Alt Left: Karl Marx, “The Genesis of Capital”: The Creation of Capitalism and Its Link to Modern Land Reform

This fascinating document is available in booklet form as it is only ~35 pages. It is an excerpt from the larger Capital volume. It’s not an easy read but it’s not impossible either.

Some of the writing is gorgeous. I read one sentence to my very anti-Communist liberal Democrat father and he swooned over the prose. That one sentence was both perfect and beautiful, though it dealt with some terrible.

In many places, this is forceful – see the fencing of the Commons in the 1300’s, done deliberately to force the peasants into the capitalist mode or production. Indeed theorists said that if the peasants could not be shoved into capitalism, there would be no capitalism, for their would be no workers. It was essential to destroy the peasants ability to live off the land for themselves in order to force them into worse circumstances as industrial workers.

We see this very same rhetoric employed today in India – where it is argued that the tribals in Chattisargh and other places must be uprooted from the lands, have their lands stolen from them to give to mining and forest industries, and forced into the capitalist mode in cities in order to properly develop the economy. It is argued that India cannot develop its economy until the Adivasis have been destroyed. Note that as with the ancient peasants, the Adivasis will live much poorer lives in the cities than the were in the rural areas.

In Colombia, we see something very similar. In Colombia, small farmers own a lot of land. They are able to subsist off this land and they do not need to participate in the larger economy. They grow enough food for themselves and some city people. The process of the Colombian revolution and the genocidal response of the Colombian oligarchy to it is all throwing the peasants off of these small plots, stealing their land at gunpoint (the paramilitaries are used for this), and terrorizing or killing them if they refuse to hand over their land.

The land is then confiscated by latifundias or large landowners who by and large control the Colombian economy. They grow coffee, bananas, etc. and raise cattle for export, generating money for the economy in the process.

In fact, this process has been going on all over Latin America for over 200 years as sort of a slow-motion process of ethnic cleansing and land theft. Smalholders are able to live off the land in Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, and Brazil, and this is seen as unacceptable as they only grow food for themselves and possibly for city-dwellers but the produce cannot be exported.

These countries wish to develop an export model of agriculture based on the large scale production of food crops for export mostly to the US. In return, their ability to produce their own food is destroyed, in my opinion, rendering their economies completely backwards. The people are then rendered vulnerable to the purchase of imported food from the US, often packaged or canned food that is not very good for you.

As you can see, the country gets screwed and the US wins both ways. By destroying the basis for feeding themselves, the US wins an export market for its processed foods. By replacing these with food crops for export to the US, the US gets to make money by importing and selling these food crops. In return the country gains nothing.

Only a small landholding and import-export elite (maybe 2

And in the process, of course, the country generates a revolutionary movement, often an armed one.

This can be seen in areas of Colombia. In one particular part of Southern Colombia, most of the rural peasantry had been thrown off the land and most of the land was now held by a few large landowners who were raising cattle on the land. The peasants had been terrorized off of their stolen land and formed ghettos in a large city nearby, which increased the poverty rate and the slump percentage of the city by a lot. Here they were poor, unhealthy, poorly fed and clothed, living in slums in shacks with no sewage systems, clean water or electricity.

These slums began to generate a lot of street crime as they tend to do. Outside of the cities on the main roads, there were soldiers and paramilitaries everywhere and one went from one armed roadblock to the other. Curiously enough, a large guerrilla movement had developed among the few remaining peasants and in teeming slums. Armed guerrillas extorted the latifundias for money that they called “war taxes.” The latifundias now paid a lot of money for paramilitaries to patrol their lands.

In the slums, an urban guerrilla movement was developing. Police, soldiers and paramilitary members were attacked with bombs, RPG’s and automatic weapons all the time and took significant casualties. The war had now moved to the city where there was no war before. Bomb and gun attacks hit city police stations on a regular basis. Death squads and army units roamed the land and the unarmed Left in the form or human rights activists, labor union members and organizers, community organizers and activists, environmentalists, campesino organizations, organizations of slum-dwellers and indigineous leaders were murdered and tortured to death on a regular basis.

The idiot US and the West see this as a process of “Communist guerrillas trying to subvert Colombian democracy, shoot their way into power, and set up a murderous Communist dictatorship which will destroy freedom and prosperity in Colombia”. The vast majority of Americans and others in the West actually buy this bullshit. Many on the Left refuse to support the Colombian guerrilla, insisting that they are anachronistic and that they should try to seek power peacefully. However, since the FARC disarmed, former members and members of newly formed political parties have been massacred like flies. So state terror blocks all road to peaceful change, leaving no alternative but the way of the gun.

Obviously the ridiculous analysis of this situation that Westerners believe has no basis in reality. The Western media cheers on the genocidal Colombian state and says that the Colombian democracy is waging a war against irrational and bloodthirsty terrorism, typically linked with drug trafficking to describe them as criminals and destroy their legitimacy.

As long as this process goes on, Colombia’s economy will stay forever backwards.

It is necessary to do a land reform in the rural areas before any country can prosper economically. Indeed this “socialist” project of land reform which the US spent decades in the Cold War slaughtering millions of people to stop was actually implemented by the US in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in order to fend off a Communist threat. Oddly enough, it ended up creating the basis for subsequent booming development in those places.

Land reform was and is the basis for the Communist and Leftist revolutions and guerrilla forces in South Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, Nepal, Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay in the past 55-65 years, with some of the revolutions happening later 40 years ago. In Paraguay this process has just started several years ago when a FARC split has taken up arms agains the state.

Alt Left: Repost: Interview With a Bhutanese Maoist Leader

This is a repost from some time ago. The old posts are nor formatted properly, so they are very difficult to read. A lot of them are pretty cool for reposts though. This is an interview with a leader of the Bhutanese Maoists who are beginning an armed insurgency against the Bhutanese state.

A little background: Actually, in some ways, this is a racial conflict. About 100 years ago, many Nepalese moved into Southern Bhutan as immigrants. Apparently this immigration was completely legal, as in they were not illegal immigrants. The majority of the people in Bhutan were more Mongoloid Asian types, Buddhists who phenotypically resemble Tibetans and speak a Tibeto-Burman language. The Nepalese were Hindus speaking Nepali, an Indo-European language.

Phenotypically, Nepalese are very unusual. They are on the border between Caucasians and Asians. Some more resemble Caucasians and some more resemble Asians. Most of the ones who moved into Southern Bhutan were more Caucasian types. Anyway, at some point, they become 6

A few decades ago, for some unknown reason, the monarchy simply ethnically cleansed most of the Nepalese out of the country and so ended up with a more mono-ethnic and monocultural state. Furthermore, the Nepalese were forbidden from returning. They have been festering in refugee camps ever since, and have been growing more and more radical.

Soon a Maoist party was born and it developed a huge following in the camps. Very huge! In the past few years, they have began an armed struggle inside Bhutan, but there have only been a few incidents. Apparently they are laying the groundwork for people’s war, which they claim they have not yet began.

Sushil claims that the Bhutanese state is feudal or semi-feudal, and I think he is probably correct. The entire region remains feudal to semi-feudal – India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan. The feudalism tends to cut across ethnic and religious boundaries and seems to be a regionalism. Recall that Tibetan was actually feudal until the Maoists took over in 1949 and overthrew the feudal monarchy.

In this region, the feudal monarchs usually use religion, as such folks always do and have always done, to enforce feudalism. The Hindu monarchs in Nepal claimed tied closely into their Hindu Gods. More or less the same with the Dalai Lamas in Tibet, similar to the divinely appointed religous-political monarchs that ruled in Europe for so long.

