened despite the destructive power and the locally lethal force deployed. Entire cities and even nations could have been virtually destroyed. But never was the human race, in its totality, at risk of being exterminated several times over for the stupid and suicidal power developed by modern science and technology.

With these current realities in mind, it is embarrassing to read the continuous news reports on the use of powerful laser-guided rockets with 100% accuracy, fighter-bombers that go twice the speed of sound, potent explosives that blow apart uranium-hardened metals that have an everlasting effect on the inhabitants and their descendants.

Cuba stated its position regarding the internal situation in Libya at the meeting in Geneva. Without hesitating, Cuba defended the idea of a political solution to the conflict in Libya and was categorically opposed to any foreign military intervention.

In a world where the alliance between the United States and the developed capitalist powers of Europe increasingly take hold of the people’s resources and fruits of their labor, any honest citizen, whatever their standpoint to the government, would be opposed to a foreign military intervention in their country.

But most absurd about the current situation is the fact that before the brutal war broke out in Northern Africa, in another region of the world, nearly 10 000 kilometers away, a nuclear accident had occurred in one of the most populated areas of the world following a tsunami caused by a 9.0 earthquake, which has already cost a hard-working nation like Japan nearly 30 000 lives. Such accident would have not occurred 75 years before.

In Haiti, a poor and underdeveloped country, a nearly 7.0 quake according to the Richter scale, caused over 300 000 deaths, countless people wounded and hundreds of thousands harmed.

However, what was terribly tragic in Japan was the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, whose consequences are still to be assessed.

I will only recall some of the main stories published by the news agencies:

ANSA.- Fukushima 1 nuclear plant is releasing “extremely high and potentially lethal radiations,” said Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the US nuclear entity.

EFE.- The nuclear threat stemming from the serious situation at a Japanese plant, following the earthquake, has triggered security revisions in atomic plants around the world and has made some countries paralyze their plans.

Reuters.- Japan’s devastating earthquake and deepening nuclear crisis could result in losses of up to $200 billion for Japanese economy, but the global impact remains hard to gauge.

EFE.- The deterioration of one reactor after another at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear center continued to feed fears of a pending nuclear disaster as desperate attempts to control a radioactive leak did nothing to provide even a glimmer of hope.

AFP.- Japan´s Emperor Akihito expressed concern about the unpredictable character of the nuclear crisis hitting Japan following the quake and tsunami that killed thousands of people and left 500 000 homeless. New quake reported in the Tokyo area.

There are reports talking about even more concerning issues.

Some refer to the presence of toxic radioactive iodine in Tokyo’s drinking water, which doubles the tolerable amount that can be consumed by the smallest children in the Japanese capital. One of these reports says that the stocks of bottled water are shrinking in Tokyo, a city located in a prefecture at more than 200 kilometers from Fukushima.

This series of circumstances poses a dramatic situation on our world.

I can express freely my views on the war in Libya.
I do not share political or religious views with the leader of that country. I am a Marxist-Leninist and a follower of Marti, as I have already said.

I see Libya as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and a sovereign State of the nearly 200 members of the United Nations.

Never, a large or small country, in this case with only 5 million inhabitants, was the victim of such a brutal attack by the air force of a militaristic organization with thousands of fighter-bombers, more than 100 submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, and sufficient arsenal to destroy the planet many times over. Our species had never encountered this situation and there had been nothing similar 75 years ago, when the Nazi bombers attacked targets in Spain.

Now, however, the criminal and discredited NATO will write a ”beautiful” little story about its “humanitarian” bombing.
If Gaddafi honors the traditions of his people and decides to fight to the last breath, as he has promised, together with the Libyans who are facing the worst bombing a country has ever suffered, NATO and its criminal projects will sink into the mire of shame.

The people respect and believe in men who fulfill their duty.

More than 50 years ago, when the United States killed more than a hundred Cubans with the explosion of merchant ship “La Coubre” our people proclaimed ”Patria o Muerte.” (Homeland or Death). They have fulfilled this, and have always been determined to keep their word.

“Anyone who tries to seize Cuba,” said the most glorious fighter in our history-”will only gather the dust of her soil soaked in blood.”
I beg you to excuse the frankness with which I address the issue.

Fidel Castro Ruz

28 March 2011

8:14 p.m.

From "Let the Railsplitter Awake" by Pablo Neruda, 1948

2011-07-16T10:03:00.002-05:00

[...]

Let none of this happen. Let the Rail Splitter awake. Let Abe come with axe and his wooden plate to eat with the farmers. Let his head like tree-bark, his eye like those in wooden planks and oak-tree boles, turn to look on the world rising above the foliage higher than the sequoias. Let him buy something in a drugstore let him take a bus to Tampa let him bite into a yellow apple and enter a moviehouse to converse with all the simple people.

Let the Rail Splitter awake

Let Abe come, let his aged yeast rise the green and gold earth of Illinois, let him lift up his axe in his own town against the new slaveholders against the slave-lash against the poisoned printing-press against the bloodied merchandise they want to sell. Let them march singing and smiling the young white, the young Negro against the walls of gold against the manufacturer of hate against the merchant of their blood let them sing, laugh and conquer.

Let the Rail Splitter awake.

Peace for the twilights to come peace for the bridge, peace for the wine, peace for the stanzas which pursue me and in my blood uprise entangling my earlier songs with earth and loves, peace for the city in the morning when bread wakes up, peace for the Mississippi, source of rivers, peace for my brothers' shirt, peace for books like a seal of air, peace for the great kholkoz of Kiev, peace for the ashes for those dead and of these other dead, peace for the grimy iron of Brooklyn, peace for the letter carrier, who from house to house goes like the day, peace for the choreographer who shouts through a funnel to the honeysuckle vine, peace for my own right hand that wants to write only Rosario, peace for the Bolivian, secretive as a lump of tin, peace so that you may marry, peace for all the saw-mills of the Bio-Bio, peace for the torn heart of guerrilla Spain, peace for the little museum in Wyoming where the most lovely thing is a pillow embroidered with a heart, peace for the baker and his loaves, and peace for the flour, peace for all the wheat to be born, for all the love which will seek its tasselled shelter, peace for all those alive: peace for all lands and all waters.

Here I say farewell, I return to my house, in my dreams i return to Patagonia where the wind rattles the barns and the ocean spatters ice. I am nothing more than a poet: I love all of you, I wander about the world I love; in my country they gaol miners and soldiers give orders to judges. Bu tI love even the roots in my small cold country, if I had to die a thousand times over it is there I would die, if I had to be born a thousand times over it is there I would be born near the tall wild pines the tempestuous south wind the new;y-purchased bells. Let none think of me. Let us think of the entire earth and pound the table with love. I don't want blood again to saturate bread, beans, music: I wish they would come with me: the miner, the little girl, the lawyer, the seaman, the doll-maker, to go into a movie and come out to drink the reddest wine. I did not come to solve anything. I came here to sing and for you to sing with me.

--Pablo Neruda From somewhere in the Americas, May 1948 Let the Rail Splitter Awake and other poems New York, International Publishers, 1970 [2001]

Slim Evans: Red Labour organizer and leader of the On To Ottawa Trek of 1935, June 16-30, 2011, issue of People's Voice

2011-07-06T20:52:00.000-05:00

This year, to mark the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of Canada's foundation in 1921, People's Voice is printing a series of articles on the party's history and prominent members.

     Arthur H. "Slim" Evans is best known as the main organizer and leader of the On To Ottawa Trek of 1935. For his decades of organizing efforts, Slim Evans was repeatedly charged and jailed, but was widely hailed as an outstanding champion of workers' rights.

     Born on April 24, 1890 in Toronto, Slim Evans left school at 13 to help support his family. He sold newspapers, drove a team of horses and learned the carpentry trade. Like many others, Evans came west in 1911, working at various jobs on the prairies, before heading to Minneapolis and then Kansas City. There he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and was sentenced to three years imprisonment for participating in a free speech fight, having read aloud the Declaration of Independence at a rally. "All I did was read it. I was too shy and too nervous at that time to make up any speech of my own," he said later.

     Evans was released in 1912 after leading a jail strike of political prisoners. In 1913 he was shot in the leg at the infamous Ludlow Massacre of striking Colorado coal miners. During five years across the western USA, he worked with many labour giants including "Big Bill" Haywood, Frank Little and Joe Hill.

     In 1916, Evans returned to Canada, doing farm work, carpentry, and then becoming a miner. He was active in the One Big Union, the Canadian equivalent of the IWW, and volunteered to help organize coal miners in the Drumheller Valley region of Alberta. The Drumheller miners walked out in solidarity with the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Rejecting the United Mineworkers of America which had failed to help them, the miners also demanded recognition of the OBU. The mineowners, the Alberta government, and the UMWA fought back, and the OBU was defeated after a lengthy battle. Evans was later sentenced to three years in prison, on trumped-up charges of using UMWA funds to fund a wildcat strike without permission. The truth was that he had used union funds to feed striking miners rather than send it as "per capita" to UMWA headquarters.

     Evans was released in March 1925, after one year in the Prince Albert Penitentiary. A petition to the Minister of Justice with over 8700 signatures of miners and other supporters from across B.C. and Alberta was the cause of his early release.

     By this time, the OBU had nearly disappeared, but Evans remained a prominent labour activist, working at a variety of different jobs. He also built a home for his family, at 17 E. 42 Avenue in Vancouver.

     In 1926, Evans joined the Communist Party of Canada. As he said later, "I believe I was a communist right from the first time I started to travel through the country and saw conditions in the various mining camps and the rotten conditions that prevailed there."

     The onset of the Great Depression saw conditions become much worse. Millions were jobless and hungry. In 1932 Evans helped organize the BC section of the National Unemployed Workers Association, fighting to win increased rates for relief work. Later that year, he began organizing the coal miners of Princeton into the Mine Workers Union of Canada, an affiliate of the Communist-led Workers Unity League. Police and the Ku Klux Klan cooperated to break the Princeton miners' strike for higher wages, and Evans was imprisoned for 18 months in Oakalla penitentiary. The authorities also evicted his family from the house on 42nd Avenue when they were unable to pay the mortgage. Another huge labour campaign finally won Evans' release in 1934, just as the struggle of the unemployed began to boil over.

     Thousands of unemployed men in the "slave camps" run by the federal government joined the WUL-affiliated Relief Camp Workers Union. BC members of the RCWU voted in April 1935 to strike for "work and wages." For two months, the strikers conducted a powerful campaign for their demands in Vancouver, and then voted to take their struggle directly to Ottawa. Riding the freights, they reached Regina, where Prime Minister R.B. "Iron Heel" Bennett invited the union to send a delegation to present their grievances. Slim Evans headed the eight-member delegation, which was subjected to a verbal attack by Bennett. Evans called Bennett a liar, and the delegation headed back to Regina, where a brutal RCMP attack halted the Trek on July 1, 1935.

     But stopping the Trek did not change the course of history. The slave camps were soon shut down, Bennett's Tories suffered a massive defeat, and workers began winning gains such as unemployment insurance. Evans and others were charged under Section 98 of the Criminal Code for "membership in an unlawful organization" - the RCWU. But the cases died when the new Liberal government was compelled to repeal Section 98.

     Slim Evans continued his labour activities, helping to organize workers at Cominco in Trail, B.C., into Local 480 of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union. In 1937 he led a campaign for medical funds to support the MacKenzie Papineau Battalion fighting for the freedom of Spain. During World War Two, he was a shop steward of the Amalgamated Shipwrights in the Vancouver shipyards.

     Tragically, Slim Evans died on February 13, 1944, from injuries after being struck by a car three weeks earlier. He was buried in Ocean View Park cemetery in Burnaby. His place in Canadian history was regained with "Work and Wages," the most complete collection of information on his life, edited by his daughter Jean Evans Sheils and Ben Swankey, published in 1977 by the Trade Union Research Bureau. Anniversary celebrations of the On to Ottawa Trek held in 1985 and later years have also done much to educate new generations of labour activists about the contributions of this remarkable Communist.

(The above article is from the June 16-30, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

MARKHAM ONTARIO COUNCIL BANS CRITICISM OF ISRAELI APARTHEID, Special to Peoplesvoice, May 16-31, 2011

2011-07-06T20:23:00.000-05:00

Special to PV
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint79/08%29%20MARKHAM%20COUNCIL.htm

     The municipality of Markham, Ontario, northeast of Toronto, has been known for its rapid population growth in recent years. Now, Markham is in the news for another reason. On May 3, a majority of city councillors adopted a motion to censor "Israeli Apartheid Week", an event held this year in 95 cities and more than 75 universities on six continents. This includes three cities in Israel and four cities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

     Organized every March by students on Canadian campuses, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) features film screenings and high-profile forums with prominent academics and community leaders. IAW condemns all forms of racism and discrimination, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti‑Arab racism, and homophobia. Many Jewish students are involved in organizing IAW.

     The Canadian Arab Federation says the May 3 motion "aims to deny Canadian students and academics the rights of freedom of expression and academic freedom, rights that are enjoyed by Israeli students and academics... The motion creates the absurd situation where Canadian students and academics are allowed to freely criticize their own government but are banned from criticizing a foreign government.

     "The motion put forward by Councillor (Howard) Shore is one of several attempts currently being undertaken to censor and suppress public debate on this subject in order to shield Israel's actions from scrutiny and criticism. Such actions are an attack on free speech the likes of which we have not seen since the 1950s McCarthy witch hunts."

     The CAF points out that Markham councillors ignored a comprehensive study undertaken by Toronto City staff, which determined the phrase "Israeli Apartheid" does not promote hatred or discrimination, and does not violate the Criminal Code or the Ontario Human Rights Code.

     Markham City Council also ignored the compelling evidence introduced from the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, the Conference of Southern African Christian Churches, the Association of Civil Rights of Israel and the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, that irrefutably proves Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are systematically discriminated against and that the situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa.

     Speakers against the Markham motion represented diverse supporters of free speech and Palestinian rights, including Jews, Christians and Muslims of all ages and gender, and from various backgrounds.

     On the surface, the motion is puzzling, since there are no university campuses or IAW events in Markham. But the municipality includes the provincial riding of Thornhill, represented by MPP Peter Thurman - the same MPP who put forward a non-binding motion in the Ontario legislature last year to condemn IAW.

     Also, Markham City Council decided recently to send a trade mission to Israel. Rejection of Councillor Shore's motion would have implied that the city condones the labelling of Israel as an Apartheid state, leaving it in the awkward position of doing business with an apartheid regime.

     As CAF National President Khaled Mouammar stated, "Regrettably, this politically expedient decision runs counter to the Town of Markham's stated mission to recognize and accept the diversity of its residents, to respect the differences in all peoples and their right to hold different opinions, to promote the value of human rights, and to oppose racism and discrimination."

No Anti-Poverty Plan in Ontario NDP Platform, by Donald Hughes June 30, 2011

2011-07-06T20:06:00.003-05:00

Source: the Media Co-op

http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/donald-hughes/7639

Last weekend, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath released her party's platform for the coming provincial general election in October. The platform presented accepts neoliberal constraints while failing to address Ontario's poverty crisis.

Horwath's fiscal plan centers on the repeal of recent corporate tax cuts, restoring 2009's 14% general rate. Given that the federal general corporate rate is set to fall to 15% in 2012, the combined rate will be 29%. This would still represent a fall in the general corporate rate of over one-third from the year 2000.

The revenue gained from the corporate tax increase is largely directed towards alternative tax cuts. The four main tax cuts contained in the plan are an investment tax credit, removal of the HST from gasoline, removal of the HST from home heating and a modest small business tax reduction.

The largest area of increased public spending is health care, with a series of small spending initiatives to improve access at emergency rooms and community clinics. This is funded primarily out of unidentified cuts to public services and a promise to reduce the use of consultants and administrators.

Another area of spending is a commitment to meet 50% of transit operating costs province-wide, with a commitment to freeze transit fares. No additional funds are made available for transit infrastructure.

The NDP platform promises to continue to index welfare and disability payments to inflation, and includes a reduction to the disability clawback rate against earned income, but otherwise accounts no money for benefit increases. Likewise, there is no new money for housing initiatives.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has called for an immediate increase in the rates of 55%, or a monthly Ontario Works payment of about $1,000. This move would restore Ontario Works to the level achieved under the last NDP government in the early 1990s.

A coalition of food security campaigners, including The Stop Community Food Centre in Davenport, have called for an immediate $100 increase in Ontario Works payments, to about $700 a month, with an aim towards "Putting Food in the Budget."

The Housing Network of Ontario has focused on promoting a policy centered on a new housing benefit as a short-term measure to alleviate poverty and improve housing access.

The NDP platform contains no specific commitment to expanding child care access in Ontario. Affordable, non-profit child care has been a component of Quebec's limited antipoverty strategy.

Another feature of this year's NDP platform is the absence of a post-secondary education strategy. In recent elections, the NDP often campaigned on promises to freeze or reduce tuition fees. In the current platform there is no significant spending related to education at any level.

Horwath's platform represents a shift to the political right for the NDP. It avoids addressing a large number of issues associated with social-democracy and the labour movement in favour of debt stabilization and generally low taxation. The aim appears to be to accept neoliberal constraints in return for the ability to make minor reforms in government. This strategy has been launched at the expense of many of the NDP's traditional campaign positions.

Greece's self-styled "Socialist" government: Nothing short of disgusting, Morning Star, Sunday 03 July 2011

2011-07-03T15:11:00.000-05:00

http://bit.ly/iEcMMg

Greece's self-styled "Socialist" government, which has thrown its own working class to the wolves of imperialism, has demonstrated its non-partisanship by treating the Palestinian people likewise.

George Papandreou's willingness to dance to Israel's tune is nothing short of disgusting.

His government has thrown its weight behind the oppressor and abandoned the oppressed by using the law against the Freedom Flotilla 2 - Stay Human campaigners.

Not that Papandreou's government stands alone. It is backed by the so-called Quartet, fronted by war criminal Tony Blair, which is happy to parrot Tel Aviv's propaganda about Gaza.

The Quartet - the UN, US, EU and Russia - claims to have concerns about difficult conditions facing Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

But it notes "a marked increase in the range and scope of goods and materials" entering Gaza over the past year.

And this group of influential global powers, which has failed to take any action to halt Israel's rapacious colonisation of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, or to weaken Israel's stranglehold on Gaza open prison, lectures those who wish to deliver aid to use "established channels."

Perhaps they are unaware that Israel's capricious control of the "established channels," otherwise known as the border crossings with Israel and Egypt, is a key factor in the impoverishment of Palestinians in Gaza.

Gazans are not the victims of an uncontrollable force of nature.

They have been "put on a diet," as one cynical Israeli politician put it, as part of a collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.

That punishment is to endure until one Israeli prisoner of war is released, even though it is the Netanyahu government that is frustrating negotiations to free Gilad Shalit.

Who says this? Hamas? No, it is Shalit's family, who regard Netanyahu as the biggest disaster to befall their son and see the prime minister as prepared to see Shalit come home in an Israeli flag-covered coffin.

But as tragic as Shalit's case is, his name is known all over the world.

The thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are, with the exception of prominent activists such as Marwan Barghouti, held hostage in anonymity.

While they languish in foreign jails, their compatriots in Gaza suffer a more insidious imprisonment.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency reported last month that unemployment in Gaza has risen to 45.2 per cent, purchasing power fell by 7.9 per cent in the second half of 2010, marking a cumulative decline of 34.5 per cent since 2006.

Electrical power is subject to continual cuts, 95 per cent of the water supply is unfit for human consumption and shortage of medical supplies has brought the health system to virtual collapse.

Great power complicity with Israel's occupation and expansionism has conspired to deny not only Palestinians' human rights but even their very humanity.

Freedom Flotilla 2 - Stay Human was organised to expose this reality and to bring hope to a victimised population.

It is being scuppered by a government that is bankrupt in more ways than one.

The Palestinians are not alone.

The majority of the world is with them, which is why over 120 countries back UN recognition of their sovereign state, no matter what the rich and powerful pretend.

Once again, our government and all others collaborating with Israel's repression must face protests and be told that their shameful collusion must end.

A line of struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, by Elisseos Vagenas, of the CC of the Communist Party Greec

2011-07-03T13:23:00.000-05:00

http://bit.ly/l2yNAk

This article was written during the important (48-hour) nationwide general strike on 28-29 June which has embraced every workplace. The strike demonstrations of All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME) which rallies the trade unions that work on a class oriented basis have been unprecedented.

The demonstrations and the mass rallies of PAME are different from those of the compromised trade union leaderships of the federations of the unions in the private (GSEE) and the public sector (ADEDY). The reason is not only the massive participation of the working people, their militancy and the measures for their protection but also the fact that they do not merely seek to block the new “package” of anti-people measures but to put forward the need to come into full conflict with the EU and capitalist exploitation as a whole.

