Anarcho-Capitalism? We Already Have It

The previous post dealt with the sheer madness of something called anarcho-capitalism, a baffling philosophy with roots in anarchism, capitalism and especially libertarianism. Because anarchism is typically a Leftist philosophy, one wonders whether anarcho-capitalism is right or leftwing. Anarcho-capitalists are quite coy, like Libertardians, and often refuse to admit that they are extreme rightwingers. Instead, they say they are “neither right nor left.”

This has ended up conning a lot of fools, mostly young, single, moneyed, male fools, usually White but disturbingly sometimes also Black and Hispanic, into lining up with Libertardianism as some sort of weird progressive vision.

It’s nothing of the kind.

True, many anarchists are Leftists, but searching through the Wikipedia article on anarcho-capitalism, I found few if any Leftists. I did find tons of rightwingers, mostly extreme rightwingers, often Libertardians, but also in many cases White racists such as White Separatists, neo-Confederates, paleocons, etc.

There can’t possibly be anything progressive about anarcho-capitalism, not in any possible universe. Most of us on the Left are dubious at best about capitalism. Capitalism may be a necessary evil, but so what? So is death, disease, all sorts of shitty things. Big deal. I should as much cheer for capitalism as I cheer for aging and death. Three cheers!

Anarcho-capitalism is everything fucked about capitalism balled into one horrific, nightmarish mass, compressed into a solid and toxic cannonball with the density of a Black Hole hurling right at your face, and no ducking allowed. Lie back and enjoy it, suckers.

Let us be clear. We Leftists are Big Staters. We like taxation to a degree, government services that benefit the people, redistribution of wealth to a degree, Big Government programs, etc. We don’t need a classless society; I have no objections to a physician making eight times more than a ditch-digger. But at some point extremes of wealth call for intense government redistribution of wealth.

The capitalist or “successful person” has generally “earned” his right to untold multiples of average wealth only in the most dubious in senses.

Capitalism, such that we allow this necessary evil beast to exist at all, needs to be caged, like all wild and dangerous animals. Capitalism must be regulated. Not strangled, but regulated.

As this article makes clear, we’ve already got something like anarcho-capitalism. It’s called the Republican Party. Or the teabaggers. Or the conservatives. It isn’t really the pure, real deal anarcho-capitalism, but it’s heading there.

The Bush Administration was a quasi-anarcho-capitalist administration. The insanity of anarcho-capitalism is shown by the theory that the best society is one in which business regulates itself. The Bush Administration relied on “voluntary regulation” more times than I can count.

The problem with voluntary regulation is that it’s no regulation at all. Business sectors under a regime of voluntary regulation generally refuse to regulate themselves in any way whatsoever. This has been proven so many times, there’s no use testing it anymore.

According to this theory, the good businesses regulate themselves and  win out in the context with the evil businesses who refuse to regulate themselves, and the capitalists get rich and everyone lives happily ever after.

This is the most cruel of fantasy worlds.

In capitalism, bad is much more like to drive out good than the other way around, the prerogatives of capital being what they are.

Looking around the world, capitalists aren’t exactly regulating themselves just to be nice and get workers, society, environmentalists and liberals to love their company and buy their shit instead of Evil Co’s shit. When all the successful corporations are spawns and clones of Evil Co., you either go evil yourself or you’re in Chapter 13.

The main thing is that all the nice stuff that business is supposed to do – not abuse workers or consumers, not pollute, not destroy the environment, pay their taxes, not destroy society and the economy – all of these business ethics are bad for the bottom line.

Abuse your workers and customers and refuse to regulate yourself? Your bottom line goes up.

Destroy the environment, society and the economy? Your stock’s rising.

Do the right thing, treat your workers and consumers well, regulate yourself, be kind to the environment, be a good corporate citizen? Watch your competitors, Mafia Co. and Evil Scum, Ltd. make mincemeat out of you.

From the article:

If you are an anarcho-capitalist, you believe that the force of the market will have companies do the right thing. The problem with this idea is that what is right for a nation is not the same as what is right for a profit making enterprise…

This is what corporations are for, the pursuit of profit. If they are not limited, then they become rapacious entities which will cut any corner, bend any rule to make more and more money. Corporations are prone to this kind of behavior even when they are limited by regulation, which is why there must be strong enforcement as well.

As you can see, anarcho-capitalism is utopia!

It is time to stop calling the Republicans capitalists, they are no longer that benign, we need to start pointing out the fact they would be happiest with no regulation. This is a powerful meme, if we are willing to use it.

No regulation means a return to acid rain. No regulation means not knowing if your medicines are safe. It means that our drinking water could have lead and PCP’s and other contaminants. It means that we would be unable to have an confidence in the safety of our cars or washing machines or ovens. It would take us to a society where the only motto is Caveat Emptor, buyer beware.

Yeah right. Some utopia.

Noam Chomsky, an anarcho-syndicalist Leftist, on anarcho-capitalism:

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn’t the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error.

The idea of “free contract” between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

Anarcho-capitalism? We’ve already got it, or we’re heading there anyway.

I Never Knew Hayek Was a Socialist

But there are two kinds of security: the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all and the security of a given standard of life, of the relative position which one person or group enjoys compared with others.

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

It is planning for security of the second kind which has such an insidious effect on liberty. It is planning designed to protect individuals or groups against diminutions of their incomes.

Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that all claims for a privileged security of particular classes must lapse

[T]here is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

There can be no question that adequate security against severe privation will have to be one of our main goals of policy (Hayek 1944).

Friedrich Hayek is the God of the “Austrian” Libertarians, the nuttiest of all, and The Road to Serfdom is his Bible. But if you actually read this monster book, it turns out that Hayek would be called a Communist by the teabaggers, Republicans, elites and corporations of today, since, anyone insisting on any minimum safety net is automatically a Communist. At the very least some kind of social democrat. Hayek was to the Left of Bill Clinton, who got rid of welfare. He’s to the Left of Barack Obama, who is busy trying to destroy Social Security.

It’s a sad day when they Hayeks are so reasonable that they’re nearly social democrats because the center has moved to the right of Hayek himself.

Of all of the Libertarian thinkers, the Austrians are considered the craziest and most dangerous of them all. Those lined up with the Austrians include the wildest of the Libertarians, including the fake anarchists known as anarcho-capitalists (I thought we had anarcho-capitalism already).

These people move beyond gutting all social spending and all normal government functions, selling off all roads, parks, forests, beaches, marine reserves, grasslands, etc. Supposedly, the gap in social spending will be taken up by charities, who will compete to see who can serve the poor better. LOL! Why would anyone get into the “business” of being a charity? For God’s sake, there’s no money to be made. It’s all just a money-loser. That right there just shows you how deranged Libertarians are.

Anyway, the Austrians go beyond. The want to get rid of state cops, fire departments and even courts. They will replace them with private cops and private firefighters. How these guys bill I will never figure out. Supposedly they will compete on how best they serve the public.

I guess the nice White suburbs can hardass Crack Down on Crime cops for their money, while the ghetto folks (How will they have the money to buy any cops?) will purchase the laid-back, Go Easy on the Criminals Cops, perfect for a criminal society. I assume at some point the private cop forces (Really warlordism) will inevitably shoot it out as private warlord cop armies and paramilitaries do all over the 3rd World. I suppose that’s all part of the anarcho-capitalism fun and games, dodging the bullets and all.

Fire departments? Competition once again? And how do they get paid? The perfect Republican way. Your house burns down, you not only over fork over for everything else you lost and buying everything new but you dish out another $20K for the bastards who fought your fire.

Of course, the longer the fire goes on, the more they make, so firefighters will drag out their battles with the flames. Since they get paid per fire fought, at some point, firefighters or the paramilitary gangs allied with them will go around torching places so they can get paid to fight the fires.

Courts? Why, we will have competition in the court system! Criminals will prefer the Get Out of Jail Free Court, while victims will prefer the Hang Em High Court. How they will sort this all out no one knows.

You buy and sell your leaders too. Kind like most capitalist societies already do, you know?

The environment will take care of itself, as it’s the evil state that wrecks the environment, not the naturophilic capitalist John Muir-Rachel Carson types.

Some advocate getting rid of all laws, which leaves it an open question why you would need cops. Some guy just shot your family? Take the bastard to court, dammit! Ruin his credit forever!

Others want laws to be bought and sold on the free market, but they already are anyway here in anarcho-capitalist US, so I don’t see how this is a reform.

I guess the military gets replaced by private militias, contractors and mercenaries, but there’s nothing new about that. It already operates that way in Russia and the 3rd World, where the rich and businesses have their own private armies, frequently assassinating their competitors.

The defense of those who could not afford cops or armies. Why, wonderful charity armies would spring up to lay it all on the line for your sorry impoverished ass for free. Yeah right.

Clearly, corporations would buy their own armies and would not only attack workers, communities, etc. like say the Colombian death squads of today, but they would even go further and in the US, where the private armies had the latest military hardware, surely they would attack other nations to drive out competitors, overthrow regimes bad for business, force open new markets, etc. All the stuff that imperialist militaries already do, but with the sociopathic ethics of capitalism to make it all even more shitty and evil than it already is.

A lot of racists, especially White Southern racists, support anarcho-capitalism because, well, Southern caste society has always been pretty anarcho-capitalistic anyway. What was the KKK but a private militia? Also, in the glorious anarcho-capitalist world, everyone can discriminate their asses off against anyone they want to, and that prospect makes racists go all google-eyed.

As you can see, the Austrians even distort the findings of their leader, Hayek.

They lie, like most neoliberals do.

Just like how the neoliberals lie about Adam Smith, who was adamant that the state had to manage the free market. The neoliberals just pick and choose the crap they want to believe even from the Biblical tomes of their Gods. Like rabbis arguing over the Talmud, it’s all a matter of interpretation to them.

References

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1944. The Road To Serfdom. University of Chicago Press, pp. 120-122

The “China Has Moved to Capitalism” Lie

In the comments section, a defender of capitalism (who I think doesn’t understand it very well) takes issue with my defense of Maoist China:

True, Maoism has a spotty record, but compared to India, Communist China looks like paradise.

Compared to India, many parts of Oakland look like paradise!

Under Mao, China experienced great famines, political repression, persecution of intellectuals during the cultural revolution, and other problems during the so-called “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” (More like “Great Leap Backwards” and the “Cultural Devolution”).

Only when Deng Xiaoping took over did China begin to prosper, which they did by adopting Capitalism. As he said, “I don’t care if a cat is black, white, red, or yellow, so long as it catches mice” (paraphrase). While China is more Socialist than India due to its relative absence of baseline poverty, China’s economic growth came more from Capitalism than Communism.

Of course, let’s also not forget that China has a ton of people. Therefore, even if the vast majority of people are poor, there are at least 400-500 million well educated and middle class people, which is more than the entire population of the United States. I know that India also has a ton of people and they’re not doing as well, but you get my point. Besides, India’s on the rise.

Robert, I think you too often conflate Capitalism with neoliberal economics and corporate America. Adam Smith hated corporations and believed in a truly free market.

If he were alive today, he wouldn’t approve of corporations outsourcing jobs, corporate tax breaks at the expense of working people, or the fact that many politicians are on the payroll of corporations and special interests. He wouldn’t approve of monopolies that harm local industries and drive people out of business.

I’m just as angry about corporate greed and theft as you are, but to attribute various ills to Capitalism is just wrong.

Also, let’s be honest, Can you name a nation that became wealthy through an economic system that wasn’t Capitalism? Sure, you have European nations that are Socialist in many ways, but they got rich in the first place through Capitalism. The wealthy non-western nations (ie. Japan, South Korea, Singapore) became wealthy by adopting western ways, which practiced Capitalism.

Well, I hate capitalism. Recall that I am a socialist. However, I support any kind of socialism, from piecemeal programs in places like the US to social democracy in Europe to China’s neo-Communism. The best system is a mixed economy with capitalist, socialist, collective, family and other forms of ownership. I call that socialism. You may call it what you will.

First of all, China and India were in the same place in 1949. Even all through the Mao era, China kicked India’s ass, and they are still doing so under neo-Communism. Maoism and neo-Communism simply kick ass on the Indian system, period.

Also understand that China’s economy grew by about 1

The Great Leap Forward did have a problematic famine, and in one year, there were 4.3 million excess deaths as compared to 1949. But in the years immediately before and after that year, the death rate was vastly higher in 1949.

The real killer was capitalist China! Every year, Maoism was saving a good 10 million plus lives.

We need to take this into consideration when thinking of why people put up with Maoism.

A new system comes in, Maoism. It’s repressive, but so was the old system. More importantly, the state cares about you, the lowly worker or peasant. And with each year after 1949, increasingly fewer and fewer people are getting sick and dying. People are living longer and longer every year. Looking back at the previous system, many more people were sick, many more were dying, and people were not living as long. Sure, there was a small setback and a famine for one year, but there was more like a short return to the bad old days.

Seen in this context, you can see why the people regarded Maoism as a Godsend and not some killer system. Sure, the system killed a few people, but many more were being killed before. You do the math!

It is important to note that China’s recent growth has not occurred due to “capitalism.” Most of that growth is coming from public firms, generally controlled by small municipalities and labor collectives. Under Mao, all firms were officially owned by the workers. Such is the case in China of today – all Chinese firms are officially owned by the workers. Sound like capitalism to you? The 3rd largest manufacturer of TV’s in the world is a public firm – it’s owned by the workers – a socialist enterprise.

Under the Chinese system, municipalities and labor collectives run firms. They compete with each other. For instance, if a municipality has a very successful enterprise, they will make lots of money. They will pay their workers more and give them better benefits. So workers flock to those cities from all over China to try to work for that firm. In this way, cities compete with each other. Sound like capitalism to you?

The cities that do best turn into “company towns.” They provide public housing for the workers, public transportation, public day care, etc. Sound like capitalism to you?

It is illegal to own land in China. Does that sound like capitalism to you? This is another Mao era decree that the radicals have been trying to get rid of. Chinese land ownership is so fair precisely because of the forbidding of the private ownership of land. Were that not in place, a few rich people would own all of rural China, like they do in India.

The state owns all the land. You go out into the wild areas, and it’s all state-owned. And much of it is protected too. If the state didn’t own that land, private speculators would have bought up a lot of that land and destroyed it.

They do let you lease the land your home is on. And if you have been paying rent on your home for a long time, increasingly, the state is just giving you the house. You own your house. You can even sell your house to someone else. You can sell the land-use rights on the land that you own the rights to. The state gives you a house to live in for free. Sound like capitalism to you?

There is a system of free public education available to most Chinese, through the graduate level. Sound like capitalism?

China offers health insurance, but it’s rather expensive, and most cannot afford it. But it covers 8

The Chinese state is now planning to spend a tremendous amount of money upgrading the rural areas, because there is starting to be some serious poverty there. People are leaving the rural areas to work in the cities. The state will spend vast sums of money on roads, infrastructure, irrigation, schools, housing, health care, etc in the rural areas. Only a socialist state would do that. Capitalist states never do these things.

All farmland in China is owned by the state. It is often managed by rural collectives though, and they can keep a lot of what they sell. A capitalist country where all farmland is owned by the state? Come on.

The banks in China are very heavily regulated. This is why China largely avoided the latest Neoliberal World Recession. Sound like capitalism to you?

China has not “moved to capitalism.” It is a mixed system with capitalism, socialism and other forms of ownership, a huge public sector and a vast state with tremendous spending power that spends wild amounts of money. The state has very heavy involvement in the economy, including planning it in some ways.

Deng’s reforms have resulted in millions of Chinese dying for lack of health care who would have not have died otherwise. That is because under these wonderful capitalist reforms, all state medical clinics began charging for visits and medicine. Many people can’t afford it, so they just get sick and die. Was it worth it? I say no.

Deng’s reforms have resulted in the closing of schools all over rural China. In some areas, 8

The great growth in Western Europe occurred after World War 2 in the context of a mixed socialist-capitalist system called social democracy. It’s not true at all that Western Europe developed due to capitalism.

Japan has had a social democracy since World War 2, but the benefits are provided by corporations, not by the state so much.

South Korea, Taiwan and Japan all had extensive land reforms that helped their economies take off. Your economy will never go anywhere with semi-feudal relations in the countryside.

Taiwan has an extensive social democracy in place.

Singapore has a very well-developed social democracy. Furthermore, Singapore is not reproducible. Sure, it’s rich, but the area around it in Malaysia is poor. Malays commute to work in Singapore every day. Singapore’s riches have come via paying low wages and buying cheap materials from surrounding poor countries.

None of those East Asian states developed via neoliberalism. They all had land reforms, extensive social democratic programs run by either corporations or the state, and especially massive state involvement in the economy, even including economic planning.

India is up and coming? 5

The “pure free market” of Adam Smith was nothing of the sort. Actually, Smith was an advocate of state intervention to protect society from the ravages of unfettered capitalism. He described pure free market capitalism as one of the most evil systems ever designed by man.

You ever hear neoliberals quote Smith on that? Of course not. All neoliberals are liars. They pick and choose what they want out of Smith and elide the rest. They describe China as “capitalist”, but if we tried to transplant a tiny bit of the Chinese system to the US, they would scream “Communism!”

The pure free market you laud is nothing but neoliberalism. Guess what? It doesn’t work. It only works for about the top 2

It creates incredible inequality and tons of poverty at the same time it produces vast riches at the top, and is everywhere associated with a tremendous amount of corruption of the political class. Everywhere you have a pure free market, you generally have a massively corrupted political class, since the capitalists purchase the state via money-based elections and their control of the media. Corruption under pure free market conditions is not a bug, it’s a feature. It goes right along with it, always.

Maoism in China: A Look at the Record

The current lie, or meme, in US, if not world, popular culture, is “Mao ruined China.” If they are being charitable, they say, “Mao nearly ruined China.”

People can and do say anything to further their cause, in this case, the cause of neoliberal capitalism and especially imperialism. Since Maoism is one of most potent enemies of both these days, it needs to be stamped out by any means necessary, lies, truth, whatever it takes, just take it out, who cares how you do it.

Let’s take a look at the real record here.

Keep in mind that the comparisons to India are because China and India were at the same level in 1949. The record below indicates how horribly India has failed compared to Maoist and even neo-Communist China. There’s no comparison. China kicked India’s ass. Indian capitalism has been nothing but 60 years of repetitive failure.

In 1949, the Chinese peasantry existed on the border of starvation and death. Life expectancy was 32 years. As if that was inevitable, note that in Russia in 1913, life expectancy was 32 years. By 1949, it was 63 years. A 32 year life expectancy for China in 1949 was not inevitable for any possible universe. More than anything else, that figure alone represents the utter and complete failure of Chinese semi-feudal capitalism.

If a peasant was ill, if he had money, he could go to a clinic in the city. If not, he would wait until he either got better or died. There were no medical facilities in the rural areas. People might add that this was inevitable in any possible China. But was it really? This was the situation in Russia in 1916. By 1949, there were clinics in every Russian village, and hardly a Russian lacked for medical care. Why was horrific lack of medical care inevitable?

By 1976, there was a polyclinic in every Chinese commune and a medical facility in every district.

Apologists, generally neoliberals who oppose all state spending on health care, since health care is a matter of private sector, say that this was inevitable. But was it really? Says who? China had not accomplished this in the decades before 1949, so why would they have accomplished it afterwards? Further, there are many nations where health care is still about as bad as 1949 China. The Maoist record on health care was so Earth-shatteringly great that even the UN’s World Health Organization complemented China on its achievement.

In 1949, China had serious problems with smallpox, leprosy, pestilence, cholera, malaria and tuberculosis. By 1976, they were nearly wiped out. Apologists say that this was inevitable? But why? The Chinese capitalists had failed, or not even tried to eliminate epidemic diseases before, why would they have suddenly changed their tune after 1949? Further, these diseases continue to be epidemic in many parts of the world, including India. India started out at the same place as China in 1949, so it’s a useful comparison.

Population growth was controlled, hunger was solved for the first time in Chinese history, and the principal fatal infectious diseases were controlled, in contrast to India, Indonesia and South America, where hunger and infectious diseases are still catastrophic problems. By comparing China to South America, India and Indonesia we can clearly see how disastrously capitalism has fared in those places and how totally Maoism has kicked capitalism’s butt.

Starvation, poverty and illiteracy were wiped out. China was self-sufficient in food for the first time ever. For the first time ever. For the first time ever. Repeat that as many times as you want to until it sinks in. So much for the lie that “Communism brings nothing but starvation.”

The industrial growth rate was double that of India. Keep in mind that China’s and India’s industrial growth rates were about the same in 1949. In industrial growth, Maoism has left India in the dust.

In 1949, China had about the same number of scientists per capita as India. In the meantime, China under Mao and his successors has completely devastated India in the number of scientists per capita. Communist China made huge efforts to increase the number of scientists in society through incredible increases in the availability of education and offering free education to the masses who only had private education for the rich before.

India’s education system is a catastrophe, and the nation places zero emphasis on producing scientists or educated people of any nature. The public education system is disastrously underfunded, and most Indians can’t afford to go to school. The rich send their kids to private schools, but that’s not good for society, as it does not produce the number of highly skilled people that a society needs to develop.

It will take India 150 years to catch up with China in the number of scientists per capita.

Most Indian scientists leave the country; most Chinese scientists stay in China and serve the nation. As you can see, the Communists have cultivated a love of service and of nation in their scientists.

Indian scientists are essentially traitors with purely capitalist values. They spout Hindutva nonsense and the Indian ultranationalist fascist mantras of the day, but they have no love of nation. Their only value is money, and they quickly hop the first plane out of India to hightail it to the UK or the US to cash in on the big bucks, leaving their catastrophe of a nation in the lurch.

From their new perches in the West, they preach contempt for the Whites that enabled them to earn these fat wads of cash while dishonestly singing jingoist praises for the glorious Jai Hind, Bharat India that they so unceremoniously dumped.

Consumption of electricity in agriculture went from 20m kilowatts/hour to 6,000m. Grain production rose

I am not sure why agriculture has failed so badly in India, but semi-feudal relations in the countryside and lack of land reform must have something to do with it. As long as India is under capitalist rule, there will never be the necessary land reform that this suffering land needs, as the feudal lords have always owned the Indian state and always will until revolution sweeps them away.

Many or most Indian farmers are actually sharecroppers in perpetual debt slavery to large semi-feudal landlords. Until this system is eliminated, India will never develop into a real nation.

Production of chemical fertilizers increased 32X, steel 4.2X, oil 63X. Those figures are amazing. Fertilizer increased by 32 times! Oil increased by 63 times! Wow.

Why was this inevitable? If it was inevitable, why had capitalist China so failed to develop these essential industries before 1949? Easy. Because capitalist China, ruled by feudal lords, placed absolutely zero emphasis on the development of a national economy. The feudal lords of capitalist China cared only about increasing their own wealth,the nation be damned. Today we see the same thing in Latin America and the same underdevelopment that results. Some people never learn.

One argument which makes no sense is that India already tried socialism, and it failed. But exactly what kind of socialism was that, anyway? It was a fake crony socialism with a small public sector in which almost all of the economy was in private hands, mostly in the hands of monopoly capital. There was no land reform in the countryside where  semi-feudal relations continued to rule. Sure, the Communists have been running West Bengal for 20 years. Who on the Left thinks there is any kind of real socialism or Communism in West Bengal?

If China and India were practicing the exact same kind of system (they were not) then why was China creaming India every step of the way, year and year out, even all through the Mao era? Answer. Indian socialism wasn’t any good, and it hardly deserved to be called socialism.

There was nothing good about Indian “socialism.” It left 5

The state sector was and is tiny. The state sector in India, including local, state and national levels combined, is about 5-1

In India, for all intents and purposes, in most places, the state is nearly nonexistent. It’s always been that way, a tiny, corrupt, crony capitalist state, even during the Indian Socialism era. The Indian state is a neoliberal dream, with a minimal government and the ruined society that always flows from that.

Industry grew by 1

Looking at these figures with a clear eye, you can see why so many Indians are getting behind Maoism. True, Maoism has a spotty record, but compared to India, Communist China looks like paradise.

The “Apartheid Fed the People” Bullshit

There is a bullshit line coming out of the supporters of the former apartheid regime in South Africa, mostly the Afrikaners (Afrikaners are 6

Big deal, Guatemala exported crops from 1954-1970, and it had a poverty rate of 9

Of course, this is typical capitalist thinking. When we socialists look at the agricultural sector, we want to see if it is producing enough food to feed the people. If not, if we need to import food. If we are producing food for export, should we instead by cultivating food for our own people. Capitalists care only about agricultural production, and whether or not it is making any money.

Capitalists only care about feeding the people of the nation insofar as the people have the cash to buy their typically overpriced food. If you ain’t got the cash, you can starve. Capitalists never place any weight in making sure that everyone in the country gets enough food to eat, because, really, that’s a money-loser. So the only way populations typically get thoroughly fed is through socialist programs.

Capitalists, of course, care nothing about any of this. They don’t even care about importing food. They’ll import the entire nation’s food supply as long as they can make money off of it.

Capitalist Latin America has long exported almost all of its agricultural produce (think bananas in Latin America) while importing almost all of its food (mostly overpriced canned food from the US). This arrangement is particularly acute in the Caribbean.

This is great for US capitalists. They make a bundle importing the bananas or whatever, and then they turned around and sell Jamaicans overpriced Beefaroni in the can. The average Jamaican ends up spending almost all their spare change for overpriced US canned food, while they could eat homegrown food much cheaper. The Caribbean elites don’t care, as they make money exporting bananas, etc, and then again importing the Raviolis from the US.

No country is ever going to develop that way. But Latin American elites have never tried to develop their countries. They only care about increasing their own wealth, to the detriment of their countrymen. Those two sentences explain the whole history of Latin America since independence. You don’t need to know much more than that.

Hence, it was with a grain of salt that I read White nationalist / Afrikaner and sadly enough, increasingly, the MSN’s version of the South African wonderland. I wondered how were the Blacks faring under this apartheid utopia?

Turns out that in 1973, the malnutrition rate among South Africans was 2

South Africa has many problems with its food supply. First of all, it is arid, and only 1

The corn crop is declining, in part due to climate change, but also due to depletion of the soil. Soil depletion is complicated, but in part it was caused by Africans having their land taken from them while they were herded onto disastrously overcrowded homelands with marginal soil that become progressively eroded with the decades. South Africans have tried to switch to sorghum, but there have been some problems making the transition.

It is true that the South African White farmers are currently victims of some horrible violence. But much of the crops produced by these farmers go out of the country as exports. In a nation with 3

Paradoxically, in addition to malnutrition, South Africans now deal with  overnutrition. ~4

The ANC regime, to their credit, is trying to formulate a program to distribute nutrient-fortified bread to all South Africans in order to combat widespread nutritional deficiencies. Of course only a socialist government would ever do such a thing, and no White apartheid regime would have ever done anything like this.

When Tea Party kooks scream about socialism, this is the sort of thing they are protesting: South Africa is trying to make sure it’s children get the calories and nutrition that they need, since capitalism has proven incapable of doing so. Isn’t socialism terrible?

Next time someone breathlessly tells you about how South Africa was the breadbasket of Africa and a food exporter under apartheid but now imports food and is running the risk of major famine under Black rule, take it with a grain of salt.

References

International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS). September 2005. Malnutrition Task Force Bulletin.Patrick, Doreen. October 18, 1973. Malnutrition: Fact or Fiction.

Sibbel, Greg. 2004. South Africa Malnutrition – The Changes of Urbanization. Kuemper Catholic High School, Iowa.

We Are Making Progress

Here.

The rightwing crazies are using this poll to show that Americans are turning into a bunch of Commies, which makes no since, as they also say that Americans hate socialism so much that they are going to repeal Obama’s health care reform.