I figure if you throw a bunch of humans on an island, after a while, the strongest will kill and or subject the weaker ones. Some total prick will rise up, call himself ruler – king – whatever, somehow gather up 9

This group has connections to Maoists in Nepal who now form a huge portion of the government (4

An Interview with Comrade Sushil of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist- Maoist), the party which is waging armed struggle against the Monarchy in Bhutan. Talks about tactics, strategy and aims of the party.

———— ——— ——— ——— –

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The following Interview was conducted at some point in the previous few weeks. It occurred somewhere in the area of the Indian-Bhutan border.

Lal Salam Blog: Thank you very much for meeting with me. So are you from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes, from Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: From the Bhutanese refugee camps?

Comrade Sushil: Uhh, actually people think that all our party are from the refugees, but i am from Bhutan. I have spent allot of time in India, working, but then also in Bhutan and then in Nepal working for the party as well.

Lal Salam Blog: So you are a cadre of the Communist Party Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoists)?

Comrade Sushil: Yes i am a member of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoist). I have been a member since 2003 and i have worked actively as a whole timer since the same year. I joined the party from within Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: What is the history of the Party?

Comrade Sushil: The CPB (MLM) was established on the 7th of November 2001, and the announcement of the Party was on the 22nd of April 2003. From this time the party has been working with the exploited people in Bhutan. The people are all exploited by the regime, so our party has been working with all the people, mainly in rural areas, but in urban areas also. Mostly we work with the people in the villages.

Lal Salam Blog: So what are the problems in Bhutan? What sort of oppressions are forced on the people of Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: The biggest problem is the feudal monarchy. Because of this monarchy the problems are created. Peoples standard of living has been kept backwards because of the Monarchy. In a third world country like Bhutan, this is because of feudalism. This feudalism is the main problem of Bhutan. This is why the Communist Party, our glorious party, is working to overthrow the regime, and to overthrow feudalism.

Lal Salam Blog: So the goal of the Party for now is to throw out feudalism from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Definitely. The main aim of our party is to overthrow feudalism and to establish the peoples rule in Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: So you would like to establish a People’s State in Bhutan? Is that what you would have replace the King?

Comrade Sushil: We should not understand like this. We should replace the king with a Proletarian Dictatorship. Our aim, our hope, no our dream is to establish a New Democratic Socialism. Only after that can we achieve our ultimate goal, which is to achieve communism. It is not only our goal to throw out the king and overthrow feudalism in Bhutan, but to establish a peaceful society that can achieve socialism and communism.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year your party started a Peoples War in Bhutan…

Comrade Sushil: No. We have not initiated a protracted peoples war in Bhutan. Since our parties establishment we have however had many rural peoples class struggles and these struggles have used different means. In different ways we have launched many struggles and programs, and we have the aim of reaching a level where we can launch a Protracted Peoples War.

Last year we did initiate some armed struggles, which is only a factor of the rural class struggle. Much of the media proclaimed this as the beginning of the Peoples War, but we are not at that phase. We are trying to reach the level of Peoples War, but we have not yet reached it, and are preparing for it. We do not know how long this will take, it will depend on many factors.

Lal Salam Blog: So there will be more attacks, more bombs and more armed actions in the future?

Comrade Sushil: Certainly. We are preparing for this. There will be more armed struggle. Without the armed struggle, we cannot change the situation in our country. We cannot change the state power. We will one day take the state power, but for now we are in preparation, making networks with the peasants and in the cities, training, preparing for the struggle.

Lal Salam Blog: Do you think Peoples War can be successful? Bhutan is already a very brutal state. As many as a sixth of the population lives in exile and the state has beaten, attacked, arrested and even raped and murdered those it perceives to be political activists?

Comrade Sushil: Our parties thought is that only by waging the armed struggle and the Peoples War can we win the liberation of our exploited people. I believe so. Thousands of people have been evicted from Bhutan, we are very aware of this. Why were they evicted? They were evicted after political activism and movements. They were evicted because the people in the southern belt had a high political consciousness. This is totally not a refugee problem, this is a political problem. It is a problem of a brutal monarchy and a restrictive feudal system. Without destroying these institutions we cannot solve these problems.

Our party is launching this armed struggle to liberate the exploited people and we know that one day we will be successful. This is a long term plan, it will take many preparations, and without this and without correct politics we cannot be successful. We have this ideology, the Marxist-Leninist- Maoist and this is a political weapon. With this weapon we believe that one day we will be successful.

Lal Salam Blog: So have you learnt much from the experiences of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and their experiences in Nepal? Are there close or special links between your parties?

Comrade Sushil: We do not have special or direct links with this party. But, and also like communists all around the world, in Peru, India or the Philippines we have ideological links. These places all have communist parties leading revolution through the armed struggle, and with all of them we have ideological links and an ideological relationship.

That means we support them ideologically and they support us ideologically. We have a relationship with the CP Nepal (Maoist) , but also with the CP India (Maoist) who are also waging an armed struggle. We don’t receive any physical support, or anything like that, but we should understand that we are all communists, and we are all internationalists, and we receive and give moral support.

Lal Salam Blog: What does your party think about Prachanda Path and the Nepali Maoists synthesis? It has been controversial to some international communists.

Comrade Sushil: About this Prachanda Path. It is something we should study. And also it is not only a thing to be studied, it has shown it has the ability to guide workers actions. I don’t want to comment more because the ideological things i have had not sufficiently studied, and till now our party has not discussed at length Prachanda Path.

Lal Salam Blog: The Maoists in Nepal have given up their Peoples War and taken a new tactic in pursuing the Constituent Assembly elections. Is this a correct tactic in your parties opinion?

Comrade Sushil: In regards to the UCPN (M) we do not think that they have given up their goals. We think they are pursuing another way, another tactic to establish a peoples state. We don’t think they have established the proletarian dictatorship. So we, our party, does not think that they have achieve state power. We too will go for a Constituent Assembly at first, and only after that can we step or jump or leap forward to a New Democratic revolution.

In the context of the Maoists we don’t think they have state power, and are still struggling for it. It is a fact that the future shows you which path you must take, you can only pick your path depending on the concrete situation you face. We will also move for a constituent assembly elections and a new state, but without establishing the proletarian people at the center of this new state then it cannot reach higher and improve the lives of the people. We think that the Maoists of Nepal face similar situations to us, and have similar actions, so we will continue to watch closely.

Lal Salam Blog: So a Constituent Assembly is a tactic that you are interested in for change in Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Actually it is the tactics and strategy of communist parties in the third world. Third world countries are semi-colonial and semi-feudal. So without a New Democratic Socialism stage we cannot reach socialism. So we are in this revolution, it is a peasant revolution we can say. So to reach our aims, to some extent we should aim for a Constituent Assembly, and this is our main slogan and the main aim of the present situation in our revolution.

That is not our only slogan, and out only goal, and it isn’t the only thing that we campaign around with the peasants and people of Bhutan. And we don’t want or aspire to another bourgeois constitution, but we need a constitution that is in favor of the oppressed and poor people of Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year the government of Bhutan held elections, in a very restricted and controlled way, but the western media still presented this as a opening up and of “democracy”. If there was to be a more open electoral system, would the CPB (MLM) pursue peaceful politics through elections?

Comrade Sushil: WE think there is only one path to real democracy in Bhutan. We don’t believe in the current “democracy” this is well known. And we don’t think that this system can lead to real democracy. The international community has its formula and they see votes and call it democracy- but there is no such thing in Bhutan and it is not possible to impose a real democracy from the outside into Bhutan.

Any “democracy” that the regime brings into practice itself will be done in such a way so that real power continues to be restricted and kept in the hands of the old order, and not in the hands of the mass of exploited people, so that this “democracy” could not be used against the regime. Even if the regime cast out the king, it would not fundamentally change it. Our party will not make compromises with that order. We wont co-operate with their agenda, we have another agenda that is contradiction to theirs.