In contrast with the demonstrations of the so called “indignant citizens“, who shout the so called “neutral” though misleading slogan “thieves, thieves” in front of the parliament, the slogan which is prevalent in the massive demonstrations of PAME is: “No cog can turn without the workers. Worker you can do without the bosses!”

The line of struggle of the communist party and the class oriented labour and trade union movement becomes increasingly important under the current conditions as the Greek people experience the consequences of the capitalist crisis that brings poverty, unemployment and destitution for the working class-popular families and when the government of PASOK along with the EU and the IMF implement a savage anti-people programme aiming at the reduction of the price of the labour force and the increase of the competitiveness and the profitability of the capital.

The KKE stressed from the very first moment that the capitalist crisis, which the Greek people are experiencing, expresses the sharpening of the main contradiction between the social character of production and labour on the one hand and the private capitalist appropriation of its results on the other. In addition, it struggled against the misleading campaign claiming that the government of PASOK was allegedly subservient to the IMF or to foreign powers revealing that the anti-labour memoranda expressed concrete choices of the Greek bourgeoisie concerning alliances that ensured its profitability in these specific conditions.

KKE has refuted the social-democratic and opportunist positions which are spread by the forces of the so-called European Left Party (ELP) as well as by others, positions that attribute the causes of the crisis to the neo-liberal management because they conceal the activity of the laws of the exploitative system; they conceal that the crises break out irrespective of the social-democratic or the liberal management as the sharpening of the contradictions of the system: the anarchy and the unevenness that characterises capitalist production, the over accumulation of capital which was accumulated in the period of economic growth due to the exploitation of the labour force and cannot find a way out that ensures a high rate of profit.

Over the last two years there have been multifaceted class-oriented struggles against the assault of capital, the anti-people policy of the liberal government of ND previously and the social-democratic government of PASOK today which is supported by the other bourgeois political forces and the subjugated leaderships of the government and employer led trade unionism.

More than 20 nationwide general strikes have been successfully organised in the period 2010-2011; likewise a series of strikes in sectors and companies, mass rallies, occupations of public buildings and other buildings as well, massive struggles with the participation of hundreds of thousands of workers and popular forces.

The KKE and PAME, the class oriented labour movement, the militant rallies supported by our party in the movements of the farmers, the self-employed, the women and the youth have played a leading role in these struggles.

The line of struggle of the KKE and the class oriented movement has made a special contribution to the conflict with capital and the anti-people policy as it clarified from the beginning that the crisis, the deficit and the debt are a product of capitalist development, of the strategy that supports the monopoly groups and that the workers are not responsible for it. More and more working people see this fact today when they compare the state debt (350 billions Euro) with the deposits of the Greek capitalists which in Switzerland amount to 600 billions Euro.

More and more working people are abandoning the bourgeois parties (PASOK-ND), open their eyes to the assessments and the proposals of KKE since the communists are proved correct by the developments. The KKE has denounced the government and the EU because they blackmail the people that the government won’t receive the 5th instalment of the loan unless they accept the new anti-labour measures.

The communists in Greece support firmly that it is the plutocracy that must pay for the crisis as it is responsible for it. At the same time, the KKE believes that the struggle for every problem of the people must develop in the direction of organising, concentrating and preparing broad popular and working class forces not only in order to create better conditions for the sale of labour power but also for the overthrow of the exploitative system so as to pave the way for the people’s power and the people's economy, for socialism.

A National Exercise in Scare Tactics, Written by Tamar Gozansky, Communist Party of Israel, Friday, 24 June 2011

2011-07-01T22:23:00.000-05:00

http://bit.ly/lZWFtt
Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Barak and the remainder of Israel’s cabinet members are running a scare campaign about what, supposedly, will befall Israel if the UN General Assembly votes in September in favor of recognition for a Palestinian State based on the 1967 borders. Foreign Minister Lieberman has even announced that the approval of such a resolution means no less than the annihilation of Israel.

This is why the government has pulled an even more drastic tactic out of its sleeve – a national drill run by the Home Front Command, optimistically labeled “Turning Point 5”. According to the plan, command and field simulation exercises were carried out for a scenario, in which hundreds of ground-to-ground missiles are fired into Israel for a period of one month. The citizens, who according to this scenario will be subject to bombardment by thousands of missiles, were required to drill “entry into protected spaces” after receiving a warning on their cell phone. Two million school children also took part in the drill.

The information publicizing the national drill have stated, that in the framework of the simulation exercise, authorities practice responding to an event in which 400,000 citizens leave their homes because of a missile attack and are transferred to live in army bases and tents in the Negev desert.

Only part of Israeli citizens have cooperated with the guidelines and actually entered a protected space on the day of the drill. But everyone, even those who did not take the exercise seriously, were treated with a fair dose of brainwashing and induced panic: in the next war Israel will be bombarded with thousands missiles that will strew death and destruction. When such a scenario is presented as inevitable, as a natural disaster, as a stroke of fate – so the military and civil establishments would like to hope – few will ask the question: how can such a missile attack be prevented?

Those who do ask will require an answer: perhaps Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, should be listened to and the answer is not a military initiative against Iran? Perhaps the advisable thing to do is to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders? Perhaps Israel’s militaristic thinking should be replaced by civilian-oriented thinking, and instead of living on the sword, we should begin to think about how we can achieve a life of peace and neighborly relations with the Arab nations?

But the Netanyahu government and the army hope that the voice of the questioners and of those who reject the logic of the scare tactics will be fainter than the incessant grating of the inflammatory fear-mongering sounded through the established media channels.

After five days of a media-saturated national scare campaign about the bombardment by thousands of missiles in the coming war, Netanyahu hopes he will stop being bothered by those who ask him, why he recently stated that the conflict with the Palestinians was insoluble, and that he will not be pestered with demands to present an actual plan for an agreement, so that he can continue to bandy the empty slogan, that “we are in favor of negotiating with the Palestinians over everything”.

George Orwell wrote in “1984” that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” When this reasoning is applied to the Home Front Command drill, we can say that if it is granted that the people in Israel are doomed to be victims of a missile assault, and its freedom is expressed in the certainty of that knowledge, all else follows: the government must be trusted; it is natural for the establishment to root out “traitors”, anyway there is “too much democracy”; and “is this a time to be discussing the price of cottage cheese!?” and so on and so forth.

And thus, the national drill accomplishes its true goal.

Revisiting Alleged 30 Million Famine Deaths during China’s Great Leap, Written by Utsa Patnaik, in People's Democracy, (Weekly Organ of the CPI(M), Vol. XXXV No. 26, June 26, 2011

2011-06-30T22:29:00.001-05:00

http://bit.ly/jaBMO0

THIRTY years ago, a highly successful vilification campaign was launched against Mao Zedong, saying that a massive famine in which 27 to 30 million people died in China took place during the Great Leap period, 1958 to 1961, which marked the formation of the people’s communes under his leadership. The main basis of this assertion was, first, the population deficit in China during 1958 to 1961 and, second, the work of two North American demographers, A J Coale (Rapid Population Change in China 1952-1982, 1982) and Judith Banister (China’s Changing Population, 1987). No one bothered to look at the highly dubious method through which these demographers had arrived at their apocalyptic figures.

The ‘estimate’ was later widely publicised by Amartya K Sen who built an entire theory, saying that democratic freedom, especially press freedom, in India meant that famine was avoided while its absence in China explains why the world did not know that such a massive famine had taken place until as much as a quarter century later when the North American demographers painstakingly uncovered it.

The capitalist press was happy to reciprocate the compliment by repeatedly writing of “30 million famine deaths,” to the extent that a fiction was established as historical fact in readers’ minds. The London Economist had a special issue on China some years ago, which repeated the allegation of 30 million deaths in three separate articles and refused to publish the Letter to the Editor this author sent contradicting the claim. More recently, in his Introduction to the book Mao Zedong on Practice and Contradiction, which he edited and published in 2006, Slavoj Zizek also mentioned the figure of 30 millions as though it were a given fact. Well known intellectuals have to be taken seriously and the claim examined.

TWO ROUTES

There are two routes through which very large ‘famine deaths’ have been claimed --- firstly, population deficit and, secondly, imputing births and deaths which did not actually take place. Looking at China’s official population data from its 1953 and 1964 censuses, we see that if the rate of population increase up to 1958 had been maintained, the population should have been 27 million higher over the period over 1959-1961 than it actually was. This population deficit is also discussed by the demographers Pravin Visaria and Leela Visaria. The population deficit was widely equated with ‘famine deaths.’ But 18 million of the people alleged to have died in a famine were not born in the first place. The decline in the birth rate from 29 in 1958 to 18 in 1961 is being counted as famine deaths. The Chinese are a highly talented people, but they have not learnt the art of dying without being born.

There is a basic responsibility that everyone, and more particularly academics, has to be clear and precise about. To say or write that “27 million people died in the famine in China” conveys to the reader that people who were actually present and alive, starved to death. But this did not actually happen and the statement that it did is false.

China had lowered it death rate sharply from 20 to 12 per thousand between 1953 and 1958. (India did not reach the latter level until over a quarter century later.) After the radical land reforms and the formation of rural cooperatives, there were mass campaigns to clean up the environment and do away with disease bearing pests while a basic rural health care system was put in place. That a dramatic reduction in the rural death rate was achieved, is not disputed by anyone. During the early commune formation from 1958, there was a massive mobilisation of peasants for a stupendous construction effort, which completely altered for a few years the normal patterns of peasant family life. Women were drawn into the workforce, communal kitchens were established and children looked after in crèches as most of the able-bodied population moved to irrigation and other work sites during the slack season. We find a graphic description of this period of mass mobilisation in Wiliam Hinton’s Shenfan. When this author spent three weeks in China in 1983, visiting several communes --- which still existed at that time --- she was told every time that “we built our water conservation system during the Great Leap.” The birth rate fall from 1959 had to do with labour mobilisation, and not low nutrition since the 1958 foodgrain output was exceptionally good at 200 million tons (mt).

HOLES IN THE ARGUMENT

There was excess mortality compared to the 1958 level over the next three years, of a much smaller order. Let us be clear on the basic facts about what did happen: there was a run of three years of bad harvests in China --- drought in some parts, floods in others, and pest attacks. Foodgrain output fell from the 1958 good harvest of 200 mt to 170 mt in 1959 and further to 143.5 mt in 1960, with 1961 registering a small recovery to 147 million tons. This was a one-third decline, larger than the one-quarter decline India saw during its mid-1960s drought and food crisis. Grain output drop coincided in time with the formation of the communes, and this lent itself to a fallacious causal link being argued by the academics who were inclined to do so, and they blamed the commune formation for the output decline. One can much more plausibly argue precisely the opposite --- that without the egalitarian distribution that the communes practised, the impact on people of the output decline, which arose for independent reasons and would have taken place anyway, would have been far worse. Further, without the 46,000 reservoirs built with collective labour on the communes up to 1980, the effects of later droughts would have been very severe. Recovery to the 200 million ton level took place only by 1965. Throughout, however, the per capita foodgrain output in China even during the worst year, 1960, remained substantially above that in India.

As output declined from 1959, there was a rise in the officially measured death rate from 12 in 1958 to 14.6 in 1959, followed by a sharp rise in 1960 to 25.4 per thousand, falling the next year to 14.2 and further to 10 in 1962. While, clearly, 1960 was an abnormal year with about 8 million deaths in excess of the 1958 level, note that this peak official ‘famine’ death rate of 25.4 per thousand in China was little different from India’s 24.8 death rate in the same year which was considered quite normal and attracted no criticism. If we take the remarkably low death rate of 12 per thousand that China had achieved by 1958 as the benchmark, and calculate the deaths in excess of this over the period 1959 to 1961, it totals 11.5 million. This is the maximal estimate of possible ‘famine deaths.’ Even this order of excess deaths is puzzling given the egalitarian distribution in China, since its average grain output per head was considerably above India’s level even in the worst year, and India saw no generalised famine in the mid-1960s.

IDEOLOGICAL BIAS

Relative to China’s population, this figure of plausible excess mortality is low and it did not satisfy the academics in northern universities who have been always strongly opposed to socialised production. Coale’s and Banister’s estimates gave them the ammunition they were looking for to attack the communes. How exactly do Coale and Banister reach a figure of ‘famine deaths’ which is three times higher than the maximal plausible estimate? Examining carefully how they arrived at 30 million ‘famine deaths’ estimate, we find that the figure was manufactured by using indefensible assumptions, and has had no scholarly basis.

In the 1982 census, there was a survey on fertility covering one million persons or a mere 0.1 per cent sample of the population, who were asked about births and deaths from the early 1950s onwards. The very high total fertility rate obtained from this 1982 survey is used by them to say that millions more were actually born between the two census years, 1953 and 1964, than were officially recorded. They ignore the birth rate of 37 per thousand derived from a very much larger 1953 sample which had covered five per cent of all households and was specially designed to collect the information on births and deaths used in the official estimates. Instead, they impute birth rates of 43 to 44 per thousand to the 1950s, using the 1982 survey. There is no justification for such an arbitrary procedure of using a much later reported high fertility rate for a long distant past. We know that a distant recall period makes responses inaccurate. These imputed extra births between 1953 and 1964 total a massive 50 million but according to them did not increase by an iota the 1964 population total, 694.6 million, the official figure which they assume as correct. Thus, although all official birth and death rates are rejected by them, the official population totals are accepted. This opportunistic assumption is clearly necessary for their purpose because it allows them to assert that the same number of extra people died between 1953 and 1964, as the extra people they claim were born.

FALLACIOUS CLAIMS

But the demographers are still not satisfied with the 50 million extra births and deaths that they have conjured up. Fitting a linear time trend to the falling death rate of the early fifties is done to say that deaths should have continued to decline steeply after 1958 and since it did not, the difference from the trend meant additional ‘famine deaths.’ Such straight-line trend fitting is a senseless procedure since the death rate necessarily shows non-linear behaviour. It cannot continue falling at the same steep rate; it has to flatten out and cannot reach zero in any population --- not even the inimitable Chinese people could hope to become immortal. The final estimate of extra deaths in both authors is raised thereby to a massive 60 million, a heroic 65 per cent higher than the official total of deaths over the inter-censal period.

Having created these 60 million extra deaths at their own sweet will out of nothing, the authors then proceed to allocate them over the years 1953 to 1964, arbitrarily attributing a higher portion to the great leap years in particular. The arbitrariness is clear from the variation in their own manipulations of the figures. Coale’s allocation raises his peak death rate in 1960 to 38.8 per thousand while Banister is bolder and raises it to 44.6 compared to the official 25.4 for that year, and 30 million ‘famine deaths’ are claimed over the Great Leap years after all this smart legerdemain. Having violated every tenet of reason, these ‘academics’ may as well have allocated all their imaginary deaths to the Great Leap years and claimed that 60 million died --- why hang themselves only for a lamb rather than for a sheep! Seldom have we seen basic norms of academic probity and honesty being more blatantly violated, than in this travesty of statistical ‘estimates.’ And seldom have noted intellectuals, who might have been expected to show more common sense, shown instead more credulous naivete and irresponsibility, by accepting without investigation and propagating such nonsensical ‘estimates,’ giving them the status of historical fact. In the process, they have libelled and continue to libel Mao Zedong, a great patriot and revolutionary. They have unwittingly confirmed the principle attributed to Goebbels --- that a lie has to be a really big lie and be endlessly repeated; then it is bound to be believed.

Thirty million or three crores is not a small figure. When one million people died in Britain’s colony, Ireland, in 1846-47, the world knew about it. When three million people died in the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the fact that a famine occurred was known. Yet 30 million people are supposed to have died in China without anyone knowing at that time that a famine took place. The reason no one knew about it is simple, for a massive famine did not take place at all. The intellectuals who quote the massive famine deaths figure of 30 million today, are no doubt outstandingly clever in the small, im kleinen, but are proving themselves to be rather foolish im grossen, in the large. A person has to be very foolhardy indeed to say that 30 million people died in a famine without anyone including the foreign diplomats in China and the China-watchers abroad having the slightest inkling of it. And those who credulously believe this claim and uncritically repeat it show an even greater folly than the originators of the claim.
                                                       ************

GREECE: Public Outrage over Austerity Plan, by Bego Astigarraga, IPS, 30 June, 2011

2011-06-30T17:42:00.000-05:00

http://bit.ly/k6F32b

ATHENS, Jun 30 (IPS) - The mass protests in Greece swelled by the hour as parliament voted this Thursday to implement the social and economic adjustment plan approved Wednesday, including measures for privatisation, tax hikes, spending cuts and mass lay-offs in the state sector.
The increasingly disappointed and restless crowd continued to demonstrate in the streets of Athens against the new Medium Term Fiscal Strategy 2012-2015, that will seriously affect middle- and low-income families and was approved at the insistence of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

A prime target of the protestors' wrath is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "She is to blame for handing Greece over to the speculators," said Nikiforos, one of the thousands of demonstrators gathered in front of the parliament building in Syntagma Square. "We must carry on demonstrating and organise a united social movement in Europe."

Konstantine, a physics student at the University of Athens, said: "The situation for workers is tragic, as they are on the edge of levels of genuine poverty." "University matriculation used to be free, but it now costs 800 euros (1,161 dollars). Schools are being closed, and public transport fares have risen by 40 percent," she told IPS.

For his part, Alexander, a psychologist and teacher of children with disabilities who belongs to the Front of the Anti-Capitalist Left (ANTARSYA), told IPS the government "wants to sell the country out to the IMF in order to save the bankers.

"Do they want to strangle us even more? We won't let them," he said.

In spite of the pressure exerted by a two-day general strike, the crowds of demonstrators surrounding parliament and the clashes with police that have left dozens of people injured, parliament narrowly passed the new adjustment plan Wednesday, with 155 votes in favour, 138 against and five abstentions. Only one lawmaker of the rightwing opposition New Democracy party voted with the governing Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK).

Panayotis Kurublis, the sole socialist lawmaker who voted against the austerity programme, was immediately expelled from the party, further narrowing the government's parliamentary majority.

Kurublis and the opposition appear to agree with over 80 percent of Greeks who in various polls rejected the stringent austerity plan and said they were totally against "selling their country at the diktats" of the so-called "troika" of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF.

Following the approval of the plan, a condition laid down by the troika for proceeding with the second phase of a financial bailout, the government of Prime Minister George Papandreou will have to implement a vast privatisation programme this year.

"We must prevent the country's collapse at all costs," said Papandreou ahead of the parliamentary vote. The passage of the austerity plan freed up the payment of the next tranche of 17 billion dollars out of a bailout loan totalling 157 billion dollars that was approved in May 2010 by the EU and IMF.

Experts say Greece's debt, the highest in the EU, will grow to 166 percent of GDP by 2012.

The new austerity package - the second since March 2010 - aims to make savings of some 28.4 billion euros (over 40 billion dollars) between 2012 and 2015 from tax hikes and public spending cuts. The government's target is to reduce the deficit to below three percent of GDP in 2015.

An estimated 45 billion euros (65.3 billion dollars) of revenue during the same period is expected from the total or partial sale of dozens of public enterprises, such as state-owned refineries, power stations, ATEbank (a largely agricultural bank), as well as management concessions for airports, highways and ports, mining rights, real estate and land.

A "solidarity tax" has been introduced which will be a one-off levy of one to five percent of personal incomes, with the highest rates being applied to the highest income brackets. The minimum taxable income threshold will be lowered, although earnings of workers under 30 and pensioners' incomes will remain tax-free.

Value added tax in bars and restaurants will be raised from 13 to 23 percent.

Despite the draconian nature of the austerity plan, international analysts are sceptical of the results it will bring for the country, which is on the brink of default. Meanwhile, popular discontent is growing and further unrest is feared.

The two-day general strike, in which all the unions joined with a very high participation rate, was a clear sign that Greek citizens are not prepared to accept more spending cuts and higher taxes.

The last straw could be the decision to eliminate 150,000 of the current 700,000 public employee posts. The government intends not to renew the contracts of temporary workers, tantamount to dismissal, and to replace only one in 10 public officials who retire.

Communist Party Israel condemns repression in Syria while opposing imperialist interference, by Uri Weltmann , Sunday, June 19 2011

2011-06-19T23:16:00.000-05:00

http://bit.ly/iBT4Ev

CPI never backed oppression: Response to Yossi Gurvitz

This weekend, Yossi Gurvitz accused former MK Muhammad Naffa, secretary-general of the Communist Party of Israel of backing the suppression of the Syrian uprising. Uri Weltmann, a member of the Communist Party of Israel, denies these allegations and clarifies the party position below. Yossi Gurvitz replies to Uri Weltmann, here.