Really, the poll is not as hopeful as one might think. First of all, capitalism and socialism are not defined. Furthermore, while only 5

This implies that Americans think that American capitalism is not a free market (neoliberal) system, which is preposterous. Instead, 2/3 of Moronicans think that the state and the corporations combine to screw workers and investors (Corporatism?), and this is somehow against free market principles (LOL).

Duh. That’s how society works under capitalism, dummies. Under neoliberalism, it’s the same thing with Premium fuel. You want neoliberalism, but you don’t want all the droppings that come with it. That makes no sense. This shows me that Moronicans are political amateurs who don’t know their political economic asses from a hole in the ground. They can be excused of course, since we have farce for politics, an infernally confusing and dishonest Lying Machine for a media and a culture of stupidity on rocket fuel.

But we don’t even have corporatism here. It would be nice if we did. Corporatism is what they have in China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc. The state is very heavily involved with the corporate sector and in fact works together with corporations to guide the economy and national industrial policy with a view towards nationalism. It works pretty darn good!

We don’t have corporatism; we have a neoliberal system in which the capitalists run the show, and the state just stays out of the way and lets them run wild, or worse, helps them charge through the streets running over everyone in their path. Then the state comes through, sweeps up everyone who got run over, and puts them in jail or fines them for being in the way or something.

We have a corporate dictatorship enabled by a state in bed with the corporations. That’s not corporatism. In corporatism, the state tells the corporations what to do, and the corporations say, “Yes sir.” Here the corporations tell the state and everyone else what to do, and the state says, “Yes massah, kin I fetch it for you?”

On health care, things look grim, but this is Rasmussen. 5

Anyway, it looks like we have our work cut out for us convincing people that repeal of this bill is not in their best interests and that this reform, meager as it is, is on balance a good thing. If you think it’s creeping socialism, we need to end the conversation and part our ways, but even most Moronicans are not that stupid.

If Moronicans really do want to repeal this bill, I say the Hell with em. It that’s true, then it shows Americans are no good and deserve every shitty thing that is going to happen to them in the future, because they’re supporting it all and egging it all on.

One of the lies about this bill is that it has “cuts in Medicare.” There are no “cuts in Medicare.” That’s just another one of the lies that the Republicans said.

The truth is that it’s the Republicans who want to get rid of Medicare. They’ve hated it from Day One, and they will never accept this great socialist program. In recent years, they have been trying to get rid of Medicare with medical savings accounts, Medicare Plus Advantage plans, etc. When we try to point this out, they accuse of us saying, “Mediscare!” and say that they are only trying to save the program.

That’s like destroying the village to save it in Vietnam.

The purpose of the italicized plans above is to destroy Medicare by removing the healthy people. The resulting program will only have the sickest people in it, and it won’t work. All insurance programs work by having good actors and bad actors. Health insurance works by having both healthy and sick people. You get rid of the healthy people, and the program fails. That’s the GOP project, but they never admit it.

Obamacare cuts the Medicare Advantage plans, which suck anyway. These were sold to moneyed seniors back in the 1990’s via a multimillion $$$$$$ and extremely dishonest ad campaign. I know seniors who signed up for these crooked plans, and they are almost all sorry they did.

The Republicans got the US government to pay elevated rates for these gold plans. For instance, say the Medicare rate is X. The Republicans got the government to pay let’s say X + 1

Well, this bullshit should be cut out altogether. The government should pay X rate for Medicare and X rate, not X +1

Oh boo fucking hoo.

Which Starves More People, Capitalism or Communism?

Observer notes that both capitalism had Communism have bad records when it comes to starving people to death. He implies that one system is as likely to starve you death as the other.

That said, I would like to defend the Communist record against one of the worst slanders, that “Communism equals starvation.” Not true, it’s actually capitalism equals starvation.

And often times, both Capitalism and Communism had the same sordid record.

It really depended who was running the given society, and at that particular time in history.

True, the diet is not top-notch, but it fills your stomach…

Ah, yeah, however, you could say the same thing for prison inmates :/

But let’s look at the figures:

The capitalist record is far worse. Capitalism starves to death 14 million a year, mostly in South Asia. How many starve under Communist or even neo-Communist systems like China nowadays? Close to zero.

Adding up all the starvation under Orthodox Communism from 1925-1990, it looks like there were around 21.5 million starvation deaths under Communism over a 65 year period.

         Starvation  Period    Rate       Per capita
USSR     5.5 m       1925-1990 84,000/yr  1/2,300
China    15 m        1949-1990 365,000/yr 1/2,730
Cambodia 1 m         1975-1979 250,000/yr 1/16
Rest     0           1945-1990 0          0
Total    21.5 m      1925-1990 331,000/yr 1/3,637
World*   336 million 1986-2010 7.14 m/yr  1/426

However, from 1986- present, only 24 years, capitalism has starved 14 million a year. That’s 336 million in 24 years, or 14 million starvation death per year. Whereas Communism averaged 300,000 deaths per year. In the 20th Century, capitalism was starving 42 TIMES as many people per year than Communism was.

And for a good part of that period, 2

Or, looking at the chart above, capitalism starves 8.65 times more people per capita than Communism and neo-Communism.

And that’s not including figures from Eastern Europe.

Good job, capitalists. Good fuckin job.

The “Chilean Miracle” Lie

tulio notes, remarking on the “Chilean economic miracle” under Pinochet.

I have a Venezuelan…he fled Venezuela and now lives in Chile, a more free market country, and btw the most prosperous in Latin America. And Pinochet had a lot to do with Chile’s prosperity, even though he was a bastard. If it weren’t for him, it would be another 3rd world Latin American country. He turned that country’s economy around.

First of all, Chile is not the most prosperous in Latin America. Mexico is quite a bit wealthier than Chile. Mexico seem like a First World country to you? 2

Second, it’s debatable whether Chile is more free market than Venezuela. Chile has long had a deep social democracy in place, and Venezuela has never had crap. Much of Chavez so-called evil socialism is just him trying to put the basics of a social democratic system and a civilizational infrastructure in place where there never was one – he’s spending money on education, medical care, roads, literacy, land reform, food subsidies, housing, electrification, plumbing, sewage, water, etc.

At least in Venezuela, you have a President who is committed to the entire low income and working class portion of the population. There’s no need for him to care about, work for or help the well-off, since they’re already sitting pretty as it is.

In Chile, the low-income and working class population pretty much get a gigantic Fuck You. The state only works for the 1/3 or so upper middle class, and everyone else can buzz off. I imagine this is still the case under Bachelet, but I’m not sure.

Pinochet had nothing whatsoever to do with Chile’s “prosperity.” Truth is he ruined that country. His radical libertarianism from the Chicago School quickly caused one of the worst depressions in history. In order to climb out of it, he had to repudiate neoliberal orthodoxy and involve the state, government spending and labor in his economic project (Keynesianism).

Even that more statist project did not do well. All of that economic growth under that Pinochet clown was just the climback from the damned Depression that he caused at the start! Big deal! By the end of his term, in 1989, Chile’s GDP finally matched of Allende, the socialist whom he replaced. IOW, 16 years of total economic flatlining and failure.

To illustrate, let me give some hypothetical figures, since I don’t know the real figures. Say per capita income was $8,000/year when Allende left office. Pinochet so nuked the economy that in a few years, PCI was something like $2,000/year. From 1978-1989, there was huge economic growth, true, but they were just climbing out the rut. By 1989, his last year in office, PCI finally made it up back to $8,000 year again. Talk about spinning your wheels.

The upper classes did much better though under Pinochet, maybe the top 1/3. Everyone else got royally screwed. Average wages declined by 3

Chile is doing ok now with a much more state-interventionist economic scheme under a Socialist President, Bachelet. Much of Chile’s relatively good human development figures are due to its deep socialist and social democratic, especially health care and education: Chile has been a pretty socialist state for a long time now. Chile has a decent national health care system, and that’s the reason for its commendable health figures. Malnutrition figures are also very low; Chile does a good job of feeding its people.

Education is another matter. About 1/2 of the public schools are literally falling apart. I mean literally, as in collapsing. There’s no agenda to fix them, because the pricks who run the country all send their kids to private schools (this is how it works all over Latin America).

It’s no surprise tulio has been brainwashed about Pinochet. The US media has told nothing but lies about the guy.

The gap between the rich and the poor in Chile is absolutely insane, and the racism and class hatred is rife and toxic. The light-skinned well to do live in gated compounds or with high walls around their sumptuous homes, often with barbed wire and guard dogs. They live that way because of the out of control crime rate, especially theft, by the darker-skinned lower classes. The crime rate is a symptom of the insane inequality and class hatred in that place. Chile is just another typical Latin American shithole, a little fancier than the rest of them.

I’ve known some Chileans; their contempt for poor and working class people was palpable, and they were openly and outrageously racist against Chilean Indians. And these people were supposedly “leftwingers.”

Update: In the comments section, the brilliant James Schipper adds some good hard figures to the argument. The rich-poor gap he talks about can be represented as a Gini coefficient.

The main thing about the Chile was that the upper classes, maybe the top 1/3 or so, totally cleaned up under Pinochet. Pinochet merely dramatically shifted income from the bottom 2/3 of the population to the to top 1/3, so obviously he’s wildly popular among the well to do in Latin America. As a socialist, I’m not supposed to support Reverse Robin Hood policies. Any socialist doing that may as well hang it up and just become a Republican. Or join the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC), same thing.

It’s fascinating that neoliberals and libertarians continue to rave about this fake “miracle”. Either they’re lying, or they’re idiots.

Some people never learn.

Schipper:

Excellent post! In the early 1980s, the unemployment rate in Chile reached 2

Pinochet also privatized pensions, but guess what, the military kept their government pension plan.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the richest 1

It seems that any government that pursues neoliberal economic policies will be praised by MSM in the West while any government that does the opposite will be excoriated.

Problems With Social Democracy and Progressive Taxation Under Capitalism

Commenter tulio notes, in favor of social democracy:

I’ll take capitalism any day, warts and all. I just think we need some elements of socialist safeguards and need progressive taxation to try and stop the rich from getting too rich.

The problem is that under capitalism it is very difficult to put in the socialist safeguards you discuss. The capitalists fight tooth and nail like insane wildcats every step of the way trying every trick in the book. Often they just say fuck it and sabotage the economy, throw a military coup or start a contra armed guerrilla movement. Then once the socialist safeguards are put in the capitalists fight to get rid of them like madmen year in and year out until they can dismantle them.

They try every trick in the book, deliberately bankrupting the state (like here in the US), capital flight, you name it. If your country owes debt to the IMF or World Bank, World Capitalism will force you to dismantle your entire socialist safeguard system, plus tons of other stuff, as a condition on getting more loans.

Furthermore, in most of the 3rd World, capitalists have so captured the state that it’s impossible to put in any socialist safeguards. Any new person who gets in and tries to do that gets threatened by the IMF and World Bank and the international investors. The lenders threaten to cut off new loans and the investors threaten to pull out all their money. So each new person who gets elected can’t put in any socialist safeguards, and they can’t do much of anything but neoliberal shit, as the international bankers and investors are calling the shots.

There are similar problems with progressive taxation or taxing business and corporations much at all. The nature of capitalism makes it very difficult to put this in, and once again, as soon as you do, the capitalists start fighting it and never quit until they get rid of progressive taxation, reduce or eliminate taxes on business and corporations and and consequently defund the state. By defunding the state, they end up wiping out all of the programs we discussed above.

This project is continuous under capitalism. So once you put in social democracy and reasonable taxation, you will have to fight the capitalists like mad every single year forever in order to keep it in. The capitalists will use every devious trick in the book to try to get rid of progressive taxation too. Further, once you wipe out sensible taxation, the only way to put it back is to “raise taxes,” which, at least here in the US, is a political death sentence.

As if all of this was not enough, consider another thing. Under capitalism, the capitalists capture almost the entire media. It’s not uncommon for reactionary pro-capitalist factions to control up to 9

These capitalist media machines are brilliant at “creating culture” and brainwashing workers, consumers, low income and middle income people into opposing their own interests and supporting the interests of their capitalist enemies. Sure, in some cases, you have a population savvy enough to figure out they’re being lied to with megaphones 24-7, everywhere they go, but it’s not easy to do.

Consider also that at the same time, capitalists everywhere on Earth attack state education. In the 3rd World, the idea is to keep the people stupid. An educated people is harder to brainwash. So in order to get a savvy population, first you need to educate them, but the capitalists will keep you from doing that. Now where do you start?

In addition to running the media, under capitalism, the capitalists actually create the culture. Marx noted this. In capitalist society, the culture of the nation is that of the ruling class. And in general it is. Your average poor or low income worker under capitalism has the mindset of a ruling class millionaire! Those are his values, political and otherwise. He’s living in a hovel, but he thinks like a corporate magnate. It’s magical brainwashing.

Gramsci called this cultural hegemony. The capitalists create a cultural hegemony in capitalist states. The only way to get anything progressive done is to create a progressive counter-hegemonic discourse and try to institute that to do battle with the cultural discourse of the ruling class.

Cultural hegemony is a serious problem. Look how many American workers, low income people, middle class folks and consumers oppose their own interests and talk like corporate boardroom types. Their minds have basically been colonized and taken over like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Many of these fools have invested decades in such foolish thinking and are not about to give it up anytime soon. It becomes an important part of their identity and even of entire communities and harder to get out than the worst weeds.

On top of that, in most capitalist countries, the ruling classes who oppose socialist safeguards and reasonable taxation just out and out buy the elections.

In much of the world, the same folks control the military. Even on the outside chance that someone decent gets in who can put in socialist safeguards and democratic taxation, typically there is quickly a military coup and the capitalists seize power again, undo all of the progressive changes, then to drive the point home, run death squads around the country for some time slaughtering people to set an example, as in, “Don’t try this again!”

In the future, people realize that if they elect a progressive person, there may be a coup afterward, which will be bad enough, but after that, death squads will run amok for years, and they may just get arrested, beaten, tortured or killed. It’s a warning to stay away from progressive politics for the rest of your life.

So, while I support social democracy and democratic taxation in theory, I’m well aware of the minefields that the capitalists have laid in the paths of doing these sensible and decent things.

The “Communism Starves the People” Bullshit

Commenter tulio notes on this post, complaining about Communism:

Seems like there’s always some famine that happens in communist countries that wipes out hundreds of thousands if not millions. Look at China’s great famines. Cambodians had to resort to eating spiders they dug up just to survive. I think these were man-made events. Capitalism has it’s flaws, but Communism is just fucked up to the core. There hasn’t been one example of a communist success.

At least not one that didn’t have to throttle back and incorporate capitalism into their economy, like China. And then that’s not even getting into all the other shit communist governments do like the censorship of the internet, lack of freedom to protest, etc.

I’ll take capitalism any day, warts and all. I just think we need some elements of socialist safeguards and need progressive taxation to try and stop the rich from getting too rich.

I’m no Orthodox Commie by any means, despite what everyone believes. I’m just a socialist. That said, I tend to support most forms of socialism that actually work well (I don’t support fake socialism that doesn’t work, and I don’t support all Communist states). As Communism is a form of socialism, I tend to look favorably on it, but then I also look favorably on European social democracy, since I consider that also a form of socialism.

I support state funding of education, medicine, food, shelter, corrections, telecommunications, military, infrastructure building, public health, libraries, parks and wildlife reserves, R & D, social safety nets, housing, utilities, and maybe even a few industries here or there. I’m basically a Big Government with a capital B type of guy.

That said, I would like to defend the Communist record against one of the worst slanders, that “Communism equals starvation.” Not true, it’s actually capitalism equals starvation.

There were continuous famines in China under capitalism. In 1949, life expectancy was only 32 years in capitalist China. The rural people lived on the edge of starvation and death all the time. Read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck to see what it was like. From 1949-1980, Mao increased life expectancy from 32 to 65. That’s the greatest increase in life expectancy that the world has ever seen.

Furthermore, the Communists built that country up from nothing. Same thing with Russia. Russia was a zero pre-Communism. Communists built that country into a 1st World country. Even now it’s a good place. The press here bitches about Soviet style housing, but it looks decent enough to me. Anyway, compare the East Bloc, the former USSR and China to Latin America, Africa, India, the Philippines or the rest of the capitalist shitholes.

None of those places have the type of horrific slums, cardboard shack shantytowns, or outrageous poverty that you see every day in those capitalist paradises. Imagine if Latin America, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the rest of the shitholes had followed a Communist model of development. Sure, they would have run into problems and at some point, they may have moved in the direction of Eastern Europe, the former USSR and China. But let us look at housing alone. All of these places would have adequate housing. Now you can complain about Soviet bloc housing, but I’d rather see that in Brazil, Delhi, Manila and Lima than those horrifying slums and favelas. Medical care would be decent in all of those places – they would have good health figures, especially maternal mortality, infant mortality, and life expectancy. They would have enough to eat – malnutrition rates would be low.

The fact that capitalism everywhere seems to produce these horrific, nightmarish slums with no end or cure for them in sight is reason enough for me to feel that it’s a totally failed system.

There have been a few famines in the Communist countries, true, but you must realize that there’s a continuous famine in the capitalist world, mostly in the 3rd world. As I noted, capitalism starves 14 million a year, year in and year out. A couple years of that, and they’ve beaten everyone starved under Communism put together.

There was a famine in the USSR, true, at the beginning of collectivization. There was another in China around the same time. It seems like if they collectivize ag too quickly, ag collapses for a few years before the new system gets going. If they want to collectivize ag, they ought do so slowly.

It’s a big lie that Communism starves people. It’s capitalism that does that. In general, the Communist states like the USSR, the East Bloc, China, etc. have done a fantastic job of feeding the people, especially compared to the disastrous dietary conditions pre-Communism.

True, the diet is not top-notch, but it fills your stomach. There was a famine in the USSR in 1932, but there’s never been another. There was one in 1962 in China, but there’s never been another. Regular deadly famines spread through both places pre-Communism.

In 1980, Cubans had the highest dietary intake in Latin America. Right now, Cuba has the lowest rate of malnutrition in Latin America. It’s really hard to make this “Communism starves the people” argument. It’s generally not true. Communism is generally pretty good about putting adequate food in people’s stomachs.

And capitalism is not! One thing capitalism cannot ever seem to do is to feed its populations adequately. When I die in 30 years, capitalism still will be failing to feed its own populations. If there’s any indictment of capitalism, that’s it. WTF man? You call that a successful system? You can’t even feed your own people, give me a break.

I’m no fan of the Khmer Rogue, but realize that there was already mass starvation going on when they took over. Agriculture had collapsed in the countryside long since. I don’t agree with emptying the cities to the rural areas like they did, but the reason they did that was to try to get the ag system going again. Presently, capitalist Cambodia has a sky high malnutrition rate.

What happened with Communist economics is more a problem with chronic shortages of food and other basics and luxuries, long lines, housing shortages, etc. Also collectivized ag had poor productivity. The centrally planned economy doesn’t work very well because you have to figure out how much everyone is going to consume every year at the start of the year and plan for that. It’s almost impossible to do that, and that leads to economic deformations. Also, labor productivity was often poor.

The best system in a lot of cases seems to be some sort of mixed economy.

Deficit/Debt Hysteria

It’s hard to check out the latest edition of the MSM shitrags (daily newspapers and newsmagazines) or lying megaphones (radio and TV) without seeing or hearing some screaming stuff about deficits and debts. The stuff is quite dire. In 10 years, debt payments will constitute 8

However, being fed a steady diet of MSM shit sandwiches my whole life before I finally figured out what the Hell I was eating anyway, I figured these capitalist corporate POS scumbags were lying to me once again.

If a capitalist’s mouth is open, he’s probably lying. And so all capitalist societies are fanciful places where all the world’s a lie, and all of us are liars. We lie to go along with the liars, because everyone else is lying, and because we’re too brainwashed or confused to figure out we are being lied to. Such is the Gramscian dynamic when the capitalists obtain cultural hegemony, as they nearly always do under capitalism.

It is curious that defenders of capitalism, including regular commenters on this blog, never face this World O’ Lies head-on. So is it ok or what?  I mean that living in a capitalist society is about as fanciful an experience as living in a state controlled by Communist propaganda. Capitalist versions of Pravda are replicated every minute across countless TV and radio stations and every corporate shitrag (daily paper and newsweekly) in the land. To say that they were “brainwashed” while we are free is the grossest of delusions, but it is essential to all capitalist societies.

Getting back to the deficit/debt hysteria, I had to search around to find some sane capitalists on the question. One of the evil things about capitalism is that under capitalism, the honest capitalists are rara avis. You really have to look around, as the capitalists try to lock out all the sane and decent voices. You know, just like those evil Commies do? So we spelunked the samizdats of Internet’s honeycombed caverns and came up with a couple of sane capitalists on the debt/deficit question.

Exhibit A: Paul Krugman.

Exhibit B: Martin Wolf.

Yeah, they’re both Jews. Liberal, capitalist Jews at that (No, wait! They must be Bolsheviks in disguise!).

Chew on that bone a bit, anti-Semites.

The depressing thing was that both of the sane people had dire messages. Those evil entitlement thingies, you know, like health care for the old and the poor and pensions for the retired, are gonna have to be slashed to the bone, their recipients cast to the desert winds so the vultures of capitalist society may pick clean their bones.

When even the sane people are channeling Edgar Allen Poe, you know that the horrorshow is the world outside your window, and the droogies are your fellow men.

So much for the end of history.

Interesting Take on the Outrageous Supreme Court Decision

When these clowns Roberts and Alito came up for nomination for the Supreme Court under ultra-rightwing George Bush’s Administration, the few of us who are sane were saying all along that these guys were a nightmare in waiting. Almost none of my “liberal” friends believed me. After all, I’m Chicken Little. The Democratic Party completely caved in to the ultraright radicals that Bush nominated, saying in effect that they were just fine. Alito in particular was outrageous, lying for days on the stand.

Now we’ve come full circle and as usual, Chicken Little me was right and my liberal friends and the idiot Democratic Party were dead wrong. Perhaps you have heard of the Citizens United vs. FEC case (full court brief)that was decided on January 21, 2010. First of all, the case is the most egregious case of judicial activism. Based on in stare decesis, the Court is supposed to allow lower court rulings to stand, in this case an appellate court ruling. Further, the finding that the court ruled on was one that the plaintiffs had already agreed to drop in lower court.

In order to overrule the lower court, there must be a clear, present and immediate public need involved. What is the clear and present public need in overturning all of our campaign financing laws?

It’s much worse than that. We are now not allowed to put any limits whatsoever on campaign contributions by the corporations and the rich. Medical lobbies spent $1.5 million/day during the Heath Care Reform debate to kill progressive reform. There are now estimates that we could see lobbies spending up to 30-50 times as much as they are currently spending. That’s a tsunami of campaign cash.

Those of you who don’t live in the US don’t know what it’s like. Especially during election season, you are bombarded with an endless barrage of big-money and corporate commercials on the TV. Turn on the radio and it’s similar. Open your mailbox and and an avalanche of corporate brochures piles into your lap. Open a newspaper and there are huge big money and corporate full page ads all through our biggest papers.

Never mind that nearly all of the TV and radio stations, large newspapers and newsmagazines are already more or less exact mouthpieces of these same corporate and big money interests.

In every way that makes sense, America is now an oligarchy. Like similar oligarchical shitholes scattered all of over the ruined Third World, the class interests are foreordained. On my Maoist list, a Maoist recently said that it is the position of the moneyed classes everywhere on Earth to be ultraright.

This is their logical position. They can’t be blamed for it anymore than a shark can be blamed for attacking a swimmer. In the ruined Third World, the rich and the upper middle classes and sadly often the entire business class always lines up with the most ferociously reactionary wing of the oligarchy.

Tragically, much of the middle class often does the same. Recall that Marx said that the middle classes always ally themselves with the rich. In the US, typically once anyone gets any money at all, they usually move into this ultra-right position. This is particularly true if they make their fat cash working for a corporation.

So this is what we’ve become. A wealthy version of a Third World oligarchical ultra-right shithole. The stolen elections are already here. The oligarchs have a death grip on the media. Civil liberties are winding down. So what’s next?

In the event of any profound Left uprising, even unarmed such as Guatemala 1954, El Salvador 1980, Aristide in Haiti, Chavez in Venezuela, Allende in Chile, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Dominican Republic 1965 or Brazil 1964, I would assume the US would quickly witness military coups, death squads and possibly even armed guerrillas on the Left as a response. If a Left regime came to power, we may well see armed contras, probably funded by the rich and the corporations.

The law shreds 100 years of laws by state and federal governments that attempted to limit campaign contributions. David Souter dourly noted this in his dissent.

The following is an interesting argument from a website I’m a member of suggesting that the decision was treason. Reason being that the court refused to say that foreigners could not also spend as much as they wanted to influence US issues and elections. This means that the only way to stop foreigners from flooding our political debates and campaigns with cash to buy their way to control over our nation is for the Congress to stop them by passing a law.

But such a law can never be passed because an openly treasonous party, the Republican Party, will never pass any law limiting foreigners right to spend whatever they can to influence our debates and elections. So we’re screwed.

Many are suggesting an Amendment of the Constitution. This will not work. We need 67 votes in the Senate, and we don’t have them. Then we need 7

By any fair legal definition, the decision yesterday by The Supreme Court 5 constitutes nothing less than an act of treason against the people of the United States. Having read and analyzed the entire 183 page decision and all of its concurring and dissenting opinions ourselves, we are fully prepared to support this accusatory conclusion.

Having so grossly abused its jurisdiction by presuming to decide a question expressly waived by the petitioner in the Court below (p 12), this rogue Supreme Court ruled for the first time that no corporation can be constrained from unlimited influence over our elections.

And even assuming that the Court intended the decision to only apply to American corporations, the Court expressly declined (pp 46-47) to reach the question of whether foreign ownership stakes in American corporations should likewise be given carte blanche to put their thumbs on the scales of our democracy.

Thus, until Congress further acts (and it must, though it could not have escaped the attention of The Supreme Court 5 that the current Republican minority has vowed to obstruct anything of consequence that Congress might try to pass), there is now nothing to constrain foreign nationals, even our most sworn enemies, from usurping what even the most die hard Tea Bagger takes as an article of faith, that the rights of citizenship of this country are only for Americans.

This must be construed, within the four corners of our Constitution, as deliberately and knowingly exposing the United States of America to harm in the interim, by giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies (Constitution Article 3, section 3), should our enemies now wish to take advantage of this unprecedented and rash decision. In simple constitutional terms . . . treason!!

The fact is that we now live in a world of giant transnational corporations, with allegiance to no sovereign government, let alone our own, sworn only to exploit the most vulnerable and desperate workers they can find in any country of the world. How does The Supreme Court 5 propose parsing which of these extra-national legal artificialities should be allowed to corrupt our democratic election process? Apparently in their minds, all of them.

So what is it that we can and must do? The first and most prominent proposal we heard yesterday, and which we of course support, was to amend the Constitution to clarify that corporations have no such rights as people (which is to say U.S. citizens).

While this certainly could not hurt, and would obviously help (assuming such an proposed amendment could garner 67 votes in a Senate already stalemated by obstructionism, let alone be ratified by 3/4 of the states, including many “red” ones), what we must first assert is that there is nothing wrong with our Constitution, and demand that Congress do whatever it can to protect it.

Because just as importantly, we are on ominous and clear notice that there is no further outrage these 5 gangsters in black robes are not gleefully and arrogantly capable of. Indeed, in his dissenting opinion (that the majority did not go far enough), Clarence Thomas characterized the decision as only a “first step” (Thomas opinion p. 1).

It is worth nothing that the authorship of the majority opinion is claimed by Anthony M. Kennedy, heretofore generally considered the least wing nutty of the 5. Therefore, the immediate and unavoidably necessary recourse must be impeachment for all five, treason already being a high crime, otherwise the horrors yet to issue from their treacherous minds is too terrible to contemplate.