We are going to establish the rule of all the people while they just want to exploit them. There is this contradiction between the people and the regime. Our party struggles because of that. If they were to try and set up a “democracy” for then when we should not be a part of it. When i say this it does not mean that we are militarists. The people want peace, and don’t want to live in terror but this regime suppresses and exploits the people, they already live in terror. It is not a hobby to carry out armed struggle, it is our only option the liberation of our people.

Lal Salam Blog: Bhutan is such a tiny country, and it has very close relations, with India in particular. If you care to reach peoples war, do you think India would interfere to defend its interests?

Comrade Sushil: On this the whole party is very much conscious. But in the present situation India is not so dangerous to Bhutan. China is quite dangerous. 11,500 square kilometers of Bhutan’s lands have been occupied and taken by China. So we are surrounded by two very large and powerful countries, who are always looking to interfere into Bhutan. They have two ways of interfering. Political intervention and direct intervention. There are Indian Army camps established in Bhutan. There are several big barracks. We have known this but we don’t think they will intervene directly.

Maybe at some point in the future. There will be political intervention, and we can try to counter this with our allies by rousing grassroots support for our cause in India. We are already doing this. If they try to intervene militarily it will be a heavy cost for them, a bloody and long civil war. Also the regime and the fuedalists don’t want this. They want to defend their borders, protect his kingdom. We also want to establish the sovereignty of Bhutan, so we will always fight foreign influence, from India as well as China.

Lal Salam Blog: I understand that your party has allot of support amongst the refugees in Nepal.

Comrade Sushil: We are not just a party for the refugees. We have support where ever our people are.

Lal Salam Blog: So in India, Nepal and Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes.

Lal Salam Blog: And your party does work amongst all the communities of Bhutan and across the whole country, not just in the southern Belt that is largely Nepali speaking?

Comrade Sushil: The southern belt is not only Nepali speaking, but there are people from many communities there as well. Myself i haven’t been to the north as yet, our party does work there, but i have been working in the south and also in the east. In allot of people, and in the media there is allot of confusion. The CPB (MLM) is not just a party in the refugee camps, and not just Nepali speaking. We have cadres of many ethnic backgrounds, and our party works all over Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: For the refugees in Nepal is it true your party favors repatriation in Bhutan rather then resettlement in third countries?

Comrade Sushil: It is not that our party policy is just to return people to Bhutan. It is not a solution. Liberating the people of Bhutan is the only real and long term solution to this problem. We are not for resettlement, and we are not for repatriation in Bhutan without changing anything else. Moving people around like they are animals is not a solution. That is our position. There needs to be a political solution to this, and only then can the refugees get their rights.

Some people have said our party was created to agitate for the repatriation of refugees, this is not the case. Our party was established within Bhutan and amongst the people. We are in favour of all the oppressed people.Only understanding the problem of the refugees as a problem of the political structure of Bhutan that we can find a solution. Our party was not established for the refugees, but for all the Bhutanese.

Alt Left: The Catholic Church in Latin America

Do you think churches, private schools should pay property taxes? In Latin America, the Catholic Church probably doesn’t pay property taxes and usually supports the Far right conservatives that you and me greatly despise. I think the Catholic Church plays a big role in upholding the oligarchy land power in Latin America do you agree?

Um I’m not sure to what extent that is true. There’s also a lot of Liberation Theology being preached all over Latin America. Keep that in mind. The Vatican used to look dimly at it, but it’s very common at the parish and lay worker level. In Latin America you have murals of leftwing guerrillas waging battle led by Jesus Christ holding an automatic weapon. The mural will have leftwing slogans written all over it. There is a strain of Liberation Theology that can be seen as “Jesus Christ with a machine gun leading a guerrilla column into a war against the rich.”

The Sandinistas had a lot of church people on their side. One of their leaders was a former priest.

In Colombia, the priests helped the leftwing guerrillas. The ELN guerrillas were founded by Camilo Torres, a priest preaching Liberation Theology, the original “priest with an automatic weapon.” The ELN still has deep roots in the church. A lot of the churches in FARC territory support the FARC.

An Irish priest from the US led a guerrilla column in Honduras in 1983 until he was killed.

Same in El Salvador. The Salvadoran guerrillas had deep roots in the church. Remember when the death squads assassinated the five top priests in the country in 1989 for being “the brains behind the guerillas?” Remember when Bishop Romero was assassinated in 1980 for preaching Liberation Theology? The FMLN Leftist guerrillas in El Salvador were practicing Catholics.

The Chavistas in Venezuela are Catholics and Chavez was a practicing Catholic.

Towards the end of his life, Fidel Castro said he was a “cultural Catholic.” There is a lot of “Catholic Communist” thinking coming out of Cuba these days and now many Communist Party members are believers who attend mass. There were also many “Communist Catholics” in the Czech Republic.

Aristide of Haiti was a priest.

The Leftist leader of Paraguay was a former priest.

In Peru, a lot of priests at the parish level even supported the Shining Path!

Remember Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker newspaper? In the US, the Church has often been quite liberal.

It all depends on the country.

Yes, the church hierarchy traditionally supported the elites in part of a deal to let the elites take power and lay off the church, but this all changed with the advent of Gustavo Gutierrez “Theology of Liberation” published in 1965 advocating “the preferential option of the poor.”

A lot of the militarizes down there back in the 1980’s used to have this attitude of the Church as being a hotbed of Communist subversion.

Catholicism lends itself to both rightwing and leftwing thinking due to the nature of the Church. Church doctrine can be interpreted either towards the Right or Left depending on which type of thinking you wish to emphasize.

Protestantism tends to have a rightwing bias pretty much baked into it.

Alt Left: Yes, There is Little Classism in Muslim Countries (Because It’s Against Islam)

James Schipper: Was it really very different (highly classist) in Islam?

Yes, Islamic countries are just not like that.

I can’t think of any Arab country that is like that.

No North African country is like that.

Neither Malaysia nor Afghanistan nor the Caucasus nor Xinjiang nor the Stans is not like that. However, Afghanistan was feudal or semi-feudal until recently. That’s why Communism was fairly popular there. An outsider went there in the 1950’s, and he saw groups of young men chanting with their fists in the air, “Kill the rich!” I suppose the Communist revolution did a land reform and got rid of this feudal land tenure system.

Communism was an easy sell in Bosnia and Albania, but Islam is weak there.

Corruption is a bad problem in the Arab World and a rich elite bled Lebanon dry for decades, but they are widely hated, and there is little to no class hatred in Lebanon.

I can’t see any class hatred in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Somalia, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or even in UAE.

I’ve never heard of any real classism in the Sahel, but no one there has any money anyway.

The only African countries with a history of classism were the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa, but there it was racialized, and the classism was imported from Christian Europe. Classism among the Whites of these states themselves was not a problem.

Angola has become very unequal due to oil wealth, but the system is not popular, and most people are ending up poor. They had a successful Communist revolution that remained in power for a long time. The anti-Communist rebels didn’t even have much ideology. Jonas Savimbi of UNITA started out as a Maoist and switched to rightwing capitalist to get money from the West for his revolution.

Africa just doesn’t have a history of European classism. It was always a relatively egalitarian village society. Sure, the chiefs were rich, but they were supposed to provide for everyone.

All of the Gulf Arab states have such extensive social democracies that in a lot of cases, you hardly even have to work. Education and health care is free and housing may be subsidized. UAE is a very rich country and capitalism roars right along, but I don’t see a lot of class hatred. For one thing, everyone in the Gulf is well-off.