Reading Yossi Gurvitz’s article, which aims to “expose” the position of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) on the developments in Syria, one is attacked by an eerie feeling of déjà vu. Suddenly, we are thrown back to the old days of the Cold War era, where facts need not stand in the way of finger pointing, and a truthful account of events is just a distraction from the fanning of anti-Communist hysteria.

The title of Gurvitz’s article – “Israeli Communist Party supports Bashar Assad (but only in Arabic)” – is doubly false: First, because the position of the CPI is not one of support for Assad, nor of support towards the criminal ways in which the Syrian army is treating the protesters; Second, because the sinister allegation that the views expressed in the Arabic press of the Party, are somehow different from the views expressed in the Hebrew press of the Party, is an old re-hash of an old lie.

Gurvtiz bases all of its claims on one blog post, by the former-Communist Joseph Algazy, which contains numerous slanders, half-truths and plain falsehoods. Gurvitz – who doesn’t read Arabic – took these claims to be true, without ever bothering to check them against facts. He is not the only Israeli Left blogger who has re-posted the slanderous piece by Algazy, but he has done so with the most enthusiasm, adding his own attacks on the principle of Jewish-Arab partnership inside the CPI (which he refers to as “a facade”).

Normally, one would not bother to write a response to such a piece. But the fact that more than one reader was fooled by the fallacies which Gurvitz, Algazy and co. peddle, demands that the record be set straight.

What exactly is the position of the CPI towards the protests in Syria?

On March 24th, shortly after the Syrian protests became a widespread mass phenomena, the Political Bureau of the CPI met, and published the following statement:

The Political Bureau emphasizes its complete rejection of the way in which the Syrian regime had chosen to act, and denounces its crimes towards the protesters, especially in Daraa, which has caused the injury and deaths of many protesters. The Syrian regime, which is threatened by US Imperialism and Israel, must meet the just demands of the protesters for freedom, democracy, a dignified life, and against corruption and emergency laws.

Contrary to the outrageous claims made by Gurvitz against the CPI, this statement – indeed, like all Party statements – was published in Hebrew, as well as in Arabic.

This position was repeated time and again in the Party press. One recent example, published last week, would be the article in “Zo Haderech” by Tamar Gozansky (Member of the Political Bureau, and former member of Knesset), who not only condemned the killing of protesters, but also warned against the danger of imperialist intervention.

This twofold position – of condemning the killings, while warning against the plans of imperialism – was repeated in the article in “Al-Ittihad” by Faten Ghattas, (Chairperson of the Party’s Central Control Commission).

In the blog post of Algazy, which was re-posted by Gurvitz, Muhammad Naffa, Secretary General of the CPI, is accused of supporting Bashar Assad. Gurvitz – following Algazy – had no misgivings about journalistic norms, when he goes on to plainly state, without a shred of proof, that Naffa had “denounced the [Syrian] uprising”. But while Algazy quotes extensively from those who criticize an article published by Naffa in “Al-Ittihad”, he doesn’t quote a single word from what Naffa had actually said. Why is that? And why hadn’t he provided a link to that article, so that the readers could judge for themselves?

In the above-mentioned article, Naffa says: “We support that the brave Syrian people will receive all of their rights, and we oppose the corruption, the State Security courts, the arbitrary arrests, the emergency laws, and the attacks on the freedom of expression, and other freedoms.” Quite a “denunciation”, isn’t it?

Naffa goes on to warn against the danger of imperialist intervention (like the Political Bureau did in its March statement, and like Gozansky and Ghattas did in their last week articles), but neither “support for Bashar Assad”, nor “denunciation of the Syrian uprising”, are anywhere to be found.

The same views by Naffa can be found in an interview, published in Saturday on the website of the CPI, and in Sunday’s issue of “Al-Ittihad.”

Algazy continued to practice “creative journalism” when he quoted a sentence, taken from a statement by a meeting of Communist Parties in Europe, which calls on Communist Parties “to express their support for Syria in the face of the imperialist plots”. This part of the statement has received criticism from some Arab thinkers, whose objections to this wording are quoted in detail by Algazy. But never once did he mention that the CPI did not actually participate in that meeting of Parties, nor was it a signatory of that statement – although he knowingly lends his readers to believe that is the case.

Why did the principled position taken by the CPI arouse so much anger among various “Left” bloggers in Israel?

Unlike some liberals on the Left, who give unconditional support to the protesters, regardless of their demands, the CPI has refused to take imperialism out of the equation. It would be plain ignorance to claim that US imperialism is indifferent towards the developments in Syria, or that it doesn’t have an interest in having a specific political line to become dominant among the protesters. Therefore, any analysis of the developments in Syria has to start by taking them in context. Not every demand by the protesters has to be automatically supported, but things have to be weighed objectively.

On the other side, contrary to some would-be “anti-imperialists”, who play the erroneous game of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, the CPI had consistently pressed for the demands of the Syrian people for democracy, freedom and social justice to be met. The Party had been quite clear that arbitrary use of power, and killing of innocent and peaceful protesters, is something that we unequivocally condemn.

Is ours a complicated position? Indeed, and rightly so. One cannot provide a simple solution to a complicated situation. Those on the Left who would try to do so, will necessarily find themselves either siding with a repressive and corrupt government, or with an occupying imperialist power.

The CPI’s position might prove to be unpopular – both to those who ignore imperialism, as well as to the apologists of the repressive Syrian government – but it is a principled stand. For more than 90 years, the Communists in this country, Jews and Arabs alike, held on to their principles, even at times when doing so was difficult, or even life-risking. We are greatly proud of that. And we will continue to do so.

Uri Weltmann is a member of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), and member of the National Secretariat of the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash). He works as a high school Mathematics teacher, and is currently studying towards his Masters degree in Philosophy of Science, at Haifa University.

THE CLC: A TALE OF TWO CONVENTIONS: By Sam Hammond, Vancouver, June 1-15, 2011, issue of People's Voice

2011-05-30T21:50:00.000-05:00

http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Pv01jn11.html#ATHECLC

For the 26th time since its founding, the Canadian Labour Congress met in Convention May 9-13 in Vancouver, BC. President Ken Georgetti welcomed the 2500 delegates with a speech that probably won't be remembered for more than a few days, if at all. The speech did not reflect the anger and anguish the people are going through across Canada, or the dangerous reality of a new Harper majority in Ottawa. That reality had to come from the floor, and it did several times during the week.
     The structural changes that will effectively reshape the CLC into a consensus of the largest private and public sector union leaders were adopted as expected, with only mild squirming from the Labour Councils which are left out of the new structure completely.

     Ken Georgetti managed the microphones with clumsy prejudice. Early in the convention he twice cut off Dave Pritchett from the Longshore Union, while CAW leader Ken Lewenza to go four minutes beyond the speaking time. On Tuesday morning, Georgetti apologized for his sins the day before, but throughout the week he continued giving speakers at pro mikes preference over speakers at con mikes. The chairing became quite a topic of discussion in the food courts and even in some of the caucuses. Many new affiliates and first‑time delegates were particularly upset.

     More than at any other CLC convention, the several hundred resolutions sent in were grouped into watered down composites and squeezed into debate times that were severely compressed by a line‑up of guest speakers, cultural presentations and discussion panels. Some of the delegates who took part in the Action Caucus estimated that in the week‑long convention, only about nine hours were allotted to floor debate on resolutions.

     One of the guest speakers was Jack Layton, who understandably was on a high over the NDP election success, and of course received a resounding welcome from the delegates.

     The Action Caucus had its first meeting on May 8, before most delegates had not arrived. Regular daily meetings of the Caucus began in earnest the next day. The main thrust of the Action Caucus was to get adoption of an "Action Plan to Resist the Harper Agenda". A petition to get the Action Plan on the floor was signed by over 500 delegates, the most effective work done at the convention. Although the Action Plan did not make it to the floor, it was in tune with the feelings of the majority of delegates. Much of it was incorporated by the executive into "Good Jobs, Better Lives: A Workers Program to Defeat the Right‑Wing Agenda," an action resolution which was passed and is now policy.

     Because of the behind the scenes work of the Action Caucus, the language of the "Good Jobs, Better Lives" resolution is militant and emphasizes the need to support unions in struggle and under attack such as CUPW and PSAC, to promote "public demonstrations" and "direct action where necessary to defeat the right‑wing agenda".

     The resolution states, "We will work with affiliates, federations and labour councils to build a strong progressive workers movement to counter the right‑wing corporate agenda in this country. This will include engaging in member‑to‑member campaigns, public outreach and direct action..."

     It also states, "At the 27th Constitutional Convention in 2014, the CLC will bring forward a political plan to defeat the Conservative government and to elect a federal New Democratic Party government." This is a much different posture than two conventions back when Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton got equal billing.

     The members of the Action Caucus brought militancy to the mikes, reflected the urgency of delegates who want a stronger fightback, and built respect and prestige for the left, for the ideology of struggle against capital and unity of working people.

     In the words of one member of the Action Caucus, "It was as if there were two conventions going on at the same time that did not connect."

     This is an accurate observation. The thrust from the top is to prepare conditions for the election of an NDP majority in 2015. The thrust from the left is to fight every day over the next four years, to prevent the Tories from implementing their pro‑corporate, pro‑war, pro‑imperialist agenda.

     The youth, the homeless, the disenchanted, the unemployed and the abandoned, our entire working class, cannot wait for social democratic salvation in 2015. Thanks to the Action Caucus and the militant delegates the "Good Jobs, Better Lives" resolution gives equal billing to both agendas. It has the potential for unity and resistance.

                                                          ****************

(The above article is from the June 1-15, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

Crisis of Capitalism: Act II Written by Zoltan Zigedy, Marxism-Leninism Today

2011-05-13T19:21:00.001-05:00

When, in the last few weeks, insiders and economists like Jeffrey Sachs and David Stockman – not noted for their radical postures – decry the state of the economy and the direction of policies, all of us should take note.

Sachs, one of the fathers of neo-liberal "shock therapy," recently cited decades-long stagnant wages and obscene levels of inequality: "We've reached the greatest income [and] wealth inequality in history... This is a new 'Robber Baron' era, of course." He went on to say "...the people at the top buy the politicians... All of them – all parties. Everyone is in the hands of the super wealthy." (Interviewed by Aaron Task, Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance).
In a similar vein, David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under the Reagan Presidency, ripped the "crony capitalism" that has changed "capital markets into a rip-roaring casino that really is not productive for the real main street economy and is generating windfall gains for a very limited number of people to no good purpose..." He sees ordinary folks trying to save in this environment as "savaged" by Federal Reserve and government policies. (Interviewed by Peter Gorenstein, Daily Ticker, Yahoo! Finance)
These gloomy, critical views stand in stark contrast to the generally up-beat, optimistic reports and forecasts that usually flow from policy makers and dominate the media today. For the experts and pundits, the crisis has passed and we are on the way – though, they concede, tentatively – to recovery.

In truth, our modern-day Pollyannas mistake the first act for the entire play. While our economy may not be on the edge of a precipice, the problems that placed the world economy near collapse have only been displaced, pushed forward or swept aside. Even an arch-advocate of capitalism such as Vincent Reinhard, senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, understands this: "After a severe financial crisis, we [tend to] get a severe recession, slower recovery and subpar expansion... Denial is a standard feature of financial crises..." (Interviewed by Stacy Curtin, Daily Ticker, Yahoo! Finance).

A closer look at the economy – an up-to-date report card from a Marxist perspective – is surely in order.

Gross Domestic Product

The broadest conventional measure of national and international economic performance remains GDP growth. Laden with the assumptions fundamental to the continued functioning of the capitalist economic engine, it valorizes all that is considered important to the ownership class and its continued accumulation of capital.
Conversely, if an enormous human asset, such as the addition of one year of life span, were added to every person in the US, that value would not show up in the annual GDP figures except insofar as it generated commercial economic activity. Yet, as biased as the GDP growth figures are, their trend does reflect something real – the prospect of capitalism's sustainability.

The first quarter figures for 2011 show a tepid US annual GDP growth of 1.8% from January through March. Pundits posture this as an aberration, a momentary stumble; but the trend line from the last quarter of 2009 is decidedly downward, in step with the drying up of stimulus funds. Nonresidential fixed investment has followed the same downward trajectory since its highpoint in the second quarter of 2010, even with spending on equipment and software leaping 11.6% this past quarter.

Likewise, export growth rates — touted by the experts as a leading force of recovery — show the same downward trend from the level reached in the last quarter of 2009. Despite the Federal Reserve's shrinking-dollar policy to sustain the rate of export growth, it is now falling below earlier levels of growth. Given that refined oil-based products account for the second largest component of export value and that the dollar value of these exports is highly inflated by the rising cost of oil, export growth calculated in dollars is exaggerated in the official numbers.

Further suggestive of foul weather ahead, the February GDP report for Canada – the US's leading export destination by far – demonstrated an actual decline of .2%. It is hard to imagine robust export growth ahead, with a stagnant Canadian economy.

The growth rate of government spending – the sole factor preventing the economy from falling over the cliff at the height of the crisis – is now in negative territory and falling rapidly. The debt hysteria gripping local, state and federal officials produced budget cuts that are only now beginning to affect the GDP and other key economic indicators. Their influence on key factors – employment, incomes, consumer spending, etc. – will be felt more dramatically and negatively in the months and years to come.

Consumer spending continues its modest growth from its decline in the depths of the crisis. Its sustainability is in question, however, given that wages failed to keep up with inflation in the first quarter of 2011. This suggests that consumer debt and shrinking savings will again be the source of consumption growth, a condition ominously reminiscent of the pre-crisis period.

Internationally, GDP growth shows the same downward trend in nearly all the developed capitalist world, particularly the European Union. For those countries that have surrendered their sovereignty to the International Monetary Fund and the European Union – Greece, Ireland, and Portugal – the decline is far more dramatic. In the case of Greece, compliance with the austerity hawks has been catastrophic, with four successive quarters of losses greater than an annualized rate of 5%. The People's Republic of China and many emerging markets, on the other hand, have sustained high growth rates for diverse reasons, ranging from rational planning to irrational investment bubbles.

Profits, Productivity and Employment

Profit growth in the US – the fuel for a capitalist economy – has sprung back sharply from its nadir in the last quarter of 2008. Accelerating rapidly from that point, growth has stabilized over the last year at a rate commensurate with the pre-crisis period. Pundits hail the growth of profits in the manufacturing sector, a factor that has now reached about 90% of its pre-crisis level of production. But they fail to ask how profit growth can be so strong with less production and capacity utilization well below pre-crisis levels.

The answer lies in a sharp increase in the rate of labor exploitation, expressed as intensified labor productivity. Labor productivity drove the explosion of profits after the 2008 collapse, settling at a level above historic averages. Put bluntly, the restoration of profitability came at the expense of an increasingly sweated, shrunken workforce.

Two factors opened the door to profit restoration: a weak, class-collaborationist labor movement, unwilling to confront capital, and the high rate of unemployment sowing fear throughout the workforce – what Marx called "the reserve army of labor." With little organized fight for a larger share of the surplus and generalized fear of job loss among the working class, intensified exploitation was readily available to the capitalist class.

Nonetheless, the trend in labor productivity, like the trend in profitability, is downward, suggesting strongly that the crisis has failed to wring from the economy the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to decline–the theoretical basis for the Marxist theory of crisis.

With private sector labor productivity losing momentum, capital has turned to the service sector, primarily public goods and services, as a target for countering slowing profitability and surplus accumulation. The current attack on public employees' rights, wages, salaries and benefits marks this tactical shift. With weak unions, disunity and nearly non-existent class consciousness, the private labor market is virtually elastic – capitalism can dictate the terms and conditions of labor. State-monopoly capital cannot tolerate a relatively inelastic public sector labor market with high union density, firm contracts and stable standards of living alongside a nearly enslaved private sector. Hence, it has launched an all-out assault on public sector workers, organized by capital's minions in both political parties. While they cannot outsource police, firemen, and other face-to-face employees, they can break their unions. Of course, this initiative is done under the transparent ruse of debt reduction.

Another alarming sign emerging from the profit picture is the return of financials as the leading force in US profit growth. While non-financial profits lost steam at the end of 2010, profits from the financial sector jumped dramatically. By the end of 2010, financial profits achieved the same percentage of total domestic profits as they did in 2005. Clearly, speculation and financial maneuvers have ominously returned to the main stage in the US economy. For example, hedge funds have been increasing their CDS bets against Japanese debt, doubling the notional value of swaps made over the last year. Millions were made with the recent natural disaster and nuclear crisis. Debt speculation is an active agent in amplifying the volatility of European debt.

While supporters and critics of Administration policies wring their hands over the persistently high rate of unemployment, massive layoffs — reducing the labor force dramatically faster than economic activity – was the key factor in restoring profitability and increasing asset value as expressed by equity markets. It would be naïve not to see unemployment as a capitalist tool of capitalist recovery, a tool that the ownership class is reluctant to surrender.

Much has been made of recent drops in the official monthly unemployment rates. Critics are quick to correctly note that these declines also reflect people who have left the workforce, people who are "discouraged" and statistically disappeared.

Perhaps a more realistic measure of the employment consequences of the crisis comes from examining the employment-to-population ratios and the labor participation rates compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ratio of US employed to the total population has lost 4.5 points from its pre-crisis peak – a workforce loss of 13 to 14 million workers. When we add back those displaced but receiving unemployment compensation, we find a loss of 1.9 points in the labor participation rate, revealing 5 to 6 million workers officially disappeared – left without jobs or unemployment benefits. For these casualties of the crisis, savings, family support, food banks, social security, meager government aid, or the street are their only means of support. Unlike the politically biased official unemployment rates that obscure as much as they reveal, these grim BLS calculations offer little to celebrate.

Nor does the future of US employment appear bright. Over the last decade, US based multi-national corporations have added over two million jobs overseas while eliminating nearly 3 million here, a trend that will likely continue.

Running on Empty

Since the depths of the crisis over two and a half years ago, US policy makers have sought to stabilize and revive the critically wounded capitalist system. First, they offered a transfusion to the financial sector by injecting trillions of publicly obligated dollars into its lifeless body. Secondly, federal authorities cut away the gangrenous tissue infected by financial speculation – over a trillion dollars' worth of fetid securities — and placed it in the vaults of the Federal Reserve and Treasury, where it rests to this day. Thirdly, lawmakers agreed to an $800 billion stimulus package meant to restart the economy's feeble heartbeat. After all these treatments, the economy remains in critical condition.

In mid-2010, the Federal Reserve recognized that these efforts to resuscitate a sickly economy were failing. Despite offering financial institutions and corporations virtually cost-free loans, the economy continued to respond sluggishly. The authorities acknowledged that the huge accumulated federal debt would eventually require higher interest rates to entice purchases of treasury securities to offset that debt. They understood that higher interest rates to secure the purchase of government debt would rebound through our financial institutions, driving all interest rates up and slowing borrowing. With lending drying up, they anticipated that the economy would slow down.

Thus, they sought to backstop this potential setback to recovery by embarking on a massive purchase of US treasury securities to maintain extremely low interest rates and ease any barriers to borrowers – essentially a rearguard action dubbed Quantitative Easing II. As with the gangrenous financial securities, they purchased nearly $600 billion in government debt and locked it in the Federal Reserve vault, where it joins the garbage accumulated in the speculative frenzy that gave birth to the crisis. They hope to determine what they will do with it and the other "assets" at a later date.

Like most of the moves that flow from economic theories corrupted by wishful thinking and iron-clad confidence in capitalism, the Federal Reserve strategy produced consequences undesired. The huge infusion of dollars to purchase treasury securities cheapened the value of the dollar against other currencies. Imports, which outstrip the value of our exports to other countries, grew more costly to the US consumer; and inflation raised its ugly head, chewing away the living standards of working people.
Further, many commodities, like oil, are traded internationally in dollars. With the value of dollars declining, pressure drove suppliers to raise prices to offset the falling buying power of the dollar, creating more inflationary pressure internationally. Moreover, rising interest rates in several countries inflated their currencies against the dollar as well, further affecting the costs of imported goods. These inflationary forces amplify the costs of other products, feeding an inflationary spiral. Despite unfounded optimism purveyed by the authorities and the media, inflation poses a serious threat to the economy and, especially, working class living standards. Those elements of the Consumer Price Index most relevant to working and poor people – fuel, health care, food, childcare, school fees, rent, etc – are those showing the most dramatic increase.

In addition, Federal Reserve policies failed in their mission. Though the cost of funding the US government debt is relatively stable, the cost of borrowing in the consumer arena continues to grow. Interest rates on mortgages, student loans, auto loans, etc. are on the rise. Again, QE II offered little relief to working people.