“Made In China, Sort Of,” by Alpha Unit

New Alpha Unit. This is a good one. I’m glad to see she is branching out into one of the Protectionist obsessions of this blog. I actually think this crap steel ought to be out and out banned. It’s obviously dangerous to use in construction projects. If it’s hazardous, ban it. It’s that simple.

I think there was one remaining US steel firm, and I think it just went out of business. Too bad, we have lots of iron ore up in Minnesota. The demise of the great US steel business and its high-paying union jobs is one of the sadder stories of the Globalization debacle. US steel firms are often slammed in corporate Time/Newsweek type organs as “protectionist.”

They have regularly been marching in to Congress demanding some sort of protection for their industry, and for this the corporate media ridicules them as if they were Flat Earthers. It’s finally looking like they have a point. Ban Chinese steel!

A man that I know and love had a construction project to complete, and decided that sheet metal would suit his purposes. He bought the sheet metal at one of those warehouse-style home improvement stores, and on the designated day to begin he got his welding equipment and set about to work.

First he realized that there was no way he could weld this metal. He’s been a welder for 40 years, and knows all about welding sheet metal and a lot of other things. This metal he couldn’t even spot-weld; it just burned up. Was this metal too thin? he wondered. Was the galvanization somehow to blame?

What he didn’t wonder at first was whether it was just really crappy sheet metal. Because when you go to one of those home improvement places to buy something, it doesn’t occur to you that you just bought a bunch of stuff that only looks like what you wanted!

It’s the Chinese version of sheet metal.

What we now know is that shoddy Chinese-made steel has been reported on, debated, and cursed for years now. Last year Reuters reported that there were Congressional hearings about the need to keep out inferior Chinese steel products. Of particular concern was a type of steel rod that is typically used in “seismic structures systems” for bridges, pipelines, and some buildings.

William Upton, president of Vulcan Threaded Products, based in Pelham, Alabama, said a company team visited China in November 2006 to investigate how Chinese companies could manufacture a competing steel rod so cheaply.

After observing “serious (safety) problems with the Chinese production,” Vulcan purchased samples of the steel rod to have it tested by a certified U.S. lab, Upton said.

The results showed “133 failures out of the 222 samples tested – an astonishing 60 percent failure rate,” Upton said. “These results are unbelievable because in normal applications for this product, only a zero percent failure rate is acceptable.”

Last year also it was reported by the Evening Times that imported Chinese steel may have been responsible for a bridge failure when a faulty cast steel component resulted in a snapped supporting cable.

This inferior Chinese steel is ubiquitous, not surprising since China outproduces all other countries. It’s a part of all kinds of everyday products people don’t give much thought to. All around the world people readily concede that this stuff is basically garbage, and yet the flow continues. North American manufacturers and construction firms expect a certain percentage of Chinese imports to be faulty, and order tests when they suspect there is a problem.

But the question I have, innocent that I am, is: Why is it okay to produce and sell garbage? Is there some kind of worldwide demand for shoddy Chinese products? If there isn’t, what is it doing flooding world markets?

"Made In China, Sort Of," by Alpha Unit

New Alpha Unit. This is a good one. I’m glad to see she is branching out into one of the Protectionist obsessions of this blog. I actually think this crap steel ought to be out and out banned. It’s obviously dangerous to use in construction projects. If it’s hazardous, ban it. It’s that simple. I think there was one remaining US steel firm, and I think it just went out of business. Too bad, we have lots of iron ore up in Minnesota. The demise of the great US steel business and its high-paying union jobs is one of the sadder stories of the Globalization debacle. US steel firms are often slammed in corporate Time/Newsweek type organs as “protectionist.” They have regularly been marching in to Congress demanding some sort of protection for their industry, and for this the corporate media ridicules them as if they were Flat Earthers. It’s finally looking like they have a point. Ban Chinese steel! A man that I know and love had a construction project to complete, and decided that sheet metal would suit his purposes. He bought the sheet metal at one of those warehouse-style home improvement stores, and on the designated day to begin he got his welding equipment and set about to work. First he realized that there was no way he could weld this metal. He’s been a welder for 40 years, and knows all about welding sheet metal and a lot of other things. This metal he couldn’t even spot-weld; it just burned up. Was this metal too thin? he wondered. Was the galvanization somehow to blame? What he didn’t wonder at first was whether it was just really crappy sheet metal. Because when you go to one of those home improvement places to buy something, it doesn’t occur to you that you just bought a bunch of stuff that only looks like what you wanted! It’s the Chinese version of sheet metal. What we now know is that shoddy Chinese-made steel has been reported on, debated, and cursed for years now. Last year Reuters reported that there were Congressional hearings about the need to keep out inferior Chinese steel products. Of particular concern was a type of steel rod that is typically used in “seismic structures systems” for bridges, pipelines, and some buildings.

William Upton, president of Vulcan Threaded Products, based in Pelham, Alabama, said a company team visited China in November 2006 to investigate how Chinese companies could manufacture a competing steel rod so cheaply. After observing “serious (safety) problems with the Chinese production,” Vulcan purchased samples of the steel rod to have it tested by a certified U.S. lab, Upton said. The results showed “133 failures out of the 222 samples tested – an astonishing 60 percent failure rate,” Upton said. “These results are unbelievable because in normal applications for this product, only a zero percent failure rate is acceptable.”

Last year also it was reported by the Evening Times that imported Chinese steel may have been responsible for a bridge failure when a faulty cast steel component resulted in a snapped supporting cable. This inferior Chinese steel is ubiquitous, not surprising since China outproduces all other countries. It’s a part of all kinds of everyday products people don’t give much thought to. All around the world people readily concede that this stuff is basically garbage, and yet the flow continues. North American manufacturers and construction firms expect a certain percentage of Chinese imports to be faulty, and order tests when they suspect there is a problem. But the question I have, innocent that I am, is: Why is it okay to produce and sell garbage? Is there some kind of worldwide demand for shoddy Chinese products? If there isn’t, what is it doing flooding world markets?

China Turns Towards Maoism

This is an interesting article about a turn to the Left among some factions of the CCP in China, particularly a revival of Maoism. Though the article, as usual for Asia Times, has an anti-Mao bent, it’s nevertheless good news. Interestingly enough, much of the movement is coming from younger cadre. Another faction is the sons and daughters of the veterans of the Long March.

The turn towards Maoism takes many forms, and many are not necessarily economic. It’s interesting that in China now, privatization is working backwards. That is, state firms are swallowing up many private firms. And most of last year’s stimulus went to state firms.

What most people don’t realize is that much of China’s economic revival is being led by public firms of one type or another. These firms are often owned at least nominally by local municipalities, often smaller ones, and labor collectives.

The #3 manufacturer of televisions in the world, maker of TV’s for many multinational TV makers, is a publicly owned firm. At root is a Maoist practice whereby many or most public firms are actually formally owned by the workers, including this TV firm. Management is still relatively autonomous, but the profits from the firm go straight into the worker’s pockets as paychecks. However, my understanding is that they are required to reinvest 90-9

Firms run by small cities have been extremely successful. Cities compete with each other and build homes and other amenities for workers. The best firms make lots of money and the workers as formal owners get to take home a chunk of it. The most successful firms have long lists of workers wanting to move to these prosperous cities. Much of this manufactured material is also exported.

What’s funny is that that Made In China product you bought at the store may well have been made by a public firm. Oh, the horrors of socialism!

Although hardline Maoists decry China’s present economic project, saying that they have abandoned socialism for capitalism, that’s not really true.

If you go outside the cities into the rural areas, such as the wild areas, all of that land is owned by the state. Although the state has had problems in the environmental arena, in many cases the state stewards wildlands well. If that land were all privately owned, I assure you most of it would be developed with an eye towards profit or habitation. China’s wildlands and wild species would be in much worse shape than they are now, and on a worldwide scale, China is not a center of mass extinctions or endangered species.

It is capitalist countries, mostly rainforest ones, such as Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Philippines, Madagascar and Mexico that are leading the extinction and endangerment epidemic, not China.

The Nepalese Maoists have gone to China’s rural collectives and come back with smiles on their faces. Compared to Nepal, China seems like a socialist paradise. The same could be said for India. China’s people are much better off than India’s in a socialist manner of speaking.

Nevertheless, it is simply outrageous that in China, people are dying because they cannot afford healthcare. That’s really disgusting. The state has been trying to extend insurance to the masses, and state insurance is for sale that covers 8

Much of the progress in education that was made during the Cultural Revolution, especially in the rural areas (and incredible progress was made) has, incredibly, been in a process of reversal. Schools are being shut down in rural areas all over China. This is the damned economic miracle you capitalist-lovers are raving about. Tastes more like crow to me.

Furthermore, China continues to support North Korea, and North Korea is the source of most of Iran’s missiles. This blog supports the efforts of both North Korea and Iran to obtain nuclear weapons as deterrents, but hopefully not to use them.

North Korea’s nukes are the subject of a lot of misinformation. Yes they have a working nuclear device, but I think it is only a small one, maybe 1

People don’t understand nuclear missiles at all. First, it’s hard as Hell to make one. Next, it’s very hard to make good rockets that go 1000’s of miles with good accuracy. Third and most important, once you get the bomb, it is a whole matter altogether to figure out how to stick the thing onto a missile in such a way that it detonates on landing when firing the rocket. This is called weaponizing the warhead. It’s a whole new ballgame. Many states have had nuclear programs that have aborted or run aground at one or the other of these phases.

All in all, the movement towards Maoism in China is great news!

“Who Are The Maoists And What Do They Want?” by Rita Khanna

Great stuff here. Who Are The Maoists and What Do They Want? A good overview of the Maoist revolution in India.

Now from a generic Left POV, I would have to say that this post makes it clear that all of the previous solutions have completely failed to address the needs of the vast majority of Indians.

That includes the Congress Party, of course the BJP and the Right, the “Indian socialism” of the first 20 years of India’s statehood, and even the parties of the Left, including, to their shame, the Communist Parties in power. Not to mention the neoliberalism of the last 15 years or so. Failed, all failed.

Now that leaves your generic Leftwinger a couple of choices. To continue to support the various failed projects of the past, Left, Right or Center, or to try something new for a change. It’s clear that the Maoists, for better or worse, are the only people in India who even have a chance at addressing the various problems outlined below. Therefore, I support the Maoists! Not because I’m a Maoist myself (I’m more of a grocery list Leftwinger, and I even support social democracy in many places as the greatest good for the greatest number) but because their model is way better than all of the atrocious alternatives.

There aren’t enough Communists in India to put this project forward, nor enough in the world to support them. So the Maoists need the support of all Communists, socialists and even progressives in general for their cause, and they ought to welcome support from the non-Marxist Left and even non-Leftist liberals and progressives.

After reading this, all I can say is, “Go Maoists Go!”

War Against the Maoists: But Who Are They and What Do They Want

Rita Khanna

Radical Notes Journal

November 19, 2009

Author’s Note: This is meant to be a simple and brief exposition of the goals and strategies of the Maoist movement in India for people who may not have much awareness about it and are confused by the propaganda in the mainstream media. This does not go into the arcane debates about mode of production in India, the debates among communist revolutionaries over strategy and tactics etc. This aims at people who, for example, are perplexed why the Maoists, instead of trying to ensure safe drinking water like an NGO, rather, often resort to violent activities against the Government.

The Indian government is launching a full-scale war against the Maoist rebels and the people led by them in different parts of the country. The initial battles, without any formal announcement, have already started. For this purpose, they intend to deploy about 75,000 security personnel in parts of Central and Eastern India, including Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. The government will organize its regular air force in addition to paramilitary and specially trained COBRA forces. The air force has begun to extend its logistic support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P. Chidambaram have declared the Maoist rebels to be “the biggest internal security threat” to India and a hindrance to “development.” The mainstream media seem to have taken them at their face value.

Their publications and television programs seem to be building a war hysteria against the Maoist rebels regardless of the fact that this attack by the government will be directed against some of the most deprived of the Indian people. Indeed this is turning into a war of the state against its own people!

While paying lip service at times to the notion that the current people’s insurgency led by the Maoist rebels has its root in decades of vicious exploitation of the poor, especially the Dalits and tribals, the blare of government propaganda tries to convince us that the Maoist rebels are dangerous, bloodthirsty terrorists determined to establish their areas of influence.

The Government is preaching that the Maoists can go to any extent to maintain their influence in these areas – by either preventing the government from undertaking development activities or by using the power of their guns and killing disobedient individuals. Their ideology is to terrorize the common people, wrest power from the democratically elected governments and destroy the entire fabric of the society.

The government and the media want us to believe that the only people, apart from a few romantic misguided intellectuals, who willingly support Maoists are the poor, ignorant, uneducated, uninformed tribal people. They seem to claim that no sensible, intelligent person living in a society like ours would support them voluntarily. But is this a true picture?

Could it be that the Maoist rebels are supporting and organizing the poor, exploited people to fight oppression, to establish a more egalitarian society where the wealth of our growing economy will be spread among all, not merely among a very small minority? Could it be that in the name of suppressing the Maoists, the state is going all out to break the backbone of these poor peoples’ fight? Could it be that the government is planning to wage a war, in our name, against our own sisters and brothers to help line the pockets of the rich?

In this hour of crisis, we must ask those questions that the government seeks to suppress.

What do we really know about the Maoist rebels, their ideology, their plans and programs? Why does the government need to go to war against its own people and inside its own territory? Are the Maoists really blocking development? Who are these Maoists anyway and what do they want?

Let us take one question at a time.

Who are these Maoists?

The Maoists are revolutionaries mainly extremely poor people, including a large number of Dalits and tribals. They come mainly from the toiling masses of India, and they are trying to organize the vast population of such masses of this country. They seek to arm and train them so that these masses can resist the onslaught of the rich. In this effort, they go beyond the idea that mass movements should focus on some specific issues like wage increases, better health care, more honesty of public servants and so forth.

The view of the Maoist rebels is that the poor and exploited people must first and foremost establish their own democratic political power and their own state power in various places. This is because without controlling state power, the poor and the exploited can at most hope for only limited improvements in their living conditions, i.e., so long as it does not inconvenience the rich who usually control the state power.

So, the Maoists mobilize the poor to fight against the existing state, even with arms if possible, as they consider the existing state to be a set of agents acting for the big multinational corporations, rich landlords and the wealthy in general.

The fight is an extremely challenging and unequal one, as the rich are aided by the government bureaucrats, the police and even the military. Also, contrary to what the Government and the mainstream media are propagating, the Maoist rebels are actually completely opposed to individual killings; they openly denigrate such stray terrorism-like acts. What they have been attempting to build up is a mass movement, even armed, to take on the violence of the ruling classes and its representative state machinery.

The Maoist movement was born in India in the late 1960s, after a radical section of political workers broke away mainly from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) because they felt the CPIM and other such parties like CPI, RSP, etc. had discredited themselves with their opportunist politics of placating and compromising with the rich. The movement has a long history of development. The present party, CPI (Maoist), came into being in 2004 by the merger of a number of fraternal organizations.

Is development in India arrested because the Maoist rebels are blocking it?

What is the state of the people of India at present? With its current high rate of growth, this is also a country of abject poverty and extreme inequality. Home to 24 billionaires (second largest in Asia according to Forbes), India can also boast of 230 million people who go to bed on a half-empty stomach (World Hunger Report).

A country whose economy grows at

In this so called “hub of knowledge economy,” only 1

Maoists do not oppose “development” at all, they only oppose the “pro-rich development” at the expense of destitution or often total destruction of the poor. For example, in the Dandakaranya region of Chhattisgarh, they oppose the setting up of helipads, but there, the poor themselves, led by the Maoist rebels, have built irrigation tanks and wells for help in agriculture, something the Indian government did not bother to do.

The Indian government routinely blames the Maoist rebels for blowing up schools! But what the government tries to suppress is that these blown up school buildings were actually being used or requisitioned as  camps for security personnel!

And what changes do they want? Why do they want these changes?

(1) Overhauling the entire structure of oppression instead of piecemeal reforms

In addition to all the woes described above, India is also a country where thousands of Muslims can be butchered in broad daylight by fascist Hindu forces (the most widespread and gruesome such pogrom in recent times happened in Gujarat in 2002), while the ministers and police look the other way.

And these features are not the stray results of the misdeeds of a few villains. The existing sociopolitical system in India has a built-in mechanism which ensures that the common masses will be oppressed by a rich and powerful few. Widespread systemic violence is required and is routinely applied by the Indian state so that common people remain disciplined and do not revolt in the face of oppression.

(2) Land to the tillers and destruction of the landlord class

About 6

In the last four decades the proportion of households with little or no land (landless and marginal farmer households) has increased steadily from 6

The Maoist revolutionaries want to change this to ensure equitable distribution of land. They do not deter the landless and poor peasants and the poor rural labourers from collective armed fight against the existing state power for achieving this goal.

(3) Freedom from money lenders and traders

Indebtedness in rural India has been increasing by leaps and bounds, especially in the recent decades. Public rural banks are closing down due to relaxation of government regulation. Therefore, instead of securing credits from public institutional sources, rural folk are now being forced to approach the village money lenders (who are often big landlords or rich farmers as well) on a larger and larger scale.

Unscrupulous traders are adding to the misery of poor peasants. They sell spurious inputs to small and marginal peasants at exorbitant prices. They also make huge profits by buying their harvest at throwaway prices and selling them in urban areas at a premium.

Not-so-well-off peasants, in this no-win situation, of course end up needing substantial credit. Private moneylenders and various for-profit financial companies take advantage of this situation by extracting enormous sums from peasants. Interest rates can be as high as

The Maoist rebels want to change this.

(4) End of caste system and eradication of untouchability

It is well known that the caste system is still thriving in India. Economically it keeps the overwhelming majority of the people in dire poverty and politically it suppresses their fundamental democratic rights. Often the lower castes are robbed of their human dignity. They are even denied access to public facilities like some sources of drinking water, schools etc.

An Expert Group of the Planning Commission reports that in 7

According to an NCDHR report, on average, 27 atrocities (including murder, abduction and rape) against Dalits take place every day. The well-off landed sections in the villages still come mainly from the upper castes. They use Brahminical ideology to try to keep all other sections of the population under domination.

The same is true for usurers, merchants, hoarders, quarry owners, contractors – all mainly come from the upper castes. In short, the upper castes are still very much in command in all aspects of rural life. Often they run a parallel raj with their own private army of goondas.

The Maoists want to break this stranglehold of the upper castes and ensure equal rights for Dalits and Adivasis.

(5) Freedom from exploitation by foreign multinationals and its local partners

Since 1991, foreign capital, in alliance with big capitalists like Reliance, Tata and state bureaucrats, has penetrated vast sectors of the Indian economy. Every sphere of our life, starting from road construction, electricity generation and communication networks to food retail, health and education are under direct control of this coterie. In the name of “development” thousands of acres of land are being transferred to big business and multinationals.

For example, in Bastar, Chattisgarh, in the name of the Bodh Ghat Dam project, tens of thousands of Adivasis are being forcibly evicted from their “jal-jangal- zameen” (water-forest- land). In Niyamgiri, Orissa the land which is the abode of several Dongria tribes has been handed over to the multinational Vedanta group, which will completely destroy the livelihood of these tribes, affecting more than 20,000 people. The state government and the mainstream opposition parties of the state are actively supporting such activities.

The Maoists, over the years, have been resisting such plunder.

(6) Ensuring people’s democratic rights

It is well known that elections are often a sham in India. The parliament, as we have seen several times, is a bazaar where the rich and super-rich can buy the MPs. According to the ADR (Association of Democratic Reform), the average asset of an MP has gone up to 5.12 crore in 2009 from Rs 1.8 crore in 2004. In our democracy the erstwhile rajas and maharajas, like the Scindias, are still proliferating and control the local economy and polity in many places.

And we also know the state of the judicial system in our country. The Salman Khans and Sanjeev Nandas can kill by running over commoners with their cars, yet they can still escape the law for a very long time, perhaps forever.

B.N. Kirpal, the judge, who arbitrarily ordered that Indian rivers be interlinked, ignoring the resulting ecological and human calamity, joined the environmental board of Coca-Cola after he retired.

The Maoists want to establish people’s court where poor people can get true justice. In fact, such courts run in many places where the Maoist movement is strong.

(7) Self-determination for the nationalities

The Indian government ruthlessly suppresses the national aspirations of many people. These people and their land became part of India by accident – because the British raj annexed their homeland or a despotic king wanted their land to be a part of India. Lakhs of Indian troops have been deployed in Kashmir and the northeastern states to curb the  struggles of the people in these states for their national self-determination.

Since 1958, AFSPA has been imposed in northeastern states, which allows armed forces to conduct search and seizure without warrant, to arrest without warrant, to destroy any house without any verification and to shoot to kill with full impunity. In Kashmir, there is 1 military personnel for every 15 civilian.

Cold blooded murders, like those of Thangjam Manorama Devi, Chungkham Sanjit, Neelofar and Asiya Jan, are carried out frequently in the name of “countering terrorism.” The Maoist rebels seek to establish freedom of self-determination for all nationalities.

So, to sum up, the new society the Maoists want to establish will have the following components:

  • Land to the poor and landless. Later on cooperative farming is to be established on voluntary basis.
  • Forest to the tribal people.
  • End of the rule of the rich and the upper caste in villages and the uprooting of the caste system. Uproot all discrimination based on gender and religion.
  • Seizure of the ill gotten wealth and assets of multinational corporations and their local Indian partners.
  • Self-determination for the nationalities, political autonomy for the tribes.
  • Establish a state by the poor and for the poor, where the present day exploiters would be expropriated.
  • Participation of people in day to day administrative work and decision making. Democracy at the true grassroots level with people having the power to recall their democratic representatives.

In summary: ensuring freedom, rights and democracy for all sections of the toiling masses.

What have the Maoists-led people’s struggles achieved so far?

Information in this section is taken, purposely, from the Expert Group Report to the Planning Commission, which is available on the web.

Contrary to what the media try to portray, the government’s own report says that the movement led by the Maoist rebels cannot be seen as simply blowing up of police stations and killing individual people. It encompasses a mass organization. Mass participation in militant protest has always been a characteristic of such mobilization.

Although the Maoists by their own admission are engaged in a long term people’s struggle against the oppression by the present India state, their movement has already achieved some short term successes in improving the condition of the poor people.

The Maoist movement in India was built around the demand of “land to the tillers.” Numerous struggles, led by the Maoists, have been fought all over the country, especially in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, to free land from the big landholding families. In many such cases landlords have been driven away from the villages and their land has been put in the possession of the landless poor. But the police and paramilitary do not allow the poor to cultivate such lands.

In Bihar, landless Musahars, the lowest among the Dalits, have struggled and taken possession of fallow government land. This has had the support of Maoists.

Under the leadership of the Maoists, the Adivasis have reclaimed forest land on an extensive scale in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, Orissa and Jharkhand. The Adivasis displaced by irrigation projects in Orissa had to migrate to the forests of the Visakhapatnam District of Andhra Pradesh in large numbers. The Forest Department officials harassed and evicted them on a regular basis. The movement led by the Maoists put an end to this.

In rural India, the Minimum Wages Act remains an act on paper only. In the forest areas of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand, non-payment of legal wages was a major source of the exploitation of Adivasi laborer. Maoists-led struggles have put an effective end to it. These struggles have secured increases in the rate of payment for picking tendu leaves (used for rolling beedies), washing clothes, making pots, tending cattle, repairing implements etc.

The exploitation previously had been so severe that as a result of the sustained movement led by the Maoists, the pay rates of tendu leaves collection have over the years increased by fifty times.

The movement has given confidence to the oppressed to assert their rights and demand respect and dignity from the dominant castes and classes. The everyday humiliation and sexual exploitation of laboring women of Dalit and tribal communities by upper caste men has been successfully fought. Forced labour, begari, by which the toiling castes had to provide obligatory service for free to the upper castes, was also put an end to in many parts of the country.

In rural India, disputes are commonly taken to the rich and powerful of the village (who are generally the landlords) and caste panchayats, where the dispensation of justice is in favour of the rich and powerful. The Maoist movement has provided a mechanism, usually described as the “People’s Court” whereby these disputes are resolved in the interests of the wronged party.

Why then does the government need to go to war against its own people led by these rebels instead of hailing them as true patriots?

There is a simple answer. Chattisgarh, Orissa are rich in mineral wealth that can be sold to the highest multinational bidder. The only obstacle standing between the corrupt politicians and ALL THIS MONEY are the poor, disenfranchised tribal people (and the Maoists leading them). So, this war. This is not something new in India or for that matter in other parts of the world.

Mobutu’s corrupt regime selling off the Belgian Congo piece by piece to the US, Belgium and other countries comes to mind. In the sixty years of independence from direct colonial rule, the Indian state has been doing the same. It has systematically impoverished the overwhelming majority to serve the interest of a powerful few and their foreign friends.

The impending war to evict the tribal people from their villages, on the pretext of eliminating the Maoists, will be fought at the behest of big corporations, who want to control and plunder our resources such as minerals, water and forests. It is high time that we recognize this pattern of waging war which will be fought by the poor on both sides, but will benefit only the big capitalists and their cheerleaders in the government.

Note: For an interested reader, the Banned Thought site contains an enormous wealth of information about the Maoist rebels, including their own documents.

Death Tolls For Western Imperialism, Colonialism and 3rd World Capitalism

Repost from the old site.

Global Avoidable Mortality blog looks pretty interesting, and I have mucked around there a bit.

The part about 500 million dead Muslims post-1950 looks pretty interesting, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

More Polya here.

Total excess mortality per year as of 2004:

Iraq        122,000

Afghanistan 359,000

India       2.2 million

Pakistan    478,000

Bangladesh  288,000

In Iraq and Afghanistan, those are the excess deaths that are probably occurring due to Coalition activities (especially in Iraq). In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the excess deaths are probably due to the lack of socialism.

Does Welfare Cause Crime?

Repost from the old site.

In the comments, Uncle Milton says:

I have spent extensive time in third world countries. In general I found them much safer than the inner cities of the US which are filled with people who collect checks from the government and still feel strongly they are owned something and will take it out on each and anyone wandering into their midst.

 

The notion that “welfare causes crime” is very problematic. I don’t believe that the folks pushing this argument have ever proved their case. In Europe, there is a good model backed up with many studies that shows that the more socialism you have in the system, the less crime you have.

The more capitalism, the more crime. This is proven in the transition from socialism to capitalism in the FSU, Eastern Europe and China which were followed by tremendous crime waves.

If you cut all those folks in the ghetto off of all the welfare, would they be any less criminal?

There doesn’t seem to be any theoretical model for why welfare would cause crime. Why would giving someone stuff turn him into a criminal? According to Uncle Milton, it is because they “feel they are owed something.”

But aren’t people owed something under Communism? Basic needs were provided for everyone. Perhaps Communism was the ultimate welfare state. At least this is what conservatives say. How then did Communist states have the lowest levels of crime around?

Furthermore, I would point out that the 3rd World equivalent of our ghettos are often vastly more dangerous that US ghettos. I worked in the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles for years and I lost one car battery in East LA and I had the wires cut on another car battery in Watts. Of course, I was usually out of there before dark.

I lived in Oakhurst, a town in the Sierra Nevada, for 16 years. I don’t know the figures, but word is that the welfare use rate was very high the whole time I was there. Girls got pregnant as soon as they got out of high school (18-20 or so) and the guy may or may not be around.

Many just became single Moms for various periods of time. I suppose there were guys floating in and out of their lives, but that’s how it goes with single Moms in general. In my apartment complex, there were two single Moms out of six tenants.

The guys support the kids in some cases and marry them in others, but in quite a few cases, they don’t marry the woman, and in other cases, they do not support them either.