As I said, it was different before. Read Ghassan Khanafani (one of the founders of the PFLP) on the lives of fellahin or peasants in debt bondage in semi-feudal Palestine in the 1930’s. Nasser did a land reform in Egypt in the 50’s and he was a hero all over the Arab World. People said they went to Yemen in the 1960’s, and there were Nasser portraits everywhere in the homes of working class people. Nasser’s land reform set off a wave of land reforms in the Arab World. In Syria and Iraq, they were done by the socialist Baath Party. There was never much resistance to the Baath’s socialism. There were large state sectors and good social democracies. Even Saddam was basically a socialist.

Bangladesh is a problem. Pakistan has been discussed but it is Indianized and Hinduized. The same problem may be going on in Bangladesh. The class hatred is vicious in India, but it’s coded as caste hatred instead. So Pakistan and Bangladesh have a sort of Hinduized Islam. But the poverty and class hatred is not nearly as bad in those two states as it is in India and Nepal.

Bahrain and Indonesia are problems for whatever reasons but in Indonesia they had to kill 1 million Communists to get their crappy rightwing capitalist dictatorship. And in the last several years they have been led by a social democrat.

Turkey does have problems with its capitalist class in terms of exploitation of workers. After World War 2, there was a Communist revolution and the Commies almost won. However, there is a huge underground Leftist and Communist movement that regularly sets the factories and yachts of the rich on fire! They’re quite popular. The Kurdish PKK was also Left. Islam is rather weak in Turkey though, and Turkey is Europeanized. Erdogan is actually quite socialist. He’s more socialist than Biden. His brand is Islamism is heavy on the social justice end.

 

Alt Left: Right and Left in Islamic and Catholic Societies

If you’re not careful, the media will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and cheering the people doing the oppressing.

Malcolm X

This is precisely the function of the media in a capitalist society. The Chinese media is not like this because, duh, China is not a capitalist country! Nor is the Iranian media because Iran is not a capitalist country. In fact, Iran is almost something like “Islamic Communism.” I’m not wild about Ayatollah Khomeini, but he did have a strong social justice streak.

The Revolution was populist, pro-independence, and anti-imperialist. Iran is almost based on a Muslim version of Liberation Theology or “the preferential option of the poor.” The social safety net is huge in Iran. Also, much of the economy is run by the state. It’s actually run by religious charities, often with ties to the military and the IRGC. I believe these religious charities do not operate at a profit. Small businesses are not bothered at all, as in all Muslim countries. I was reading Ayatollah Khameini’s tweets for a while on Twitter, and I could have been reading Che Guevara. Basically the same message.

Islam is just not friendly to neoliberal economics or radical individualism. It is a very collectivist religion in a very collectivist society.

Neoliberalism hasn’t caught on much of anywhere in the Muslim world other than Indonesia and the Southern Philippines, and they had to murder 1 million Communists in cold blood to get there in Indonesia and the Moros have always rejected Catholic rule in both a political and economic sense. it is notable that the Maoist NPA are also huge in Mindanao, home of the Moros.

Pakistan, too, has inherited the selfish economics and even feudalism in land tenure straight from Indian Hinduism. They even have caste, which would be considered an aberration in any decent Muslim society.

All of the Arab countries are basically socialist at least in name, and that was never a hard sell there. It’s true that 100 years ago, the Arab lands were mostly feudal in nature, with big landowners and peasants in debt bondage. They rich had co-opted the religious authorities like they always do, and the mullahs preached that Islamic feudalism was right and proper because the Prophet had said, “It is normal that some are rich and some are poor.” But it was always a hard sell, and it had a very weak foundation.

After independence, socialism was instituted in most if not all Arab countries at least in name. In particular, huge land reforms were done in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Palestine. I assume something like that was done in Algeria too. It was a very easy sell, and everyone went along with it without a hitch. The mullahs quickly changed from support for feudalism to support for socialism.

Hamas rules Gaza and I was shocked at how huge the social safety net is. The many religious charities run the safety net, which is distributed under the rubric of Islam. This is done instead of the state doling it out.

Mohammad himself didn’t have much to say about economics, but he wasn’t a neoliberal capitalist or a feudalist.

In Christian societies, the rich have utter contempt and hatred for the poor, who they regard as little more than human garbage. If you want to see this philosophy in action, look at the classism in Latin America. As all Muslims are part of the umma, and hence, as all are brothers and sisters, it is simply unconscionable that wealthy Muslims would be able to openly hate poor Muslims. You simply cannot treat your fellow Muslims like that. It’s not officially haram but it might as well be.

European Style Fascism in the Middle East

It is instructive that the only place in the Arab world where neoliberal economics and in particular Libertarianism took hold was in Lebanon, and even there, it was only among Catholic Maronites. Most Arab Christians look east to Antioch (and before that, Constantinople) to the Eastern Orthodox church, which is really just the eastern wing of Catholicism.

The Maronites, though, deride Antioch and instead look to Rome. They see themselves as European people instead of Arabs. Many deny that they are Arabs and instead refer to themselves as “Phoenicians.” It is interesting that the only real classical fascism in the Arab World  took hold in the Lebanese Maronites, where the Gameyels imported it from Europe in the 1930’s.

The Jews of Israel also developed a very European form of fascism starting with Jabotinsky and his book The Iron Wall in 1921. This man was an open fascist. He is considered to be the spiritual father of the Likud Party. During the 1940’s, the armed Jewish rebels split into leftwingers who were almost Communists and rightwingers who were more or less fascists.

The Kahanists today look a lot like a European fascist party. And in fact, the entire Israeli rightwing around Likud, etc. looks pretty fascist in a European sense. So Israeli Jews are really Jewish fascists or fascist Jews. It has never been an easy ride for liberal and secular US Jews to support the Orthodox religious fanatics and rightwingers if not out and out fascists in the Likud, etc. in Israel. This was always completely unstable, and after that latest war, it’s finally starting to fall apart. But the seeds of destruction were already there.

But note that the Jews of Israel very much look to the West and see themselves as Europeans (which many are for all intents and purposes). They align themselves with the Judeo-Christian European society that many of them came from.

Half of Israeli Jews are Mizrachi Jews from the Arab World, and they have always had a Judeo-Islamic culture. However, when they moved to Israel, this was dismantled by perhaps not entirely. They rejected it due to the association of Arabs and Islam with the enemy, which is correct.

Economics and Catholicism

This radical classism and near-feudalism in Latin America was supported by the Catholic Church, which was always a very rightwing institution because they were always in bed with the rich. There were always Left splits in Catholicism like Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker. The Catholic clergy in the US has tended to be quite leftwing.

There is a long history of “Catholic Communism” in the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the Basque Country, France, Italy, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. The IRA was a leftwing Catholic armed group. A lot of priests were caught hiding IRA cadre. So was the ETA in the Basque Country of Spain.

Catholic Leftism never caught on in Poland and Lithuania due to hatred of Russia and the USSR. Nevertheless, both are more or less socialist countries.

Even today there is an active “Catholic Communist” movement in Cuba that is very lively. In Honduras and Colombia, Catholic priests actually led guerrilla bands. Liberation Theoloy is something like “Jesus Christ with an AK-47.” The Leftist who recently took power in Paraguay was a former Catholic priest.

The ELN was founded by a priest, Camilo Torres, and many Catholic clergy even supported the Shining Path! Edith Lagos, a 20 year old woman, was the leader of a very early Shining Path column in Peru. She was killed in 1980 and the entire town of Ayacucho, 30,0000 people, came out for her funeral which was held at midnight. The lines of mourners stretched through the whole city. All of the priests in town blessed her body, and she was given a proper Catholic funeral.