Prospects

Rather than a recovery, we are in Act II of a severe crisis of capitalism. It is not merely a financial crisis, a severe business-cycle trough or a radical imbalance, but a profound crisis of the capitalist system. Yes, there are imbalances, especially in the global economy. However, they are the effects and not the causes of this deep crisis. The advanced economies are scrambling to find solutions – individually – to the intractable problems of stagnation or decline, inflation, debt, intensified competition and failing economic institutions. These problems have fostered equally intractable political crises. Economic blocs, like the European Union, are under great stress from the diverse interests of the member states.

The emerging economies, on the other hand, are super-heated and threatened by the influx of speculative capital boiling over into severe eruptions of inflation and over-production.

As I argued some years ago, early in the crisis, the ephemeral era of capitalist cooperation – once called "globalization" – is over. Nation-states are going it alone, trying to find solutions to their immediate life-and-death issues, often at the expense of their global "partners." Where they do find areas of limited cooperation, for example, in the aggression against Libya, their differences surface as well.

Years from now, when sober heads look back on the global crisis, they will recognize that the stability of thye People's Republic of China, with its publicly owned banks and rational planning, did more to save the global economy from the brink than all of the bankrupt policy antics of the major capitalist powers. But there are more acts to come before the global capitalist economy finds firm ground.

What is missing from the maelstrom is for the working classes of all nations to move to center stage and demand solutions benefiting the vast majority. The Economist magazine, the voice of free markets since Marx's time, reports that confidence in free markets has sunk by 21 percentage points internationally since 2002. Similarly, the Gallop Poll shows the confidence in banks and Congress is now at an all time low in the US. Only 23% of respondents have "a great deal of" or "a lot of" confidence in banks. The Congress scores even lower: a meager 11% share "a great deal of" or "a lot of" confidence in the US legislative branch.
The crisis opens great opportunity to shape the world in a new direction, a direction that would not merely tame capitalism, but remove its destructive forces forever.

Ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, or, democratic Israel at work, By Gideon Levy, Haaretz,12.05.11

2011-05-13T12:38:00.001-05:00

While we are still desperately concealing, denying and repressing our major ethnic cleansing of 1948 - over 600,000 refugees, some who fled for fear of the Israel Defense Forces and its predecessors, some who were expelled by force - it turns out that 1948 never ended, that its spirit is still with us.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/ethnic-cleansing-of-palestinians-or-democratic-israel-at-work-1.361196
It happened on the day after Independence Day, when Israel was immersed in praise of itself and its democracy almost ad nauseam, and on the eve of (virtually outlawed ) Nakba Day, when the Palestinian people mark the "catastrophe" - the anniversary of the creation of Israel. My colleague Akiva Eldar published what we have always known but for which we lacked the shocking figures he revealed: By the time of the Oslo Accords, Israel had revoked the residency of 140,000 Palestinians from the West Bank. In other words, 14 percent of West Bank residents who dared to go abroad had their right to return to Israel and live here denied forever. In other words, they were expelled from their land and their homes. In other words: ethnic cleansing.

While we are still desperately concealing, denying and repressing our major ethnic cleansing of 1948 - over 600,000 refugees, some who fled for fear of the Israel Defense Forces and its predecessors, some who were expelled by force - it turns out that 1948 never ended, that its spirit is still with us. Also with us is the goal of trying to cleanse this land of its Arab inhabitants as much as possible, and even a bit more. After all, that's the most covert and desired solution: the Land of Israel for the Jews, for them alone. A few people dared to say it outright - Rabbi Meir Kahane, Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and their disciples, who deserve a certain amount of praise for their integrity. Many aspire to do the same thing without admitting it.
The revelation of the policy of denying residency has proved that this secret dream is in effect the establishment's secret dream. There one doesn't talk about transfer, heaven forfend; nobody would think of calling it cleansing. They don't load Arabs onto trucks as they once did, including after the Six-Day War, and they don't shoot at them to chase them away - all politically incorrect methods in the new world. But in effect that's the goal.
Some people think it's enough if we make the lives of the Palestinians in the territories miserable to get them to leave, and many have in fact left. An Israeli success: According to the Civil Administration, about a quarter of a million Palestinians voluntarily left the West Bank in the bloody years 2000-2007. But that's not enough, so various and sundry administrative means were added to make the dream come true.
Anyone who says "it's not apartheid" is invited to reply: Why is an Israeli allowed to leave his country for the rest of his life, and nobody suggests that his citizenship be revoked, while a Palestinian, a native son, is not allowed to do so? Why is an Israeli allowed to marry a foreigner and receive a residency permit for her, while a Palestinian is not allowed to marry his former neighbor who lives in Jordan? Isn't that apartheid? Over the years I have documented endless pitiful tragedies of families that were torn apart, whose sons and daughters were not permitted to live in the West Bank or Gaza due to draconian rules - for Palestinians only.
Take Dalal Rasras, for example, a toddler with cerebral palsy from Beit Omar, who was recently separated from her mother for months only because her mother was born in Rafah. Only after her case was publicized did Israel let the mother return to her daughter "beyond the letter of the law" - the cruel letter of the law that does not permit residents of Gaza to live in the West Bank, even if they have made their homes there.
The cry of the dispossessed has now been translated into numbers: 140,000, only until the Oslo Accords. Students who went to study at foreign universities, businessmen who tried their luck abroad, scientists who went abroad for professional training, native Jerusalemites who dared to move to the West Bank temporarily - they all met the same fate. All of them were taken by the wind and expelled by Israel. They couldn't return.
Most amazing of all is the reaction of those responsible for the policy of ethnic cleansing. They didn't know. Maj. Gen. (res. ) Danny Rothschild, formerly the chief military governor with the euphemistic title "coordinator of government activities in the territories," said he heard about the procedure for the first time from Haaretz. It turns out that not only is the cleansing continuing, so is the denial. Every Palestinian child knows, and only the general doesn't. Even today there are still 130,000 Palestinians registered as "NLR," a heartwarming IDF acronym for "no longer a resident," as though voluntarily, another euphemism for "expelled." And the general who is considered relatively enlightened was unaware.
This is an absolute refusal to allow the return of the refugees - something that would "destroy the State of Israel." It's also an absolute refusal to allow the return of the people recently expelled. By next Independence Day we'll probably invent more expulsion regulations, and on the next holiday we'll talk about "the only democracy."

This story is by:

Gideon Levy

Osama bin Laden is dead – but US imperialism’s worldwide war lives on, By the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation

2011-05-07T12:44:00.000-05:00

The following article is the editorial for the upcoming edition of ML Update. It is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

* * *

http://links.org.au/node/2298

May 7, 2011 -- The US has proclaimed its success in its decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, culminating in the killing of bin Laden by US military operatives in a house in Abbotabad in Pakistan. As the televised triumphalism and images of hyper-nationalist celebrations in the US fade, however, Washington's heroic narrative is being subjected to uncomfortable questions.

Ironically, Osama bin Laden’s death has come, not in the wake of 9/11 when he was at the peak of his strength, but at a time when bin Laden and his al Qaeda were effectively sidelined in an Arab world that is witnessing a democratic awakening and upsurge. This fact too robs the US narrative of some of its sheen.

The US itself has put forward conflicting versions of the night-time raid by its military team. The initial US claim of an intense firefight has now been discarded, with the US admitting that in fact, only one man opened fire on the US operatives. The claim that bin Laden himself opened fire too has been withdrawn, and the US has admitted that he was in fact unarmed. Osama bin Laden’s killing is said to have been witnessed by his 12-year-old daughter. Apart from Osama and his son (whose bodies were speedily disposed off in the sea), at least three other men and one woman were killed, while many have been injured.

Why was it necessary to kill an unarmed Osama bin Laden rather than arrest him and bring him to justice? Why has his body been hurriedly disposed off in a way designed to prevent the possibility of any closer scrutiny of the manner and circumstances of his death? The US has yet to answer these questions convincingly. Moreover, an armed attack on a sleeping household including several children, the killing of an unarmed terrorist in the presence of his child, and the killing of other unarmed men and a woman – these are not the stuff of a heroic encounter with a dreaded terrorist.

US President Barack Obama has claimed the killing of bin Laden to be the crowning achievement in the war on terror. Some have even tried to glorify it with comparisons to the end of Hitler and the defeat of fascism. Such inflated claims are quite baseless. The end of Hitler did mark the end of WWII and a world historic defeat and decline of fascism. The killing of Osama bin Laden, in contrast, spells neither the end of terrorism as a phenomenon nor the end of the US imperialist "war on terror".

By-product of anti-Sovietism

Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda are known to be the most dangerous by-products of the anti-Soviet strategy pursued by the US in the 1980s using the popular resentment in Afghanistan and the Islamic world against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Modern-day terrorism is largely a US strategy that has backfired, and this cannot be contained or ended by the end of Osama bin Laden. Rather, continuing US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wars on Libya are likely to keep spawning more terrorism.

The most immediate political effect achieved by the Osama killing is the sharp rise in popularity ratings of Obama, who is soon to face elections. The Osama coup has effectively taken the wind out of the sails of the aggressive Republican/Tea Party campaign that had been gathering momentum in the backdrop of growing unemployment and continuing economic crisis in the US and the huge politico-economic costs of the US misadventure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, Obama’s claim to have avenged 9/11 may well outweigh the propaganda of his rivals.

There are indications that the despotic Saudi rulers, threatened by the Arab uprising and seeking a convergence of Arab ruling interests and those of US imperialism and Obama in particular, helped deliver Osama to the US.

Pakistan’s military establishment is facing tough questions within its own country about how much it knew and concealed of Osama bin Laden’s hideout, which was a stone’s throw away from a military academy. The Raymond Davis episode, Wikileaks revelations of Pakistan’s rulers’ doublespeak on US drone attacks, and now the Osama episode, have created some ferment in Pakistani society about the nexus between the Pakistan ruling class, the military establishment, terrorism and US imperialism.

The Pakistan rulers and military as well as the US are wary of possible reverberations of the "Arab spring" in Pakistan. Whether Pakistan will indeed witness some version of an "Arab spring" remains to be seen, but it must be stressed that only a democratic and anti-imperialist awakening of the people can be an effective answer to both imperialism and terrorism (which, after all, is nothing but an imperialist ploy gone berserk).

India

In India, we are witnessing some hawkish clamour to use the US Osama operation as a precedent for unilateral action to hunt down the masterminds of 26/11 [the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terrorist attack] inside Pakistan. The Indian army and air force chiefs have indulged in irresponsible statements about India’s preparedness for a similar operation against terrorists in Pakistan. Instead of indulging in such misplaced jingoism, India should re-examine its own relationship with the US in the light of the US treatment of Pakistan.

The Osama operation, like the Raymond Davis episode, has underscored the sheer contempt the US has for the sovereignty and independence of its so-called allies and partners. All US "partners", including new members of the club like India, should be warned. Terrorism and imperialism pose similar threats to both Pakistan and India. With the increased US presence in South Asia, with its accompanying spiral of terrorism, people of both countries need to recognise the need to come closer to tackle these twin challenges of terrorism and imperialism effectively.

THE CAMPAIGN IN QUEBEC - A WORKING CLASS PERSPECTIVE By Johan Boyden, Montreal, in People's Voice

2011-04-28T18:55:00.000-05:00

As the federal election campaign wraps up in the area of the country that most effectively denied the Conservatives a majority in 2008, much discussion has been around class and social issues.

At the French-language leaders debate, Madame Muguette Paille, a middle-aged, working-class woman, living in a de-industrialized Québec town asked: "Myself, together with many people in my community, are unemployed. We will soon run out of employment insurance. What will you do?"

By the end of the debate Michael Ignatieff had said her name eleven times. Soon, facebook groups in this previously unknown woman's name sprang up with thousands of members.

One wonders how Madame Paille would respond to the Communist Party's proposal to set EI benefits at 90% of previous earnings for the duration of unemployment.

The Communist Party is also putting up messages for peace which have proved distinctive and popular. In the four Montreal ridings with Communist candidates, over six hundred signs have gone up, calling for voting for people before profits, ending support of Apartheid Israel, and immediate withdrawal of the troops from Afghanistan.

Talking down to workers

The Liberals too have signs - giant billboards showing a silhouette of a fighter-jet to one side, a family on the other, each with a check box. The message is clear. Voters face a question of priorities. And almost everyone understands it - even though the fighter jets will be built here.

Of course, the Liberals are trying to re-write history. They got Canada into the imperialist war in Afghanistan and started this bonanza for the merchants of death by increasing military spending. They shamelessly raided the EI fund to pay off the federal debt.

But with decades of inflation, high unemployment (higher than many other parts of Canada), lower wage levels, and de-industrialization - a situation that has only got worse with the economic crisis - is it any surprise that working class Québécois connect with Muguette Paille?

Nor has the Canadian military ever been very popular here.

Between these sentiments of the people and the solutions offered by the major parties is a wide class gulf. As elsewhere in Canada, when the big business parties propose their solutions they are speaking directly down to - but not for - the working people.

Cheap Québec-bashing

What is different from the rest of the country is the unrecognized and constitutionally denied sovereignty and self-determination of the Québec nation within Canada. This grievance finds its expression in the Bloc Québécois.

The English-language corporate media portrays the Bloc as malicious nation-wreckers. An Angus Reid-Toronto Star poll after the TV debates claimed to reveal high levels of antipathy toward Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe. "Virtually every utterance from Duceppe prompted viewers to press buttons registering their annoyance,'" the Star reported.

The irrational fear-mongering reaches a high-point with the Harper Conservatives' endless rant about the `coalition with the separatists.' Conservative incumbent for Fort McMurray-Athabasca, Brian Jean, even announced Ignatieff would put Duceppe in charge of defense.

The Communist Party's candidates have exposed this cheap Tory fear-mongering as big-nation chauvinism.

"Parlons Québec"

In fact, the Bloc Québécois campaign - "Parlons Québec", based on the idea that they are the only true voice for the nation - is more about jobs.

Accepting GM and the auto industry's departure, the Bloc platform calls federal attention to this industry an example of Ontario bias (`attention' that has forced auto workers and retirees to accept major concessions). Instead, the BQ puts the emphasis on Québec's crisis-afflicted forest sector - proposing loans to the forest industry.

This is the Bloc's vision of Québec as a "market" and they also say the other parties "refuse to fight for Québec's financial sector so as not to offend Toronto." In essence it is a class-collaborationist illusion that the workers and bosses of Québec are in the economic crisis together.

Like the New Democrats, the Bloc voted for the bombing of Libya; nor does their platform call for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. But on other issues it is stronger: banning scabs, establishing a guaranteed income supplement, opposing the privatization of Canada Post, eliminating tax havens, and abolishing tax give-aways for oil companies.

A different direction

The BQ will never form a government. Its identity is as a protest vote. This allows it to put forward some progressive policies, even drawing trade union leaders into its ranks as MPs. Yet after some twenty years of protest votes, perhaps the limitations of this tactic are becoming clearer to Québécois.

The "surge" of the New Democrats in the polls in Québec is also "fluffing" NDP support in the rest of Canada, pollsters say. The NDP made their break into Québec with the 2007 byelection victory of a former member of the Québec National Assembly and Charest Liberal, Thomas Mulcair. Now the NDP's Québec lieutenant, Mulcair has also "distinguished" himself as a hard pro-Zionist voice.

Mulcair has given his party new visibility. And at least some of the rise in interest in the New Democrats is also likely connected with growing support for Québec Solidaire, the left-wing party represented by National Assembly member Amir Khadir.

But the NDP's policy history on the national question includes opposition to Québec's right of self-determination (ie. supporting the Clarity Act). In this election they are calling for extension of the language law, Bill 101, to federal workers in Québec. The constitutional implications, however, are unclear. Some opinions suggest it may actually be illegal. Will the NDPs rise in popularity will translate into votes in Quebec? Not necessarily.

Of all the Parties on the ballot, the Communists alone are calling for a new, democratic constitution based on an equal and voluntary partnership of the Aboriginal peoples, Québec, and English-speaking Canada up to and including the right of separation.

While the national question has not been the burning issue this campaign, it would be naive to suggest the long-standing grievance of the unequal union of Canada is about to go away. Nevertheless, the election debate in Québec about social issues shows how this is a campaign taking place in tough times. People are looking for different ideas - and feeling more connection with Madame Paille, perhaps, than any of the big parties.

(The above article is from the May 1-15, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

CANADA'S COMMUNISTS DEMAND "ENVIRONMENT, NOT PROFITS".April 16-30, 2011 Volume 19 - Number 8

2011-04-26T23:15:00.000-05:00

http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Pv16ap11.html#JCOMMUNISTSDEMAND

In this election, the Communist Party of Canada has advanced a wide-ranging set of proposals designed to protect the environment. The major opposition parties and the Greens base their policies on "market-based" tinkering with the "real costs" of human economic activities. But the Communist Party argues that capitalism itself, a system based on the extraction of maximum profits, is inherently a threat to human survival. The goal of the Communist Party is public ownership of key industries and resources, which would allow for democratic control and economic planning to protect the interests of working people and the environment.

     In recent years, the corporate-backed Harper Tories have made Canada a key opponent of serious measures to tackle the deepening global climate crisis. The Communist Party demands emergency action on this issue, as well as support for reparations to countries affected by capitalist-driven climate change.

     The Communist platform calls for legislation to slash greenhouse gas emissions, including a phase-out of coal‑fired plants. Rejecting the claim that such measures will "kill jobs," the Communist platform urges investments to create jobs through renewable energy and conservation programs. This would include more stringent vehicle emission controls, expanded urban mass transit, and the eliminate of fares by subsidizing fare collections. The Communists call for funding high‑speed rail lines, and the development of a fuel-efficient Canadian car.

     Radical change is advocated in the Communist platform, aiming to remove the private profit motive as the driving force behind economic decision-making. The platform renews the Party's call to adopt a People's Energy Plan, including public ownership and democratic control of all energy and natural resource extraction, production and distribution.

     In the short term, the Communists call for a 100% tax on the windfall profits of the oil monopolies, and to "stop and reverse the privatization, deregulation and break‑up of public energy utilities."

     The Communists urge a freeze and reduction of energy exports to the U.S., and instead propose to expand shared power flows among provinces through an East‑West power grid. The Party opposes any new development of the Alberta tar sands, and calls to close these operations within five years. Jobs should be guaranteed for workers in more sustainable industries at equivalent wages, and compensation provided for Aboriginal peoples and communities affected by the tar sands. The Party opposes the Enbridge and Mackenzie Valley pipelines, and oil and gas exploration and shipping on the west coast. It calls for a moratorium on the development of shale gas resources in Quebec.

     To protect working people hard-hit by declining incomes, the Communist Party supports restoration of the "two price" system, with higher prices for energy exports, and lower prices for domestic uses, especially home heating.

     On other environmental issues, the Communist platform includes a ban on "biofuels" derived from feed grains; heavy fines and jail terms against polluters and destructive corporate practices, such as clear-cutting, in‑ocean fish farming, and deep‑sea draggers; and no industrial development in parks.

     The Communist Party also calls for action such as income supports to defend family farms and protect Canada's food sovereignty. The Party's platform urges stronger action to support organic farming: reduce the use of antibiotics, fertilizers, and pesticides, a ban on "terminator" seeds, and mandatory labelling of genetically‑modified food products.

‘Apartheid economy need radical change’ says South African Communist Party, Wednesday, April 27, 2011

2011-04-26T23:04:00.000-05:00

http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/apartheid-economy-need-radical-change-1.1061393

Unless something radical is done now about the apartheid economy inherited by government, its achievements will be greatly undermined by the system of capitalism, the SA Communist Party said on Tuesday.

“Our attempts at a gradual economic transformation have only landed us with a failed BEE project which is at the heart of the corruption we see today,” the party said in a statement to mark Freedom Day.

“We have not expanded our industrial and manufacturing base as a country, thus everyone is chasing this or that government tender.”

While millions “swim in poverty and hunger we cannot allow a continued painting of a picture where those who have access to power or those who have access to those with access to power are enriching themselves at the expense of the masses”.

Corruption was theft from the poor and directly undermined democracy.

The SACP called on all in society to join hands, in a principled and non-sectarian way to fight corruption.

“We must honestly and urgently review narrow BEE as it has not addressed the huge economic inequalities and has led to the empowerment of only a small elite instead of the majority.

“Many in the world are now exposed to similar conditions we have spoken about because of the failure of capitalism.”

Humanity faced a serious ecological crisis and as Freedom Day was celebrated, “we must ask ourselves if our future generations will have this opportunity given the speed at which our environment is being destroyed in order for some to become rich”, the SACP said.