Although the rate of this sort of thing among the Amerindians in town is insanely high, I would like to focus on the Whites. There is a very high rate of welfare use among Whites in this town. This includes all kinds of welfare – food stamps, Medicaid, welfare proper, etc. There was very little crime in this town.

The crime rate was so low that I often did not lock my car at home and often left the house without locking the door. I did that for years with no break-ins. Violent crime was nearly nonexistent. Gangs did not exist, and juvenile crime did not seem to be significant from my POV.

I had heard that it took a long time for a welfare culture to develop as kids come of age and become pathological due to being raised in a welfare family. I watched this scene for 16 years and no welfare culture develop. I assume that was enough time.

It’s an interesting question why high welfare use seems to be associated with mass pathology in some groups (Hispanics and Blacks) but not in others (Asians and Whites). Even in Oakhurst, relatively high levels of pathology coincided with extremely high welfare use among Amerindians. Nevertheless, with Amerindians about

So much for welfare causes crime.

Fraud and Cronyism Under Neoliberalism – A Feature, Not a Bug

Repost from the old site.

In the comments section, Uncle Milton suggests that the massive fraud perpetuated under the Bush regime (I would add under Reagan too) was antithetical to a free market system. A true free market system is supposed to make fraud illegal.

By any definition of classical economics, what happened to the real estate market was fraud on a massive scale. PS No bid contracts in Iraq as you might guess as nothing to do with free market economics. Crony capitalism and corruption are in conflict with free market economics. If you take a turd, paint it white, and call it beautiful.. it’s still a turd.

 

By your definition, Unc, free market economics hardly occurs anywhere. This seems to be the problem. Once these neoliberal systems are put in, they are very prone to corruption and crony capitalism. Extremely prone! Everyone wails about it, but it seems to be almost an inherent part of the system. A feature, not a bug.

And the proponents of the free market tend to be very tolerant of massive fraud to the point of not even tolerating it. The more free market the system, it seems the more fraud and cronyism.

As more socialist leaning groups come in, they tend to reign in the fraud to some extent. Europe has very low levels of fraud (it’s considered to be a safe place to do business), and it has high levels of socialism in its system.

China moving from socialism to capitalism was followed by massive fraud and cronyism. Same with Russia and to a much lesser extent Eastern Europe. The neoliberal revolution in Latin America coincided with a tremendous amount of crony capitalism and fraud as state enterprises were sold off to friends of the state in a cronyist fashion for pennies on the dollar.

The way to reduce fraud and cronyism in a capitalist system is to empower the state more (social democracy). Culture also plays a role though.

As an aside, I would point out that the free market ideologists spreading the gospel of neoliberalism had almost nothing to say about the massive cronyism, fraud, graft and out and out theft associated with their neoliberal revolution.

While the billionaires looted Russia bare and bled the country dry, the Jeffrey Sachs’ (the mastermind of the plan and yes, he is Jewish) of the world said nothing. The corporate media mostly just cheered.

The Friedmanites out of the Chicago School have for the most part been fashioning a free market vision in which fraud, graft, cheating, lying and even out of out theft seems to be legal when done by big capitalists wearing suits under a legalistic veneer. There were few persecutions for the massive fraud that occurred under Reagan and now under Bush.

If, as Unc notes above, the financial crash was predicated on massive amounts of out and out crime, it should be clear to us in the next year or so that almost no one is going to go to jail over it.

The FBI looked into investigating the financial crash and seems to have decided that there were far too many criminals committing far too many crimes for the FBI to even begin to get involved at current staff levels, especially with the needs of the War on Terror, so it looks like most of the criminals are just going to get away with it.

As I note above, increasingly, it seems as if mass cronyism, fraud and financial crime in general under neoliberalism is more of a feature than a bug.

Interview with Ganapathi, Leader of India’s Growing Maoist Revolution

This is a great interview with the Supreme Commander of the Indian Maoists, Ganapathi. He is little known and almost never heard from or even seen. The Indian government supposedly does not even know what he looks like. They have only a grainy photo from some years ago.

The Indian Maoists are having spectacular success, and I support them all the way. Not because that’s my nature, but because all of the other parties, from Congress in the Center to BJP on the Right to the CPI-M (Communist Party of India-Marxist) on the Left, have utterly failed the Indian people in every way imaginable. And they’ve had 72 years to get it right. It’s time to say enough is enough and look at some other alternatives. Hopefully, the Maoists could build India up like Mao built up China and then maybe they could transition to a mixed economy like the Chinese have now.

Lalgarh is an area of West Bengal, a state that has been ruled by the CPI-M for 20 years now. This party has completely failed the people in every way imaginable. One could argue that they are not even much of a Communist party anymore. The Maoists have taken over this region of western West Bengal and now control most of it. The people in this region are tribals, or adivasis, the indigenous people of India who are outside the caste system, but nevertheless on the bottom of the ladder. The tribals in Lalgarh are called Santalis.

Much of the state of Bihar is now controlled by Maoists and they hold sway over all of Jharkand. They are in many areas of Orissa, but do not control the whole state. Chattisargh is seriously overrun with Maoists and is almost Ground Zero for the rebellion. They are also in the far eastern part of Maharashtra.

They suffered a serious setback about a decade ago in Andhra Pradesh and this is what the reporter was referring to. I don’t know the details, but it looks like just a concerted counterinsurgency project by the state. The Maoists are starting to get a bit of a presence in Haryana, but it’s mostly the armed propaganda stage at this point. They are also organizing in Dehli and other big cities, but they have a lot of problems in urban areas and it’s going to be really hard to get an urban insurgency going.

Everywhere the Maoists have their most intense following with the tribals and adivasis, the lowest of the low. I am not sure to what extent they have support with Dalits and other low castes.  It’s true that they have lost some top leadership lately, but I figure they will just replace them with underlings. This interview took place in Dandakaranya, in Chattisargh.

People who oppose the Maoists are asked what precisely India should do instead, considering the failure of all of the attempted capitalist models so far.

It’s interesting, and tragic, that the Left are the only people on Earth other than some fellow successionists who support the nationalist struggle of the Tamils in Sir Lanka. The entire rest of the world, imperialist and statist, has lined up with the Sinhala-Nazis. And you people ask me why I’m a Leftist. What good are the alternatives?

We Shall Certainly Defeat the Government

The supreme commander of CPI (Maoist) talks to Open in his first-ever interview.

At first sight, Mupalla Laxman Rao, who is about to turn 60, looks like a school teacher. In fact, he was one in the early 1970s in Andhra Pradesh’s Karimnagar district. In 2009, however, the bespectacled, soft-spoken figure is India’s Most Wanted Man. He runs one of the world’s largest Left insurgencies—a man known in Home Ministry dossiers as Ganapathi; a man whose writ runs large through 15 states.

The supreme commander of CPI (Maoist) is a science graduate and holds a B Ed degree as well. He still conducts classes, but now they are on guerrilla warfare for other senior Maoists. He replaced the founder of the People’s War Group, Kondapalli Seetharaamiah, as the party’s general-secretary in 1991. Ganapathi is known to change his location frequently, and intelligence reports say he has been spotted in cities like Hyderabad, Kolkata and Kochi.

After months of attempts, Ganapathi agreed to give his first-ever interview. Somewhere in the impregnable jungles of Dandakaranya, he spoke to RAHUL PANDITA on issues ranging from the Government’s proposed anti-Naxal offensive to Islamist Jihadist movements.

Q Lalgarh has been described as the New Naxalbari by the CPI (Maoist). How has it become so significant for you?

A The Lalgarh mass uprising has, no doubt, raised new hopes among the oppressed people and the entire revolutionary camp in West Bengal. It has great positive impact not only on the people of West Bengal but also on the people all over the country. It has emerged as a new model of mass movement in the country.

We had seen similar types of movements earlier in Manipur, directed against Army atrocities and Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), in Kashmir, in Dandakaranya and to some extent in Orissa, after the Kalinganagar massacre perpetrated by the Naveen Patnaik government.

Then there have been mass movements in Singur and Nandigram but there the role of a section of the ruling classes is also significant. These movements were utilized by the ruling class parties for their own electoral interests. But Lalgarh is a more widespread and more sustained mass political movement that has spurned the leadership of all the parliamentary political parties, thereby rendering them completely irrelevant.

The people of Lalgarh had even boycotted the recent Lok Sabha polls, thereby unequivocally demonstrating their anger and frustration with all the reactionary ruling class parties. Lalgarh also has some distinctive features such as a high degree of participation of women, a genuinely democratic character and a wider mobilization of Adivasis. No wonder, it has become a rallying point for the revolutionary-democratic forces in West Bengal.

Q If it is a people’s movement, how did Maoists get involved in Lalgarh?

A As far as our party’s role is concerned, we have been working in Paschim Midnapur, Bankura and Purulia, in what is popularly known as Jangalmahal since the 1980s. We fought against the local feudal forces, against the exploitation and oppression by the forest officials, contractors, unscrupulous usurers and the goondaism of both the CPM and Trinamool Congress.

The ruling CPM, in particular, has become the chief exploiter and oppressor of the Adivasis of the region, and it has unleashed its notorious vigilante gangs called Harmad Vahini on whoever questions its authority. With the State authority in its hands, and with the aid of the police, it is playing a role worse than that of the cruel landlords in other regions of the country.

Given this background, anyone who dares to fight against oppression and exploitation by the CPM can win the respect and confidence of the people. Since our party has been fighting uncompromisingly against the atrocities of the CPM goons, it naturally gained the confidence and respect of the people of the region.

The police atrocities in the wake of the landmine blast on 2 November [in 2008, from which West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had a narrow escape] acted as the trigger that brought the pent-up anger of the masses into the open. This assumed the form of a long-drawn mass movement, and our party played the role of a catalyst.

Q But not so long ago, the CPM was your friend. You even took arms and ammunition from it to fight the Trinamool Congress. This has been confirmed by a Politburo member of CPI (Maoist) in certain interviews. And now you are fighting the CPM with the help of the Trinamool. How did a friend turn into a foe and vice-versa?

A This is only partially true. We came to know earlier that some ammunition was taken by our local cadre from the CPM unit in the area. There was, however, no understanding with the leadership of the CPM in this regard. Our approach was to unite all sections of the oppressed masses at the lower levels against the goondaism and oppression of Trinamool goons in the area at that time.

And since a section of the oppressed masses were in the fold of the CPM at that time, we fought together with them against Trinamool. Still, taking into consideration the overall situation in West Bengal, it was not a wise step to take arms and ammunition from the CPM even at the local level when the contradiction was basically between two sections of the reactionary ruling classes.

Our central committee discussed this, criticized the comrade responsible for taking such a decision, and directed the concerned comrades to stop this immediately. As regards taking ammunition from the Trinamool Congress, I remember that we had actually purchased it not directly from the Trinamool but from someone who had links with the Trinamool.

There will never be any conditions or agreements with those selling us arms. That has been our understanding all along. As regards the said interview by our Politburo member, we will verify what he had actually said.

Q What are your tactics now in Lalgarh after the massive offensive by the Central and state forces?

A First of all, I wish to make it crystal clear that our party will spearhead and stand firmly by the side of the people of Lalgarh and entire Jangalmahal, and draw up tactics in accordance with the people’s interests and mandate. We shall spread the struggle against the State everywhere and strive to win over the broad masses to the side of the people’s cause.

We shall fight the State offensive by mobilizing the masses more militantly against the police, Harmad Vahini and CPM goons. The course of the development of the movement, of course, will depend on the level of consciousness and preparedness of the people of the region. The party will take this into consideration while formulating its tactics. The initiative of the masses will be released fully.

Q The Government has termed Lalgarh a ‘laboratory’ for anti-Naxal operations. Has your party also learnt any lessons from Lalgarh?

A Yes, our party too has a lot to learn from the masses of Lalgarh. Their upsurge was beyond our expectations. In fact, it was the common people, with the assistance of advanced elements influenced by revolutionary politics, who played a crucial role in the formulation of tactics. They formed their own organisation, put forth their charter of demands, worked out various novel forms of struggle, and stood steadfast in the struggle despite the brutal attacks by the police and the social-fascist Harmad gangs.

The Lalgarh movement has the support of revolutionary and democratic forces not only in West Bengal but in the entire country. We are appealing to all revolutionary and democratic forces in the country to unite to fight back the fascist offensive by the Buddhadeb government in West Bengal and the UPA Government at the Centre.

By building the broadest fighting front, and by adopting appropriate tactics of combining the militant mass political movement with armed resistance of the people and our PLGA (People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army), we will defeat the massive offensive by the Central-state forces. I cannot say more than this at the present juncture.

Q The Centre has declared an all-out war against Maoists by branding the CPI (Maoist) a terrorist organisation and imposing an all-India ban on the party. How has it affected your party?

A Our party has already been banned in several states of India. By imposing the ban throughout the country, the Government now wants to curb all our open activities in West Bengal and a few other states where legal opportunities exist to some extent. The Government wants to use this draconian UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act] to harass whoever dares to raise a voice against fake encounters, rapes and other police atrocities on the people residing in Maoist-dominated regions. Anyone questioning the State’s brutalities will now be branded a terrorist.

The real terrorists and biggest threats to the country’s security are none other than Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, Buddhadeb, other ruling class leaders and feudal forces who terrorize the people on a daily basis.

The UPA Government had declared, as soon as it assumed power for the second time, that it would crush the Maoist ‘menace’ and began pouring in huge funds to the states for this purpose. The immediate reason behind this move is the pressure exerted by the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the imperialists, particularly US imperialists, who want to plunder the resources of our country without any hindrance.

These sharks aspire to swallow the rich abundant mineral and forest wealth in the vast contiguous region stretching from Jangalmahal to north Andhra. This region is the wealthiest as well as the most underdeveloped part of our country. These sharks want to loot the wealth and drive the Adivasi people of the region to further impoverishment.

Another major reason for the current offensive by the ruling classes is the fear of the rapid growth of the Maoist movement and its increasing influence over a significant proportion of the Indian population.

The Janatana Sarkars in Dandakaranya and the revolutionary people’s committees in Jharkhand, Orissa and parts of some other states have become new models of genuine people’s democracy and development. The rulers want to crush these new models of development and genuine democracy, as these are emerging as the real alternative before the people of the country at large.

Q The Home Ministry has made preparations for launching a long-term battle against Maoists. A huge force will be soon trying to wrest away areas from your control. How do you plan to confront this offensive?

A Successive governments in various states and the Centre have been hatching schemes over the years. But they could not achieve any significant success through their cruel offensive in spite of murdering hundreds of our leaders and cadres. Our party and our movement continued to consolidate and expand to new regions. From two or three states, the movement has now spread to over 15 states, giving jitters to the ruling classes.

Particularly after the merger of the erstwhile MCCI and People’s War in September 2004 [the merger between these groups led to the formation of the CPI (Maoist)], the UPA Government has unleashed the most cruel all-round offensive against the Maoist movement. Yet our party continued to grow despite suffering some severe losses. In the past three years, in particular, our PLGA has achieved several significant victories.

We have been confronting the continuous offensive of the enemy with the support and active involvement of the masses. We shall confront the new offensive of the enemy by stepping up such heroic resistance and preparing the entire party, PLGA, the various revolutionary parties and organisations and the entire people. Although the enemy may achieve a few successes in the initial phase, we shall certainly overcome and defeat the Government offensive with the active mobilization of the vast masses and the support of all the revolutionary and democratic forces in the country.

No fascist regime or military dictator in history could succeed in suppressing forever the just and democratic struggles of the people through brute force, but were, on the contrary, swept away by the high tide of people’s resistance. People, who are the makers of history, will rise up like a tornado under our party’s leadership to wipe out the reactionary blood-sucking vampires ruling our country.

Q Why do you think the CPI (Maoist) suffered a serious setback in Andhra Pradesh?

A It was due to several mistakes on our part that we suffered a serious setback in most of Andhra Pradesh by 2006. At the same time, we should also look at the setback from another angle. In any protracted people’s war, there will be advances and retreats. If we look at the situation in Andhra Pradesh from this perspective, you will understand that what we did there is a kind of retreat. Confronted with a superior force, we chose to temporarily retreat our forces from some regions of Andhra Pradesh, extend and develop our bases in the surrounding regions and then hit back at the enemy.

Now even though we received a setback, it should be borne in mind that this setback is a temporary one. The objective conditions in which our revolution began in Andhra Pradesh have not undergone any basic change. This very fact continues to serve as the basis for the growth and intensification of our movement.

Moreover, we now have a more consolidated mass base, a relatively better-trained people’s guerrilla army and an all-India party with deep roots among the basic classes who comprise the backbone of our revolution. This is the reason why the reactionary rulers are unable to suppress our revolutionary war, which is now raging in several states in the country.

We had taken appropriate lessons from the setback suffered by our party in Andhra Pradesh and, based on these lessons, drew up tactics in other states. Hence we are able to fight back the cruel all-round offensive of the enemy effectively, inflict significant losses on the enemy, preserve our subjective forces, consolidate our party, develop a people’s liberation guerrilla army, establish embryonic forms of new democratic people’s governments in some pockets, and take the people’s war to a higher stage.

Hence we have an advantageous situation, overall, for reviving the movement in Andhra Pradesh. Our revolution advances wave-like and periods of ebb yield place to periods of high tide.

Q What are the reasons for the setback suffered by the LTTE in Sri Lanka?

A There is no doubt that the movement for a separate sovereign Tamil Eelam has suffered a severe setback with the defeat and considerable decimation of the LTTE. The Tamil people and the national liberation forces are now leaderless. However, the Tamil people at large continue to cherish nationalist aspirations for a separate Tamil homeland. The conditions that gave rise to the movement for Tamil Eelam, in the first place, prevail to this day.

The Sinhala-chauvinist Sri Lankan ruling classes can never change their policy of discrimination against the Tamil nation, its culture, language, et cetera. The jingoistic rallies and celebrations organised by the government and Sinhala chauvinist parties all over Sri Lanka in the wake of Prabhakaran’s death and the defeat of the LTTE show the national hatred for Tamils nurtured by Sinhala organisations and the extent to which the minds of ordinary Sinhalese are poisoned with such chauvinist frenzy.

The conspiracy of the Sinhala ruling classes in occupying Tamil territories is similar to that of the Zionist rulers of Israel. The land-starved Sinhala people will now be settled in Tamil areas. The entire demography of the region is going to change. The ground remains fertile for the resurgence of the Tamil liberation struggle.

Even if it takes time, the war for a separate Tamil Eelam is certain to revive, taking lessons from the defeat of the LTTE. By adopting a proletarian outlook and ideology, adopting new tactics and building the broadest united front of all nationalist and democratic forces, it is possible to achieve the liberation of the oppressed Tamil nation [in Sri Lanka].

Maoist forces have to grow strong enough to provide leadership and give a correct direction and anti-imperialist orientation to this struggle to achieve a sovereign People’s Democratic Republic of Tamil Eelam. This alone can achieve the genuine liberation of the Tamil nation in Sri Lanka.

Q Is it true that you received military training from the LTTE initially?

A No. It is not a fact. We had clarified this several times in the past.

Q But one of your senior commanders has told me that some senior cadre of the erstwhile PWG did receive arms training and other support from the LTTE.

A Let me reiterate, there is no relation at all between our party and the LTTE. We tried several times to establish relations with the LTTE but its leadership was reluctant to have a relationship with Maoists in India. Hence, there is no question of the LTTE giving training to us. In spite of it, we continued our support to the struggle for Tamil Eelam. However, a few persons who had separated from the LTTE came into our contact and we took their help in receiving initial training in the last quarter of the 1980s.

Q Does your party have links with Lashkar-e-Toiba or other Islamic militant groups having links with Pakistan?

A No. Not at all. This is only mischievous, calculated propaganda by the police officials, bureaucrats and leaders of the reactionary political parties to defame us and thereby justify their cruel offensive against the Maoist movement. By propagating the lie that our party has links with groups linked to Pakistan’s ISI, the reactionary rulers of our country want to prove that we too are terrorists and gain legitimacy for their brutal terror campaign against Maoists and the people in the areas of armed agrarian struggle.

Trying to prove the involvement of a foreign hand in every just and democratic struggle, branding those fighting for the liberation of the oppressed as traitors to the country, is part of the psychological-war of the reactionary rulers.

Q What is your party’s stand regarding Islamist jihadist movements?

A Islamic jihadist movements of today are a product of imperialist—particularly US imperialist—aggression, intervention, bullying, exploitation and suppression of the oil-rich Islamic and Arab countries of West Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, et cetera, and the persecution of the entire Muslim religious community. As part of their designs for global hegemony, the imperialists, particularly US imperialists, have encouraged and endorsed every war of brazen aggression and brutal attacks by their surrogate state of Israel.

Our party unequivocally opposes every attack on Arab and Muslim countries and the Muslim community at large in the name of ‘war on global terror’. In fact, Muslim religious fundamentalism is encouraged and fostered by imperialists as long as it serves their interests—such as in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, and Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan.

Q But what about attacks perpetrated by the so-called ‘Jihadis’ on innocent people like it happened on 26/11?

A See, Islamic jihadist movements have two aspects: one is their anti-imperialist aspect, and the other their reactionary aspect in social and cultural matters. Our party supports the struggle of Muslim countries and people against imperialism, while criticising and struggling against the reactionary ideology and social outlook of Muslim fundamentalism. It is only Maoist leadership that can provide correct anti-imperialist orientation and achieve class unity among Muslims as well as people of other religious persuasions.

The influence of Muslim fundamentalist ideology and leadership will diminish as communist revolutionaries and other democratic-secular forces increase their ideological influence over the Muslim masses. As communist revolutionaries, we always strive to reduce the influence of the obscurantist reactionary ideology and outlook of the mullahs and maulvis on the Muslim masses, while uniting with all those fighting against the common enemy of the world people—that is, imperialism, particularly American imperialism.

Q How do you look at the changes in US policy after Barack Obama took over from George Bush?

A Firstly, one would be living in a fool’s paradise if one imagines that there is going to be any qualitative change in American policy—whether internal or external—after Barack Obama took over from George Bush. In fact, the policies on national security and foreign affairs pursued by Obama over the past eight months have shown the essential continuity with those of his predecessor. The ideological and political justification for these regressive policies at home and aggressive policies abroad is the same trash put forth by the Bush administration—the so-called ‘global war on terror’, based on outright lies and slander.

Worse still, the policies have become even more aggressive under Obama with his planned expansion of the US-led war of aggression in Afghanistan into the territory of Pakistan. The hands of this new killer-in-chief of the pack of imperialist wolves are already stained with the blood of hundreds of women and children who are cruelly murdered in relentless missile attacks from Predator drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And, within the US itself, bail-outs for the tiny corporate elite and attacks on democratic and human rights of US citizens continue without any change.

The oppressed people and nations of the world are now confronting an even more formidable and dangerous enemy in the form of an African-American president of the most powerful military machine and world gendarme. The world people should unite to wage a more relentless, more militant and more consistent struggle against the American marauders led by Barack Obama and pledge to defeat them to usher in a world of peace, stability and genuine democracy.

Q How do you look at the current developments in Nepal?

A As soon as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) [CPN(M)] came to power in alliance with the comprador-feudal parties through the parliamentary route in Nepal, we had pointed out the grave danger of imperialist and Indian expansionist intervention in Nepal and how they would leave no stone unturned to overthrow the government led by CPN(M).

As long as Prachanda did not defy the directives of the Indian Government, it was allowed to continue, but when it began to go against Indian hegemony, it was immediately pulled down. CPN-UML withdrew support to the Prachanda-led government upon the advice of American imperialists and Indian expansionists. We disagreed with the line of peaceful transition pursued by the UCPN(M) in the name of tactics. We decided to send an open letter to the UCPN(M). It was released in July 2009.

We made our party’s stand clear in the letter. We pointed out that the UCPN(M) chose to reform the existing State through an elected constituent assembly and a bourgeois democratic republic instead of adhering to the Marxist-Leninist understanding on the imperative to smash the old State and establish a proletarian State.

This would have been the first step towards the goal of achieving socialism through the radical transformation of society and all oppressive class relations. It is indeed a great tragedy that the UCPN(M) has chosen to abandon the path of protracted people’s war and pursue a parliamentary path in spite of having de facto power in most of the countryside.

It is heartening to hear that a section of the leadership of the UCPN(M) has begun to struggle against the revisionist positions taken by Comrade Prachanda and others. Given the great revolutionary traditions of the UCPN(M), we hope that the inner-party struggle will repudiate the right opportunist line pursued by its leadership, give up revisionist stands and practices, and apply minds creatively to the concrete conditions of Nepal.

Q Of late, the party has suffered serious losses of party leadership at the central and state level. Besides, it is widely believed that some of the senior-most Maoist leaders, including you, have become quite old and suffer from serious illnesses, which is also cited as one of the reasons for the surrenders. What is the effect of the losses and surrenders on the movement? How are you dealing with problems arising out of old age and illnesses?

A (Smiles…) This type of propaganda is being carried out continuously, particularly by the Special Intelligence Branch (SIB) of Andhra Pradesh. It is a part of the psychological war waged by intelligence officials and top police brass aimed at confusing and demoralising supporters of the Maoist movement. It is a fact that some of the party leaders at the central and state level could be described as senior citizens according to criteria used by the government, that is, those who have crossed the threshold of 60 years.

You can start calling me too a senior citizen in a few months (smiles). But old age and ill-health have never been a serious problem in our party until now. You can see the ‘senior citizens’ in our party working for 16-18 hours a day and covering long distances on foot.As for surrenders, it is a big lie to say that old age and ill-health have been a reason for some of the surrenders.

When Lanka Papi Reddy, a former member of our central committee, surrendered in the beginning of last year, the media propagated that more surrenders of our party leaders will follow due to ill-health. The fact is that Papi Reddy surrendered due to his loss of political conviction and his petty-bourgeois false prestige and ego. Hence he was not prepared to face the party after he was demoted by the central committee for his anarchic behaviour with a woman comrade.

Some senior leaders of our party, like comrades Sushil Roy and Narayan Sanyal, had become a nightmare for the ruling classes even when they were in their mid 60s. Hence they were arrested, tortured and imprisoned despite their old age and ill-health. The Government is doing everything possible to prevent them from getting bail. Even if someone in our party is old, he/she continues to serve the revolution by doing whatever work possible.

For instance, Comrade Niranjan Bose, who died recently at the age of 92, had been carrying out revolutionary propaganda until his martyrdom. The social fascist rulers were so scared of this nonagenarian Maoist revolutionary that they had even arrested him four years back. Such is the spirit of Maoist revolutionaries—and power of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism which they hold high. When there are serious illnesses, or physical and mental limitations to perform normal work, such comrades are given suitable work.

Q But what about the arrests and elimination of some of your senior leadership? How do you intend to fill up such losses?

A Well, it is a fact that we lost some senior leaders at the state and central level in the past four or five years. Some leaders were secretly arrested and murdered in the most cowardly manner. Many other and state leaders were arrested and placed behind bars in the recent past in Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Haryana and other states.

The loss of leadership will have a grave impact on the party and Indian revolution as a whole. We are reviewing the reasons for the losses regularly and devising ways and means to prevent further losses.

By adopting strictly secret methods of functioning and foolproof underground mechanisms, by enhancing our mass base, vigilance and local intelligence, smashing enemy intelligence networks and studying their plans and tactics, we hope to check further losses. At the same time, we are training and developing new revolutionary leadership at all levels to fill up the losses.

Q How do you sum up the present stage of war between your forces and those of the Indian State?

A Our war is in the stage of strategic defence. In some regions, we have an upper hand, while in others the enemy has the upper hand. Overall, our forces have been quite successful in carrying out a series of tactical counter-offensive operations against the enemy in our guerrilla zones in the past few years.