I believe that the PT or Workers Party of Brazil has a large Liberation Theology component. The Catholic clergy had an excellent relationship with the FARC in Colombia. Of course, the Catholic clergy played a big role in Venezeula, and Hugo Chavez himself was a practicing Catholic. The FMLN Salvadoran rebels were explicitly Catholic, as were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. One of the Sandinists’ top leaders, Tomas Borge, was a Catholic priest. Jean-Paul Aristide in Haiti was a Catholic priest. Catholic believers are now allowed to join the Communist Party in Cuba, and near the end of his life, Fidel Castro said he was a “cultural Catholic.”

After Vatican 2 and Liberation Theology began to spread out via the seminal documents written by Gustavo Gutierrez in Brazil, “A Theology of Liberation,” otherwise known as “exercising the preferential option for the poor,” it began to spread in Latin America. It started with local priests and especially Catholic lay workers in impoverished areas and then slowly spread. Even today, Catholic layworkers and especially seminaries are very leftwing, while the Vatican itself is not. A lot of seminaries are hotbeds of homosexuality, and the gay priests and lay workers are quite open about it. It is estimated that 1

Alt Left: Repost: An Easy Way to Raise the IQ’s of 100’s of Millions

Repost from the old site.

Get rid of iodine deficiency.

Amazingly, even moderate iodine deficiency causes IQ declines of 10-15 points if it’s in a pregnant woman or an infant. It looks like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone all have moderate to severe deficiency.

It would be interesting to see a better rundown of the severity of the deficiency in each place so we could figure out how much collective IQ could go up with iodine supplementation. In India, 500 million (5

Yet another failure of Indian capitalism to provide for the very basics in human needs in India, and one more reason I support the Maoist revolutionaries in that country.

Many other nations have mild deficiencies. I don’t know what a mild deficiency does to your IQ, if anything. 1

Alt Left: Repost: Mao Messed Up

I think an assessment of Mao ought to be made on a scientific basis, beyond politics. Anti-Communists and rightwingers have an extremely poor record as far documenting this sort of thing, so I almost want to dismiss everything they say.

Probably the best sources would be leftwingers or even Communists who also happen to be some sort of China scholars. To the detriment of Mao, a number of Leftists, socialists and Communists who are also China scholars are starting to contribute some very negative things about Mao.

The good side is quite clear. Life expectancy doubled under Mao, from 35 to 70, from 1949 to 1976, in only 27 years. Supporters of fascism and Hitler are challenged to provide evidence that Hitler’s rule benefited anyone. Nazism was at core a death cult. Life expectancy collapsed in Germany under Hitler and in all of the regions that were occupied by Nazis. Nazism wasn’t about improving life for the common man at all; it was about war and endless war and endless extermination of the less fit.

Communism, with the exception of Pol Pot’s rule, where life expectancy collapsed in Cambodia and 1.7 million died, has been quite a bit different. Most Communist regimes have killed people, but at the same time seem to have saved many lives, often millions of lives. So it gets hard to tally things up.

I suppose pro-Communists would say that the many deaths were necessary in order to save so many lives. That’s an interesting argument and ought to be taken up. Was there a way to save so many lives without killing millions of people? I hope there would be, but I’m not sure.

Pre-China Mao was vastly deadlier than China under Mao. The life expectancy figures make this clear. Czarist Russia was 3 times deadlier than the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. This is where this “greatest killers of all time” crap runs into the mud. If the death rate was 3 times higher per year under the Czar than under Stalin, just how was Stalin the worst killer of all time?

Same with Mao. I don’t have good figures, but once again, it looks like Nationalist China in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s was 3 times deadlier per year, or maybe more, than Maoist China. If the death rate collapsed under Mao, how was he the worst killer ever? The truth is there are plenty of ways to kill a man. You can kill him with a bullet or by sending him to a camp, or you can kill him by disease and lack of food, the silent and uncounted method that the capitalists prefer.

Nevertheless, an accounting of deaths under Mao needs to be done. Just glancing at the data here, it’s already looking like Mao was way worse than Stalin. Way worse.

The initial consolidation of power in China was brutal. Whether the landlords were killed by the party or by the peasants is not that relevant. Mao said that 700,000 landlords were killed, and even he thought that was too many. China scholars think it is higher, from 1-4 million. I would dismiss the 4 million figure, but anywhere from 700,000-3 million is possible. Further research is needed here.

The Anti-Counterrevolutionary Drive of 1950 followed, an attempt to uncover supporters of the Nationalists and counterrevolutionaries. Tens of thousands were killed, or possibly up to a million, let’s call it 20,000-1 million. Further research is needed.

Anti-Christian Campaigns of the 1950’s. These were launched against mostly Christians, but also other religions. “Many thousands” are said to have died. Definitely some further work is necessary here.

Anti-Counterrevolutionary Campaign of 1953. Mao said, “9

The Great Leap Forward Famine happened between 1959-1961. Unlike the fake Holodomor of 1932-33, it’s looking more and more like most of the blame for this horrible catastrophe can be laid at the feet of Mao himself. The man was a fanatic. He was told that there was a famine, and in early 1959, he backtracked on some of his crazy ideas, while he blamed subordinates for the famine.

Then there was the Lushan Conference in May 1959. Mao accused Peng Dehuai, a critic of the Great Leap, of conspiring against him. Peng was purged, and the Great Leap went was ordered to go ahead full speed. If there had been no Lushan Conference, there would have been no famine. There followed two years of catastrophe, in which there was overprovisioning of grain from the peasants which was then stored in warehouses in cities, where it rotted or was exported for scarce foreign currency.

Much of the problem was that local officials were wildly exaggerating harvests, hence the overprovisioning at the state level. They thought that with bumper harvests, they could take grain from the countryside to the cities without problems. But there were no bumper harvests. Harvests had collapsed. Finally in 1961, the state figured out that it had screwed up royally and started mass importing grain. Caravans of grain trucks flowed to the countryside, and the famine was over. But many were too weak to even walk to the trucks to get the food.

Mao is blamed for an atmosphere of terror that led underlings to fake bumper crops where none had occurred. With no democracy in the party, no one wanted to contradict Mao. Mao himself had some utterly idiotic ideas, which he was allowed to implement due to lack of party democracy. After the Great Leap, the party realized it had screwed up bad. Even Mao knew that. The Cultural Revolution was in a lot of ways Mao’s attempt to regain face after getting egg on his face in the Great Leap.

As far as deaths during the Great Leap, this is still up in the air. Even Maoists admit that there were 15 million excess deaths in the period. Some of the higher figures use preposterous accounting techniques whereby people who had never even been born were counted as “deaths.” Tell me how that works. Nevertheless, the figure may be higher than 15 million. At any rate, it’s the worst famine in modern world history, and it’s a permanent blot on Mao’s record.

The Cultural Revolution was sheer insanity. Many received poor educations as schools were shut down. Many cultural relics and buildings were destroyed, and a good part of China’s cultural heritage was smashed up.

People were killed and hounded all over China for little or no reason. Red Guards rampaged all over China, torturing, humiliating, imprisoning and murdering all sorts of people, including local party officials, teachers and even university professors. When someone was hounded, the humiliation went on every day and there was no escape. No one would dare to come to your side, not even your spouse. Deng Xiaoping’s son was tossed out of a window and paralyzed from the waist down.

Red Guard factions battled each other in cities across China with weapons looted from local Army depots. Sometimes Army units joined in. Red Guards in one city would attack Red Guards in another city. Women and children were murdered and kids were even buried alive. Enemies were cannibalized in one area. Ridiculous, insane and anarchic, right? Sure.

In some parts of China, victims of the Red Guards are still angry. The Red Guards are still around, older now, but still living in the villages alongside their victims. Their former victims hate them. Lawsuits have been brought against former Red Guards, but the courts have thrown them out.