The party called on voters to support the ANC is the May 18

local government elections, and reject the “reactionary agenda” of the Democratic Alliance to fragment national unity and treat the three layers of government as isolated islands.

“We in the SACP know well that democracy in SA doesn’t come without contradictions and reactionaries who want to exploit them for their own narrow agendas.

“At the heart of this is an attempt by reactionary forces to use our hard won democratic order to further their class interests.

“Only the ANC led alliance victory will lay conditions for the exercise of people’s power,” it said. - Sapa

Aida Touma-Sliman named new editor in chief of "Al Ittihad" daily communist newspaper in Israel , CPI site

2011-04-25T11:40:00.002-05:00

Aida Touma-Sliman named new editor in chief of "Al Ittihad" daily communist newspaper in Israel

The head of the International Department of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) and well know leading feminist activist, Aida Touma-Sliman, named new editor in chief of "Al Ittihad" daily newspaper.
2011-04-16_205900

Aida Touma-Sliman
http://21stcenturymanifesto.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/aida-touma-sliman-named-new-editor-in-chief-of-al-ittihad-daily-communist-newspaper-in-israel/"Al Ittihad", founded in 1944, is the voice of the CPI in Arabic, and the solely Arabic daily newspaper in Israel. Among the former editors-in-chief of "Al Ittihad": Emil Habibi, Tawfik Toubi, Salem Jubran and Ahmad Sa'ad.

Aida Touma-Sliman is the Director General of Women against Violence in Nazareth, member of the Political Bureau of the CPI and the first women appointed to the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab citizens of Israel and member of the Executive Committee of Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality). She has a BA degree from Haifa University in Arabic Literature and Psychology.

Canada's relationship with Castro shaded by U.S., By Jordan Press, For Postmedia News, April 19, 2011

2011-04-19T20:13:00.001-05:00

There's one good reason why Fidel Castro had a good relationship with Canada: we're not the United States.

With Castro officially handing over power to his younger brother Tuesday, the U.S. likely will continue to affect the relationship Canada has with Cuba.

Just as American foreign policy is warming up to Cuba, Canadian relations have cooled, which could affect Canada's economic and diplomatic interests in Cuba and Latin America.

Experts say that, unless Canada changes its foreign policy strategy for Cuba, it's unlikely that Canada's influence in the region will improve even with a new Castro in power.

"I don't think you're going to see anybody of a senior cabinet level visiting Cuba and I don't think you're going to see Raul Castro get a visit from Ottawa for an official visit if Stephen Harper is re-elected," said Peter McKenna, chair of the department of political studies at the University of Prince Edward Island.

"We should set ideology to one side and look at the broader interest of Canadian foreign policy."

In the years that Fidel Castro was in power, the relationship with Canada was always "normal," said John Kirk, an expert on Cuban-Canadian relations from Dalhousie University.

"The keyword is 'normal.' It's a normal relationship with ups and downs," he said.

"The low point in government to government relations in the past 30 years has come under Stephen Harper. But people to people, however, it's extremely successful."

On Tuesday, the reins of power were passed officially from Fidel, 84, to brother Raul Castro, 79, after a vote of the Communist Party's congress. The elder Castro had ceded control to his younger brother when he fell ill in 2006.

The vote marked the first time in more than 40 years that Fidel Castro was not first secretary of the Communist Party.

In 1961, Canada announced it would not follow Washington's lead and cut diplomatic ties with Cuba. John Diefenbaker's decision to maintain the status quo was driven in part by personal feelings — he didn't like John F. Kennedy — and in part because he saw an opportunity for Canada.

"Diefenbaker, the original Red Tory, believed that with the U.S. breaking relations . . . Canada could fill the gap," Kirk said.

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — when the presence of Soviet missiles on Cuban soil brought the world as close as it's ever been to a full-scale nuclear war — Diefenbaker was hesitant to agree to American requests to put Canadian troops on high alert, widening the gulf between Canada and U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Since the early 1960s, Canada has continually tried to show its independence from the United States on foreign policy, with Cuba being a primary example, McKenna said.

In the years that followed, the Canada-Cuba relationship had more ups than downs. Trudeau visited Cuba in 1976, the first NATO leader to visit the country during the Cold War.

Castro and Trudeau had similar histories — they were Jesuit-educated and held law degrees — and Castro liked that Trudeau worked in the Cuban sugarcane fields in 1949, a fact Castro took as evidence that Trudeau understood the Cuban people.

The relationship continued even after Trudeau cut foreign aid to Cuba in 1978. When Trudeau died in 2000, Castro was an honourary pallbearer at the funeral.

The bilateral relationship cooled under Brian Mulroney, Kirk said, and cooled further under Jean Chretien.

Kirk said the federal government doesn't understand Cuba or how to engage with it properly at a diplomatic level.

Economic ties between Canada and Cuba remained strong over the years. Every year, thousands of Canadians vacation in Cuba. According to Statistics Canada, more than 700,000 Canadians visited Cuba in 2007, injecting $629 million into the Cuban economy.

"Canadian tourists are very important for the Cuban economy," said Jose Azel, a Cuban exile and senior scholar at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

Azel said Castro never would have wanted to jeopardize that flow of foreign currency into the country and likely maintained good relations with Canada to keep tourists coming to the country.

ONTARIO LIBERAL BUDGET ATTACKS PUBLIC SECTOR By Liz Rowley, Peoples Voice

2011-04-14T18:16:00.000-05:00

ONTARIO LIBERAL BUDGET ATTACKS PUBLIC SECTOR

By Liz Rowley

http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint77/02%29%20ONTARIO%20LIBERAL.htm

Setting the stage for the October 6 provincial election, the Ontario Liberals have crafted a budget intended to scare voters away from the provincial Tories, while wooing Big Business for their continued support.

The budget speech announced that recovery is in full swing, but the world is an unstable place and thus "reforms" are necessary. It slams the "choices we reject" ‑ a reference to Tory leader Tim Hudak's agenda, which includes a promise to cut one or more points from the HST's current rate of 13%.

A 1% cut to the HST is a $3 billion cut to health and education, say the Liberals. "The choices we (Liberals) reject" are slashing social assistance (Mike Harris' first act was a 22% cut); slashing infrastructure spending leading to job losses and disrepair in the post‑secondary sector; laying off 33,000 teachers, 12,000 doctors, 37,000 nurses, and cutting funding for 80% of long term care beds. Each item is equivalent to about $3 billion.

But the Liberals are also preparing voters for new attacks on public sector workers and services. Declaring that "we must live within our means", 1500 jobs will be cut in the next two years, on top of the 3400 in the 2009 budget.

A further $200 million in cuts to major agencies in the next two years will mean a 10% cut to funding for the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs, a $9 million cut to Children Aid, and a 15‑30% increase in child care fees to parents, along with the closure of some child care centres. This is the tip of the iceberg; watch out for what's coming.

The government will also establish the "Commission on Reform of Ontario's Public Services", chaired by TD Bank's former Chief Economist Don Drummond. This is one to watch. And in an ideological tip of the hat to the far‑right, inmates will be moved to new super jails, and there will a reduction to the gravy in executive office budgets at Ontario hospitals and universities (whether any currently exists or not).

For the election, the government is offering 60,000 new spaces in universities and colleges; many will be filled by international students seen as revenue generators with their extraordinarily high tuition fees.

Full day kindergarten will be extended to cover 200 more schools by September, but it will be 2014 before all schools are covered. For health, there is a paltry $15 million over three years for breast cancer screening; $93 million for mental health services aimed at youth; and increased drug coverage for seniors and others covered under the (means‑tested) Ontario Drug Benefit Program.

For Big Business, massive provincial tax cuts bring the CIT rates down to 10% in Ontario; much lower than in the Great Lake States which are Ontario's main US competitors. These tax cuts were engineered by the Harris Tories ten years ago, and carried through by the Liberals. Combined with the federal CIT rate, the Marginal Effective Tax in Ontario will be 25% next year ‑ unprecedented in post‑war Canadian history.

Then there is also the HST, which the government dares to claim is being passed on in savings to consumers by 91% of businesses in the form of lower prices. The government also claims that the HST has increased purchasing power, though Statistics Canada figures show that personal debt levels are skyrocketing in Ontario. Purchasing power is declining as a result of rising food and home‑heating and fuel prices, and more expensive rents and housing.

Not in the budget are the attacks on public sector bargaining rights, and the elimination of the right to strike for municipal transportation workers in Toronto. This is expected to wash across the province, pushed by right‑wing civic and provincial governments.

The message to Big Business is clear: there is no need to switch support to the Tories. The Liberals can do the job, and will deliver.

(Next issue: the outlook for the October provincial election in Ontario.)

PCV Statement against the military aggression against the Libyan people and the presence of the President of the United States in Latin American territory, CARACAS, 21 MAR. 2011, Tribuna Popular

2011-03-21T14:51:00.004-05:00

http://www.pcv-venezuela.org/

CARACAS, 21 MAR. 2011, Tribuna Popular TP .- The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) rejects the military aggression against the Libyan people and the presence of the President of the United States in Latin American territory, saying that at present the "concern of the people is the struggle for peace and against imperialist aggression. "

This was announced at a press conference,by the national secretary for international relations of the PCV, Latin American Parliament deputy, Carolus Wimmer, who emphasized that "the capitalist ruling-class is once again advancing imperialist aggression in its eagerness to take the energy resources of all our countries. "

The communist leader accused the United States and other members of the Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Resolution No. 1973 of the Security Council of the United Nations (UN), as being on the margin of international law. "To threaten or attack Libya or any other country with international intervention is totally unjustified," he said.

For the Communist Party of Venezuela indiscriminate aggression on the Libyan people is done with the intention to weaken and to strike at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in order to control energy resources. "We reject such an active attack and join with the mobilizations that are taking place in Caracas against the embassies," said Wimmer.

The PCV supported the proposal made by the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, who proposed a peaceful alternative to foster a commission to mediate in Libya's internal conflict and seek a peaceful solution. This is the only real proposal still not too late for that, "he said. Wimmer said that the conflict in Libya is a dispute for power, for it is the duty of governments worldwide to help peaceful solutions rather than the military aggression that is now being done indiscriminately as "smart bombs are not able to discriminate between civilians and military. "

"The United Nations was created after World War II, for peace, that is the role it should play and not give permission for war," said the communist leader. The Party calls on the peoples and governments, to pressure the contending parties in Libya, through dialogue, it seeks a peaceful solution that benefits the vast majority of the Libyan people.

Obama's trip to Latin America seeks to regain control of our resources For the Communist Party, is no coincidence, nor is it surprising that at the same time that there is military aggression against the Libyan people, the United States President Barack Obama, is making a tour of some Latin American countries. "As Obama himself declared, has two objectives: One, as representing the interests of multinationals, seeking increased exports of waste products from the United States to our countries and, secondly, ensure that natural resources, energy, water and minerals pass over under the control of the U.S. government, "said Wimmer.

The PCV called for strengthening the anti-imperialist front and join the protests As part of this counter-imperialist, the Communist Party of Venezuela called on the Venezuelan people, parties and revolutionary movements to mobilize and strengthen the Anti-imperialist front against U.S. aggression and the aggression of the countries of capitalist Europe, stressing that Venezuela is also targeted by attackers. In this framework, the PCV called to strengthen and consolidate the Bolivarian revolution against imperialism. "The only defense against assault, is a people united with the revolutionary process, to successfully confront the media campaigns that seek to divide us," he said Wimmer.

Therefore, the Communists made a new call to accelerate the formation of the Broad Front and National Patriotic Pole, a broad range of all patriotic forces, to agree upon an agenda for collective and unified organization, "this is a urgent task to defend against economic and military aggression, "they said.

Mobilization agenda:

Tuesday March 22 at 12 m, protest against imperialist aggression, the U.S. Embassy.

Thursday, March 24, to express our solidarity with the Libyan people in the Libyan Embassy.

Saturday 26 March, "Day of the Right of peoples to armed rebellion", convened by the Continental Bolivarian Movement (MCB), in the parish on January 23 throughout the day with marches, forums and cultural activities in the Plaza Manuel Marulanda.

A Tangled Webb: A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century, Written by Roger Keeran

2011-03-10T17:36:00.000-06:00

March 3, 2011
via www.mltoday.com

In February 2011, Sam Webb’s “A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century” appeared on the website of Political Affairs. No one who has read Webb’s statements in the past decade will be surprised by his recent effort which is just a re-statement of his social democratic views. Edward A. Drummond has fully analyzed Webb’s previous writings in “Reflections on Revisionism in the USA” and other articles available on this web site.

Still, several novelties exist in the most recent piece that deserve a rejoinder.

Webb claims to have come to some bold and new ideas after the fall of the Berlin wall and after reading or re-reading some Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci and others. What is astonishing is that Webb thinks his ideas are bold and new, when they have been advocated by social democrats like Edward Bernstein since 1899.

All of the following ideas touted by Webb would fit comfortably in the program of any socialist or social-democratic party of the 2oth century: rejection of the term “Marxism-Leninism,” the embrace of “‘gradual’” and “‘reform’” (not “dirty words”), the elevation of “electoral and political struggle to a primary arena,” the stress on “the struggle for democracy,” “challenging the notion that everything is subordinate to class and class struggle,” the “condemnation of the Stalin regime,” the idea that “the nature of the struggle…[is]winning positions and influence in the state,” the idea that “socialism will bring an end to exploitation of wage labor, not in one fell swoop, but over time,” the “embrace of a new humanist ethos,” the rejection of “democratic centralism” and of a party with “a high degree of discipline and centralized structure,” and so forth.

In other words, Webb’s vision of a party of socialism of the 21st century turns out to look a lot like a socialist party of the 20th century, if not the 19th century. One might be tempted to say with Marx, “first time tragedy, second time farce,” except this is not the second time that social democratic ideas have appeared in a Communist Party as something bold and new. It is more like the hundred and second time.

Lenin noted in “What Is To Be Done?” (a book notably missing from Webb’s reading list) that the attraction of social democratic ideas is completely understandable, particularly when reaction is riding high and revolution is on the distant horizon. Lenin compared revolutionaries to a group holding each others’ hands while marching along a “precipitous and difficult path” trying to advance while surrounded by enemy fire. He compared those who advocated social democratic ideas at such moments to those who wanted to leave this path and retreat into a neighboring marsh.

While marching toward social democracy and reformism, Webb insists on holding on to the hands of revolutionaries. He apparently thinks by invoking the names of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Debs, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Dimitroff, and Togliatti he can grasp the hands of revolutionaries even while he rejects their revolutionary ideas. Just as he invokes the names of revolutionary thinkers, so Webb employs some of the vocabulary of revolutionary Marxism — class, class struggle, economic crisis, ruling class, imperialism, racism, independent political action, and internationalism.

Webb, however, drains these words of any content and fails to link them to any actual struggles, say for example the struggle for international solidarity with the Cuban Five or the actual struggle against U.S. imperialism’s current wars of occupation and aggression. The only purpose of such names and words is to seduce some of what’s left of the Communist Party into joining him on his march to the marsh.

A good example of Webb’s tendentious treatment of revolutionary thinkers occurs with his treatment of Gramsci. Webb cherry picks certain of Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony, civil society, positional struggle, and ruling class divisions to incorporate into his reformist manifesto, but he conveniently overlooks Gramsci’s lifelong opposition to reformism, commitment to revolution, and belief in a disciplined, vanguard party.

After all, it was Gramsci’s fable of the beaver that lampooned those who think like Webb. In this fable, a beaver is pursued by hunters who desire his testicles for medicinal reasons. The beaver decides to save himself by cutting off his own testicles. Webb hopes to save himself from attacks of the ascendant rightwing, from the scorn of leftist intellectuals, and the disapproval of his desired coalition partners by castrating the revolutionary spirit and content of Marxism. Webb portrays such surgery as simply the removal of the “too rigid and formulaic” ideas and “questionable assumptions,” the “undialectical” methodology, and the “too centralized” structure.

Such words, however, only fool himself and the gullible. No one reading Webb’s piece, could say what Gramsci’s biographer said of him: he had “no intention of revising Marx,” “he thought of himself as carrying on Lenin’s work,” and “opposition to the reformist point of view was a constant stand in his political and intellectual life.” (Cammett, pp. 192, 197.)

Two ideas are missing in Webb’s vision: revolution and theory. The only time Webb refers to theory is to warn against “our theoretical structure” being “too rigid and formulaic.” And the only time he refers to revolution is to warn against “the insurrectionary model of revolution.” It is hard to avoid the impression that Webb would just as soon dispense with the words theory and revolution altogether. No serious person, however, can view these as casual omissions. When Lenin said, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” he was not only defending a formulation of Engels but was also advancing an idea that would be embraced by Gramsci and every other revolutionary thinker.

Theory gives us insight into the present, foresight into the movement of history and confidence in our goal. Marxist-Leninist theory gives Communists the understanding and will to withstand and counter the bombardment of other theories and ideologies from neoliberalism to liberalism to anarchism. As Gramsci argued Marxist theory provides passion (and “only passion sharpens the intellect”) and human will, and “only he who strongly wills identifies the elements necessary to realize his will.”

It is easy to dismiss the importance of Marxist theory. To some it seems difficult to understand all the technical language and nuances. It is difficult to follow the theoretical debates and to know whom to believe. In some hands, the theory can slide into dogmatism or blind faith. And anyway for some, calling Marxism a theory is too grandiose, since it falls short of the near universal acceptance accorded theories of natural science. Such attitudes make Webb’s cavalier treatment of theory of little concern to many on the left. Therefore, a few words about the role and importance of Marxist theory are in order.

First, the basics of Marxist theory are no more difficult to grasp than the basics of Copernicus’s theory of the universe, Newton’s laws of physics, or Darwin’s theory of evolution. In truth, Marxism’s claim to theory is not grandiose, rather the word “theory” itself has acquired unfortunate grandiose connotations. Rightly understood, theory means systematic study. Such study at best results in explanations that simplify and systematize the causes of complex and diverse phenomena. In this sense, Marxist theory plays the same role as other scientific theory in that it provides an understanding of the world that is deeper than common sense, an understanding that penetrates beneath surface appearances.

In natural science this means understanding the common origins of species that appear to common observation as different and unrelated, or in understanding the true movement of celestial objects, when our senses mislead us into thinking that sun goes around the earth, or in understanding that objects which common sense tells us are “solid” are actually comprised atoms which are themselves more space than matter, and so forth. Marxist theory enables us to understand the development of history, classes, class conflict, imperialism, and the inevitability of socialism, even while common parlance denies the importance of these terms, dismisses the possibility of their explanation, or offers counter explanations.

Of course, two major differences exist between natural science and social science. The subjects of natural science lend themselves to precise observation, measurement, and experimental testing, in ways that social scientific theory can never duplicate. Consequently, natural science can produce “laws,” i.e. theories, agreed upon by all people of reason, whereas social sciences, like Marxism, can point only to historical trends and tendencies, which will always be open to contestation.

Secondly, though natural science may threaten some interests (as evolution challenges religious ideas of creation and the theory of global warming challenges the profits of oil companies), natural science is further removed from immediate class interests and power than social science. This also makes social science more contestable than natural science. Just because a theory like Marx’s is more contestable than Darwin’s does not, however, make it less important or valuable. Indeed, for revolutionaries the fight for theory is part of the fight for socialism. Without constant attention to it, the passion, confidence, and intelligent guide to action that sustain revolutionary struggle will be sapped.

This is precisely what is missing in Webb’s vision. Because he has no time for theory, he has no belief in revolution. With no revolutionary theory and no revolutionary belief, he also lacks any passion for struggle, any indignation against those who are pillaging the planet, waging war, and oppressing working people, or any plan, goal, or courage for revolutionary struggle. Webb’s only plan to get to socialism is to support the Democrats and the labor movement against the ultraright.

All his indignation is reserved for other leftists with whom he disagrees, for the ideological straw men he sets up to knock down, and the “right wing extremism” that blocks the great potential of the current administration. Webb’s strongest words of condemnation are not for the imperialists who rain bombs from drones on innocent Afghan villagers, or those who engage in torture, imprisonment without trial and extraordinary rendition, or the capitalists who have reaped unheard of profits for the last thirty years while wages stagnated, or the Wall Street banks and corporations who looted the public treasury in 2008 and 2009 to save themselves from the crisis they created, or the racism that keeps millions of African Americans unemployed, poor and imprisoned, or the Democratic and Republican politicians out to destroy public sector unions, and so on. There is not a word about them. No, Webb’s strongest words of condemnation are for the “boneheads” who want to attack the whole capitalist class and for Stalin, nearly sixty years dead, to whom Webb boldly dishes out his “unequivocal…condemnation.”