It is true that our party has suffered some serious leadership losses, but we are able to inflict serious losses on the enemy too. In fact, in the past three years, the enemy forces suffered more casualties than we did. The enemy has been trying all means at their disposal to weaken, disrupt and crush our party and movement.

They have tried covert agents and informers, poured in huge amounts of money to buy off weak elements in the revolutionary camp, and announced a series of rehabilitation packages and other material incentives to lure away people from the revolutionary camp.

Thousands of crores of rupees have been sanctioned for police modernization, training and for raising additional commando forces; for increasing Central forces; for training Central and state forces in counter-insurgency warfare; and for building roads, communication networks and other infrastructure for the rapid movement of their troops in our guerrilla zones.

The Indian State has set up armed vigilante groups and provided total support to the indescribable atrocities committed by these armed gangs on the people. Psychological warfare against Maoists was taken to unheard of levels.

Nevertheless, we continued to make greater advances, consolidated the party and the revolutionary people’s committees at various levels, strengthened the PLGA qualitatively and quantitatively, smashed the enemy’s intelligence network in several areas, effectively countered the dirty psychological-war waged by the enemy, and foiled the enemy’s all-out attempts to disrupt and smash our movement.

The successes we had achieved in several tactical counter-offensive operations carried out across the country in recent days, the militant mass movements in several states, particularly against displacement and other burning issues of the people, initiatives taken by our revolutionary people’s governments in various spheres—all these have had a great impact on the people, while demoralising enemy forces.

There are reports of desertions and disobedience of orders by the jawans posted in Maoist-dominated areas. Quite a few have refused to undertake training in jungle warfare or take postings in our areas, and had to face suspension. This trend will grow with the further advance of our people’s war. Overall, our party’s influence has grown stronger and it has now come to be recognised as the only genuine alternative before the people.

Q How long will this stage of strategic defence last, with the Centre ready to go for the jugular?

A The present stage of strategic defence will last for some more time. It is difficult to predict how long it will take to pass this stage and go to the stage of strategic equilibrium or strategic stalemate. It depends on the transformation of our guerrilla zones into base areas, creation of more guerrilla zones and red resistance areas across the country, the development of our PLGA.

With the ever-intensifying crisis in all spheres due to the anti-people policies of pro-imperialist, pro-feudal governments, the growing frustration and anger of the masses resulting from the most rapacious policies of loot and plunder pursued by the reactionary ruling classes, we are confident that the vast masses of the country will join the ranks of revolutionaries and take the Indian revolution to the next stage.

Peter Tobin, “India and Nepal – Big Brother Little Brother Part 2″

This is the 2nd part of Peter Tobin’s excellent essay, India and Nepal – Big Brother Little Brother. He is a fine writer and I am honored to present his work on my site.

This post is very long, running to 115 pages on the Web. Nevertheless, it is not a difficult read, as I have read it several times already. Still, it would be best to print it out and read it at your leisure.

This article deals with the recent history of India and Nepal in a manner in which most of us are not familiar.

He also ties in Indian nationalism with Irish nationalism and compares and contrasts the two movements. Tobin’s analysis is interesting for a Marxist, as he negates the notion that the IRA is taking a progressive stance in calling for the unification of all of Ireland.

Instead, he sees it as opposed to the progressive axiom of self-determination. A proper Marxist POV, says, Tobin, would be for Irish nationalists to allow the right of self-determination to the counties of Northern Ireland. He compares this reluctance on the part of Irish nationalists to Indian nationalists’ refusal to grant the right of self-determination to Muslims on the subcontinent, a fascist project that led the violent partition of India, endless war in Kashmir and a very hostile reality between India and Pakistan.

Hence, Irish national unification nationalism, like Indian national unification nationalism, is a fascist project as is the case with most national unification or nation-building projects, not a progressive or Left one.

There are many other interesting tidbits here. Tobin notes that the Hindutva movement actually has its roots in normative Indian nationalism and the Congress Party itself and such heroes as Gandhi and Nehru can be seen as Hindutvas themselves. That India has always dominated Nepal in a brutal and callous way shows that India itself, like Israel, must now be recognized as an imperialist power in its own right.

I made quite a few edits in the text, but for style, punctuation, grammar and spelling only.

1947 INDIA SPRINGS FROM THE HEAD OF MARS

Over the past generation India has shed its non-aligned status and has formally placed itself in the Anglo-Saxon camp. For a number of reasons, some of which I will outline below, it has become a fully active member of the ‘War on Terror’.

To a large extent this has laid bare that which was previously obscured by the radical rhetoric and sometimes practice of the Congress leaders of the pre and post independence movement: that is the phenomenon of a Hindu Great Power chauvinism which lays claim to the entire subcontinent including the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas and what is now Pakistan.

It was initially conceived in the first decades of the twentieth century by the nationalist ideologue Savarkar who introduced the concept of Hindutva (Hinduness) to describe all movements and parties under the umbrella of Indian nationalism.

It is there in Nehru’s Discovery of India written from 1942 onwards while interned by the British. Published in 1946, it formed the Hindu response to those who would challenge the territorial assertions of Indian nationalists. The extreme form of Hindutva can presently be seen in the murderous cretinism of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, Indian People’s Party) founded in 1980 and now the second largest party in the Lok Sabha.

It is salutary to note that Modi, the leading BJP minister in the Gujarat regional government, personally organized the massacre of over 2,000 Muslims in that state in 2002. The BJP is also pro-American and committed to the neo-liberal project.

There is therefore no substantial ideological or political difference between the BJP and the CI Establishment in this claim to the entire subcontinent. What they have, they hold; where they don’t have control, they have consistently followed expansionist policies of economic and military penetration to achieve that end.

Following independence, initial animus was directed against what were held to be the pretensions of Jinnah’s Muslim League in claiming national rights based upon majority Muslim populations in the North West and East of India. Jinnah rightly claimed that in a few years he had turned:

Muslims from a crowd into a nation.

The emergence of Muslim nationalism provoked the Indian Congress politicians and ideologues into the corrupt, anti-democratic inveigling of a large chunk of Kashmir into the nascent Indian state completely disregarding the wishes of the vast majority of the population there for integration with their coreligionists in an equally nascent Pakistani state.

It reflects, like Irish nationalists in their continued refusal to accept self-determination for the Loyalist population in the six counties, their rejection of a ‘two nation’ theory applying on the subcontinent.

That and the seizure of Hyderabad began India’s first, but by no means last, war of aggression in 1948.

As the largest power on subcontinent, India has always acted with impunity in defending and extending its border and influence. Besides the wars with Pakistan which culminated in the dismantling of that state in 1972 with the detachment of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), it had the arrogance to launch a war against China in the Askhai Chin in 1962.

Its military caste, inflated with hubris inherited from its former imperial master, expected a walkover. The military ignoramus, Mountbatten, who had been parachuted into the high command of SEAC (South East Asia Command) in 1943 over the head of the more competent General Slim, through his royal connections, claimed that India had:

A magnificent army, a capable air force, and a good navy brought up by the British. Look at the terrain and tell me how the Chinese can invade. (sic) I would hate to plan that campaign.

The only correct statement in the above was that the Indian Army was a British creation; its officer class was comprised of Koi Hais (Anglo-Indian Blimps) who, emboldened by all their wars and particularly the walk-over in annexing Portuguese Goa in 1961, were gung ho for war against China. L’appetite vient en mangeant.

In the final event, their army was outmaneuvered, outfought and outclassed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and the Indian government was forced to withdraw its troops and territorial claims which, significantly, were based on the British unilaterally imposed McMahon line. (Vide: India’s China War, Neville Maxwell, 1969.)

These territorial assertions were partly based on the fact that the Askai Chin is part of Kashmir, the whole of which Indian nationalists lay claim to, as detailed earlier, but significantly also on the basis that the new line was a secret provision of the 1914 Simla Agreement between the then Dalai Lama and Britain and followed upon the British invasion of Tibet a decade earlier. British historians euphemistically refer to this event as the ‘Younghusband Expedition’.

It was inspired by the adventurist Viceroy, Curzon, seeking to exploit the growing weakness of Manchu China by encouraging Tibetan separatism and to forestall the Russians from gaining influence in that region, reflecting the anti-Russian ‘forward’ school of Raj expansionism that had been evident in Afghanistan and North India throughout the 19th century.

The Chinese had never accepted this invasion or the agreement that resulted from it and which changed British policy, a policy which up to 1904 had recognised that Tibet was under the suzerainty of the Court of the Middle Kingdom. The emerging Kuomintang, from its progressive beginnings under Sun Yat Sen to the later years of the Bonapartist reaction of Chiang Kai Shek, upheld the ‘One China’ policy.

After China ‘stood up’ with the 1949 Liberation, there was even less likelihood of it accepting the spurious legacy of Curzon’s geopolitical cartography. It was not, therefore, as the deluded Mountbatten stated, an ‘invasion’ but a consistent policy of refusing to acknowledge imperialist borders aimed at fragmenting China. The Chinese Communists fought a defensive war against India in order to re-assert the acknowledged historical unity of their country.

Delhi’s aim of enforcing what had begun as a British land grab emphasizes how completely Nehru’s Congress government adopted the reactionary politics and territorial parameters of their former colonial masters. In this sense the war of aggression against the People’s Republic was not an aberration but was entirely consistent with India’s general expansionist policies on the subcontinent and particularly consistent with its attitude towards China.

A long standing animus towards the Communist country was previously seen in the comfort and aid given to the Tibetan Yellow Hat clique and their post 1914 attempts to secede Tibet from China.

Despite all the rhetoric of Third World solidarity that came out of Bandung in 1954 and the Panch Sheel (five points) agreement, where the two countries had agreed not to interfere in each others’ internal affairs, India allowed these separatists, fronted by the youth Gyatso, the Dalai Lama (a CIA creature then as now), a haven after the failure of their American-backed armed uprising in 1959 which the Indian government allowed to be organised from Kalimpong (Nehru himself admitted that the place was ‘a nest of spies’).

After the defeat of this Tibetan ‘Bay of Pigs’, they were allowed to resettle in Dharmsala, which was said to be the biggest CIA base in the world outside of Langley at that time. India essentially allowed the US to pursue its proxy war against China from its territory.

Its anti-colonial soul was further betrayed to a new, but equally expansionist, superpower, when Congress accepted its British inheritance from the instance of independence. For example, it took over with alacrity the policy of keeping Hindu rulers in majority Muslim areas; the British had pioneered this stratagem after the success of the first Sikh wars in 1846 in Jammu and Kashmir based on the principle of divide and rule.

Independent India inherited directly these petty princelings and through them disenfranchised the Muslim populations in those states.

Only lip service was paid to Gandhi’s pacifism. For years before his assassination, he had already been marginalized by the radical group around Menon and Nehru who were the real powers in formulating policy and strategy. Like the Dalai Lama, he has since become a saint to sections of a gullible, dim, historically ignorant Western petit-bourgeoisie.

Nehru put this more aggressive and hardheaded projection of the national interest very clearly in the Lok Sabha in 1959 in relation to the border dispute with China:

But where national prestige and dignity is involved, it is not the two miles of territory, it is the nation’s dignity and self-respect that becomes involved. And therefore this happens.

Yet he continued to delude himself, invoking Gandhi, that “basically we are a gentle people” who “emotionally disliked war,” that had been forced on them by the “warlike Chinese.”

The controversial but perceptive Bengali writer Chauduri, (Inter alia he argued that the Indians were originally Europeans who had been corrupted and denatured by an exotic, tropical environment.) in an acclaimed series of essays, saw through the hypocritical rhetoric, and penetratingly observed a few years after the war:

Hindu militarism is a genuine and powerful force, influencing Indian foreign policy…the conflict with China was inspired almost wholly by Hindu jingoism with the Hindu possessiveness as a second underlying factor. (The Continent of Circe, Niraud C. Chauduri, 1965. p. 107. Circe was a sorceress and weaver of spells from Greek legend.)

This bellicose militarism swept the country, reactivating the concept of the Dharma Yuddha (righteous war) but in a degraded and incompetent form. It demonstrated what a powerful force militarism had become since independence.

However the defeat in the Indian-Chinese War not only strengthened the position of the ‘capitalist roaders’ within Congress but led to one of the biggest defeats of the Party in the history of elections anywhere, when it was swept away in Jaipur in 1962 by a the victory in a ballot by the Swatantra party which championed the free market and was backed by business and many of the former princes.

It proved to be Nehru’s ‘last hurrah’ and effectively ended his political dominance. It was also the end of the experiment with socialism, and India began the sad trajectory that has culminated in its present junior partnership in transnational capitalism.

What this jingoist war did reveal was that the imagined form of an herbivorous Orientalized humanism could not conceal the real substance of a carnivorous and hegemonic bourgeois nationalism. The Gandhian hiatus was a thin varnish which tried to cover an historic Hindu martial spirit, that had as its ideological lodestone the aggressive ardor and warlike tales of the Mahabharata.

1950 INDIAN INTERVENTION IN NEPAL

This newly emergent Indian imperial policy can be clearly seen in the response to the crisis in Nepal in 1950 which saw an alliance of Nepal Congress and King Tribhuvan against the hundred and fifty year rule of the Ranas.

The Ranas were a feudal dynasty that controlled Nepal for that historical period. Unlike their earlier homologues, the Russian Boyars, they did not face a Ivan the Terrible until Tribhuvan, and they exercised a firm grip with a succession of Kings being more or less figureheads. After they seized power with the help of the British in 1846, they remained firmly allied to the East Indian Company and post 1857 Raj in defending British interests in Nepal.

It was the Ranas who facilitated the recruitment of Gurkha mercenaries into the British Indian army, for which they received a payment per head.

During the 1930’s and 40’s, Nepal was swept up in the growing and powerful campaign for independence in India, and there were attempts to set up a Nepalese Congress Party which drew support from primarily the Hindu populations in the Kathmandu Valley and the other major urban centers and from the Terai, which borders India.

The Ranas’ response was brutal suppression – activists were hung or imprisoned, and many driven into exile; principally to India, where they received asylum and support from the Congress Party and the government it subsequently formed in 1948. Nepali Congress was therefore launched in India in 1950 under the auspices of the Congress government.

It is of some significance that at its first conference, NC repudiated non-violence as a tactic in the struggle against the Ranas and began agitating for an armed invasion from India to coincide with an internal uprising in the towns and cities.

Though they were dependent on support from India, such was the situation in Nepal that they were prepared to take a position on the application of Gandhian passivity and its obvious uselessness to the Nepalese situation. The ‘saintly’ pacifist Mohindas consistently held firm to the principle of non-violence and had little sympathy for those who advocated armed struggle.

Thus he refused to intervene to save Baghat Singh, a revolutionary Communist who advocated and engaged in armed struggle, from execution in 1931. By his silence, Gandhi colluded in his execution. Gandhi also retained a dislike for the martial pretensions of Subhas Chandra Bose. For all his vaunted humanism, he was a social reactionary who resolutely defended the caste system.

This militant stand reflected the radicalism of the new born NC. Many of its early leaders, such as GP Koirala and his brother, BP Koirala had cut their teeth in the brutal struggles to establish trade unions in the jute mills of Biratnagar, Nepal’s largest industrial concentration close by the Indian border. GP became the first Prime Minister after the 1990 Andolan and remains an influential NC leader at the present time.

NC’s militancy was in stark contrast to the Congress Party of India which had undergone a process of embourgeoisiement and a growing attachment to Hindu chauvinism. This was reflected in its subcontinental strategy as regards to Nepal and similar neighboring states, as they were all considered as being within India’s sphere of influence.

The unruly Nepalese infant party was to find its interests subordinated to this world view, and this was clearly shown in the events between 1950/2. Nehru initially encouraged and assisted in preparing NC for an armed incursion into Nepal. The current Ranas, the Shamshers, were regarded by Indian nationalists as having been British clients and, as noted earlier, had proved ruthless in persecuting the embryonic nationalist movement. Nehru stated in the Lok Sabha in 1950:

In the inner context of Nepal it is desirable to pay attention to the forces that are moving in the world – the democratic forces, the forces of freedom and to put oneself in line with them, because not to do so is not only wrong according to modern ideas but unwise according to what is happening in the world today.

By late 1950, preparations for an incursion by the Mukti Sena (Liberation Army), as the armed wing of NC styled itself, were well advanced. Though its rank and file were mainly Nepalese, stiffened by a core of recently demobbed Gurkhas, it was largely officered by ex-Indian National Army Boseites.

That this was facilitated by an Indian Congress government demonstrated the schizophrenic attitude to Bose and his forty thousand strong Indian National Army (INA) recruited from Japanese prisoners of war. When they launched an invasion of India in alliance with their Japanese allies in 1944, their cry was ‘Chalo Delhi‘ (on to Delhi), the cry of the 1857 rebels. This consciously emphasized the continuity of the ‘long revolution’.

By declaring for armed struggle against the British, Bose repudiated the Satyagraha strategy (literal translation: ‘to maintain the truth’.) This was the name given to the program of civil resistance. Gandhi used this definition because he wanted to distinguish it from Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience. That Bose allied himself with Japanese expansionism was a logical step; “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

It was the same conclusion that Irish nationalists, such as Pearse, Connolly and Casement, reached prior to 1916, in respect to Germany, and indeed a policy the rump of the IRA continued during the 1939-45 war. In respect to the struggle for Irish independence, this line of march succeeded in the years immediately following the 1916 Easter Rising and reasserted the physical force tradition over the parliamentary wing of Irish nationalism.

The charismatic Bose, however, while remaining on the margins of nationalist agitation and not able to shake the grip of the Gandhian Congress Party over the movement, nevertheless engendered, at least, posthumous respect for his patriotism and commitment. Such was his popularity with Indians in the closing years of the war that Gandhi and Nehru, albeit from different positions, were forced to oppose the British proposal to try ex-members of the INA. (Bose died in a plane crash in 1945 and so was beyond British lynch law.)

He became a hero, revered because he had frightened the British not just with the INA as a direct military threat but with the prospect that its very existence provided a mutinous pole of attraction to its own Indian Army. This reflected the nervousness evinced by the British that followed the first great War for Independence in 1857 with respect to internal security and, for example, was the reason the Raj refused to send Indian Army regiments to the Mesopotamia campaign in 1915 during the First War.

Eventually his martial spirit proved more attractive to Indians than the pacifist pieties of Mohindas. Satyagraha was replaced by Duragraha (to hold by force). The former, in the eyes of militant nationalists, demanded too much Dhairya (forbearance) in the face of the enemy. It was not surprising that Gandhi’s assassin, Godse, was a leading Hindutva militarist fanatic.

The incursion into Nepal from India succeeded in linking up with internal opposition forces, and within a month, the Ranas were destabilized. But India at this stage was concerned with stability on its border, and complete victory was snatched away from NC with India forcing a three way agreement between the Ranas, the King and NC.

The NP leader, GP Koirala’s, aim of a constitutional monarchy was dropped, and the issue of a promised constituent assembly was kicked into the long grass, Tribhuvan, his successor, Mahendra and the Indian government all reneged on it. Monarchical absolutism asserted itself, and within a few years the prisons were filled with Congress activists along with many Communists whose movement had grown since the founding of the CPN in 1949, a response to the failure of NC and its lack of radicalism.

The Party’s launch coincided with the first translation of the Communist Manifesto into Nepalese by its first leader, Pushpa Lal (also a veteran of the Biratnagar trade union struggle). The work had an immediate resonance among the radical intelligentsia, especially the sections on pre-capitalist social formations that were immediately relevant to the Nepalese situation.

In addition, there were the Manifesto’s political demands, many of which had already been achieved in developed bourgeois democracies, e.g. progressive taxation, free education and elections, which were revolutionary demands in the context of a authoritarian, feudal state.

In 1960, Tribhuvan’s successor, Mahendra, consummated this process by declaring an end to political parties and parliamentary government and instituting the Panchayaat system, a feudal talking shop convened under the King. This lasted until the first great Andolan in 1990 which relegalized the parties and reintroduced a Parliament complemented by, what was intended to be, a constitutional monarchy.

Thus for forty years, successive Indian governments did little to assist Nepalese democrats in their struggle against monarchical absolutism.

Nehru’s government had in fact used the crisis of 1950 to extract yet another unequal treaty, the first of which had been initiated by the British in 1816 with the imposition of the Sugauli Treaty, which made Nepal a captive market for industrial goods produced in India, followed by the later Nepali-India Trade Agreement of 1923 which created a ‘common market’ between the two countries.

The 1950 Peace and Friendship Treaty extended that grip and gave the Indians monopoly control over Nepal’s commercial, industrial and finance sectors. This was reviewed every ten years, and the events from 1990 onwards have seen no change in India’s economic domination; it is presently estimated that 8

They also took over from the British the process of exploiting Nepal’s huge water resources initiated by the 1920 Sherada Dam Agreement and cemented by the further exploitation of the 1954 Kosi Agreement and 1959 Gandaki Agreement.

The Indian ruling class took further advantage of the 1990 upheaval to have all the Nepalese rivers declared a ‘common resource’ for Nepal and India in a ‘Joint Communique’ between the two governments. They added a qualitative twist in 1996 with the Integrated Mahakali Development Agreement which assumed control of the entire Mahakali River for India’s power and irrigation needs.

As Bhatterai, (now number two in the leadership of UCPN(M) after Prachanda) noted:

The Mahakali Treaty, however, has adopted a more devastating form of neocolonial exploitation and oppression by talking equality in theory but in practice ensuring monopoly in the use of water and electricity to the Indian expansionists and imposing trillions of rupees of foreign debt upon Nepal. (B. R. Bhatterai, The Political Economy of the People’s War, 1998, published in The People’s War in Nepal – Left Perspectives, editors A. Karki & D Seddon, p.128)

All of these agreements have progressively dispossessed Nepal of its greatest natural resource. They have particularly affected the Terai, the southern plains contiguous to India and Nepal’s ‘grain basket,’ in order to benefit Indian industrial and agricultural interests.

From the outset India has used its geographical, political and economic position over Nepal to ensure that its hegemonic interests predominated.

When it suited, they allowed Mahendra and his successor, Birendra, to expand and consolidate power, but when the latter attempted to take an independent position specifically by ‘playing the China card’ by buying and importing arms from the People’s Republic in the late 1980’s, they responded with a refusal to renew a trade and transit treaty in 1989 and effectively launched a economic blockade on Nepal.

This, on a country that by this time could not produce enough to feed its population, was devastating, and it caused tremendous deprivation in Nepal.

This crucially weakened Birendra’s Panchaayat and provided the nexus for the 1990 Andolan. (This was as important as the People’s War from 1996 to 2006 proved in creating the conditions for the second Andolan.) The thinking in Delhi with respect to the uprising was that Nepal was now so dependent on India they could manage and control any resulting democratic change as they had always done.

Not only was the major Nepalese party, NC, completely in their pocket by this time, but there was a growing Hindu comprador capitalist class which which would automatically respond to their influence without being urged to.

In the nineties and the first years of the new century they were content to allow the fledgling democracy under NC and its principal ally, the CPN(UML) to attempt to turn Birendra into a constitutional monarch. This changed when the PW grew in influence, and there emerged a strong connection with the Indian Maoists.

The crucial event which propelled them, yet again, to back monarchical despotism was the beginning therefore of the PW in 1996. There was a hitch with the murder of Birendra and his family, allegedly by the Crown Prince, Dipendra, in 2001. He somehow managed to shoot himself in the back of the head with an assault rifle and took two days to die. Thereafter he was referred a the ‘King in a coma’.

It has since emerged that the attack was carried out by an American trained special forces unit organised through RAW (cf. the CIA murder of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Vietnamese President, in 1963; of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960; of Panama’s Torrijos in 1968; and the numerous bungled but hilarious attempts to assassinate Castro.)

It led to the accession of Gyanendra, who after 9/11 gave the US a pledge to reinvigorate the war against the Maoists, which Birendra had shirked, provoking American fury and his subsequent assassination. Gyanendra in return received armaments and dollars from the US. The fact that he could act autonomously in giving this assurance emphasized the crucial flaw in the 1990 settlement which had left the RNA subject to unilateral, monarchical control.

After a visit by Powell in February 2002 where this understanding was cemented between the Americans and Gyanendra, the Indian government found itself in a bidding war with Uncle Sam and their faithful British ally.

It was keen to see its previous influence restored with the belief that the Anglo-Saxons would undermine their former neocolonial control ceded to American interests and particularly their desire to encircle and monitor the growing power of China. The inclusion of the secular Maobaadi as ‘terrorists’ can be seen in this light.

The Indian government had been to the fore in supplying the regime with arms and logistical support. The supply of armaments was, however, suspended after Gyanendra’s dismissal of his government and the restoration of monarchical absolutism. Indian policy from 2002 onwards represented a break from the ‘two pillar’ strategy which supported both the parliamentary forces and that of the King. At the heel of the hunt, they did not care “what color the cat was as long as it caught the mouse.”

The reasons successive Indian governments had failed to make a objective evaluation of the Maoist movement related to the threat they represented to stability in the region and particularly their threat to abrogate such Indo-Nepalese agreements as the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1950, the 1996 Mahakali Treaty along with all similar unequal treaties.

Also of significance to them was the Maobaadi’s networking with India’s own Maoists, which had finally led to the establishment of the Coordinating Committee of Maoist Groups in South Asia in 2001, creating a formal structure to expand revolutionary armed struggle in that region. It only confirmed Indian paranoia.

India had, from 1996 onwards, identified with the monarchy and the parliamentary forces, and along with the US, UK and Belgium poured in armaments to equip the growing Royal Nepalese Army, which by 2006 was approximately 70,000 strong. India provided 25,000 Insas combat rifles, the US 20,000 M16 carbines, South Africa and Belgium 2,000 machine-guns.

Britain further provided two Islander STOL (Short Take-off Or Landing) reconnaissance aircraft, which were adapted and fitted with 50mm heavy machine guns and 200mm mortar bomb racks which, along with two Russian M17 large helicopters, were used to massacre villagers in Maoist held territory as they gathered for political meetings.

The RNA was up against the PLA of 30,000 that had grown from half a dozen Maoist urban refugees which had gone “into the jungle” in 1996 armed with a couple of rusty Lee Enfields but which had built offensive and defensive capacity by expropriating arms and munitions from the police and the RNA.

The Indian government during this period abandoned its previous pragmatic policies which sought a stable Nepal. Their backing of Gyanendra and the reactionary parliamentary forces only exacerbated the crisis. The CPN(Maoist)s’ call for the ending of all the unequal treaties was not unique; it was shared by many in Nepal. The shrinking strata of national capitalists supported this policy as they resented the expansion of Indian domination of the Nepalese economy with the attendant rise of a comprador class.

On the question of solidarity among the Maoist parties on the subcontinent, the Indian government wrongly saw them as a monolithic and undifferentiated entity, which precluded them from showing any flexibility. Instead they resolutely refused to talk to the Nepalese Maobaadi. This was despite the fact the influence of CPN(Maoist) was on the rise (by the time of Jana Andolan in 2006 they controlled nearly 8

If the Indians wanted a stability on their northern border, there was a necessity to engage with the Maoists at either a formal or informal level.

There is some evidence that CPN(M) recognised the strategic threat that India presented and were concerned that at some stage they would send in their army to forestall or overthrow any regime with pretensions to independence. They were also worried that the fall-out from 9/11 had placed them on the US list of ‘terrorists’ and were prepared to try and reduce their growing list of foreign enemies by exploiting contradictions among them and by attempting to detach India from the Anglo-Saxons.

To this end, the anti-Indian rhetoric of the Party was toned down in the few years after 2001 as they tried to establish some form of dialogue with the Indian government. They were comprehensively rebuffed.