From a Communist POV, one of the most tragic things about all of these persecutions and killings, when one reads the details of the individual cases, is that many of the victims were not even counterrevolutionaries. Many were dedicated, hard-working Communists and revolutionaries, often devoted Maoists. Lord knows why they were purged and victimized.

The insanity and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution is one reason why the Party wants to keep a tight reign on power. China descends pretty quickly into wild and deadly anarchy.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Chinese Communist Party publications and the theses and dissertations by students at Chinese universities, which tend to toe the party line. As a rule, the Cultural Revolution is regarded as a big mistake by ultra-Left forces, and the Party definitely wants to avoid such messes in the future. I’ve even some some Party critiques of the Great Leap, though not much is said about that. It’s clear that the high ranks of the Party regard the Great Leap as a disaster.

There continue to be some very serious human rights abuses in China, as this 89 page report from Human Rights Watch reports. Even from the POV of a Communist, some of the abuses of these petitioners seem just flat out wrong. There doesn’t seem to be any legitimate Communist reason to be attacking a lot of these poor petitioners.

Surely in a Communist system, petitioners should have the right to protest uranium pollution of rivers, corrupt officials abusing their posts and stealing land, etc. In what way are these folks counterrevolutionaries?

But it’s not true that everyone who protests in China goes to jail. There are around 100 public protests every single day in China, often involving large groups. Only a few of them get arrested, harassed, beaten, tortured or jailed. But I guess you never know when your card will come up.

The fact that some of the harshest critiques of Mao’s crimes, excesses and stupidities are coming out of the Chinese Communist Party itself shows that slamming Mao can be done within a socialist, Leftist or Communist framework.

Can it be done in a Maoist framework? This I’m not so sure of. The Party will not come out and make public its findings on Mao as the USSR did with Stalin because the party continues to wave the banner of Mao and practically rules under his name and visage. It’s possible that slamming Mao would so delegitimize the party that it might be fatal for the CCP. It’s a tough call. For the anti-Semites, I have a homework assignment for you. Since Mao was a Communist and Communism is Jewish, obviously Mao was a Jew. Please uncover the secret Jewish connections of Mao and his closest supporters in the CCP.

Alt Left: The Capitalist Mindset: The Left Has No Right to Rule

Trouser Snake: So what’s the endgame? Just access to more markets to continue the capitalist Ponzi scheme?

Pretty much. Some people never learn. And the people on Earth least likely to learn are capitalists. It’s like they’re drug addicts, hooked on a crack or heroin drug called capitalism. They’re as blinded as an addict.

And they’re incapable of being peaceful. They are actually mandated to destroy any form of socialism on Earth, and as far as the social democracies, well, they’ll get to those later. They simply refuse to compromise with the Left at all, and their view in general is that the Left has no right to rule.

It is this raw, pure Latin American model of ultra-capitalism or pure neoliberalism that is presently dominant in the US in the Republican Party. As this form of capitalism leads to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a rapid and profound pace, it also inevitably leads to a left revolutionary reaction of some sort. This is so predictable as to almost be a law of politics along the lines of some of our physical laws like gravity.

However, this basic capitalist mindset has been subdued in most places:

  • In Europe by a social contract to ward off Communism, now fading.
  • In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by similar social contracts, now possibly also fading.
  • In Africa by African nationalism, a local capitalism that is intertwined with such, a strong resistance to the exploitative, rape and ruin policies of colonialism, by the Marxist roots of some of the early post-colonial leaders and some independence struggles, by extreme poverty which lends itself to socialist movements, and possibly by what was probably a very collectivist tribal culture pre-colonization.
  • In the Middle East and North Africa by Islam in general, which is very hostile to extreme capitalism as anti-Islamic and an attack on the notion that all Muslims are brothers and are mandated to help each other, and also by Arab nationalism in particular, with its strong anti-colonial bent and roots in Marxism.
  • In Turkey by Islam, oddly enough. Erdogan is actually a social democrat along the lines of most Islamists (see the explanation under the Middle East and North Africa entry above).
  • In Russia and much of the former USSR by the Soviet experience which was much more popular with the people than you are told here, by and nationalism, in particular, Russian and Armenian nationalism, and by a longstanding collectivist culture with roots in a long-lasting feudalism and the underdog mindset of the masses that resulted.
  • In Japan, where corporations took over the role of the social democratic state as per Japanese ethics, nationalism, and in-group preference – our people are the best people on Earth, so we must show solidarity with each other and not let each other starve. Which model is presently falling apart. There is also a basic, possibly ancient, Asian collectivist mindset, which had been previously opposed by feudalism. However, it is easy for a collectivist culture to toss feudalism aside as feudalism is so anti-collectivist. Feudalism was a poor fit in Asia – note the experience in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos- similar to how it never worked well in the collectivist Arab world and was easily overthrown in Russia.
  • In India, where a long-standing anti-colonial ethic and independence struggle with socialist roots goes along with a long with long-standing leadership of the non-aligned countries.
  • In Central Asia, by Islam (see above) and in Iran by the Iranian revolution.

As you can see above, the capitalist morons in most of the world weren’t thinking straight, but then when are they ever? They think about as well as any addict of anything. In the Arab World, Russia, and Asia, they set up feudalism, the worst form of pre-capitalism, which generates such hatred that when it is overthrown, most former serfs go socialist or Communist.

Further, they tried to wedge feudalism into collectivist cultures, which never works, as they are the opposite of each other. This feudalism where it was longstanding led obviously to extreme forms of socialism or sometimes Communism because feudalism is so brutal and extreme that it leads, logically, to brutal and extreme counter-reactions.

This is along the lines of the theory that the more brutal and extreme the system, the more brutal and extreme the counter-reaction to that system is.

You could hardly find a country where ultra-feudalism was more ingrained in the modern era than Cambodia, along with extreme hatred between the urban and rural people. The reaction? The Khmer Rogue.

The vicious slaver regime in Haiti was overthrown by the Haitian Revolution, where all 25,000 Whites on the island were murdered in cold blood.

In the Chmielnicki Rebellion in Poland in the 1500’s, a vicious peasant rebellion took place in which not only were half the Jews killed for being allied with the feudal lords, but 1/3 of the population of the entire country was killed. Of course, all you hear about here in the West is those 25,000 Jews who were killed. I guess all those dead Gentiles didn’t count. Gee, I wonder why that is.

There were various peasant or anti-feudal serf revolts in the Inca Empire. From what little we learn of these revolts, the serfs rebelled, seized power, and killed all of the Inca feudal elite. Peasant rebellions are not only murderous, but they tend to be exterminationist.

I could go on but you get the picture.

Elsewhere, foolish capitalists imposed their capitalism via an ultra-exploitative colonial model which is guaranteed to generate extreme hatred, rebellion, and underdog views among the colonized (if not exterminationist anti-colonial rebellions – see the Haitian example above), which leads to inevitable independence struggles usually premised on underdog philosophies like socialism and Communism. By colonizing most of the world, capitalist morons insured a post-colonial world with socialist tendencies and hostility to highly exploitative neoliberalism.

Places in the World Where Extreme Capitalism (Hyper-Neoliberalism) Holds Out

Latin America is one of the few places in the world that capitalism is so extreme as to oppose even social democracy, and this is all due to the proximity and overwhelming presence of a colonial ethic under the presence of the US.

Of course, we have long had such a model here in the US, but its  savage nature has been masked by a ferocious war on Communism cleverly turned into a war on socialism, social democracy, and even petty liberalism. The great wealth of the country has also masked the brutal features of this system, as there was so much money that even the losers in the system were able to eek out a piece of the pie, although this aspect is fading  fast – look at the homeless swarming our streets.