Ever since the election of Richard Nixon as president in 1968, this country has moved pretty steadily to the right. Every Republican president has been more conservative than the one before, and every Democratic president from Carter to Clinton to Obama have embraced some of the neo-liberal agenda, pursued imperialist wars abroad, and turned their backs again and again on the needs of workers and the poor. Even though the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt confirm what Marxist theory holds, namely that decades of seeming quiescence masking growing class conflict can given way suddenly to revolutionary upheaval, it is easy without such theory to grow dispirited.

Antonio Gramsci knew this. Yet, even though he lived most of his adult life under Italian fascism and in a fascist prison, he never lost his belief in the efficacy of theory and the inevitability of revolution.

Webb is no Gramsci. Under even less arduous times than Gramsci faced, Webb has turned toward social democracy and reformism. We on the left should bear him no ill will. An increase in the number of real liberals and social democrats should be welcome in this country. The only thing we should say is what Lenin said, “We think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands….”

Decision Time for the CPUSA Written by Edward A. Drummond in M-L Today Feb 15, 2011

2011-02-16T10:08:00.000-06:00

http://fwd4.me/vrD

Editors' Note: we received this article from Edward A. Drummond. His criticisms of Sam Webb’s “A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century” are severe. We invite responses from our readers in the weeks and months ahead.

I welcome the mounting calls in the CPUSA to replace Sam Webb in order to restore and revive the Communist Party.

I urge that he resign now, and spare us a messy internal fight.

It is now necessary to remove him. Not to remove him is not an option. His job is a political post, and he doesn’t have the appropriate politics. How do we know that? He says so in his new 10,000-word think piece “A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century.” [1]

It’s not personal. He simply doesn’t do what we pay him to do. He isn’t doing his real job. Evidently, he does not intend to do it. He has made gigantic mistakes. He has presided over organizational decline. But he shuns accountability. Self-criticism is rare, whispered, and tucked away in paragraph 17. He conceals information from us. He has a pattern of dissembling.[2] He has become an ideological émigré from the Communist movement. But he beckons us to follow him.

It's time to reassign him to other work where he can do less damage. With this outrageous essay he has thrown down the gauntlet. If we don’t move him out as national chair, how can we say we have any self–respect?

I concede: Sam Webb has the right to change his politics and become a non-Communist. That he has exercised that right is evident in the article under discussion. Webb, however, does not have the right to be a non-Communist and at same time be chair of our party, the CPUSA. Nobody has such a right.

I will grant, also, that Sam Webb is an accomplished speechwriter. Moving words around on a page, he can produce "truthiness," a useful term invented by comedian Stephen Colbert. Webb can make apostasy seem like common sense. For example, he throws out Lenin’s party of a new type -- in favor of an opportunist party of the old type -- with these sentences:

A party of socialism in the 21st century will construct its own organizational model in line with its own material conditions and needs. It shouldn't be hatched out of thin air or imported from another country.

A more accurate title for his confessional essay would have been “How I Became a Social Democrat, and Why You Should Too.” Most of its ideas he has expressed before, but here they are more boldly expressed. Various writers, including me, have critiqued them on this web site.[3] A tenth of the article is devoted to his personal political evolution away from Communism. Sadly, all Party members will not read a ten thousand-word think piece. If they do not, the damage inflicted will be all the greater.

Top Ten Reasons to Remove Him

On the basis of this document alone, Comrade Webb should be required by the NC to vacate his post. Its most egregious disclosure is this: he doesn’t believe any longer in the goals of the CPUSA. It took him ten years to confess to this. Those paying attention had deduced it years ago. Webb declares:

1. Lenin and Leninism are Out. “As for "Marxism-Leninism," the term should be retired in favor of simply "Marxism." No wonder the CPUSA opposition to US imperialist wars -- Iraq, Afghanistan -- has been enfeebled.

Marxism? He says he is for it. However, there are few more fundamental Marxist ideas than historical inevitability, and the class character of the state. Having dumped Leninism, it turns out he’s not really in favor of Marxism either. Historical inevitability? Out. “After all, there is no direct or inevitable path to socialism.” Class character of the state? Out. “Struggle within the state is no less important than struggle against the state.”

The core principle of Party organization -- democratic centralism -- is out. There is a remaining prohibition against factionalism that he applies to others, but not to his own faction. I will return to this.

Leadership of mass movements, i.e. a struggle for a CPUSA vanguard role in people’s movements? Out. He says he is for it. But not when you read the fine print. [4]

The Party Program is out. His socialism is “a work in progress.” The CPUSA Program says Marxism-Leninism is the ideological guidance of the Party. He says no.

2. Fake internationalism. He says he is for internationalism, but rails against “foreign-sounding” words.[5] He is quite selective about foreign-ness. Leninism is foreign-sounding; Marxism is not foreign-sounding. This is deceitful hogwash rooted in reformism and national chauvinism.

3. Sophistry and double talk. A document so rife with bunkum surely says something about its author’s character. His version of “dialectics” is mumbo jumbo.[6] He is clueless about real dialectics. He claims that a “party of socialism in the 21st century is “steeped in class struggle.” Class struggle is what he is running away from. His labored, fake modesty is repellent. He declares that these are just a few exploratory ideas…which I humbly submit… knowing we all make mistakes ...it’s a work in progress. In 2005, he sprang his “Reflections on Socialism” on the Party convention on its last day. It was similarly billed as a personal viewpoint, just a few tentative ideas. It has been on the Party web site as a canonical text ever since.

If he were really modest he would acknowledge the complete failure of his analysis. Recall how wrong – and how haughty – his opinions were, when he chastised domestic and foreign skeptics as “ostriches.”

Labor and its allies now have a friend, a people's advocate in the White House. ... it is obvious that the Obama administration represents a qualitative break with rightwing extremism and free-market fundamentalism. Not to see this, not to acknowledge this, not to welcome this, no matter whether you live in or outside U.S. borders, is to act like the ostrich that sticks its head in the sand and misses what is happening on the ground. [7]

4. Misleading the members. Good leaders don’t make big mistakes, and they revise mistakes promptly. As he now admits openly, Webb’s theories and policies are not “mistakes.” The decision to hollow out the CPUSA as a genuine Communist Party, to make it merely a pressure group inside the Democratic Party came first. Sam Webb changed his politics in the 1990s.[8] But he also decided to keep his job (and the perks and assets that go with it), and try by stealth and by guile the to remake CPUSA as a social democratic or perhaps a liberal Democratic organization. The two, in practice, are little different. Since coming into office in 2000, he has been tiptoeing and wordsmithing his way toward this end. So far, he has largely succeeded.

5. Anti-Communism. A full answer to his obsession with Stalin would require a book. Suffice it to say anti-Stalinism is the antechamber to all-out anti-Communism. For one so preoccupied with the “ultra right,” he uses the bitterest anti-Communist rhetoric of the ultra right in his plea for more anti-Stalinism in the CPUSA. [9]

6. Harmful impact on mass movements. With Communists playing a smaller role in it, the antiwar movement is floundering. When was the last big antiwar demonstration in Washington? The trade unions -- without a Communist critique, Communist skill at building left-center coalitions and Communist strategic understanding -- have no idea what to do now that Obama Administration is attacking working people almost daily. Their plan was to elect Obama and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. What’s the plan now?

7. Harmful Impact on the Party. A falling, aging membership. Dwindling CPUSA influence on the left and people’s movements. Internal Party morale at rock bottom. Clubs drifting.

8. Incompetence. His stewardship of the organization is in itself a sufficient basis to remove him. Webb’s self–described “flexible and non-dogmatic Marxism,”[10] has led to a trail of errors. In 2008-2010 we were treated to delirious rhapsodies about the President’s alleged “community organizer” background. A chimerical "Obama Movement" was claimed to exist, thereby conflating a movement with 1) a campaign email list of small donors, or else 2) a transient moment in November 2008 when new forces entered the voting booth. A progressive “Obama Agenda,” to which we were required to rally our new Democratic Party contacts, was said to exist. When his right-wing Cabinet appointments were made, we heard, "Don't go bananas," such appointments need not imply future policy direction.

For two years -- facts be damned -- Webb and Co. continued to swoon. Obama became the leader of the people's movements, a "friend." Early 2009 was the "springtime of possibility." He was "brilliant," a "transformational" politician. The country was coming "out of the crisis," into "an era of democratic reform." Members were advised to attend the Inaugural festivities. Some Party leaders actually predicted that Obama would shift leftward after the Inauguration. We heard the "Impossible has become Possible." A mountain of evidence that Obama, not McCain, was the main recipient of Wall Street donations was dismissed. [11]

9. Webb doesn’t do his job. He is mainly responsible for carrying out the line of the Party as expressed in the Party Program.[12] Openly, he is declaring that his present political convictions lead him in another direction. A self-respecting organization cannot tolerate such behavior.

10. Webb’s ideas amout to Browderism for the 21st Century. "The historic error of social democracy is trailing behind the big bourgeoisie," wrote William Z. Foster in 1946. [13] The ghost of Browder haunts the CPUSA today. The present course of the CPUSA is precisely the Browder error: trailing an illusory liberal monopoly bourgeoisie whose political expression is said to be the Obama Administration

Browder wrongly projected that Big Three (US-UK-USSR) wartime unity would continue after the defeat of the Axis, with the consent of US monopoly capitalists, all “intelligent men.” Browder then tried to ally the CPUSA with his imaginary “liberal” big bourgeoisie. In fact, the Truman government was becoming less liberal by the day as it became the instrument of US ruling circles’ desire to launch the Cold War and McCarthyism.

Similarly, today, the leadership circle around Webb hitched its wagon to Obama in 2008, as it had earlier hitched its wagon to Congressional Democrats. Obama and the Democrats are – we are supposed to believe – the voice of the “liberal” big bourgeoisie, our rampart against the “ultra right.” Reality just won’t conform to Webb’s predictions. The US Administration is moving rightward as fast as it can.

Other objectionable, dishonest features, such as the use of Straw Men, are everywhere. No Communist, ever, has said “reform is a dirty word,” as he implies.

Marxism is revolutionary in theory and practice, but it doesn't consider "gradual" and "reform" to be dirty words nor does it believe that every political moment at the level of concrete reality is actually or potentially radical and revolutionary.

Conclusion

If the Webb line is Browderism for the 21st Century, its end, sooner or later, will be the same. The ship is already foundering on the sharp rocks of reality. But will its end be in time to save the Party?

Ousting him in an internal fight will not be easy. On his side, for example, is the abysmally low standard of Party ideological education which he has done so much to lower. This fact works in favor of his desired transformation of the Party into a gelatinous association of liberal Democrats.

I beseech Party members, still holding back, to re-think the “factionalism” issue. That democratic centralism is already a dead letter is clear from the open advocacy by his surrogates of a Party name change, even ending the CPUSA as a party. Webb’s Twenty-Nine Theses tell us he is no longer a Communist. He is not binding himself by democratic centralism. You should not be either, if it impedes the fight to save the Party. If and when we restore the Party, then we can restore disciplined, democratic unity, that is to say, restore democratic centralism.

If other leaders of the National Committee (NC) and National Board (NB) have neither the wit nor common sense to understand what’s at stake -- if they cannot grasp that Webb’s stated politics make him unsuitable for the post he is in -- then we must go to the Districts and clubs. He holds the most important post in the Party. He sets the line. He sets the leadership agenda and priorities. He makes assignments. He hires and fires. He has the last word on the assets.

So far, many Party leaders have hardly covered themselves in glory. Some still stay silent. Like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, they hope that “something will turn up.” Some confine their opposition to sharing derisive comments about his inane ideas only among their friends, who already agree with them. This is opportunism. The result is that nothing changes, and nothing will change. The Party is in a tailspin. This is perhaps their last chance to redeem themselves.

If his new document stands unchallenged, Webb will have ample reason to think the way is clear to do what he pleases. He has surrounded himself, mostly, with toadies on the NB. One hopes that not all on the NB are toadies. The NC, though purged of many of its independent thinkers, still has healthy forces.

It is unacceptable for a Communist party, a revolutionary party, to be headed by a person who does not share its beliefs. Would it be acceptable for a union leader openly to take the side of the employers?

Some say, “Ignore him; we can do good work without him.” To believe that is a big mistake. Stealthily for ten years, more or less openly for five years, he has been nudging the Party rightward. Most ignored his “class is too stiff” essay of 2000. Some ignored his speech to the Left Forum in 2004. They ignored his “Reflections on Socialism” in 2005. They ignored the dismantling process. Physical dismantling included the bookstores, Party archives, the print PWW, and on and on. Some, truly dead from the neck up, want to ignore even this document.

Fence-sitting is no longer possible.

Removing him from office and changing the line would start a recovery process.

When US imperialism was pushing deeper into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Pete Seeger wrote about LBJ’s criminal folly in a famous antiwar ballad. He likened the escalation of the war to a US platoon commander who pushed his unit into the murky jungle river. The ballad’s unforgettable refrain was, “We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the Big Fool says to push on.”

Today, the CPUSA is “Waist deep in the Big Muddy.” Its members must act before the waters rise over our heads. Time is short.

-End-

________________________________________________________________

Endnotes

[1] http://www.politicalaffairs.net/a-party-of-socialism-in-the-21st-century-what-it-looks-like-what-it-says-and-what-it-does/

[2] It took him more than ten years to own up to the fact that he changed his politics in the 1990s. He says he has re-thought his decision in the 1991 CPUSA versus Committees of Correspondence battle, but he won’t tell us why or how.Here is his idea of self-criticism: “Unfortunately, the "movement" of these broad social forces was not sustained in the post-election period.” It takes gall to write such words, when one was advocating that the movement adjust itself to the politics of the Obama Administration, not vice versa. He goes on to be agnostic about what is responsible for this “unfortunate” development.

[3] “Reflections on Revisionism" (2005); ”From Revisionism to Party Liquidation"( 2008); “the Crisis of the CPUSA” (2009). All available at <>

[4] “The task of a party of socialism in the 21st century is to give leadership to the movement as a whole, to be a force for broad working class and people's unity, to interconnect the particular and general demands of a multilayered social movement, to articulate a socialist vision and values – a challenge to be sure. We have no illusions that we can meet this challenge through our efforts alone.”

[5] ”A party of socialism in the 21st century is internationalist in outlook and practice. And well it should be.”   But then he also writes: “As for "Marxism-Leninism," the term should be retired in favor of simply "Marxism." ….it has a negative connotation among ordinary Americans, even in left and progressive circles. Depending on whom you ask, it either sounds foreign or dogmatic or undemocratic or all of these together.   ”

[6] In Thesis #11 he declares: “I would strongly argue that the relationship between the two – class and democracy – is dialectical. Each interpenetrates and influences the other. Neither one can be fully realized apart from the other. And both interact in the context of a social process of capital accumulation. ” Clear?

[7] Note that the process doesn’t work in reverse. In 2008-10 when the Democrats held, so to speak, two and one-half branches (the House, the Senate, a 5-4 balance on the US Supreme Court), there was no discussion that the political emergency was over and the ultra right was fading as the main danger. Webb has shifted the line. The mere existence of the ultra right, not its power, actual or potential, is the justification of the permanent CPUSA embrace of the Democratic Party.

[8] “If I were asked to sum up what conclusions I reached it would be this: our theoretical structure – Marxism-Leninism – was too rigid and formulaic, our analysis too loaded with questionable assumptions, our methodology too undialectical, our structure too centralized, and our politics drifting from political realities. “

[9]  ”... a party of socialism should make an unequivocal break with Stalin and his associates, not to please the enemies or critics of socialism, but to acknowledge to millions that the forced and violent collectivization of agriculture, the purges and executions of hundreds of thousands of communists and other patriots, the labor camps that incarcerated, exploited and sent untold numbers of Soviet people to early deaths, and the removal of whole peoples from their homelands can't be justified on the grounds of historical necessity or in the name of defending socialism. They were crimes against humanity.   To describe these atrocities as a mistake is a mistake – criminal: yes, a horror: yes, a terrible stain on the values and ideals of socialism: definitely. To make matters worse, the practices of the Stalin regime set in place theoretical notions, structures and relations of governance, laws of socialist economy, justifications for concentrated power, and a great-leader syndrome that in the end weakened socialism in the USSR and other socialist countries.   I can't speak for other parties, and have no desire to, but our party should be unequivocal in its condemnation of the Stalin regime.”   

[10] A phrase directly borrowed from Browder, by the way.

[11] The donations bestowed on Obama by Wall Street were public information. See <>

[12] I was tempted to write “the line of the Party Convention.” The May 2010 convention was as one comrade who attended declared, “more an exercise in crowd control than a Communist convention.“ See “Impressions of the CPUSA Convention” at www.mltoday.com.

[13] “Marxism-Leninism versus Revisionism,” Foster, Duclos, Dennis, Williamson, Weiss. 1946

Reflections of Fidel The Revolutionary Rebellion in Egypt. February 14, 2011 (Taken from CubaDebate)

2011-02-15T19:29:00.000-06:00

Havana. February 14, 2011
http://fwd4.me/vpC
Reflections of Fidel
The Revolutionary Rebellion in Egypt
(Taken from CubaDebate)

I said several days ago that the die was cast for Mubarak and that not even Obama could save him.

The world knows what is taking place in the Middle East. The news is circulating at incredible speed. Politicians barely have time to read the cables coming in by the hour. Everyone is aware of the importance of what is occurring there.

After 18 days of harsh battling, the Egyptian people attained an important objective: to defeat the United States' principal ally in the heart of the Arab countries. Mubarak was oppressing and plundering his own people, he was an enemy of the Palestinians and an accomplice of Israel, the sixth nuclear power on the planet, associated with the military NATO group.

The Egyptian Armed Forces, under the command of Gamal Abdel Nasser, had overthrown a submissive king and created the Republic which, with support from the USSR, defended the homeland from the Franco-British and Israeli invasion in 1956 and retained possession of the Suez Canal and the independence of this millennial nation.

Thus Egypt enjoyed a high level of prestige in the Third World. Nasser was known as one of the most outstanding leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, which he participated in creating, together with other eminent leaders of Asia, Africa and Oceania who were fighting for national liberation and political and economic independence from the former colonies.

Egypt always enjoyed the support and respect of the abovementioned international organization which brings together more than 100 countries. That sister nation currently presides over the Movement for the three-year period established; and the support of many of its members for the struggle which its people are now waging will not be slow in coming.

What did the Camp David Accords signify, and why are the heroic Palestinian people so passionately defending their most vital rights?

At Camp David – with the mediation of the then U.S. President Jimmy Carter – the Egyptian leader Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the famous accords between Egypt and Israel.

It is said that they held secret talks during 12 days and, on September 17, 1979, signed two important accords: one referring to peace between Egypt and Israel, and another related to the creation of an autonomous territory in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which Al-Sadat thought – and Israel knew and shared the idea – would be the headquarters of the Palestinian state, whose existence, as well as that of the state of Israel, the United Nations Organization agreed on November 29, 1947, during the British Mandate of Palestine.

After difficult and complex talks, Israel agreed to withdraw its troops from the Egyptian territory of Sinai, although it categorically rejected the participation of Palestinian representatives in the peace negotiations.

As a result of the first agreement, Israel returned to Egypt the Sinai territory occupied in one of the Arab-Israeli wars.

In virtue of the second, both parties committed themselves to negotiate the creation of the autonomous regime in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The former comprised a territory of 5,640 square kilometers and 2.1 million inhabitants; and the latter, 360 square kilometers and 1.5 million inhabitants.

The Arab countries were angry with that agreement in which, in their judgment, Egypt did not energetically and firmly defend a Palestinian state whose right to exist had been at the center of the struggles waged for decades by the Arab states.

Their reaction reached such extreme indignation that many of them broke off relations with Egypt. In that way, the UN Resolution of November 1947 was erased from the map. The autonomous entity was never created and thus the Palestinians were deprived of the right to exist as an independent state, leading to the interminable tragedy endured there and which should have been resolved more than three decades ago.

The Arab population of Palestine is the victim of acts of genocide; their lands are being snatched from them and are deprived of water in those semi-desert areas, and their housing is destroyed with sledge hammers. In the Gaza Strip, one and a half million people are systematically attacked with explosive missiles, live phosphorus and the well-known stun grenades. The territory of the Strip is blockaded by land and sea. Why is there so much talk about the Camp David Accords and no mention of Palestine?

The United States supplies Israel with the most modern and sophisticated armament, worth billions of dollars every year. Egypt, an Arab country, was converted into the second recipient of U.S. weapons. To fight against whom? Against another Arab country? Against the Egyptian people themselves?

When the population was demanding respect for their most elemental rights and the resignation of a president whose policies consisted of exploiting and plundering his people, the repressive forces trained by the United States did not hesitate to fire on them, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.