India chose to stay aligned with the US, which regarded the Nepalese Maoists as a bloody and inflexible party; the US Embassy even raised the specter of a Khmer Rouge style takeover in Nepal. They accepted therefore Gyanendra’s argument that they should be included in the War Against Terror the US launched in 2001. What was significant in their inclusion was that the Maoists were secular and thus did not qualify for the nomenclature of Jihadist.

The Americans, with the acquiescence of the Indian government, therefore extended the original criteria to define a terrorist entity as where “…two or more people combine to threaten existing property rights.” This was a active policy which included US military ‘advisers’ training and equipping the RNA and flooding Nepal with CIA operatives.

Like the global phenomena of AIDS, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Avian flu, the Americans were everywhere in Nepal and so became hated by the Nepalese. I witnessed this first hand on both my visits to Nepal. They were so unpopular that many visiting American students used to stitch a Maple Leaf decal on their backpacks in a pathetic attempt to pass as Canadians.

Despite Indian worries regarding potential threats to subcontinental hegemony from outside powers, they looked on as the Americans and Gyanendra sabotaged the peace talks in January 2003 between the Maoists and the then Prime Minister Deuba. They even expressed anger at being marginalized by not being consulted beforehand by either of the two parties engaging in the talks exploring the possibility of peace.

The Maoists were acting in good faith, as they had long indicated a desire to ‘leave the jungle’ and enter the multi-party system.

Apart from suspending arms shipments, which by that time were surplus to the RNA’s requirement, they never seriously challenged Gyanendra’s suppression of all political parties in 2002 until 2005 when, alarmed at the growing success of the Maoists and the impact any victory would have in India, they relinquished the ‘Two Pillar’ policy in favour of the parliamentary parties.

Sotto voce they were equally perturbed at the growing US presence and influence in Nepal which threatened their traditional hegemony. At this juncture they ceased calling the Maoists ‘terrorists’ and facilitated peace talks between the seven parliamentary parties and the Maoists in India. It was obvious to them by now that Gyanendra was a busted flush.

How had a secular republic born in a bitter struggle against imperialism, within only sixty years, reached a fundamentally reactionary and chauvinist polity? This is I want to address in the next section – that and to contrast India’s weaknesses and strengths in the successful struggle against the Raj and the failure after 1947.

IRISH AND INDIAN NATIONALISM – A COMPARISON

The duplicities, antidemocratic maneuvering and aggression shown towards the Muslim League and Pakistan were underpinned by hostility to Muslim claims to self-determination wherever on the subcontinent they formed a majority.

Muslims were not granted any rights to a national identity, as they were seen as Indians under the skin (there is little racial difference) who needed to have their ‘false national consciousness’ stripped away to reveal their ‘true’ Indian identity.

It is very similar the ideological position that Irish nationalists use to deny Protestants in the six counties of Ireland a right to a national identity. Irish and Indian nationalists saw their respective Protestant and Muslim communities as settlements through conquest.

This concept of a national essence is bourgeois metaphysics; it falls into the category of historical idealism. From a materialist position, a nation is first and foremost an historically constituted stable community of people who share a common culture, language and mode of production from which arises a national consciousness. It is where an ideology becomes a material weight.

The other striking similarity between Hindu Indian and Irish nationalist assertions is the claim to hegemony over a defined geographical territory. In the case of the former, it is to the whole subcontinent, including the retaining arc of the Himalayas, and in the latter to all the island of Ireland.

In the case of the former, it arose from a determination to hold on to the territorial parameters established by the British and fortified by the ancestral Hindu belief that the ‘Land of Snows’ was in mystical counterbalance to the Gangetic Plains and Mount Olympus of the Indian gods.

For Irish nationalists, it was the myth that there had been an ‘historic Irish Nation’ prior to the arrival of the British. But the defeat of the High King of Ireland, Brian Boru, at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 by the armies of Leinster and Dublin effectively ended any maturation of the embryonic nation. Thereafter until the Anglo-Normans arrived in 1170, the island was a patchwork of petty tribal families engaged in semi-permanent warfare. It was these divisions which facilitated Strongbow’s incursion.

The failure of the Irish tribes to establish a recognized central kingship was noted four hundred years later by a Tudor agent, who reported to Henry VIII:

There be more than sixty countries inhabited by the King’s Irish enemies, where reigneth more than sixty chief captains, whereof some calleth themselves kings, some kings peers, and every one of the said captains makes war and peace for himself, and holds by sword and hath imperial jurisdiction, and obeys no other person.

That much is to the debit, and it exposes the ideological and political limitations of bourgeois nationalism, but it has to be set against the fact that whatever the negative features, the Irish and Indian struggles for independence were genuine anti-imperialist movements against their British imperial masters.

Each was an heroic and ultimately successful trailblazer for many subsequent anti-colonial struggles.

The tactics that eventually achieved the final expulsions of their respective British occupiers differed: the Irish, after the late 19th century parliamentary Home Rule campaign which collapsed in ignominy after 1916, successfully pursued a strategy of guerrilla war with the mass support of the agrarian Catholic population, while the Indian movement under Gandhi’s leadership pursued a policy of mass agitation and civil disobedience purportedly based on Ashima (non-violence).

Nevertheless, each of these national liberation struggles were bitter and bloody in strikingly similar ways. In the case of the former, for all the subsequent pacifist gloss emerging from the secular beatification of ‘Gandhiji’ about the campaign to drive out the British, we know that for every Robert Emmet, James Connolly or Kevin Barry there was a Mangal Pandey, Lala Lajpat Rai or Bhagat Singh.

The ‘Quit India’ movement organised at the height of the British empire’s life and death struggle with the Japanese Empire was no tea party. The notion that Congress achieved independence through nonviolence was a myth, fostered by the Congress Party and particularly Nehru to bolster his credentials as a principled international statesman working working for world peace and nuclear disarmament – India became a nuclear power post-Nehru.

There was genuine political and ideological support from Irish nationalists with the Indian struggle, a genuine sympathy with fellow anti-colonialists based upon the assessment that what the British first practiced in Ireland – famine, war, dispossession, exploitation, ethnic cleansing and genocide – they then visited on the rest of the World.

de Valera underlined that solidarity when he took George Washington’s words:

Patriots of Ireland , your cause is mine.

and in 1920 said that

the cause of Ireland is the cause of India, Egypt and Persia.

Fittingly he was an honored guest at the Indian independence ceremony in 1948.*

Stalin, the CPSU’s principal spokesman on the national question, noted the link between the two struggles:

Not only has bourgeois society proved incapable of solving the national problem, but its attempts to “solve it has inflated it and turned the national problem into a colonial problem and has created against itself a new front stretching from Ireland to Hindustan. (Marxism and the National Question, Tenth Congress CPSU, J.V. Stalin,1921, pp. 106/7)

In the postwar years, the two new states followed a similar domestic and foreign policy, and in this lay the seeds of their present vicissitudes. Early attempts by the Irish to develop an agrarian based economy free from dependence on British capitalism proved abortive. The endeavors of the newly elected Fianna Fial government of 1932 to pursue policies to protect and stimulate Irish agriculture and industry behind import taxes led to a tariff war with Britain.

This reflected the need of all newly independent countries, whether nationalist or Communist, to pragmatically follow the advice of the great German empirical economist, Frederick List. In opposition to the theology of Smith and his ‘hidden hand,’ he observed that newly emerging nations needed to protect their home markets and their fledgling home industries with tariffs against the predations of the existing dominant world economic powers of finance capital.

He further argued that the ‘visible hand’ of the state is necessary to stimulate and oversee the process. His prognostications led to establishment of the Zollverein, which drew the many German states and principalities into a customs union that laid the economic basis for Germany’s political unification in 1871.

Thus India and Ireland came to the conclusion that if they continued to allow unfettered access to their home market by more powerful and technologically advanced free trading imperialists, then so long would they be economically dependent, as they could not hope to compete on a level playing field.

In its own way, India initially followed List’s principles, with a socialist twist. Encouraged by the Congress leadership around Menon and Nehru, it launched a programme of nationalization and attempted to lay the basis of a planned economy with a series of five year plans.

Although they achieved a growth in GDP of

As Lenin pointed out clearly and as was later developed by Mao, there needed to be both a cultural revolution and a radical transformation of extant property relations following the political seizure of power which involved the masses in a complete revolutionary challenge to the existing order.

The newly empowered Indian Congress government failed to grasp this post-imperial axiom, and thus the caste and the feudal land systems were left untouched.

In the intense political and ideological rivalry that existed between the two newly liberated countries of Communist China and Congress India, it was, however, the former who succeeded economically and lifted their people out of absolute poverty and immiseration with a commitment to the ‘cradle to grave,’ ‘iron rice bowl’ policy and by comprehensively taking the socialist road.

It was the Chinese Communists who saw that in Stalin words that:

…the national and colonial questions are inseparable from the question of emancipation from the power of capital… (Ibid, The National Question Presented, J.V. Stalin, p. 114)

It can be argued that in the final analysis, China has integrated itself into world capitalism, but its socialist, autarkic period up to the late 1970’s enabled it to do so on its own state capitalist terms.

Compare China, even in its Maoist period, to the squalor and degradation that the majority of Indians, both in town and country, continue to live in, and only a fool or a reactionary would not conclude that India has failed by any measurable criteria.

India, under the growth and influence of a bourgeois comprador class, has integrated itself into the economic neoliberalism of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Chaudari predicted with remarkable foresight this eventuality earlier when he wrote:

Working within the emerging polity of the larger Europe, the Anglo-Saxon can be expected to lay claim to a special association with India on historical grounds. In plain words I expect either the United States singly or a combination of the United States and the British Commonwealth to re-establish and rejuvenate the foreign domination of India. (Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, N.C. Chauduri, 1951.)

Later, in 1962, he observed:

In the fulfillment of their destiny the American People will become the greatest imperial Power the world has seen, and they will repeat their history by having the blood of the Dark Indian on their head as they have that of the Red. (The Continent of Circe, N.C. Chauduri, 1965, p. 85)

THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIA & NEPAL

This revolution has now reached India and here the minerals which it stands in need of are found for the most part in the territories of the aboriginals. Very powerful forces stand behind the movement: the policies, interests, money and technical skills of nearly all Western nations: and, above all, the all-consuming Hindu avarice.

All this in combination is breaking down the isolation of the aboriginal, threatening not only his security but existence. There is a Hindu push towards the wilds, which never existed before, and very large vested interests are being created for the Hindus in the homelands of the primitives. The white ants are on the march. (Ibid, N.C Chauduri, 1965, p. 76)

Given the failure of autarkism, India has increasingly adopted neoliberal economic policies, making India safe for international capital and expanding the wealth of the Hindu ruling class. This process was cemented during the 2006 meeting with Bush by the commitment of the Indian government where India agreed to ‘liberalize’ their economy by opening it to multinational companies looking for cheap labor and expanding the extraction of India’s natural resources.

Although as can be seen in the prescient quote above, notwithstanding that it was written in terms that would now be termed as passé or non-PC, the seeds were planted a generation ago. In doing so they have heightened the contradictions within Indian society and have led to campaigns of resistance springing up in opposition to a reactionary economic strategy enforced by state terror which is accurately defined as fascist by revolutionary Communists on the subcontinent.

In this respect the much heralded ‘economic miracle’ of the past few years is only confined to 1

For the rest of the population in both town and country, living conditions have worsened considerably over this period. The majority of unfortunate rural Indians still eke out a primitive existence in Stone Age conditions. Most of these peoples live in conditions of deprivation, without regular access to decent nutrition, health care, education, clean water, etc.

The manic need of transnational imperialism to seize India’s resources to feed wasteful overconsumption in the developed Western World, as was noted earlier, has led to land wars against the indigenous Adivasis in India’s poorer regions like Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal, Madya Pradesh and Jharkand.

To enforce these policies, gangs of rightwing vigilantes, goondas, licensed by the regional and central authorities, are conducting what at best can be described as ethnic cleansing and genocide against these tribal peoples. The process noted by Chauduri in the 1960s has considerably accelerated over the past decade.

The three major parliamentary parties, CI, BJP and the CPI(M) or Communist Party of India(Marxist), are committed to expanding this reactionary program further, which can be clearly seen in the states where one or the other of them is in power. In Chhattisgarh, for example, where the BJP hold sway, there is an attempt to fast-track this process and allow voracious extractive monopolies to plunder resources following the dispossession of the tribal ethnics at the hands of vicious paramilitary Salwa Judum (Freedom Marchers, sic).

The only serious opposition to this neoliberal capitalist strategy are principally the Maoist groups, in alliance with the affected Adivasis, who are engaging in armed struggle in many states, forming a red belt that runs down the spine of India.

They have an armed presence in over 180 of the 600 departments of the country, and they have been described by the Indian CoS as presenting the ‘greatest menace to India’s internal security.’

The Indian ruling class is agitated by the threat of Maoists exercising any sort of power and enacting a radical programme in Nepal, which they have hitherto dominated and where their ‘mini-me’ Nepalese counterpart has so slavishly followed their path into even deeper reaction.

It is true that during the struggle against the King, culminating in his defeat, India facilitated peace talks between the Maoists and NP and the UML, which led to the Maoists declaring a cease fire. The alliance that arose between the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists worked to overthrow the monarchy.

The Delhi government, for example, released Guarev, a UCPN(M) politburo member, and its principal spokesman on foreign policy, so that he could participate in these talks. But the depth of the ongoing hostility to the Maoists is reflected in the fact that he was interned along with thousands of indigenous Maoists and tribal resisters, without charge or trial for three years, under the draconian State Security laws inherited from the British. These are the same laws under which they martyred Baghat Singh.

The motives for this temporary change lie not in India reconfiguring its policy towards Nepal but because they expected that the Maoists would not prove up to the task of operating within a multi-party democracy and would fail any substantial electoral test.

They were not alone in this assessment; internal and external observers thought the Maoists would come a poor third in any such contest. To some extent this was not entirely a complete fantasy, as in the 1994 elections an earlier incarnation of the Maoists, the UPFN (United People’s Front Nepal) failed to win a single seat in a contest where the UML emerged as the winner with 88 seats, followed closely by NC with 83 seats.

What went against their 2008 expectations was the fact that the inspiration brought about by the PW dramatically increased the electoral appeal of the Maoists among a critical mass of the population. So it was that the Maoists confounded all the pundits gathered in Kathmandu by winning 4

The key to the present crisis is the refusal to accept that the CPN(M) had a mandate for change and this is what provoked the subsequent plotting against the Prachanda led government.

The Americans played a strong role in the orchestration of the anti-Maoist campaign. The US has steadfastly refused to remove the designation of ‘terrorist’ from them, unlike Delhi which had not used the description since 2002.

The US State Department reinforced this scheming with a recently commissioned survey on the 2008 election in order to undermine the credibility of the electoral success of the UCPN(M) by alleging that it was the product of brute force and intimidation. They specifically singled out the Young Communist League for vilification and cited their defensive campaign against Indian inspired and separatist agitations in the Madesh bordering India.

Although the Party honored its word given during the peace talks with the SPA and put the 30,000 strong PLA into UN supervised cantonments, it had in reserve almost 300,000 YCL cadre for the electoral battle which for a number of reasons proved crucial to electoral ascendancy. A prominent bourgeois journal claimed that:

The YCL is just another name for Maoist guerrillas not openly carrying guns. (An Armless Army, The Nepali Times, 20/27th April, 2007)

Their relative numerical strength in a population of just over 23 million is a reflection of the appeal of the Maoists to the youth of a country where nearly 6

This US policy parallels with their policy towards Hamas in Gaza which had, at the behest of the West, called a cease-fire in 2006 and similarly entered an electoral battle.

When it proved similarly successful, it was similarly rubbished, and the goals for lifting the isolation of Hamas were moved further away. Here too, the leadership of the US was determinate and expressed the message to those it still regards as ‘terrorists’ that “however you play the game – you will lose!”

‘WAVING THE RED FLAG’ – THE CPI(M) & CPN(UML)

I have covered so far the role that India has displayed in relation to Nepal. I have also tried to outline how the NCs’ development and present objectives either coincide with or are determined by this neocolonial power. I now wish to turn to the UML, ostensibly a ‘left’ party, and show how it came to campaign in this ‘orgy of reaction’ that saw the Maoists driven from power. Although it was precipitated by right wing Army officers, the final blow against Prachanda and the UCPN(M) was the UML’s withdrawal from the coalition government and subsequent open support of Katawal’s actions.

How did this happen?

That a Communist party should sabotage a left government committed to radical policies in alliance with internal and external reaction came, initially, as a shock to many.

Notwithstanding the fact that many of members I was privileged to meet were sincere, dedicated comrades and which made the critical analysis I eventually reached all the more difficult, though I was impelled to do so by a sense of Communist commitment.

What misplaced use of dialectics by the UML leadership led them to such a clearly reactionary pass?

Was it unique, or did it mirror the drift of the CPI(M) away from revolutionary Communism and a capitulation to a pro-capitalist position?

I will argue the latter; that each party reached similar political and theoretical positions and modified, or even abandoned, socialism under the dead weight of reaction on the subcontinent and beyond. Their mentors and paymasters are drawn from those sources.

I first got involved in Nepalese politics through GEFONT/UML.

In October 2005 I went to Nepal for two reasons; the first to trek up the Khumbu to Everest Base Camp, and secondly, as a Communist, I had become interested because the People’s War had been raging there since 1996 against the unpopular American, British and Indian backed feudal monarchy and the supine, corrupt parliament.

I did not have to go far to establish contact, as UML’s trade union wing GEFONT was organised at the hotel where I stayed on arrival (which was owned by the King’s sister) and I met their shop steward – who was also its Maître’d’. Through him I visited their head office in Kathmandu on the wonderfully named Putali Sadak (Butterfly Road) and there met Chairperson Neupane and other members of the executive, among whom were Bishnu Rimal and Binda Pandey, and their research and international officer, Budhi Acharya.

I found myself more at home than in the UK, where Communists have to work within a single Laborite trade union movement, the TUC. The Nepali trade unions are organized like their French counterparts, with the main political parties each having their own union centre. The Nepali Trades Union Congress (NTUC) was, for example the trade union face of NC. GEFONT, in this respect, has the same relationship with the UML as the CGT has with the PCF, although, unlike the CGT, GEFONT’s 300,000 members are also Party members.

I was particularly impressed that pride of place, in a very busy, comprehensive and dedicated research department, was given to a shelf with Progress Publishers‘ forty two volume editions of Lenin. I could not imagine a British trade union head office being so equipped. I had a similar frisson when I visited the UML office in Pokhara and saw, proudly displayed, on the wall of the Regional Secretary’s office, posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

The division between the two Communist parties is not parallel with the splits in the West: there is no anti-Stalinist crawling to petit-bourgeois liberalism or any reflection of the Sino-Soviet split in their mutual opposition. Trotskyism, as in any genuine revolutionary struggle in the developing world, has no purchase or relevance. Disagreements are fundamental and are not based on what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

I was also struck by the wide range of activities GEFONT was engaged in; they were fighting battles against child labor, for literacy and numeracy programmes, campaigns to eliminate bonded labor (Kamaiyas), women’s rights, etc., battles which in the West we had long ago won. Alongside these endeavors, they were also occupied with the more recognizable free collective bargaining activities on behalf of diverse industrial and service groups that is part of our normal warp and weave.

In addition, health and safety is taken very seriously in a country where life is cheap, hard and short. For example: as a carpenter and ex-building worker for most of my working life, it was a shock to see masons and their laborers manhandling large blocks of dressed natural stone in flip-flops! The quality, however, of their tradesmen, including carpenters and joiners, was really outstanding, especially given the primitive conditions they work under.

The quality of GEFONT’S propaganda and research on this range of issues was excellent, detailed and exhaustive, equal if not superior to that of any UK union.

I was also informed that the following April, the population led by the SPA in the urban centre – principally in the Kathmandu Valley – together with the Maoists who were dominant in over 8

I went home, but with my appetite whetted, and I resolved to come back the following April. I continued learning the language, studying its history and writing, and wrote what in retrospect was a naïve article which the Labour & Trade Union Review was good enough to print. In this piece I drew on the spirit of unity that was evident across the political spectrum and was particularly pronounced between the two Communist parties previously and literally at war over the difference in their respective strategies of armed or electoral struggle.

I also attempted to get my union, UCATT (Union of Construction, Allied Trades & Technicians), to establish fraternal links, but as with any labor organisation it balked at association with ‘Communists.’

I finally counted at least seven serious Communist parties, CPN(M) and the UML being the biggest, as opposed to the UK where the various organisations laying claim to being Communists amount in relative terms to three men and a dog, as opposed to these Nepalese parties which could count on the support of 6

To this end, I went through dialectical contortions, arguing that the two principal parties, despite the profound differences between them over strategy, were each correct from the positions they occupied in a society where the unequal development between the urban and the rural was strongly pronounced.

Hence the UML flourished in the strong civil society of the towns and cities because they reflected the objective economic and political needs of the urban masses against the relatively advanced, though increasingly comprador, capitalist system which applied there. In any event, the Maoists proved surprisingly strong in the urban centers as the 2008 election showed. They even defeated the UML General Secretary of Nepal in the two Kathmandu seats where he stood!

The Maobaadi, advancing People’s War on the other hand, reflected those values of the rural masses in a struggle against a residual but still strong martial feudalism that had received a new lease of life from the backing of the Anglo-Saxon and Indian governments who advocated and promoted increased military repression against the ‘terrorist’ threat in the countryside.

That was then and this is now: with the alliance between the bourgeois parliamentary parties and CPN(Maoist) shattered and with the former backing the military against the political authority of the Prachanda government.

The UML support for the Katawal coup places them firmly in the camp of bourgeois reaction and counterrevolution. It provides a classic case that it is not what you call yourself but what you do that counts.

Neither is that position an aberration in respect of the UML but instead reflects a process that has been ongoing since the 1990 Andolan.

This was a turbulent period, with twelve changes of government in eleven years. The UML were enthusiastic participants in this parliamentary game and even provided a Prime Minister for nine months in 1994 with the UML General Secretary Adikhari replacing GP Koirala, the leader of an increasingly fractious NC.

This decade long charivari did much to discredit the parliamentary parties as more and more Nepalese became increasingly disenchanted with these displacement politics activated in lieu of necessary radical action. They had had high hopes that, following the success of the Andolan and the humbling of Birendra, Nepal would go through a transformation where the many problems that had gestated under the monarchy would be swept away with measures that, for the first time in Nepalese history, would favour the masses.

They expected programs to tackle poverty (Nepal is the 17th poorest country in the World), to deal with illiteracy, child labor and the caste system, to enact justice and equity for the Janjatis; of these, ending feudalism (especially on the question of land ownership) being the most prominent. It was also hoped this new democracy would expand and modernize Nepal’s lamentably underdeveloped infrastructure.

That these problems were not dealt with was not, however, solely due to the narcissistic political squabbling during these wasted years.

Another crucial factor limiting any room for a radical program was that from the launch of the ‘new democracy’ in 1990, GP Koirala’s NC government continued and expanded Birendra’s initiative in 1985, admitting the IMF and the World Bank as arbiters of Nepal’s economic and social destiny. These multilateral bodies are the economic arm of American imperialism and enforce neoliberal capitalist nostrums through the comprador class in whatever particular country they have either a foothold or full control.

The mechanism used is the euphemistically named the ‘Structural Adjustment Program,’ (I have retained the American spelling) which implements privatization and price-dictated market policies.

What semblance there was in Nepal of a mixed economy was dismantled; a process overseen by economic hit men dispatched there as IMF/WB enforcers. Thus subsidies on fertilizer, essential goods and services were abolished, and the few enterprises that were state controlled were privatized.

This meant that prices on such items as petroleum doubled overnight, causing tremendous hardship for the majority of the Nepalese people who were reliant on that commodity for domestic use and transportation. Privatization in its turn led to redundancies, closures, asset stripping and the slashing of wages and conditions for the employees kept on by their new masters.

This latter was carried out for purely ideological reasons even if the enterprise was a thriving, going concern. They were sold off at four or five times less than their extant value in the face of any commercial logic. It was similar to the legalized theft that was initiated during the corrupt, philistine Thatcherite period in the UK, although no scraps were thrown to the Nepalese masses as a bribe as happened there. All the plunder went either to Nepalese compradors or Indian capitalists.

The SAP also terminated the licensing system which had assisted those enterprises which were export-led and left them at the mercy of more powerful and developed external economic interests which have successfully penetrated the Nepalese market.

Also drastically affected were state expenditures in health and education. Even the minimum welfare provisions that did exist were reduced, and tariffs that protected Nepalese industries, particularly small scale manufactures, were ended.

These policies were enacted during the high water mark of triumphalist free market capitalism, and they were no different to those forced upon the countries of the former Soviet Bloc or indeed anywhere else the tentacles of this global octopus envelops. A similar breed of carpetbaggers to those that swept over Eastern Europe after 1989 poured into Nepal, with Indian capitalists to the fore.

In Nepal, as elsewhere, these destructive ‘Year Zero’ economics caused tremendous hardships for the respective peoples who fell under their aegis.

THE UML AND THE STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAM

As has been noted, the NC government that took power in 1990 was an enthusiastic participant in the SAP, demonstrating the growing influence of a comprador bourgeois in its ranks. Politically and ideologically, it demonstrated that NC had become the Nepalese wing of CI.

How then did the newly formed UML respond to the SAP and its harsh effects on the mass of population? How did it respond to the phenomenon of globalized capital out of which the SAP stratagem emerged?

How did it address the fact that the dominance of international capital intensified the socioeconomic disparities between the developed and the developing world?

The answers to those questions reveal the crucial dilemma that lies at the heart of its political theory and practice and show how it occupies the same terrain already inhabited by its Indian homologue, the CPI(M). It also demonstrates the gulf between it and the CPN(M).

In regard to the first question, they did not fail to note the deleterious impact on the living and working standards of the Nepalese masses.

A prominent UML commentator summed up the results:

…the State after 1990 haphazardly followed neoliberal economic policy which did not actually suit Nepal’s constitutional vision and socio-economic reality. This produced a systematic race to the bottom dynamics, poverty, inequality, social alienation and political protest.

Analyzing the mistake of policy makers, a social scientist says – “The post 1991 governments, however, deviated from the welfare state and sought to create a subsidiary state where poorer people subsidized the rich and the powerful. It was actually the outcome of heavily increased pressure of Globalization in our national scenario.” (Challenging Globalization, World of Work, B. Rimal, 2005 p.214)

Given this recognition, what policies did the UML advance to oppose the negative effects of IMF/World Bank diktats on Nepal?

In this respect, I will concentrate on one major policy advanced in response to the demand of the IMF under the SAP for privatization of sixteen publicly owned enterprises, as it is indicative of the UML’s general politico/economic strategy. I will quote below from GEFONT policy statements, given that its policies are interchangeable with those of the UML.

In the first place, it acknowledges the role of transnational capital’s liberalization of the Nepalese economy but gives some role to the pressure from the indigenous capitalist class:

The business class, basically the big house bosses has high influence on the state power now. This kind of influence, although it was limited before 1990, highly expanded after the restoration of multiparty democracy. With a high volt emphasis on privatization after 1991, lobbying of big houses has increased manifold. (Study & Research, 2004, Section 14)

The principle driving this demand is that:

Instead of taking a long and arduous route for a new company, eases the prospective investors into a ready-made business enterprise. (Ibid, Section 4)

It also complains that:

With the blind and haphazard privatization of public enterprises, both production and employment have been adversely affected. (World of Work, 2005, p. 215)

However, this did not mean that there was a root and branch opposition to this reactionary program and its clear deleterious effects on Nepal’s people; instead, it promoted a policy of attempting to minimize those effects and making the process more efficient. The slogan therefore was:

Selective liberalization – selective privatization. (Ibid, p.47)

In other words; rather than the ‘blind and haphazard’ approach, it wanted one targeted on enterprises that needed ‘restructuring’ so they could compete better in the world market. So, for example, loss making, unproductive and technologically backward jute mills were among those where privatization was supported. It was even suggested that the Hetaunda cotton mill be added to the list; despite the fact that it had an adequate capital structure and modern machinery, it was ‘operationally inefficient’.