Further, a system of social liberalism (not social democracy but headed down the road) was installed in the New Deal (as an anti-Communist social contract along the lines of the European social contracts) and further entrenched by the Great Society, here driven in part by powerful new anti-racism on the part of the state. These band-aids over the cruel neoliberal model in the US successfully kept the inevitable “peasant rebellion,” or left revolution to be more precise, postponed for a very long time.

Of course, as ultra-neoliberalism moved along its standard path of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer (greatly increased economic inequality), an inevitable left revolution started to take form. This can be seen in the Bernie Sanders insurgency in the Democratic Party, Operation Wall Street demonstrations, and even the misdirected but Communist-led BLM and anarchist-led antifa riots this summer. Once again this violence is a form of peasant rebellion and is absolutely inevitable as wealth inequality reaches a certain point.

There are a few other places outside Latin America:

  • In the Philippines, though the new president calls himself a socialist and had good relations with the Maoist NPA guerrillas.
  • In Indonesia, which however recently elected a social democrat.
  • In Thailand, where long-standing military rule tamped down class struggle, which now rages uncontrolled in a very confusing way.
  • In South Africa, where a racist White ruling class did not want to share anything with the Black underclass, and Communism, socialism, and the Left period was associated with the Black struggle for self-rule and the guerrilla war which followed. However, the ANC government is full of former Communists and people with Marxist roots.

Alt Left: No, Of Course Socialism Has Not Been a Failure

Transformer: Hey Robert, I would like your opinion about black libertarians Thomas Sowell and Walter E Williams. Do you think they make arguments that are difficult to refute? Here is Sowell saying Socialism is a failure.

I’ll get to Williams in a bit.

Of course I don’t agree with Thomas Sowell. I’m not even sure that Communism has been such a failure, or socialism if you will. I really like the Chinese Communist Party’s new definition of Communism or socialism or whatever. The words Communism and socialism don’t have any meanings. They mean whatever people who use them say they mean. In other words, people can keep changing the definitions of these things all they want to and say, “Well, Communism and socialism used to mean this, but now it means this new thing.”

Anyway, I really like the Chinese socialism with Chinese characteristics model of Communism and I believe China is absolutely a Communist country and I would say that they have figured out how to make Communism actually work. The Vietnamese model is quite similar and even that works quite well. So does the Laotian model.

I will admit that I am not sure if the classic model of state socialism or Communism is capable of producing a functional economy. I worry that it doesn’t. But that’s why I say redefine the word and decide that socialism and Communism are these new things that the  Chinese and the like are doing instead.

We decided the old model didn’t work, so we went back to the drawing board and made a new model. And everybody screams and yells and says you can’t do that because the only way to do your model is the old way, so the new model isn’t even the model anymore and instead it’s something else. I think these people are engaging in magical thinking.

What’s wrong with that?

Iran has a very socialist system and it works great. So does Belarus. Russia is a lot more socialist than you think, way more. I like the new Cuban model too.

And I think the Venezuelan model works great too. The problems they are having down there have to do with sanctions and an embargo that are completely wrecking the economy. Just to give you an example of how evil the US is, Iran shipped four ships of gasoline to Venezuelan and the US intercepted them on the high seas and out and out stole the cargo. They brought they ships to Houston where they are stealing the cargo right now. So you see, we’ve made it impossible for them to make their own gas and when anyone tries to send them gas, we seize the ship and steal the cargo.

Almost every single country on Earth is on paper at least some form of social democracy. I think only the US and Botswana are not. I’m not sure about Canada, but it’s way more SD than we are. The Democratic Party’s social liberalism and its cogener in Canada are not social democracy. Social democracy is rather to the left of both of those things.

Why even read those guys unless you are still figuring out your basic views on political economy? Well, if you are still figuring that stuff out, by all means, go ahead, read the right, read the left, read everyone. But that rightwing stuff is very brainwashing, and almost all of it is a lie in some form or another.

Alt Left: Birth of the Cultural Left Analysis: Did the Black Panthers Hate Whites?

I think the Panthers are still around, but they are not very active. I actually don’t mind them. They did a lot of really cool things like free breakfasts and lunches for school children. They have been superseded by the New Black Panther Party, an explicitly racist organization that actively promotes hatred of Whites. The real Panthers recently criticized the NBP for hating Whites, saying that the original Panthers were never about hating Whites; instead they just wanted equal rights for Blacks.

The rightwing recently has published some articles suggesting that the Panthers hated Whites. To my recollection, they did not. They helped the Weathermen break Tim Leary out of prison, and they visited him in Algeria, where some of them (Kwame Ture nee Eldridge Cleaver of Soul on Ice fame) had also taken refuge. A lot of radical Whites worked hand in hand with the Panthers.

The Panthers were Marxists (actually Maoists) of that particular er, which would coincide with the Cultural Revolution period in China. Think of how culturally conservatives the Chinese Communist Party was at this time. That’s what the Panthers were like.

They were strongly against degeneracy of any type as most Communist parties (CP’s) were at that time. Some Panthers were openly homophobic, saying homosexuality was a bourgeois vice, a popular view among CP’s of that time (See the Cuban leadership’s position on this subject in the 1960’s). They certainly didn’t promote Black crime, drug use, or even irresponsible behavior.

I will say that Farrakhan’s (whom I very much dislike) people are huge on social responsibility too, and I appreciate them for that. They are very much into clean living and non-degeneracy, and they despise Black crime.

I came out of the cultural revolutions of the 1960’s, which is why probably why some people are shocked at how leftwing I am. They’re blown away when they figure that out about me. “Wow, I didn’t realize he was so leftwing!” Well, I am. I’m race realist though and hate the Cultural Left. I’m a “conservative socialist.”

Hell, I was on the mailing list for the Weatherman at one point not even long ago! Well, their above ground organization that is (the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee), which frankly has strong links to this BLM movement right now. So, yes, the present Weathermen (now given up arms as a peaceful organization) are very much behind BLM.

My friends were drug dealers who hung out with Tim Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in Laguna Canyon in Laguna Beach where the BEL made and distributed millions of tabs of Orange Sunshine LSD.I remember my friends telling me about going to parties in the canyon and how they had lookouts high up in the eucalyptus trees to watch out for cops. I did go to a party in the Canyon once, a real hippie party with real hippie chicks and lots of pot smoking. Love was definitely in the air.

I have supported Latin American guerrilla groups. I actually gave to the “weapons fund” for the Salvadoran guerrillas for some time. So I’m actually a real dyed in the wool terrorist supporter or even financier if you will, although I stopped giving them money long ago.

If I did that now, I would be violating the Patriot Act by giving Material Support for Terrorism (Whatever the Hell that means!), and I could be looking at 10 years. But alas, those were different times. Even the 80’s were far more laid back, relaxed, and anti-authoritarian compared to now when we seem to be on some weird authoritarian trip due to fears over “terrorism” which is about nonexistent in the US.

Anyway, this was a time of peace, love, dope and all that. Everyone was very much into nonviolence to the point of near-passivity. Any aggressive behavior was “uncool.” Every hippie man was your brother, and every hippie woman was your sister. There was magic in the air. And Yoko brought her walrus, don’t forget that.

Plus there was lots of “free love.” I still have fond memories of hippie chicks. I will say it was a lot more loving and friendly than things are nowadays with all this weirdness, antisociality, fear of strangers and single men, “pedophile” hysteria, #metoo insanity, and general fear or even terror of men – and this at a time when major crimes like rape have crashed 6

Sometimes I think the lower the crime rate goes, the more paranoid people get about crime. Don’t ask me to figure it out. I have no idea why humans do whatever irrational thing du jour they happen to be doing.