When the Egyptian people were awaiting explanations from the government of their own country, the replies came from senior officers from U.S. intelligence agencies or the U.S. government, without any respect whatsoever for Egyptian officials.

Do the leaders of the United States and their intelligence services, by any chance, know nothing of the Mubarak government's colossal theft?

Faced with the people's mass protests in Tahrir Square, neither government officials nor intelligence agents said one single word about privileges and the bold-faced robbery of billions of dollars.

It would be an error to imagine that the revolutionary popular movement in Egypt simply constitutes a reaction against the violation of their most fundamental rights. Peoples do not risk repression or death, nor do they stand fast the whole night protesting energetically about purely formal issues. They do so when their legal and material rights are pitilessly sacrificed to the insatiable demands of corrupt politicians and to the national and international forces sacking the country.

The rate of poverty already affected the vast majority of a combative, young and patriotic people, whose dignity, culture and beliefs have all been attacked.

How could they reconcile themselves to the continuing increase in the price of food with the tens of billions of dollars attributed to President Mubarak and the privileged sectors of his government and society?

At this point, it is not enough to know how high that figure is; it must be demanded that the funds be returned to the nation.

Obama is affected by the events in Egypt; he acts or appears to act as if he were the owner of the planet. What is happening in Egypt seems to be his own issue. He has not stopped talking over the telephone with leaders of other countries.

The EFE agency, for example, reports, "… He spoke with British Prime Minister

David Cameron; Jordan's King Abdala II and with the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a moderate Islamist.

"The U.S. President recognized the 'historic change' that Egyptians have made and reaffirmed his admiration for their efforts…"

The principal U.S. news agency AP released some arguments worthy of attention:

"Wanted: Moderate, Western-leaning Mideast leaders willing to be friends with Israel and cooperate in the fight against Islamic extremism while protecting human rights…

"That's the impossible wish list from the Obama administration after popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia ousted two long-serving and close but deeply flawed U.S. allies in stunning rebellions that many believe will spread.

"This dream resume doesn't exist and isn't likely to appear soon. Part of the reason is that American administrations for the past four decades sacrificed the lofty human rights ideals they espoused for the sake of stability, continuity and oil in one of the world's most volatile regions.

"'Egypt will never be the same,' Obama said as he welcomed the departure of Hosni Mubarak on Friday.

"'Through their peaceful protests,' Obama said, ‘Egyptians changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.'

"Even though governments around the Arab world are nervous, there is no sign that entrenched elites in Egypt and Tunisia are willing to cede the power and vast economic leverage they have enjoyed…

"The Obama administration has insisted ever since President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia last month – a day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Arab leaders in a speech in Qatar that without reform the foundations of their countries were 'sinking into the sand…'"

The people in Tahrir Square do not appear to be very docile.

Europe Press relates:

"Thousands of demonstrators have arrived in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the mobilizations which provoked the resignation of the country's President, Hosni Mubarak, to reinforce those who have remained in the area despite attempts by the military police to dislodge them, according to reports by the BBC.

"The BBC correspondent posted in the central Cairo plaza has reiterated that the army is looking indecisive faced with the arrival of more demonstrators…

"The hardcore are situated on one of the square's corners… and have decided to stay in Tahrir to make sure that their demands are met."

Regardless of what may happen in Egypt, one of the most serious problems faced by imperialism at this time is the shortage of grain, which I analyzed in my January 19 Reflection.

The United States uses an important part of the corn it raises, and a large portion of soybeans, to produce biofuels. Europe, for its part, employs millions of hectares of land for this purpose.

On the other hand, as a consequence of climate change produced fundamentally by the rich, developed countries, a shortage of water and food is emerging which is incompatible with the growth of the world's population, at a rate which will result in 9 billion inhabitants within 30 years, without the United Nations or the most influential governments on the planet warning or informing the world of the situation in the wake of the fraudulent Copenhagen and Cancun meetings.

We support the valiant Egyptian people and their struggle for political rights and social justice.

We are not opposed to the people of Israel; we are opposed to the genocide of the Palestinian people and in favor of their right to an independent state.

We are not in favor of war, but rather in favor of peace among all peoples.

Fidel Castro Ruz
February 13, 2011
9:14 p.m.

Translated by Granma International

Sam Webb: Which side are you on?, a comment to Sam Webb’s article “A party of socialism in the 21st century, By the CPUSA Houston club

2011-02-10T21:22:00.000-06:00

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/sam-webb-which-side-are-you-on/

Sam Webb: Which side are you on?
Written on 10 February 2011

Response to Sam Webb’s paper on “A party of socialism for the 21st century…”

This document has also been posted as a comment to Sam Webb’s article “A party of socialism in the 21st century: What it looks like, what it says, and what it does which appeared in Political Affairs www.politicalaffairs.net

By the CPUSA Houston club

The CPUSA Houston club met on 2/6/11 for its monthly meeting. Naturally one of the most important points of discussion was Sam Webb’s new vision of the party as presented in his recent article “A party of socialism in the 21st century: What it looks like, what it says, and what it does.” Most found the document confusing and contradictory. Confusion and contradiction are the classic tools used by the right wing to discredit Communists and the working class.

Many important points were made by club members. One of the first questions that came up was “Do xenophobia, nihilism, anti-communism and blatant self-destruction have any place in the program of the CPUSA?” These are fairly serious charges and should be examined one by one.

Xenophobia

Certainly Webb is correct that there is more opposition to anything “foreign” from the nutty nuts on the right. Does this mean that the party should capitulate to this way of thinking and formally jettison anything that might be taken as “foreign” from our ideology? He maintains that “Leninism” might be seen as “foreign” and should be removed from our ideological positions. From this logic, also Marxism, socialism, a revolutionary party and class struggle might be seen as “foreign” concepts and should be expunged as well. What does this line of thinking mean for internationalism, support for immigrant’s rights struggles as well as world peace? Back in the 60’s, the John Birch Society used to put up billboards along the highways demanding “Get U.S. out of the U.N.” Should the party embrace this thinking since the right wing view it as “pure” and not “foreign”?

One has to wonder what would have become of the great U.S. civil rights struggle led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. if he had decided to abandon Mahatma Gandi, since he was “foreign”? What if the leaders of the Haymarket uprising had been run off since they were German socialists and anarchists and were therefore “foreign”? What if Fidel Castro had sidelined Che Guevara since he was “foreign”? What if organized labor in this country silenced Joe Hill since he was “foreign”? By the way, Marx and Engels are just as “foreign” as Lenin and are equally detested by the wealthy elite.

If Leninism is seen as “foreign”, then that is a major failure of the party to educate people about what Leninism means.

Dropping Leninism from the party in any kind of formal way is not only dishonest, and self destructive but is “foreign” to the thinking of most party members.

Nihilism

The nasty stench of nihilism can also be detected in Webb’s long discourse which he, himself, describes by stating “Readers will surely note inconsistencies, contradictions, silences and unfinished ideas.” The scary part is that top CPUSA leadership seems to have finished their ideas on the party and intends to finish the party. Webb damns our party ideology (the same ideology on which a great history of working class struggle has been built) as “too rigid and formulaic, our analysis too loaded with questionable assumptions, our methodology too undialectical, our structure too centralized, and our policies drifting from political realities.” These are serious charges and Webb fails to back up his thinking with any facts. It appears that Webb is advocating nihilistic idealism and rejecting materialism. Adolf Hitler, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly could not have slammed the party more effectively.

Webb’s nihilism does not stop here. He predicts war, climate disaster and all manner of apocalyptic catastrophes which could prevent any forward movement of the working class. He certainly does not provide any answers as to how working people can fight back against these overwhelming forces. He opines “After all, there is no direct or inevitable path to socialism. Nor is the working class going to simply ‘rise up’ at some appointed time and fight for a society of justice.” With a CPUSA cowering in the corner, where can the working class seek leadership and guidance?

From this line of thinking should our new slogans be “Workers of the world, come to your senses! Your chains are better than starvation!”? and/or “What do we want? Nothing! When do we want it? Whenever!”

Anti-Communism

Again, it is appalling that the ugly face of anti-communism appears at our top leadership. One Houston member pointed out “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.” Webb is using the ideological weapons of right wing opportunism and liquidationism to mount an anti-communist assault on the party of the working class.

We have theory as a guide to action based on scientific socialist principles discovered by Marx, Engels and Lenin as well as others. The uniqueness of our party is that our theory (Marxism Leninism) is interconnected, interdependent and coherent as well as flexible and fluid to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world. We have a method of analysis (dialectical materialism), practice (historical materialism) and organizational principles (democratic centralism – democracy and unity of action). Without theory, we have no vision that is based on sound foundations, leaving us to flop around aimlessly. Without a path forward based on material conditions, we grow frustrated and ineffective. Without organizational cohesiveness, our force is greatly diminished, easily split and made to work at counter purposes. What Webb proposes is to discard those elements which make us a revolutionary party.

While most of the article was an attack against an imaginary left sectarianism, the most effective disruption of the CPUSA program has been from the right. This is easily demonstrated in our history – Jay Lovestone, Earl Browder, Committees of Correspondence, etc. Have we forgotten Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Yakovlev? How did their “new ideas” work out for them? Gorbachev and Yakovlev are some of the most despised people in the former Soviet Union. It is often said that those that do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. Have we learned nothing from the experience in the former Soviet Union where opportunists in the party gutted the CPSU until there was nothing much left to defend?

Liquidationism is the elimination of the party of the working class as an independent force, gutting its theory and purpose and blurring the lines of fundamental class conflict.

Webb has propelled the CPUSA onto the slippery slope of right wing opportunism, reformism, economism and finally liquidation of the party

Self Destruction

Continuing along the road chosen by Webb will only lead to the self destruction of the party. We are reminded of the boiling frog analogy. If a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out and save itself. This is what happened when Earl Browder proposed dismantling the party. Webb is being much more subtle and potentially much more effective in destroying the party. If you place a frog in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.”

The future of the party and the working class

Obviously, anti-communism, xenophobia, and nihilism are poison to a working class party of action. It is up to the members, friends and allies as well as local clubs and district organizers to recognize the self-destructive path we are on and take concrete steps to get us back on course. Obviously, the tactics and strategies we use to fight the class struggle cannot be identical to those strategies and tactics used by Lenin, and Stalin. But to renounce them because the right wing might find them distasteful is unforgiveable. We must not throw out the baby and keep the bathwater. It is up to us to educate working people about our history and what our theory has to offer them in their everyday struggles against the real enemy, capitalism. If we renounce Stalin completely, then we are saying that his contributions to the defeat of German fascism and Japanese imperialism were wrong and we are renouncing the fact that he was a powerful ally of the U.S. in those global struggles.

Since the left and organized labor are in disarray, our party needs to seize the moment and reclaim our role as the vanguard party of the working class. No one is going to award it to us just because we’re good looking. We are going to have to earn it through struggle and victories for the working class.

We, the Houston club of the CPUSA, call on all members to demand an extraordinary National Convention to decide the future of the party. We are calling for a people’s trial of the Webb faction for its blatant and open betrayal of our Party Program and Constitution, mismanagement of party resources, disassembling of the party organizational structure as well as the right wing opportunism and efforts to liquidate the party. Such a trial should be easy to carry out since Webb and his small group of cronies have been very public about their treachery against the CPUSA. If found guilty of crimes against the working class and the CPUSA, they should be unceremoniously removed from office and the control of party resources should be wrenched out of their grasp. It is time to close this humiliating chapter of CPUSA history and move forward with a fully rejuvenated party.

SPECIAL NEWS UPDATE REGARDING KOREA, DECEMBER 1-31 issue Peoples Voice, 2010

2010-12-10T11:06:00.002-06:00

SPECIAL NEWS UPDATE REGARDING KOREA, DECEMBER 1-31 issue Peoples Voice, 2010

http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/

Portion of June 22, 2009 resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada

The Communist Party of Canada warns that Resolution 1874, adopted by the United Nations Security Council on June 12, (2009), will not contribute to advancing the cause of peace and disarmament in the Korean peninsula. By continuing to focus blame on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea for tensions in this region, Resolution 1874 increases rather than reduces the danger of military confrontation.

However, it is wrong to claim that Resolution 1874 allows open aggression against the DPRK, a falsehood which is being spread by imperialist forces and the right-wing media as part of a wider campaign to soften up public opinion for military action against North Korea.

The resolution condemns the nuclear test conducted on May 25 by the DPRK, and imposes new sanctions. However, as noted by Zhang Yesui, Chinese permanent representative to the United Nations, the Security Council remains determined "to resolve the DPRK nuclear issue peacefully through dialogue and negotiations."

While Resolution 1874 creates a framework for states to inspect ships and aircraft suspected to be carrying "weapons of mass destruction" or other banned goods, this can be done only with the consent of the country under which the vessel or aircraft is registered. This means that if a vessel belonging to the DPRK refuses inspection, it would be an act of war to seize such a vessel. In the view of the Communist Party of Canada, the gravest danger to peace in the region remains the threat of such arbitrary action by the United States and the South Korean regime.

We also point out that while Resolution 1874 is explicitly phrased to avoid impacting on humanitarian objectives, many previous U.S. actions have violated such Security Council decisions. A serious confrontation could be triggered by bogus U.S. claims that it was compelled to seize vessels as part of the search for WMDs.

Our fears are based not on speculation, but on the wider pattern of U.S. policy in the region. For example, the United States has reneged on its commitments to provide food aid to a World Food Program in the DPRK, and as recently as April, the U.S. sponsored a Security Council resolution against the DPRK for launching a communications satellite.

The threat to peace in the Asia Pacific region arises from US imperialism, which was the first state to develop and use nuclear weapons against civilians, to deploy nuclear weapons outside its own borders. The United States deploys 250,000 military personnel in the Pacific region and regularly takes part in military rehearsals of ground invasions of the DPRK. For over half a century, the United States has refused to engage in serious dialogue with the DPRK, instead pursuing a path of military threats.

We call upon Prime Minister Harper to support an immediate halt to the economic sanctions against the DPRK, and an end to the military interference of the United States in the Korean Peninsula. Canada must instead begin to help normalize relations between the United States and the DPRK, based on the principles of non-interference, cooperation and peace. Canada must support proposals to begin the dismantling of all nuclear arsenals, which would dramatically reduce military tensions in the Korean Peninsula and in all other regions of the world.

SACP second largest party in SA - Central Committee, Malesela Maleka, 28 November 2010

2010-11-29T22:01:00.000-06:00

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71654?oid=213220&sn=Detail&pid=71616

Statement issued by the SACP Augmented Central Committee, November 28 2010

The annual augmented Central Committee of the SACP took place in Randburg from the 26 -28 November. The augmented CC is, as the name suggests, an expanded CC that includes representation from the SACP's districts, the Young Communist League's provincial structures, and from institutions that the Party has jointly established - among them the Chris Hani Institute and the Financial Sector Charter Campaign. The annual augmented CC enables the SACP to collectively review the past year and to prepare for the next.

In reviewing 2010 the CC highlighted a number of key positive developments.

The ANC NGC

In the first place, the CC saluted the achievements of the ANC's October National General Council. We particularly welcomed the robust but disciplined manner in which the overwhelming majority of ANC branch delegates affirmed the key themes advanced by ANC President Cde Jacob Zuma in his opening and closing addresses to the NGC.

We believe there is now a clear determination on the part of the ANC and its membership to re-assert the historic values, discipline and strategic perspectives of the ANC and the movement it leads. In affirming these positions, the NGC raised exactly the same issues that the SACP's December 2009 Special National Congress firmly placed on the national agenda.

Collectively we need to address the dangers of a reckless demagogic populism. We need to guard against factional power plays within our movement, based on narrow self-enrichment agendas. And we need to condemn disgraceful displays of conspicuous consumption, not least those that degrade women.

Continued membership growth and Party activism

The CC also welcomed the growing influence, activism and membership of the SACP and Young Communist League. The SACP's membership has grown by a further 20,000 members this year, bringing our total membership to 114,600 - confirming the SACP as the second largest political party in South Africa (after the ANC) in terms of active paid-up membership. Among the highlights of SACP work during 2010 has been the convening of ongoing political education workshops, many of them convened jointly with COSATU affiliates, countrywide and at all levels from the local level up.

The YCL - a vanguard youth formation

The YCL has also emerged ever more firmly as a vanguard youth formation, bringing a militant but disciplined coherence into a sector that is now often characterised by volatile, anarchic tendencies. Among the highlights of the YCL's year was its convening of a Jobs for Youth Summit that drew in participation from over 50 formations, and included youth from the ANCYL, SASCO, COSAS, faith-based formations, and also, notably and encouragingly, from the DA, FF+ and IFP formations.

The crisis of youth unemployment is a matter that needs to be taken up by all South Africans. The CC urged the YCL to take forward its constructive work in this critical youth sector, and wished it well for its National Conference in Mafeking in mid-December.

The SACP - taking joint and collective responsibility for governance

The growing influence of the SACP has also been marked by the increasing appointment of communist cadres (in their own right as ANC cadres, of course) into key positions within government, in the national, provincial and local spheres.

While the SACP does not measure its successes in narrow head-count terms, and while we are committed to the principle of deployments being based, above all, on capacity, commitment and a proven track-record, we are nonetheless heartened by deployment developments over the past year.

The SACP has never conceived of itself as a non-governmental organisation. In the current reality of SA, the SACP, together with its Alliance partners, is committed to building popular and working class power both outside of and WITHIN the state.

In line with this commitment to take joint and collective responsibility for governance, the CC strongly re-affirmed decisions taken by the Party in regard to the deployment of its leadership (including its general secretary) nationally, provincially and locally. The CC also once more reaffirmed the Party's commitment to building leadership collectives, and avoiding all attempts to reduce the question of leadership to individual personalities.

The New Growth Path

A key achievement of 2010 has been government's consolidation and public release of a New Growth Path perspective. Minister for Economic Development, Cde Ebrahim Patel, presented government's NGP document to the CC. The CC warmly welcomed the major paradigm shift represented by the NGP and government's earlier announcement of the Industrial Policy Action Programme 2 (IPAP2).

While we should certainly debate the detail of both IPAP and the NGP, this time around we must not allow detail to distract us from consolidating and defending the absolutely critical policy and programmatic shift that these policies now begin to represent. In essence this shift is characterised by the following key features:

    * An agreement that we have to radically transform the systemic features of our present productive economy;
    * The key objective is not to achieve an arbitrary GDP growth target (for example, 6% or 7%), but job creation and greater equality;
    * These outcomes can only be achieved through active state intervention in the economy - through, amongst other things, planning, state-led investment, and the consolidation of a strong, strategically-mandated SOE and DFI sector. This will require the consolidation of a new state-owned bank, and generally a strategically-disciplined, democratic state capable of driving a state-led but people-driven transformation process.
    * The imperative of aligning macro-economic policies with our industrial policy and other productive economy objectives.
    * The imperative of state-led coordination of and between critical sectors of society - e.g., the productive economy, education and skills training, infrastructure development and environmental sustainability.
    * As much as possible, our redistributive interventions, including BBBEE, must also contribute coherently to the progressive transformation of the productive economy - for example, land redistribution can no longer simply be guided by principles of civil rights and historical redress (as important as these might be).
    * The achievement of a new growth path will not be possible without also addressing the way in which SA has historically been located within the global capitalist system as a semi-peripheral primary commodity exporter and regional sub-imperial power - "a (capitalist) gateway to Africa". The achievement of a NGP in SA will depend critically on our ability to play a progressive role in the reconstruction and development of our region. It will also depend on our ability to manoeuvre strategically within the context of major structural shifts within the global reality, not least through deepening anti-imperialist South-South relations.

These, we believe, are the fundamental core features of a new growth path. It is important to recognise that government has deliberately called it a "path" and not a "plan" - it is a strategic direction that we need now to move along, learning and adapting as we proceed.

Nothing is written in stone, other than the imperative of no longer delaying decisive action. Above all, we must not now turn government's NGP into a debating forum. We need, from within and beyond government to begin, together, to actively and decisively take major steps to place our economy onto a new job-creating and more egalitarian path. We cannot wait any longer.

Global capitalism - a crisis that is not going away

2010 has underlined the correctness of what the SACP has been consistently saying - the global capitalist crisis that began in 2008 is deep-seated, structural in character and it will be long-lasting. Everywhere imperialist forces, private banks, and western governments are seeking to displace their crisis onto the backs of workers, the poor, and middle-class strata.

Neo-liberalism's anti-protectionist, free market presumptions lie in tatters as national capital interests scramble to save their own profits and life-styles. The US has cynically declared a currency war on the world with its so-called quantitative easing QE2 initiative - pushing an extra $600billion into circulation - that will further appreciate currencies like the Rand, threatening our own efforts to reverse de-industrialisation.