There was a complaint against privatization where enterprises were profit making and also when new private owners did not deliver the promised benefits or even where they were closed down; as in the case of an agricultural tool factory. They also complained where blatant asset stripping was evident, as in the case of the Bansbari Leather and Shoe Factory.

Generally they were concerned that the program, whether it showed successes or failures, had no provisions for either retraining or redeployment for the increased unemployment it created.

The most significant privatization that was supported was that of Nepal’s existing water utilities. The reasons given were that it was severely undercapitalized and operating with antiquated technology. It also had meager coverage of the country with 7

My GEFONT/UML comrades were extremely defensive and noted that it only contributed 1

Later, in a spirit of ’emotion recollected in tranquility,’ it became clear that while it was an extant severely underdeveloped utility, it was perhaps Nepal’s greatest natural resource, with a truly massive developmental potential. Vide my earlier section on India’s long established recognition and exploitation of this resource through successive unequal treaties.

Furthermore, I noted that its commodification gave it an exchange value that overrode its use value as a basic necessity for all life, human or otherwise. It had instantly become a source of profit that devalued its crucial importance for day to day existence.

In the final analysis, however, the overarching criticism of privatization was that it was ideologically driven and not based on any economic rationality. The main reason that the entire program of liberalization was failing, GEFONT/UML argued, was because there was a failure to give an adequate role to the state.

It was argued that where SAP’s had been extremely successful, government intervention had played a dominant role, as in South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, where these programs had produced ‘high growth with equity’. (Ibid, p.47)

But these were singular exceptions in long established social and economic formations which were contrary to the anti-statist presupposition behind the neoliberal phenomenon which originated in the US and the UK during the Reagan/Thatcher years and was thereafter imposed on the rest of the world through the IMF, WB and WTO.

The state was, therefore, not a mechanism for solving social and economic problems; it was, as Reagan asserted, the problem. So the governments of developing countries were there to serve principally as facilitators of international finance capital.

This even applied within the imperial heartlands, as was noted by the Washington insider, Robert Reich, in his book, Supercapitalism :

Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down.

In short, the political institutions of bourgeois society no longer regulate capitalism, but instead market forces regulate the political institutions. It is they who say what is and is not possible.

This naivete regarding prospects for the utilitarian state in the face of the dominance of monopoly capitalism ran through the UML like the print in a stick of rock. It informed their desire for tripartism, for industrial democracy, a mixed economy, Keynesian deficit spending and for an expanded welfare state when these have become anathema to the major world capitalist powers.

What they wanted was the type of social democratic settlement that had marked the postwar years in Europe until the 1970s, not realizing that this was a tactical contingency that Western capitalism had conceded to its labor movements and working classes not because it was some inevitable evolution of a humane economic consensus but simply to make the system more attractive to the peoples of the ‘Free World’ in the face of competition from a planned, ‘cradle to grave,’ full employed, socialist Eastern bloc.

America, while supporting this social democratic settlement among its European allies through, e.g., the Marshall Plan, was able to avoid these stratagems because its labor movement was comparatively weak, and its working class consciousness was underdeveloped and fragmented.

Therefore, despite the fact that the immiseration of the 1930’s was as pronounced in the US as it was in Europe, there was no equivalent pressure there to follow a similar course. This, plus the fact that the rapid expansion of its consumer culture began shortly after it switched to a fully employed wartime economy, as opposed to Western Europe where conspicuous consumption started fitfully and differentially, began a good fifteen or twenty years after the war.

What social change did come to the US as a implicit result of the existence of a USSR Soviet Bloc was in the granting of civil rights as demanded by a powerful national lobby, led by the NAACP, to the descendants of its black slaves. Similarly, the struggle against Apartheid only succeeded because of the direct support of the USSR.

With the gradual erosion of socialism following the de-Stalinization initiated by Khrushchev in 1956, free market capitalism began a process of reassertion. It was spurred on by the fact that the Keynesian solution to the problems of underconsumption and unemployment, which had distinguished capitalism before the postwar social democratic consensus, was coming to the end of its useful life as it had led to the rapid increase in the rate of inflation, creating social and economic instability.

Monetarism became one of the main free marketeers’ instruments for addressing this problem – a brutal policy of restricting the money supply would increase its value, not just by making it scarcer as a commodity in itself but by reducing government expenditures, specifically on welfare provisions. It also decreased overall consumption, although Thatcher’s regime added the additional measure of rolling back the hitherto strong British trade union movement that had flourished during the war and after.

It was, however, the suicide of the USSR in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Bloc that finally saw the end of this historically contingent postwar settlement. Capital now saw no need to keep its working classes mollified through the mechanisms of full employment and welfare statism. Social democracy proved to be a comparatively short hiatus in the history of capitalism and was replaced by the predatory neoliberal model which finds crude, brutal expression in contemporary world capitalism.

In the developing world, which had been drawn into the world market and where a growing proletariat is increasingly becoming the source of increased absolute value to expansionist transnational monopolies, the neoliberal model’s dominance could be maintained through either the neocolonial stratagems of creating and supporting comprador bourgeoisies in these super-exploited countries or by using the model’s superior military might either directly or indirectly by Western invasion or arming it’s comprador stooges to crush any progressive resistance to the hegemony of Western imperialism, or where necessary, an admixture of these modalities.

Iraq is an example of the former, Nepal of the latter.

The UML, like its sister party, the CPI(M), has not understood, therefore, that the social democratic dog has barked but the caravan of finance capital has moved on.

There is a similar naivete in the UML’s self-image on offering a middle way between the Scylla of capitalist imperialism and the Charbydis of Communist revolution. In this sense, its propaganda is replete with condemning the excesses of these oppositional forces, e.g.:

Today’s Nepal is in the quagmire of extreme Leftist and Rightist ideologies and, as such, (is) caught in the crossfire of violence and counter violence (of) these extremist ideologies. (Ibid , p.iii)

And again:

The “People’s War” launched by the CPN(Maoists), the Communist faction heavily marred with ultra Leftist thinking and terrorist activities, has been a serious concern of Nepali politics. The state is still under the control of reactionary and anti-worker forces. And the movement for the democratization of Nepali society still continues. (One Union, 2005, p.2)

The UML too thought that it could beat the Maoists electorally following the 2006 ceasefire and the subsequent April Andolan. In fact, it was humiliated and lost a third of its electoral support.

The UML has also promoted extreme military measures against the Maobaadi both before and after it became a member of Koirala’s NC government when it launched in the 1998 ‘Killer Sierra Two’ operation; a brutal army crackdown under the guidance of American and Israeli military advisers against the Maoists and their supporters over a more extended geographical area than Operation Romeo in 1996.

Throughout the period of the PW, it backed any repressive legislation against the Communist revolutionaries. Though still steeped in the idea of Communist opposition, the leadership was determined to play the role of a respectable parliamentary opposition, and the glaring contradiction gave it problems with its rank and file. It maintained this posture despite a drain of cadre who take their Leninism seriously which continues to this day. It has also led to a fierce debate withing the leadership.

The leadership’s re-branding has been described as an attempt to become a Eurocommunist style party and to move away from Leninist insurrectionist vanguardism. Gramsci, a great original Marxist thinker, became widely read among leading cadre. I was asked to send an English edition of Prison Notebooks to a Central Committee member, as it was difficult to obtain anywhere on the subcontinent. I was only too pleased to do so, and it made me realise how much we in the West take easy access to such theoretical works for granted.

The UML was attempting to give intellectual ballast within a Marxist spectrum as a means of justifying its embrace of reactionary politics. As was noted earlier, unequal development between the urban centers, particularly the Kathmandu Valley, and the countryside, particularly in the West where the Maoists flourished, was pronounced.

It meant that a strong civil society existed in the former, and therefore using a Gramscian conceptual framework was no mere fanciful affectation but could be accurately used as a tool of descriptive critical analysis.

The Maoists implicitly recognised how developed this urban civil society was. It was one of the reasons they modified Mao’s original PPW strategy in the context of Chinese conditions of “letting the countryside encircle the city,” realizing that any attempt to take urban areas by force would lead to a Pyrrhic victory at best and therefore a political defeat. The UML’s problem was the political line that was grafted onto this matrix that left it open to a charge of opportunism.

Whatever the new strategy, it steadily lost electoral support from the highpoint of 1994 when it emerged as the largest party with 3

The most crucial problem the UML faces is not its participation in parliamentary politics but its attempt to find a middle ground between two irreconcilable forces. In the developing world, the contradiction exists in its most antagonist form as the privileges of the Western World depend upon the increasing deprivation of the populations of the former.

War, famine, hunger, dispossession and superexploitation is the lot of the majority of the peoples in this Third World. The stark choice facing the twenty-first century is, to paraphrase Luxembourg, “Socialism or capitalist barbarism,” or as Arundhati Roy, the writer and activist, put it in relation to India, “either justice or civil war.”

There is no halfway house, and attempting to inhabit one will not only fail but implicitly gives support to a reactionary status quo.

It has also led increasingly to the UML, like the CPI(M), giving explicit support to, if not actually initiating, retrograde policies and stratagems. The Maoists have gone as far as claiming that the UML is in thrall to US and Indian interests, and that is borne out with its participation in the coup that provoked the resignation of Prachanda and the withdrawal of the then CPN(M) from government. It openly backed the CoS, Katawal, with one of its rewards being the installing of UML leader as Prime Minister.

What is also illustrative of the UML’s subservience to Indian interests is the failure to ever criticize the policies of successive Delhi governments. I have previously detailed, for example, how Indian administrations have used their economic and geographic dominance to force a series of unequal treaties on Nepal, following the example of their previous British masters. The Maoists have consistently called for their repeal, and this is a popular Nepalese demand.

Yet the UML is silent on the issue for the most part. In one instance referred to earlier, they were actually the government that facilitated and signed the 1996 Mahakali River Treaty (Mahakali River Integrated Development Treaty). This marked a new low, even by the standards of previous treaties, in giving India full control of the river in return for next to nothing. When it was ratified by the Parliament, it outraged many Nepalese who concluded all the parliamentary parties involved were Indian stooges, and rumors even circulated that the UML lead negotiators had taken money under the table.

Another measure which brought UML further opprobrium, especially from the Janjatis, was the decision to broadcast news in Sanskrit, which is spoken by no one in Nepal. This further fueled the resentment among those tribal groups already aggravated by the imposition of Nepali as the national language and the introduction of compulsory Sanskrit in schools which were controversial features of the 1990 Constitution.

Nepali, like Hindi, is a member of the Indo-Aryan group of languages which have their roots in Sanskrit (similar to the role that Latin played in Europe in relation to the evolution of the romance languages). Nepal is a multiethnic, multilingual society with over sixty ethnic groups, each with its own language, customs and religions.

For over two hundred years, these groups were excluded from political and economic power by dominant Brahmin castes who established Hindu dominance and sought to impose cultural and linguistic homogeneity upon all the peoples of Nepal.

In the Panchaayat era of Mahendra and Birendra, the slogan “One people – one language – one religion,” only intensified the resentment of the Janjatis against the phenomenon of Hindu domination. Unlike their Indian counterparts, the Adivasis, they form a sizable part of the population, and they supported the first Andolan by way of challenging Hindu hegemonic chauvinism. They felt betrayed however by the policies of the new democratic parliament which actually took steps to consolidate Hindu power.

This was especially true of the first NC government who dominated the shape of the new constitution and was controlled by the upper Hindu castes. What was surprising was the notionally progressive UML continued and even intensified the entrenchment of Hindu cultural and political control when they took over the reins of government from NC in 1994. The issue of the Sanskrit radio news emphasized this reactionary policy.

Consequently, many Janjatis flocked to the Maoist banner after the PW was launched in 1996 as the Maoists offered to reverse the domination of the minority Hindus in favour not only of the tribals but of the Dalits and the Terai Madeshi. The campaign against Sanskritism and the demand for cultural, political and economic freedom was an important part of the CPN(M) program.

It served to underline the fact that the UML, despite its residual Leftist rhetoric, was firmly set on a path of reaction first trodden by the CPI(M). How far this has taken the latter is shown by the recent events in West Bengal where a ‘Left Front’ government has been in power for over thirty years and now openly represents monopoly capitalist interests. It has gone, in the words of one local critic, “from Marxism to marketeering.”

This has been dramatically shown by its attempts to ethnically cleanse Adivasis from a 40 km square area around Nandigram, designated by the government as a Special Development Zone (SEZ), so that Salim, an Indonesian based multinational, can establish a huge chemical complex there.

Local resistance has been so fierce that the government dispatched 4,000 armed police, cadre and goondas to crush it. The violence and terror of this campaign led, in one notorious instance, to a massacre of 14 unarmed demonstrators. Consequently, leading CPI(M) cadre have been targeted and assassinated by Maoist guerrillas, acting as the armed wing of the CPI(Maoist).

It was mentioned earlier that this is prompted by the central government as part of the accommodation to a neoliberal strategy and is replicated in the individual states selected by whatever party is in power. The Left Front regime’s ruthless behaviour is in this sense no different from that of the BJP in Chhattisgarh, even to the extent of sending in CPI(M) cadre leading gangs of armed goondas against the Adivasi resisters.

That the UML is capable of such reactionary extremities is not in doubt; in its brief period of government, it proved that, far from establishing a progressive hiatus, it was indistinguishable from its NC predecessor, not only continuing its reactionary policies but formulating new ones of its own.

CONCLUSION

Like the NC, the UML has become a creature of Indian interests, and while each has developed by a different political route, they have arrived at the same destination. As they each largely draw support and membership from the Hindu segment of the population, they are culturally and linguistically homogeneous to India. Consequently they each find no great difficulty in pragmatically deferring to India’s economic and strategic power.

Like the Maoists, they recognize that, for example, Nepal is not self sufficient and is dependent on Indian imports to feed its population. Unlike the Maoists, however, this serves to bolster their pragmatism in the face of that power. Generally, again unlike the Maoists, they have no fear of Indian expansionism and would not even recognize the term. They rather see the growth of India’s influence as a natural reflection of its overall dominance in all the important spheres alluded to above, including its geographical position in relation to landlocked Nepal.

They are each willing agents, even if unconsciously, of the ‘Sikkimisation’ of Nepal. Sikkim voted in 1948 to stay out of India but gradually succumbed to Indian influence, a process stimulated by failure to produce an efficient government under its monarchy and which culminated in the 1975 occupation by the Indian Army and the subsequent referendum which a majority of the Sikkimese voted to ditch their King and become the 22nd state of the Indian republic.

They are each what could be termed ‘Indo-pendent’ parties, and thus, along with the reactionary pro-Indian officer class of the Nepalese Army, they found no difficulty in collaborating and scheming with primarily the Indian government but also with those of the US and UK in a campaign of sabotage against the Prachanda-led administration which culminated in the military coup recounted at the beginning of this article.

The weight of India’s actual and potential leverage on Nepal has also been implicitly recognised by the UCPN(M) and is one of the principal reasons behind its decision to move from the strategy of protracted People’s War and to the arena of multiparty democracy. It is, like freedom, a recognition of necessity; the realization that India could strangle any Nepalese revolutionary government at best or crush it by military intervention at worst.

It the understanding that there is no Socialist Bloc that can aid and support it, as was evident in the case of the Chinese Revolution, which could rely on the solidarity of the USSR to pursue its People’s War against a comprador Bonapartist Kuomintang clique and which led to victory in 1949.

Prachanda, in a recent meeting in London, said, in this respect:

The UCPN(M) cannot copy either the Bolshevik insurrectionist 1917 seizure of power in Russia or that of the CPC’s victory in China in 1949 but has to ‘develop’ its own strategy based on a concrete analysis of existing Nepalese conditions.

The looming and threatening power of Indian reaction is one of those conditions. The UCPN(M) has upset dogmatic Western Maoists by this adaptation to the existing reality and has developed a strategy to recognize the particularity of Nepal in the 21st century.

The acceptance of multi-party democracy by the UCPN(M) is such a ‘development’ and is not an opportunist stratagem to achieve power but is a long-standing principled policy to establish a ‘new democratic state’ in place of the present bureaucratic/comprador structure. It does not contemplate, therefore, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat following a Protracted People’s War, Prachanda in a speech in 2002 articulated this position:

…we want to clarify once again we are committed to guarantee party freedom in the new state power to be constructed after the destruction of feudal autocracy. The state envisaged by us will not be a one-party dictatorship. The freedom to operate political parties according to one’s ideological convictions and contest elections will be guaranteed.

There only the activities of such elements upholding feudalism and inviting foreign domination will be curbed. We are committed to establish and develop a people’s democratic system of the twenty-first century. Such a democratic system won’t be a mechanical imitation of the traditional kind but will be guided by the people’s needs of the twenty-first century.

In this light the commitment to draw the previously oppressed and excluded classes and castes within Nepalese into this process is a part of extending and deepening this ‘new democracy.’

It also accepted that this stage of political transition will be dominated, in the words of Bhatterai in a 2008 interview, by a “capitalist revolution”who further gave the assurance that, “We will not nationalize large scale industry and we will respect free enterprise.” That this is not in contradiction with orthodox Marxist-Leninism, as he further said:

Marx, Engels and Lenin have already addressed this question. Between feudalism and socialism there is capitalism. But we have not yet had a capitalist stage in Nepal. It is therefore necessary to develop one.

The desire of the UCPN(M) was:

To go beyond Mao. We need to elaborate our own model. Marxism is not a religion, it is a science. We want to develop Marxism. (Le Monde, 11/04/2008, Author’s translation)

This capitalism will not be a comprador but a national one. It is a distinction that Mao himself made:

In the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the people’s republic will not expropriate private property other than imperialist and feudal private property, and so far from confiscating the national bourgeoisie’s industrial and commercial enterprises, it will encourage their development. We shall protect every national capitalist who does not support the imperialists or the Chinese traitors. In the stage of democratic revolution there are limits to the struggle between labour and capital.

The labour laws of the people’s republic will protect the interests of the workers but will not prevent the national bourgeoisie from making profits or developing their industrial and commercial enterprises, because such development is bad for imperialism and good for the Chinese people. (On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism , Mao Tse-Tung, 1935, pp. 168/9 Selected Works, Vol.1)

Following a recent Central Committee meeting which produced unity after a party sanctioned ‘two line struggle’ regarding this position, a member of the UCPN(M) politburo wrote:

And those who were in favour of restructuring the state explained that they too were engaged in a struggle, but it was a different type of struggle which may look Rightist and reformist in form but that in essence it was neither Rightist or reformist. This is because all these steps are being taken not to consolidate the old feudal and comprador/bureaucratic set-up but to achieve a new restructured state. (Thesis, Antithesis & Synthesis, Hsila Yami, Kantipur Times, August 2009)

This is a classic exposition of the “negation of the negation.” It demonstrates the subtlety and sophistication of the Nepalese party cleaving closely to Mao’s analytical methodology. It has been criticized by the Communist Party of India(Maoist) as Rightist deviation from the strategy of PPW which intends to culminate in the smashing of the existing state. They are rightly engaged in armed resistance the length and breadth of India against the forces of a social-fascist comprador state.

But they will find it even harder than in Nepal for the “countryside to encircle the city”, as civil society is even more entrenched in Indian urban centers than in Nepal.

It is certainly a qualitatively different application from the religio-dogmatic, karaoke forms that pass for Maoism among some Western anoraks.

Finally, there is no inevitability that the strategy of the UCPN(M) will be successful, any more than there is about the victory of the worldwide proletarian revolution, but it is certainly better equipped, intellectually and politically, to handle the twists and turns that are distinctly manifest and unique in Nepal as they are indeed in all revolutions.

*My grandfather,Gabriel Byrne, was typical in this respect; he was a volunteer with the 6th Battalion of the Irish Republican Army during the 1918-21 War of Independence. He took the Republican side in the civil war that followed and for a while was de Valera’s driver. He was interned for a time in the Curragh and remained a ‘Dev’ man until his death in 1969.

He came from the Dun Laoghaire working class and started life as a railwayman at the station there, from which many Volunteer operations were launched including a famous ambush on the Marine Parade, two hundred yards from Dun Laoghaire station, where several Black and Tans died in a bomb attack on their Crossley Tender. In peacetime, through hard work combined with a shrewd business sense he became a newsagent in Monkstown next door.

He never lost his republican radicalism or his antipathy to British imperialism. When I was twelve, he thrust E.M. Forster’s Passage to India into my hands and said: “If you want to know what the British were like in India – read this!”

**I was not surprised by the results, as during April 2006, I went on a solo trek around the villages off the Annapurna Trail, a region that was supposed to be one of the few rural areas left under the control of the God-King’s army. Equipped with some Nepalese language, I found ubiquitous evidence of Maoist activity and propaganda and that they had almost total support from the people thereabouts.

One of the few exceptions was an ex-Ghurka shopkeeper who by coincidence had been quartered at barracks in Aldershot where I had worked as a carpenter during the late sixties. The CPN(M) opposes the recruitment of Ghurka mercenaries into either the British or Indian armies.

If I gave the Maoist greeting, Lal Salam (Red Salute), to peoples in fields or villages, it was readily returned, and I made many friends. The commitment was genuine and heartfelt and shaped by years of oppression from a state which was only visible in a repressive military form. The PLA was stood down in that area as part of the CPA.

If you Google: “Peter Tobin – Bishnu Rimal,” you will find an interview I conducted with the latter (a UML Central Committee member) a few days after the victory of the Andolan which will confirm that I guessed right on the depth of Maoist support.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhattarai, B. Monarchy versus Democracy.

Chauduri, N.C. The Continent of Circe.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History.

Karki, A & Seddon, D. The People’s War in Nepal – Left Perspectives.

Mao Tse Tung. On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism, Selected Works, Vol. 1.

Marx, K. The Future Results of British Rule in India, Selected Works, Vol.1.

Maxwell, N. India’s China War.

Misra, A. War of Civilizations – The Long Revolution (India AD 1857).

Muni, S.D. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal.

Rimal, B. Challenging Globalization.

Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National Question.

Thapa, D. A Kingdom Under Siege.

Yami, H. Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.

PERIODICALS & JOURNALS

Himal – Southasian

Kantipur Times

Le Monde

Nepal Telegraph

Nepali Times

The Worker, Journal of the UCPN(M)

UML/GEFONT PUBLICATIONS

One Union

Study & Research

Trade Union Rights

World of Work

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Kumar Sarkhar for his explanation of the term Bhadralok, and also for drawing my attention that any description of Indian civil society that does not represent its multiethnic, multilingual and multifaceted political culture and therefore exaggerates Hindu hegemony will be unbalanced. While I do not therefore resign myself from the ‘Two Nations’ theory in respect of Ireland, I do need to study the Indian experience further – after all comparisons might be odious.

He has also provided me with details of the position of the CPI(M) with regard to partition and their discussions with Stalin and Zhdanov representing the CPSU. This has pointed to a gap in the article relating to early history and development of the Indian CP.

I would like to thank Tongogara Tewodros for drawing my attention to Hegel’s views on slavery.

I would also like to thank Sudeshna Sarkar for correcting a Tourette’s grammatical tic I had developed by correcting my spelling of Hindu names, and by pointing out that KP Bhatterai was the first PM following the 1990 Andolan, and not GP Koirala. Her article on a sacred Hindu relic was helpful because it detailed the section of the Mahabharata where the Pandavas brothers flee to the Himalayas racked with guilt at the enormity of their victory over the Kuaravas brothers following the mythic battle of Kurukshetra.

This episode both bears out and challenges the notion of a historical martial Hindu spirit (which is proposed by Chauduri and which this article tries to confirm with the history since Independence); it confirms it in the battle, which although one among many, is pivotal, it modifies it with the anguished withdrawal of the victors. This rejection of the world finds its echoes throughout Hindu literature and history where powerful figures step down, practice virtue and find spiritual solace.

It was not particularly confined to Hindu myth – we have the historical figure of Siddhartha Gautama who relinquished his princely status in order to ‘become one with himself and the universe’ and become Buddha in the process.

Finally, I would like to thank her generally for a vigorous exchange on issues raised in the article.

Peter Tobin September 2009

Health Care Reform in Taiwan and South Korea

A couple of nice articles about health care reform, and frankly national health care, in Taiwan and South Korea. The article about South Korea is rather complicated, and I did not understand all of it. It’s from the American Journal of Public Health. The article about Taiwan is much easier to understand. Taiwan has more of a single payer system. One of the main beefs that US conservatives have about single payer is that you don’t get to choose your doctor, and the government wastes too much money and won’t spend efficiently. Actually, it’s the private sector that is inefficient. Taiwanese health care has the lowest administrative costs on Earth, and it’s a single payer system. Medicare also has very low administrative costs, around Both are beginning to run into problems, but that’s inevitable. For an example of the sort of problems Taiwan experienced before national health care, in 1999, 5 South Korean health care reform actually started in 1977, when the government began requiring companies to cover employees with health insurance. It’s pretty amazing that even this reform is apparently completely off the table in the crazy US. This is actually closer to the Japanese model. All Japanese are covered, mostly through their work. I believe that the corporations are mandated to cover employees, but they typically covered them anyway, since Japanese corporations have a much more paternalistic attitude than the “Fuck off and die!” attitude that US corporations take towards their employees. South Korea’s model is called “decentralized” and hence similar to that of France or Germany, but I don’t understand what that means. South Koreans have had problems with cost containment on the supply side as private hospitals, private physicians run up costs unnecessarily. There are also problems with increased outlaw for pharmaceuticals. I am told that the physicians’ groups, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies reportedly promised Obama that they would not kill health care reform if he pushed it. He made this deal with them when he was running for President. All the ranting and raving you hear about health care is coming from independent rightwingers and the Republican Party – the corporations have stayed out of it. That’s possibly why the arguments sound so shrill and insane. If the corporations were running this campaign, they would be a lot slicker about it. Obviously, this was a quid pro quo. What we need to know is what Obama promised in return. I bet he promised nothing more than a public option and to declare single payer DOA. 6 The US seems to be the only country on Earth where people actually protest against health care. Americans are nuts.

The Failure of the Neoliberal Model For Developing Countries

On the 60th Anniversary of Chinese Liberation post, James Schipper says that I should compare China to Taiwan and South Korea instead and see who did better. I pointed out that a book on China by the reactionary Time-Life Corporation in 1962 at the height of the Cold War noted that Taiwanese miracle was not reproducible in China. They wished it was, but there was no way to do it. For one thing, one thing that helped create the Taiwanese miracle was a flood of US aid. In order to China to receive a concomitant amount of aid, China would have to have received an unheard-of figure that was simply not possible to achieve at that time, or even now. Further, there was the problem of feeding the people and rural poverty. Taiwan solved this, mostly by doing a land reform, but Taiwan is a little island, and feeding the island was not an insurmountable task. The book pointed out that the main problem facing China was feeding the population. Only 2 Everywhere on Earth, US imperialism has always fought the imposition of any kind of national health care, state involvement in the economy and especially land reform. Many nations have been overthrown by the CIA and other agents of US imperialism for attempting even those most meager reforms. Indeed, all Hugo Chavez seems to be doing is trying to create some sort of social democracy in Venezuela. Yet in Taiwan and South Korea, the US agreed to national health care, massive land reform, trade barriers, heavy state involvement in the economy, the whole works. This is because I believe that the US knew that all of these were necessary to develop an economy. Taiwan and South Korea were intended by imperialism to be “showcases against Communism”, to be sparkling examples of what “capitalism” could do better than say North Korea or China. It’s really amazing how cynical imperialism is, but if imperialism has to do a bit of a socialist dance to fight Communism, then that’s what it will do. The sad thing is that if the North Korean, Soviet and Chinese “threats of a good example” did not exist, there would be no reason for imperialism to create these “anti-Commie showcases” and the model for those countries may well have been the Philippines, Thailand or Indonesia instead. I would like to point out a few other things, mainly that we are comparing one socialist country to another, since I consider Taiwan at least to be a socialist country and South Korea to be a partly socialist country. As I’ve said on this site, I support all kinds of socialism. The main thing is that we are not comparing a socialist China to a neoliberal capitalist South Korea or Taiwan. Taiwan at least is a very socialist country. They did a land reform, and they have universal health care that even includes dental care! I don’t know much about South Korea, but I know that they did a land reform. It’s important to note how essential that land reform was developing those two nations. Neoliberal dumbasses never seem to figure that out. You have to deal with the problem of feeding your people and take care of the problem of rural poverty by doing a land reform, and then you can think about becoming a developed country. Until then, the best you can hope for is some backwards clusterfuck wreck like Brazil or Equatorial Guinea. Also, neither Taiwan nor South Korea are examples of neoliberal capitalism. Both were very heavily state-directed, state-guided and even state-involved economies. The state was pretty much setting economic policy and telling the corporations what to do. The state and the business sector were very much tied together. It was almost a “national socialism.” Also both countries protected their budding industries with huge trade barriers until they got big enough to compete with the big guys. All developing countries need to protect their budding industries from competition with huge economies – otherwise you are never going to develop. Of course all of this – land reform, national health care (including dental!), heavy state involvement in the economy, trade barriers to protect budding industries until they are big enough to compete – are anathema to the neoliberal agenda that holds sway over the entire world, mostly due to US imperialism. Neoliberalism never developed one undeveloped country ever, and probably never will.

60th Anniversary of the Liberation of China

Very nice article sums up very well the great changes that occurred in China on October 1, 1949. The author finds that almost every Chinese woman he meets his joyous about the Chinese Revolution. Why? It was the greatest movement for he liberation of women that has ever occurred in the history of the world. On that day, for instance, Mao issued a decree forbidding forever the binding of feet, a practice that was rampant under Chiang’s Nationalist government. Arranged marriages were ended and women received 1/2 of their husband’s property. As Mao put it, “China stood up.” Indeed. Were the Revolution never to have taken place, surely Chinese women would still have bound feet, would get screwed (literally in marriage) and would suffer form arranged marriages. In the rural areas, education and health care would be rare to nonexistent, just as it is in India today. Mao also tried to stop wife-beating, an ancient tradition in China. His methods were ingenius. Mao ordered women all across China to order the men in the villages to stop beating women. If they did not stop, there would be consequences. Many men did not stop, so party cadres in the villages told Chinese women to gather up their farm implements and raid the houses of the beaters and beat them up with farm tools. So all across China, in 100’s of thousands of villages, women armed with hoes and shovels stormed into houses and beat up men who were beating their wives. Wife-beating quickly dropped to a low level, though unfortunately it still continues today. The Chinese government is said to be capitalist, but that is not really true. The latest government educational decree sent teachers to all villages with over 200 residents. In the 3rd World, capitalist countries don’t do things like that. The reigning neoliberal model says the less the state spends on education, the better, as it is regarded as a waste of society’s money that would be better spent by the public sector. Instead, private schools are encouraged. The US “liberal”mass media cheers the closing of schools in the Third World and government issuance of nonpayable school fees. When the Sandinistas were thrown out of office in 1990, the entire US media stood up and cheered. Nearly all legislators of both US parties (the “liberal” Democrats nearly more than the Republicans) roared their approval for the defeat of the Sandinistas. The ultra-reactionary Violeta Chamorro got down to business very quickly. One of the first things she did was to close health clinics all over Nicaragua. Next she issued a $30/year fee that parents had to pay for every student in the public schools. This was unpayable for huge numbers of parents, so swarms of students all over Nicaragua quickly dropped out of school. I assume that that’s still the case today. It is for such things that the entire US media cheers. Floods of students being thrown out of schools all over the land because they can’t pay the bills. Countless health clinics closing all over the land, leaving poor 3rd Worlders with no medical treatment. Both parties, “liberal” Democrats and Republicans, roar their approval of such atrocities. The World Bank and the IMF, both of which are controlled both by US imperialism and also by World Jewry, imposes similar conditions all through the 3rd World. In order to get a loan, government spending must be slashed to the bone, especially health and education spending. Subsidies to poor for anything, for food, transportation, utilities, anything, are ordered to be slashed or ended altogether. Prices for food, utilities, transportation, you name it, rocket upward and taxes are raised on the poorest of the poor. At the same time, taxes on business and the rich are gutted or eliminated and poor country must be opened up to economic colonization by corporations from the rich nations, often US corporations. Careful studies have shown that IMF/World Bank policies have resulted in declining education and health figures across the board. The best estimates show that these sanctions have killed millions over the past couple of decades, and possibly continue to kill millions every year. So US imperialism and World Jewry are probably deliberately killing millions every year in the 3rd World through structural adjustment alone. So any government that massively increases education to its people in these days must be a socialist nation, since capitalist countries by their nature do not do such things. In the US, on Wikipedia and among reactionaries everywhere, there’s a new line out: the Chinese Revolution failed. Next time someone tells you that, think again.

Libertarianism – The Enemy of all Non-Human Life on Earth

As several posts on Occidental Dissent make clear, libertarianism (and its mainstream congener, neoliberalism) is utterly incompatible with the preservation of any non-human and non-domesticated or non-utilitarian life forms. Libertarians like to throw up weird scenarios whereby preserving wildlife, wild spaces and wild places would somehow be more economically viable than exterminating them, exploiting them, and devastating them. The problem is that this never works out in praxis. Even when we environmentalists produce reports showing that preserving forests and meadows is worth way more than chopping them down or ruining them with cattle, 10 Since neoliberalism is just libertarianism, neoliberalism also can never support environmentalism. Market-driven environmental policies must be some kind of a cruel joke. They can never work. In strict economically rational terms, it is either never or almost never economically rational to save species, habitats or places. Destruction and extermination is where the money is, and in neoliberal theory, maximum return is the only variable we are allowed to consider. Libertardarians now argue that humans (I guess maybe those of White European stock) now care enough about environmentalism that we can zero out government, privatize everything, and everything will still be hunky dory for the bighorns, the spotted owls and timber wolves. Yeah right. In the first place, this would only work with White people, because only Whites can be environmentalists at the moment, and only more advanced Whites in North America and Europe need apply even here. That’s because Whites in Latin America and Russia have proven to be utterly capable of taking care of the environment. Native Americans and Siberians can probably preserve things too, but they don’t run any states. Let’s test out the libertarian theory on most liberal-minded of the more progressive Whites on Earth, the ultra-liberals in California (though not a White state anymore, nevertheless, California is one of the most pro-environmental states in the nation). The argument that humans now care enough about species to preserve them is proven wrong here in the West. Even here in ultra-liberal California, the glorious salmon are nearly extinct. The striped bass fishery in the Delta and Bay has also been ruined. The vast herds of Tule Elk that roamed all over the valleys and coastal areas of our state have been decimated and only exist on miniscule preserves that look like petting zoos. Fishers and spotted owls are being driven extinct by the timber industry as we speak. A lot of CA endangered species are not real celebrities, but salmon would seem to have quite a bit of worth. Yet the salmon fishery in CA and up and down the West has been decimated. And even the ultra-liberal CA senators like Dianne Feinstein insist that we have not creamed the salmon enough, and need to take them out once and for all now. Feinstein’s mostly doing this for one of her rich Jewish buddies, Stewart Resnick of Beverly Hills. So much for liberal US Jews! The notion that humans (Anywhere!) now value wildlife enough to be trusted with preserving them in a libertarian society is seriously wrong, and we can prove it right here in California. In the 3rd World, humans are so bestial, venal, animalistic and backwards that they indeed are well on the way to extrerminating everything non-human, non-domesticated and non-utilitarian in sight. An excellent argument in favor of White superiority (which I agree with) is, as I noted above, that Whites are really the only humans on Earth (who run states) that care about non-human life enough to preserve it.* Virtually every other race and ethnic group of man will gladly exterminate every single non-domesticated species and non-utilitarian species in its land at the drop of a hat. Preserving species is something only Whites can do. And it’s something that only White governments can do, the White private sector haven proven endlessly to have failed at this endeavor. *I honestly wish that non-European states were capable of not exterminating everything in sight, but I doubt it. The Middle East is an environmental catastrophe. The only environmentally decent place is Israel, but that’s populated by White people. The only environmentally progressive place in Latin America is Costa Rica, but once again, that’s a White country. It seems that all Arabs and mestizos can do is destroy. Asians seem like a nightmare in environmental terms. They aren’t even capable of tender feelings towards cats and dogs, which they massacre for sport and food, so how can they possibly be trusted with non-domesticated things. The Japanese have been some of the worst scofflaws in international fishing and their bestial exploits in whaling have earned them the scorn of the planet. True, in some ways, Koreans and Japanese seem to want to preserve what’s left on their lands, but environmentally, those places are pretty much human-nuked anyway, mostly by overpopulation. A preservationist impulse isn’t worth much if there is nothing left to preserve. The hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia never had the caretaker mindset of American Indians, instead opting for the more primitive mindset of “kill everything that moves.” The extinction process in SE Asia is very advanced and the state does very little to stop it. Environmental consciousness is extremely low. Probably Vietnam is one of the more standout states. China is just now starting to develop an environmental ethic, but it doesn’t seem to be very advanced, and in a lot of ways, environmentally, China looks like America 1890. I’m amazed that anything non-human and non-bovine is still walking around in India, where the extinction process is quite advanced, the state is extremely weak, and poachers are everywhere. Russians have always been some of the most backwards and barbaric of the Whites, and environmentally, that’s still the case. Since the collapse of the USSR things have really fallen badly apart. Market hunters and poachers stalk the land. In Siberia, the poacher harvest of salmon is the same size as the legal harvest. The Amur Leopard and the Siberian Tiger are hanging on by their bare claws, and I expect them to go extinct soon. Africa has to be one of the worst places on Earth to be a species of wildlife. Africans are primitive people, and primitives tend to kill anything that moves, usually for food. The only reason that there were still huge wildlife populations 50 years ago is due to White colonists, who forbade the Africans from wiping out the animals. With decolonization, Africans quickly set work slaughtering anything that moved. That they had not done so in centuries past was due only to the crudity of their weapons. You can’t kill many animals with a spear. In 1965, Africans with firearms were a threat the animal population of the continent. The large megafauna were only saved when the former White colonists were called back in by concerned Africans to save the animals. Many of the large animal populations still exist, but poachers and bush meat hunters take a devastating toll. I don’t see anything positive in the future. Africans don’t seem to be capable of not exterminating animals. One argument is that non-Whites do these things because they are poor. Equatorial Guinea now has a PCI of $21,000/year. Anyone seen any nice environmental initiatives coming out of there? Has the wealth of the Japanese prevented them from killing whales? Has Korean wealth prevented them from waging mass pogroms against dogs and cats? Has the relative wealth of Brazil and Argentina prevented environmental devastation in these places? The Gulf Arab countries are extremely wealthy, but my understanding is that they are environmental wrecks. So much for the “they do it because they are poor” line.

Why Was The Bankster-Destruction of the World Economy Necessary?

According to Libertarian (Libertardarian) theory, or neoliberal theory, the recent blowup of the US economy by the FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sector was absolutely necessary, or at least was absolutely normal. Any attempts to regulate US capitalism to try to prevent such economic ruin in the first place would have been and would be catastrophic. It’s important to note that Libertardarian theory and neoliberalism are essentially the same thing. Neoliberalism rules the West, especially the US. It’s firmly in place in much of the Third World. And since Thatcher, it’s made major inroads even in socialist Europe. Almost all US Economics departments have been colonized by neoliberal crazies. If you go anywhere in the US to study Economics, you come out a wild-eyed neoliberal nutcase. Nearly the entire US mass media has been intellectually colonized by Neoliberal Madness, including all of the major US dailies, the major US newsweekly magazines, all major US network TV, and most of the paid intellectuals at US intellectual policy foundations. The Republicans have been a neoliberal party for decades now, but the Democrats are not far behind. The “socialist” Obama is no such thing. On the FIRE question, he’s as insane as George Bush or Milton Friedman. Obama’s administration is littered top to bottom with bankster and FIRE crooks, from Larry Summers to Robert Rubin to Tim Geithner to Robert Reich. Much of the blame for the horrific destruction to the US and world economy can be laid at the feet of the Clinton Administration, who tried to out-reactionary the Republicans in deregulating the FIRE sector. The recent G20 summit solved nothing, Obama’s braying aside. Despite a lot of loose Obama talk, little to nothing has been done to regulate the FIRE sector. The banks are back gambling again in the same way they did before, the same way that ruined the economy of the planet, and no one is going to stop them. The next blow-up is probably going to be even worse. Libertardarianism is ridiculous. It’s never been attempted anywhere, really, and the only places where it’s been de facto in place, such as the Third World and pre-civilized America, ended up or end up pretty well wrecked. The only people who have fun in these places are the rich people. Everyone else gets screwed. A lot of White Americans think that Libertardarianism is tres cool. What they really mean is it’s good for White people. A bunch of White nationalist retards recently got on board for supposedly the same reason when they supported the Ron Paul campaign. Libertardtarianism is behind the recent blowup of not just the US but the world economy. Qui bono? Almost no one. White people? Get real. Upper middle class or middle class Whites? Not really. Basically what happened is that the banks and FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector robbed the national economy blind. They had to be bailed out to $10 billion, which came out of our savings from our taxes, out of Social Security and Medicare. SS and Medicare are pretty well nuked now, but that was the project all along. The economy is screwed. Income has been flat since 2001, and wages have been flat since 1980. My friends in Europe are moaning. The economy there is ruined by the US bankster-crooks. It’s gone for all the rest of the year and all next year. My friends were White Europeans with good incomes living very well. Their incomes and lifes have been screwed hard, and so have the lives and incomes of millions of other European Whites. So you’re an upper middle class White in the US. You made out? Dubious. You probably lost your corporate job, you may have lost your house, your car, God knows what else. How many American Whites have been screwed like this by this Banker Ripoff? My Mom bought her house 4 years ago for $130K. It’s now worth $48K. She’s a normal, elderly White woman, who’s worked her whole life. Why did she need to get fucked like this for some lying Banksters? This blowup has screwed the US economy. A lot of companies are hurting bad or out of business altogether. How did this Bankster Ripoff Scam benefit US business, or US capitalism? It didn’t. All it did was blow a hole in the safe and make off with a ton of loot and leave us holding the bag. The Republicans won’t reform the FIRE criminals, and neither will the “socialist” Obama. Why not? He’s not a socialist! Both parties, even the “liberal” Democrats, are 10 Can anyone even give me a pro-capitalist, pro-business or pro-White argument about why this Greatest Bankster Robbery even needed to happen in the first place? I don’t get it. It was bad for business, bad for capitalism, bad for Whites. Yet Libertariantards not only justify but champion such Free Market Fundamentalist Mumbo-Jumbo.

European "Socialists" Agree To Drive Bluefin Tuna Extinct

Repost from the old site. Environmentalists who insist that socialism or social democracy will save the environment have always worried me. Canada’s been ruled by social democrats for a long time, and it’s horrible on environmental issues. Interestingly, the radical rightwing US Bush regime proposed a reduced quota to keep the bluefin tuna from going extinct, and the far rightwing governments of Guatemala and Panama amazingly agreed to it. So who shot it down? A bunch of “socialists” in Europe, in particular the leftwing Spanish government. Looks like the Arab governments of Mediterranean (presumably including “socialist” Qaddafi and the “Socialists” in Algeria) are the ones who really shot it down. 9 The impetus? Protect the local fishing trade, which is big money. But once the bluefins go extinct, and they will under this plan, the amount of money the industry will make off the bluefin trade will be $0 per year. The job loss will be a nice round 10 Extraction industries under capitalism have always been like gays on a condomless months-long group sex binge in San Francisco. Fun now, pay bigtime (die) later. Over and over, fishermen have deliberately driven fish species to commercial or actual extinction, and that’s just recently. Extraction industries are ultimately suicidal. They never get it. They’re like Peter Pan and age. They never think the stock is going to run out. Extraction industries will destroy everything in their path – fish, wild animals for furs or food, forests for wood, range for cattle or sheep, you name it. Foresters will always choose to cut down every last tree and then stand around bewildered like a drunk who wakes up on Saturday morning and realizes he blew his check at the bar. Ranchers will always destroy range, especially if it’s public range that they don’t even own. How? By running too many cows or sheep on it. After decades of that, they can hardly run one ungulate on the land anymore, but like a wiped-out gambling addict running to the casino with his latest paycheck in hand, they never seem to get it. Extractive industry is run by perpetual children masquerading as adults who are not able, due to the nature of their industry, to think or behave rationally. All voluntary regulation, deregulation, minimal government (Republican, conservative and rightwing) solutions will always fail. If there’s one aspect of the capitalist economy that will always need adult supervision, it’s the extractive clowns. Problem is the state is typically in bed with the extractive problem gamblers. There are no easy solutions, but socialism is surely a false hope. From flooding the West with immigrants, legal and illegal, to support for suicidal extractives on “national economy” grounds, modern socialism will always fail the environment. The solution is Deep Ecology. Deep Ecology is divorced from the capitalism vs. Communism thing and always puts the environment first.

Oil Speculators Account For 50% of Oil Trades

New study here. I don’t understand economics very well, but this seems ridiculous. What is the point of this? Why are 5 This seems absurd to me. People who are rewarded in society are people who are producing or distributing a product. Even artists selling schlock are producing something that someone wants to buy. Overpriced pituitary cases on basketball courts seem silly with their multi-million $ salaries, but they are producing a product, professional sports, which millions want to pay for in various ways. All of these strike me as socially useful types of production. Hell, even dope and porn are products that folks are willing to fork over bucks for. Production need not be socially beneficial, but I would suggest that production or distribution itself ought to be a requirement for any socially useful type of economic activity. I have no beef with folks who are either buying or selling oil, or any other commodity for that matter. That’s a product. Buying and selling is part of the function of the market in a market society. But sheer gambling seems to be completely extraneous to any social benefit. No product is produced, no product is purchased, no product is sold. This seems to me very much a useless, leech, “parasitic” type of economic function. Just gamblers in a casino called a Commodities Market. Well, it turns out that these gamblers blew up the cost of gas to $4.50/gallon last year. Similar gamblers serving no useful social function whatsoever blew up the housing market and screwed the economy of the whole damn world. Various arguments are offered. The typical one is, “They will make money and invest it.” First of all, that’s not really true, and second of all, that’s trickle down economics, which can be used to justify the most outrageous kind of economic inequality on the basis that the rich will somehow share the wealth in some funny and hard to see way. Various other neoliberal arguments were offered that I did not understand, with these capitalists suggesting that speculation plays an essential role in markets and in the economy. The assumption being that if you get rid of the speculators, the whole economy collapses, but no one cries “Chicken Little” like a capitalist. Anyway the speculators themselves are already collapsing the damned economy. How could things get worse if you reign the leeches in? These arguments were found on a liberal site I go to. It’s amazing how many “liberals” are hardcore, radical, neoliberal free market capitalists. One wonders, since economics is out of the question, what exactly their liberalism is all about? Clicking on their profiles reveals guys, some Jewish, always with lots of money, who are members of groups called “Progressives,”Left This”, “Left That”, “Fight the Right”, “Stop Rush”, “Obama Supporters”, etc. They’re main concern is “world peace,” which will never occur in my lifetime. I guess some of them want to save the whales or the fucking baby seals. As commenter Lafayette Sennacherib suggests, when you take Economics out of the Left, there’s nothing left. You have a bunch of greedy capitalist bastards living in mansions yelling about gay rights or feminism or baby seals or snail darters or “White racists.” What about the workers? What about economics? What about a fair and just system? Silence from these guys, as they try to count their uncountable piles of cash and write a check to the Democratic Central Committee. If this is “Obama liberalism”, Hell, just take it out and shoot it in the field in the back and put it out of its misery. I want no part. One final note on the oil commodities market: a reasonable regulation would be to require these speculators to at least take possession of the oil they are buying. Hardly any will do that, so that will kill the parasites right there. Reasonable, right?

PC Lunacy on Immigration and Other Things

The quote at the end of the post is from a middle class Black commenter who took tremendous offense at this rather moderate post, accusing it of sounding like the neo-Nazis on Stormfront. He also took issue with my description of this site as anti-racist (In my opinion, it is, and that is one of the foundational themes of this site), and said instead it was a racist site. He has now been banned because you don’t get to call this a racist site, and if you come here and spout PC anti-racism at me, I will soon tire of you and ban you. So this fellow was banned. He objected to many things in the post. One objection is that a Black state in the US would not be a miserable failure. I’m quite sure it would be a disaster, and that is why you hardly see any Blacks crazy enough to advocate for this. In particular, he objected to my saying that all of the Blacks in the US could take off tomorrow, while it would be painful in some respects in that we would lose a lot of quality workers and citizens, I’m confident that on balance, Whites would be better off. Obviously, professional sports would be hit very hard, but White men have been shooting hoops, throwing footballs and catching fly balls for a long time now, and I’m sure they could go back to it. Baseball’s practically a Caribbean Latino sport now anyway. We no longer need Blacks for cheap labor, as we’ve imported millions of illegals to do that. The crime rate would obviously plummet, many of our ruined cities would become quite a bit more livable again, music and other entertainment would become less obviously sociopathic, many of our social pathologies would ameliorate, and perhaps most significantly, we would be free of a lot of racial friction generated by a perpetually grievanced group (Blacks) that many Whites are getting increasingly tired of. Granted, since the 1960’s, Blacks have resembled a bunch of angry people locked out of a really cool party hanging out on the sidewalk and yelling that they want in. Inside, we Whites are partying it up. Whenever you see a scene like that, you know how painful and ugly it is. Well, Obama got elected, and to me that meant that Blacks finally got invited into the party after all this time. Instead of being grateful or happy, they seem just as pissed off as ever. They’re inside the party now, and everyone is having fun, but they still act like they are out on the sidewalk. Many Whites, including me, are exasperated. There is a sense of, “What more do we need to do, anyway, before you all settle down, relax and try to be happy?” What I am saying is that the culture of grievance gets old. US Blacks are the richest, the best educated, the most politically powerful, the most intelligent and the most cultured Blacks on Earth. Despite the ghettos and all, they live quite well here compared to just about any Black or heavily-Black country. Sure, you can find some other White countries that are maybe better for Blacks, but once again, you come back around to the original argument that White cities, regions and states are great places for Blacks to live in. Blacks agree. They vote with their feet. Once a city gets too Black, the most functional Blacks start taking off too, usually to a Whiter area. I’m not a White nationalist or a Back to Africa idiot or any of that. I just note that Whites do not particularly need Blacks in the US, while the converse does not seem to be true. Blacks need Whites. If all the Whites left tomorrow, this country would rapidly turn into the usual Black and mestizo Latin American type country. It would not be a better place for Blacks. So I’m not making any argument for ethnic cleansing or saying Blacks don’t have a right to be here. But this is why quite a few Whites are enthusiastic about a White ethnostate in the US, while almost no Blacks are keen on the idea of a Black ethnostate. Whites look at the White ethnostate with no Blacks and ask, “OK, why is this a problem?” Blacks look at a Black state with no Whites and probably think, “Uh-oh. Detroit. Black Belt. Count me out.” Blacks benefit in the present integrated system to some extent in that Blacks in the US are fairly spread out and diluted and further that many of the victims of Black criminals are non-Blacks. In a Black ethnostate, all of the Black criminals would be concentrated together, and there would be no non-Black victims to dilute the victimhood. Blacks would be seriously hammered by Black criminals in a Black ethnostate as Black criminals turned all of their antisocial fury on the only victims available, other Blacks. Anyway, all the above is surely insulting for a lot of Blacks to think about, so they are going to be pretty defensive about it. On immigration, this guy spouted the standard PC line, which is quite common nowadays. You hear it across the board by the entire US elite. Immigrant advocates are also parroting this nonsense. It’s interesting that the modern version of Political Correctness is really Marxism stripped of class analysis and focusing solely on race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and other nonsense. Many of the folks pushing this Leftist line on race are in fact marrying it to explicitly free market economics and reject anything smacking of a Left view of economics, at least according to a friend of mine who is currently taking a syllabus called “Multiculturalism” – mandatory at California state universities now! He calls it “Anti-White Studies.” Considering the Cultural Leftism these folks were pushing, I assumed that they were liberals or even Leftists. But this Cultural Marxism, according to my friend, is married to an embrace of “the free market” and a rejection of most to all government intervention and regulation of economies. This really is the same pro-corporate globalism that is being pushed by the corporations. Our modern corporations feature, along with diversity advisers, multicultural seminars and crazy hate speech and anti-harassment codes, the standard conservative pro-corporate economics. So Political Correctness often nowadays is a bizarre mix of the worst – Right neoliberal madness of the kind that is blowing up our economy mixed with brain-dead stupid and White-toxic Leftist Cultural Marxism. There’s nothing in this for any principled progressive White person. Economically, it’s just conservative gunpowder and matches. The only Left part of it is objectively hostile to Whites and frankly working class folks of all races, as it demands that White nations be flooded with the entirety of the Third World in the name of redress for supposed White crimes and evils. So working Whites get the double-whammy. First we get hit by the Rightist Hurricane Neoliberal side of this template. Next we get hit by Leftist toxic anti-White hate propaganda combined with a tsunami of Third World non-White immigrants driving wages into the gutter and turning once-livable cities into Third World hellholes. There’s nothing here for us. Check out this standard PC line on why mass Third World immigration is necessary for all White countries:

Some Whites will always talk about how we don’t “need” these non-Whites and such and such, but the fact is, if they weren’t needed, they wouldn’t be there in the first place. First off, White countries don’t even reproduce at replacement level, thereby making it imperative to have to bring in non-White immigrants just to keep their rapidly-aging societies from having a labor shortage and to be able to support the social security benefits of Whites retired and soon to be retired. The situation is even more accelerated in Europe with it’s even lower white birthrate than in America. So go ahead and cut off the spigot of non-White immigration, and the White countries will eventually vanish off the face the planet based on their low birthrates alone. You ought to be thankful there are non-White workers coming in to make up the slack for your low-fertility rates. I guess next someone will be blaming Blacks for white low fertility rate since you know, Blacks are responsible for everything bad in the universe.

Does anyone reading this blog actually believe this tripe? Yet this is what passes for standard and unquestioned wisdom by the PC Mafia and entire right to left political spectrum of US elites.

Pakistan Adimst the Ruins

Note: Repost from the old blog. Pakistan amidst the ruins. Read those figures over and tell me that she does not need socialism, and socialism, now. If the word socialism gives you the shivers, how about at least the socialism of Sri Lanka, which has managed to produce spectacular figures in all areas that Pakistan has so lacked. How can anyone possibly look at these kind of figures and tell me that capitalism works at all in the 3rd World? They are just starting? Hell, they have had 60 years to practice. Enough already. Capitalism in South Asia is killing at least 8 million people every year, year and year out, no exceptions. That right there is an excellent reasons for Maoists across the subcontinent to take up arms to overthrow the existing system and put in whatever they choose. Anything that kills fewer than 8 million a year is better than the status quo, right? So why worry about killing a few here and there? Is it worth killing a few to save a million? Of course it is, always was, always will be. Let us see the red flag fly over South Asia, not just Nepal.

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