In the course of 2010, the epicentre of the crisis has also shifted to the Euro-zone. The danger of toppling dominoes impelled by creditor-driven sovereign defaults is very real. The crisis in the Euro-zone is seeing drastic and aggressive moves by centrist governments to roll back popular gains.

In the face of these developments, everywhere there is working class and popular resistance. Day by day, the objective grounds for developing a very broad anti-imperialist front are developing.

Next weekend, the SACP will be convening the 12th International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties. Over 80 parties from all over the world have confirmed their participation. The meeting will focus on the global capitalist crisis and on the imperative of communists taking an active role internationally in turning the multitude of defensive struggles in every part of the world into an offensive struggle to roll back capitalism itself - it is a system that from every perspective, including being able to guarantee environmental sustainability, or decent work for all, or food security, increasingly demonstrates its threat to human civilisation itself.

Sixteen days of activism against violence against women and children

The SACP is actively engaged in the present "Sixteen Days of Activism". We are a society in which patriarchy continues to be a deeply-entrenched challenge. Too often regressive male behaviour hides behind of cloak of "culture". The SACP and the YCL are actively campaigning against reactionary customs like ukuthwala.

The SACP, together with its allies, will be embarking on a campaign for the establishment of more shelters for the victims of gender violence. We encourage communities to continue speaking out against gender violence. While reports indicate that we are beginning to stabilise the number of new HIV infections, there is a need to intensify the HIV Counselling and Testing campaign with active community support.

The CC also received a report from the Minister of Police, cde Nathi Mthethwa. He briefed the CC on government's strategic plans to combat crime and corruption. The CC engaged with the input, welcomed the progress made so far, and noted that it is the working class and poor in our country who are the principal victims of crime and corruption. Combating these evils is not just a matter for government, and the SACP once more commits to helping to strengthen the role of communities and the labour movement in this regard.

The SACP's programme of action for 2011

The CC discussed and approved the SACP 2011 programme of action. The key pillars of this programme include:

Revitalising the broad-based campaign for the transformation of the financial sector. After a period of stale-mate, recently, important progress has been made in the NEDLAC financial sector charter process thanks to a greater dynamism from the side of government. The SACP will be calling for a new Financial Sector Summit in 2011 convened by NEDLAC.

The Party will be resuscitating the broad front Financial Sector Charter Campaign structures as well as convening public forums and seminars. Notwithstanding some progress with, for instance, extending banking services to everyone, gains made are constantly threatened by the profit-maximising interests of the private banks.

There are, for instance, indications that at least some of the banks are planning to walk away from the Mzansi Account which achieved a remarkable 6 million new accounts within the space of a few years. Critical challenges in our struggle to transform the financial sector include the establishment of a state-run bank, cooperative financing, and the challenge of providing loans to working-class families for housing and for higher education fees for their children.

Local government elections - the SACP will be participating integrally in the ANC-led election campaign, including in the development of the manifesto, and consolidation of local election structures. The CC received an input on the forthcoming campaign from ANC NWC member, cde Jessie Duarte.

Deepening our work with the progressive trade union movement - including taking up the challenges of a consolidating an effective social wage for the working class especially in relation to housing, public transport, and the National Health Insurance, and linking these to COSATU's living wage campaign. The SACP will also be expanding its joint political schools with COSATU affiliates.

In the course of 2011, the SACP will continue to engage actively with its internationalist work, including ongoing solidarity efforts with Swaziland, Cuba, Western Sahara and Palestine. We will also convene on International Women's Day (8 March) a continent-wide African Women's Conference.

The CP of China and its strategic dialogues with PASOK and the Socialist International, From: Communist Party of Greece, Monday, 22 November 2010

2010-11-27T07:14:00.000-06:00

http://inter.kke.gr

Comment of the Newspaper «Rizospastis”-Organ of the CC of the KKE (19/12/2010)

It is well-known that the KKE has come to the conclusion that capitalist relations are developing in China today, with the peculiarity that this is happening under the political leadership of the governing party which bears the title “communist”.

The consequences of this development are well-known: the elevation of China to the top of the countries with the fastest rates of capitalist development and the largest number of billionaires, the abolition of important workers’ gains, such as free health care and education, which the workers have to now pay for, and the existence of millions of unemployed and low-paid workers.

It was not by accident, then, that Liu Jieyi, Deputy Director of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, in his meeting (16/11) with G. Papandreou, Greek Prime minister and President of PASOK and the Socialist International stated that ” The relationship between PASOK and the Communist Party of China is exceptional and we have every intention of working more closely together, in order to promote our inter-party relations and through inter-party dialogue to reinforce the exceptional strategic cooperation between our two countries, especially now as we face many challenges”. Liu Jieyi did not forget to congratulate G. Papandreou on the “excellent election results”. It could not be otherwise, as the political representatives of the monopolies (such as COSCO), regardless of their packaging, (“socialist” in Greece or “communist” in China), understand their common class interests.

The anti-people choices of the PASOK government are saluted and supported by Chinese officials, as long as they are combined with the opening of the road for the Chinese monopolies.

But as we learned from Liu Jieyi, the “love” of the CPC is not only reserved for “socialist” PASOK but for the whole Socialist International. As he himself said: “We are of the opinion that the continuation of coordination and the exchange of views are important, as is the strategic dialogue between the Socialist International and the Communist Party of China. We have every intention of continuing this dialogue further, because as we discovered in the meetings over the last two days, there are many points of agreement between the Socialist International and the political orientation of the Communist Party of China.”

We should remember that this “International” supported the wars of the USA and NATO, and is a political pillar of support for the exploitative capitalist system in Europe and the entire world.

After all this, one may well wonder that maybe the CP China is getting ready to abandon its last “fig-leaf”-its title?

VI Congress of the Cuban Communist Party: Towards a Future of Socialism, By Hilda Pupo S. / hildita@ahora.cu / Monday, 15 November 2010

2010-11-15T22:30:00.005-06:00

http://www.ahora.cu/english/sections/opinion/3163-vi-congress-of-the-cuban-communist-party-towards-a-future-of-socialism.html

The announcement of the holding of the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in April, brings an implicit truth: we approach the development of a defining event for the future of Cuba and its Revolution.

There is talk of strengthening brotherhood and changes to the current circumstances, but it is good to clarify, not to raise hopes in those who wish us ill, that those changes are only within the current model of socialism in the country.
Following the first modifications in recent years, the hostile press started asking about their slow pace and their alleged superficiality. Raul said that he had been elected president to defend socialism, not to destroy it.

It is certain that only under a political system like ours, we will be able to face the difficulties and plan our course without losing the essence of Cuba's humanitarian work; therefore the economy, the central theme of the event, will be discussed further in the search for better use of forces or more planning, but not the imperative of the market where the naked capitalist trend of supply and demand prevails.

It will analyze the defense of equal rights and opportunities for all citizens, other than to egalitarianism in the mechanisms of distribution and redistribution of income, because we cannot keep thinking about the general merits for the grace of wanting to be fairer. The work must be paid for quantity and quality and this will set the difference.

If the draft Guidelines for the economic and social policy of the country will be available to the entire population, which can emit criteria with a view to consideration and approval by Congress, it is due to the permanent respect for democracy. "Revolutionaries, the direction and the majority of the people are our most important strategic weapon, which has allowed us to get here and continue the future development of socialism," said Raul.

The discussion of his speech at the celebration of July 26th in Camagüey, is the best background for the deliberations that will begin now, and which call for reflection children of knowledge, not romantic and unworkable criteria.

With the meeting of the Communist Vanguard the economic model, now immersed in the adjustments to the reorganization of work that aims to deflate the templates in the search for higher yields, will be updated. Enhancing self-employment is part of these new mechanisms.

The greatest wealth in this definition of future is the people's participation.

On the resignation of Gordon Campbell Statement by the Communist Party of British Columbia, Young Communist League - BC Blog,

2010-11-14T19:58:00.000-06:00

The three terms of the Campbell Liberals have been characterized by implementing the lowest taxes for the wealthy and corporations in North America at the expense of the standard of living, wages and social programs of BC residents. His forced resignation is a compliment to a tenacious and awakened electorate who has had enough.

http://yclbc-lowermainland.blogspot.com/2010/11/statement-by-communist-party-of-british.html

In his devotion to corporate welfare Gordon Campbell kept the minimum wage at the lowest level in Canada while presiding over an economy where the top ten CEO’s collectively in 2009 earned $70 million dollars. Upon the imbalanced scales of extreme wealth and extreme poverty Gordon Campbell’s weight was always on the side of extreme wealth.

For seven years British Columbia has had the worst child poverty in Canada. After nine years of tuition fee increases BC takes in more from tuition fees than it does from corporate taxation. The massive privatization of Healthcare services, with parallel cutbacks in quality and accessibility, has channeled hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into corporate bank accounts while rolling back healthcare wages 15% and then freezing them at that level.

The Campbell Liberals repeatedly broke election promises that had value to the public and steadfastly adhered to every policy that gave away public resources to private business. They have brought almost every school board in BC into funding crisis that has put 200 schools on the closure list so far. They broke their promise not to privatize BC Rail and in the corrupted bidding process implicated cabinet ministers in a scandal currently hidden behind two scapegoats and a plea bargain that hides the extent and involvement of elected officials in betrayal and corruption.

The Campbell Liberals have gutted the Environmental Assessment Act and created Cabinet powers that overrule municipal by-laws and autonomy to the point that municipalities can only govern if they don’t interfere with corporate interests. They cut the transfer of gambling profits to Charities and the Arts from 33% to 10%. They made massive funding cuts to Women’s Shelters, closed down homeless hostels and cut and slashed their way through almost every social or special needs program in the province.

For Gordon Campbell to whine about a vindictive public and the strain on his family after ruining so many lives is typical of the arrogance and contempt he and his government have exercised. The NDP MLA’s and Party Leader who stroke him on his way out with platitudes about “years of public service” should tell the truth and expose the years of “corporate service” if they don’t want to appear as members of the same club.

Gordon Campbell was not brought down by the parliamentary opposition; he was not brought down by a caucus revolt. He was brought down by massive public rejection of the Liberal Government’s record of lies broken promises and deceit that made it impossible for him to continue. The HST debacle and the transfer of $1.6 billion from the public to the private purse has become the catalyst, the glue of all the diverse forces screaming betrayal. The historic pending referendum is evidence of the public rage.

Gordon Campbell is going, he should be gone and his entire caucus that supported him doggedly should leave with him.

Had Enough? Written by Zoltan Zigedy, in Marxism-Leninism Today, October 6, 2010

2010-11-14T18:53:00.000-06:00

Frustration with the Obama Administration has reached a new level with only 45% of US citizens polled approving of the job that the Administration is doing and 39% voicing approval of the Administration's policies on the economy (see Wall Street Journal/NBC telephone polls, 9-7-10). The overall mood is pessimistic: 65% of those polled believe that the US is in a period of decline; 59% of the polled population thinks that the country will be the same or worse in five years.

http://mltoday.com/en/subject-areas/commentary/had-enough-957-2.html

Only 30% of poll participants believe that the country is headed in the right direction. This is a negative assessment not seen since the tail end of the Bush Administration.

In a normal election cycle – the give-and-take of the two Parties – this would signal enthusiasm for the party out of power: the Republican Party. However, among Republicans, only 30% have a positive view of their own party, the lowest number recorded since before 1990.

These numbers express a smoldering anger about where we have arrived since the 2008 election and where we are heading.

The only major new force on the political scene reflecting this angry mood is the Tea Party phenomenon — a faux populist movement backed by extreme-right money and fueled by the ultra-right media.

Facing an interim election in November, all of the healthy forces in US political life are scrambling to establish a posture towards these elections. Bitterness, backbiting, and confusion abound. The Internet is abuzz with the anger of scorned liberals who feel betrayed by two years of at best, ineffectual, at worst, malign Administration leadership.

As the Administration positions itself for the coming months, it reflects this mood by jettisoning three of its leading economic lights: Peter Orszag, Christina Romer and Lawrence Summers. The exit of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, has passed the rumor level and is now a fact, as is likely the departure of many other prominent members of the Administration. Despite their fealty to the corporate financial sector, Obama has suggested that he is seeking economic advisors that are more comfortable communicating with the corporate world.

Some in liberal circles cling to lingering hopes that the "real" Obama will soon be revealed. With all the enthusiasm of a revival meeting, they are awaiting a political rapture – a fulfillment of the "change" and "hope" themes of the election campaign. But my angry local letter carrier sees it differently. She says that people mistook "hope" for "dope," a succinct declaration of her own frustrations.

Indeed, all signs point to a reshuffling of the Administration in an even more conciliatory-to-the-right, pro-business direction. As the Wall Street Journal reports, "Part of the president's task will be to 'reset' relations with the business community, not only to ease working in a divided Washington but also to smooth his path to re-election" (9-23-10). There is little room in this scenario for the revelation of a progressive, pro-working-class agenda. The WSJ cites senior White House officials as saying, "the president could concentrate on finding common ground on deficit reduction, education and immigration while guarding his achievements, from health care to student lending to financial regulation."

The Political Crisis
All polls agree that approval ratings for the President have sunk substantially since his inauguration. And approval ratings for Congress hover at an embarrassing low level, a level that has been maintained since a time deep into the Bush Administration. Polls also show that both Parties are generally unpopular. Whether one bought the Obama message or not, it should have been apparent that his Administration was meant to change the national mood of dissatisfaction and the international scorn brought on by the previous Administration. They have failed in that task. And the political crisis continues.

The distance between the legislative actions of elected officials and the needs and desires of the electorate has never been greater. And the Obama Administration suffers inordinately from this distance because they promised so much in the presidential campaign. This distance was shown most recently with the issue of allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. Initially, Obama and the Democratic leadership proposed maintaining the cuts for all but the very wealthy, a move that would have brought a measure of fairness to tax policy and generated $700 billion over 10 years in extra Federal revenue.

The Republicans mounted a hysterical and demagogic campaign based on the inflammatory charge of tax increases. When opinion polls showed that the tax increases for the rich were popular (mid-September, CBS/New York Times - 53-38%), especially in key "battleground" states, the Republicans backed down. But, immediately, 31 Democratic Representatives voiced their public opposition to taxing the rich. Consequently any decision on the Bush tax cuts will be deferred until after the November elections. Every signal points to Congress maintaining the Bush tax policies for another two years.

Why is there such distance between popular issues and legislative action?

Many pundits employ vague, cloudy concepts like "gridlock" or blame a new-found intransigence or incivility. But the truth is simpler, but deeper: Elected officials are, for the most part, owned by monopoly capital. To a very great extent, the course of political success is greased with money and the opportunity to forge a successful and long political career is dependent upon corporate friendliness. Of course this is not new, but it has reached a new level of prevalence, demonstrating strikingly that the state – its structures and personnel – is dominated by and serves the interests of monopoly capital; that is, our reigning socio-economic system is state-monopoly capital.

Thus, there is no exit, without some radical surgery, from the political crisis that grips the US.

Moreover, the results of the November elections – regardless of the outcome - will have no dramatic impact on our profound political crisis. This does not mean, however, that there is nothing to be gained in the election. There are independent candidates – Greens, for example – who could open cracks in the corrupted two-party system. There are also some independent-minded Democrats who could, though only with a strong prod from progressive constituents, mount a meaningful challenge to the ossified, corporate-coddling Party leadership. And there would be advantages, advantages with a shrinking relevance, to maintaining a balance of forces favoring the Democrats. However, the ever-growing distance between the Democrats and the needs of the populace dampens any enthusiasm for fighting for this advantage.

Therefore, there is a deep and deadly contradiction embedded in the two-party system, a contradiction that will only be overcome with the emergence of independent movements unwaveringly committed to principled, progressive politics.

Going forward, we can expect the Obama Administration to focus on the 2012 Presidential election. The Obama team will maneuver rightward, leaving many of the now-distant campaign promises like the Employee Free Choice Act or immigration reform in its wake. The hints referenced above signal an aloof presidency, above the fray, though ever sensitive to the needs of the corporations and their generous campaign contributions. Like Bill Clinton, Obama will seek a presidential posture dissociated from any ideological position, but portraying civility, bi-partisanship, likeability and managerial competence – a posture appealing to the non-ideological center thought to be crucial for re-election.

Needed: A Break from the Past
Undoubtedly, these observations may not come as news for many, especially many of the 65% of those polled who think the US is in decline. The widespread mood is anger and disappointment. But little will come from moods if no useful conclusions are drawn, if patterns remain unseen, if events are misunderstood. Far too many see the political crisis in terms of flawed personalities, individual values or ideological caricatures.

The long-term trend of wealth and income inequality; the ever-growing concentration of power and influence in the hands or corporations, especially the financial sector; the growth of political corruption and the role of money and media in electoral politics; the ascension of the callous, anti-social culture of individualism assailing "entitlements" or common benefits; the repeated aggressive military missions to deny any barriers to international capital — all these phenomena interact and decisively cause the deepening political crisis. These are not moments of bad judgment, occasionally flawed policies, or aberrations. They are features of the logic of capitalism, a capitalism that brought on an equally profound and closely related economic crisis.

Not everyone yet makes these connections, but they ignore them at great peril. While there is a widespread sense that we are at a decisive moment, there is an unfounded faith that the old solutions will suffice. Some pine for an imaginary time of social harmony and cultural unity while conveniently ignoring those left out of their idyllic fantasy – a world without immigrants, embracing segregation and racism, and willfully ignorant of the crude exploitation of labor. Others embrace liberal values associated with an imaginary kinder, gentler capitalism, but turn away from the reality that the profit-hungry modern corporation stands firmly and powerfully against this dream.

Politics will become real only when we face the truth that the modern monopoly capitalist corporation stands as the adversary to all but the very rich. That understanding will lead to the further understanding that only a broad anti-monopoly strategy will solve the crises of our economy and our politics.

It's a curious, but telling, fact that political discourse has shifted from the extreme-right-imposed cultural battlefield of abortion, gays, and guns dominating the last decade to the issues of the economy and the role of the state. The Right has entered this new battlefield under the banner of fiscal austerity and hostility to government. Led by tea-bagger foot soldiers, they rail against government spending, regulation, and social programs. If they succeed in selling this line to voters, they will bring pain and devastation not only to working people, but also to the whole economy and social fabric.

Sadly, the Democratic Party leadership has shown little or no interest in engaging the right on this battlefield. They concede that government spending should be restrained, regulation should be minimal and non-antagonistic to business interests, and social programs must be trimmed. It is left for Democratic-friendly labor leaders and party loyalists to defend this blatant coincidence of political outlook. They must excuse this conjunction of Democratic views with Republican ideology as a tactical retreat or they must argue that Democrats will inflict the pain of austerity more compassionately. Neither excuse is credible with angry, frustrated voters who continue to thirst for effective change.

This is the great tragedy of the November elections. Indeed, there is much at stake, but the Democrats refuse to fight a credible battle, a battle that would require at least a modest rebuff to their corporate masters. As things stand, the election will turn on how much fear of a return to Republican leadership can be generated rather than what the Democrats would accomplish with a victory.

Last week's giant rally in Washington, DC only underlines these contradictions. Committed people came in droves to express both an outrage at where we are heading and a determination to join others in changing course. Hopes were high that leaders would energize the causes that inspire people to action, such as fair labor legislation, employment opportunities, peace, immigration reform, racial equality, help for the poor and disadvantaged, and mortgage and other debt relief. While speakers readily chronicled the evils produced by a system of inequality and injustice, they were hesitant to speak its name: capitalism. Instead, most urged those who came on buses, trains, planes, and cars to work for the election of Democrats in November.

This constant cycle of placing all the hopes for a better future in the hands of corporate-owned Democrats must be broken. This is not a call for those fearful of a Republican victory in November to sit on the sidelines or boycott the elections, but, rather, for them to further commit to establishing independent voices, voices that will demand that all elected officials choose between corporate fealty and the causes of the people.

For too long, many progressive and left leaders have posed supporting the Democratic Party against any initiative that might upset or provoke Democratic leaders. They narrowly and rigidly limit political action to the electoral campaign and reject any challenge to Democratic Party leadership as heretical and divisive. Such an approach has led us into the current political crisis and offers no way out. This false tactical finesse smothered the anti-war movement and tolerated the evisceration of health care reform, the expansion of imperialist aggression, the coddling of the financial sector, and the criminal neglect of the unemployed, the underemployed and the poor. It is time to reject it and move on.

There is no easy escape from our political crisis. But it begins by building movements outside of and often apart from the ineffective Democratic Party.