Bottom line is that humans are basically irrational and illogical at their core and we tend to be driven around all through life by our emotional needs and beliefs, which often seem to be pulling us through life blindly on a leash like a dog ownder, not even why we do or feel certain things.

I can’t tell you how many of my female clients have asked me, “Why do I feel this way?”  The answer was not readily apparent. Obviously it’s happening for a reason, probably an  unconscious one. Then they ask me, “How do I stop feeling  this way (getting dragged through life with their emotions like a dog an a leash)?” It’s hard to answer questions like that. The solutions are there no doubt, but they are more tangled up in the forbidding jungle of the psyche than we want  to admit.

The only answer I would have to taht question would be to develop some “emotional literacy,” to try to develop and cultivate at least some  emotional control. My emotions don’t drag me through life blindly, baffled at why I am doing or feeling  this or that. I

t’s more the opposite. Whereas with many people, including  most women for sure, their emotions are dragging through them through their lives blindly, with me it’s the other way around. I have my emotions on a leash and I drag them around. I’d rather drag my emotions through life in my own leash than the other way around. Control gets a bad rap, but a lot of forms of it

Anyway, the Panthers were just Black hippies. They hung out with the White hippies. Black hippies were “brothers,” or “soul brothers,” if you will. There were some problems with them of course (they are Blacks after all), but most of them were quite well-behaved or at least much  better behaved than they are now. I suspect the demand for nonviolence in the hippie movement weeded out the bad ones. There may have been some self-selection going  on.

Bottom line is I really disagree that the Panthers were White-haters. It’s BS.

Alt Left: Where Rightwing Economics Pushes Too Far (Always), There Inevitably Arises A Left Revolutionary Backlash

Of course in a number of places like Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Ecuador the revolution was overthrown by mostly illegal means, but the Left is still very powerful in all of these places and no one likes the new rulers. Everywhere in Latin America where the Right is in power, the people are wretched if not up in literal arms. Nobody wants rightwing governments down there anymore. As we have seen in recent years pace Milton Friedman, rightwing regimes in Latin America can only be imposed by force anymore. The people have been lied to too many times and no one believes the rightwingers anymore.

The places that didn’t have one like Colombia, Peru, and Chile either have an armed Left or mass riots.

They almost had one in the UK. They had one in Greece, but the Left sold out.

They had one recently in Indonesia, and there may be one in the process in the Philippines.

Thailand had an aborted revolution via the Red Shirts, but it was thwarted.

They had a revolution in Nepal, but it was thwarted by the state putting in fake Communists.

The rest of the world is already more or less socialist so there’s no need for a revolution!

The Arab World, Central Asia, Africa, and most of Europe are already socialist, so there’s nothing to change.

The “rightwing populist” leaders coming to power in Russia, Poland, and Hungary are all socialists! Over there even the Right are socialist.

Neoliberal rightwing economics is dead all over the world, though its corpse is stirring violently.

Rightwing economics is only in power in the Baltics, parts of Latin America (Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru), the Caribbean (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and the Philippines. It is unpopular in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, and Honduras. Peru is more stable, but there are constant labor riots led by unions, and there remains an armed Left in the mountains. It is unpopular in Haiti and I don’t understand DR politics. Where the Left remains in power as in Venezuela and Nicaragua, it has 70-8

Hong Kong and Singapore are the Libertarian showcases, but neither is sustainable because they cannot be replicated worldwide, as all of their wealth is dependent on massive exploitation of the poorer countries and even surrounding areas. Housing is completely unaffordable for workers in both places as in all Libertarian countries. And Hong Kong is undergoing a revolution from the Left, as it is going Communist.

India is going neoliberal but they are doing via religion, so the foolish Hindus have had the blinders put over their eyes and are supporting it like the superstitious pinheads they are. Meanwhile India remains a socialist country as stated in its own Constitution, and where that lie has become too obvious, there is a Maoist revolution in the hinterlands to set things right.

Singapore is not as Libertarian as it seems. The state owns all land and almost all of the housing is public housing. National health care exists but it is a very poor model. A pro-Chinese Communist Party leftwing opposition party with Marxist roots is very popular. So as we can see, even the showcases are undergoing revolutionary reactions. There’s really no way around this. As rightwing reaction grows extreme, and equal and  opposite leftwing reaction forms in opposition to it. For every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s social science, but it may as well be physics, n’est pas?

Can the whole world become Singapore and Hong Kong? Well, of course not. Singapore and Hong Kong are only rich because so much of the rest of the world is poor. The Third World makes $1/hour so the Singaporeans and Hong Kongers can drive BMW’s. Is this really so hard to figure out.

We can’t all be rich, you know? It would be like Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. It’s like saying the whole world could become the British Empire. It’s not even possible. Or it would be like having footraces where everyone comes in tied and there are no winners or losers. How likely is that to happen?

Alt Left: The Alt Left Position on Religion with an Emphasis on Christianity

One wonders why I put Alt Left in front of this post. I originally did not want to, as many of my posts have nothing to do with Alt Left ideology. In particular, I do not think the Alt Left should be religious or get involved in scriptural or doctrinal arguments. We are too secular at our core for that. What we are is believer-friendly!

However, as I thought about it, there’s a way to sneak this in. More on that below.

First of all, the Alt Left is probably the only section of the Left that is not objectively hostile to not just religion in general but Christianity in particular. The American Left has always been extremely hostile to Christianity, silent (to their discredit) about Judaism, one of the primitive forms of ethno-religious barbarism known to man, and lately, openly celebratory about Islam, probably the most backwards and reactionary religion on Earth. The US Left has been anti-White for a long time. The religion of the US Whites is Christianity, hence US Christianity is tainted by the sins of the fathers. Not to mention that American Christianity has never been anything close to a theology of liberation; instead it has been a backwards theology of reaction more akin to Judaism than Chrisitianity than Judaism from Day One. But that’s not why the Left hates it. The Left, frankly, hates America. America in its only proper sense means White America. Anything else is fraudulent in a historical if not sociopolitical sense. As America = Whites, the Left hates Whites. As Christianity is the religion of the of the American Whites, the Left hates Christianity, in particularly Protestantism. The Left is probably going to become more pro-Catholic as as a result of their valorization and reification of the recent Hispanic immigrants to the US.

If you are on the Left and religious, come join the Alt Left! I’d love to have a religious Alt Left faction. We have a particular fondness for Christianity because the Alt Left was founded in the US. But we don’t privelege Protestantism above Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox, especially as Protestantism in the Western Hemisphere has never been anything but reactionary.

Even more importantly, the Alt Left is the only faction on the Left that openly supports Whites, first of all, the Whites of the US but second of all, our White ancestors in the Old World. If you’re on the Left and you either love Whites or love being White, come join us in the Alt Left! We are the only Left faction that does not hate Whites!

The Alt Left supports (Eastern Orthodox) Replacement Theology because that is part of the essential doctrine of the Palestinian Christians, whom we support to hilt. We also support the Russian Eastern Orthodox doctrine of the Russian ethnic Leftist rebels in the Donbass, whatever that might be called.

The Alt Left also (Catholic) Liberation Theology, which can be boiled down to “Jesus as a leftwing revolutionary guerrilla with an AK-47.”

See especially the “Catholic Marxists” Camilo Torres, the rebel-priest and original “priest with an AK-47) founder of the ELN in Colombia, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (particularly the rebel poet-priest Ernesto Calderon), the FMLN in El Salvador (particularly Archbishop Romero), an Irish priest who led Honduras largest guerrilla group in the 1980’s whose name eludes me, Jean-Paul Aristide of Haiti, and believe it or not, the Maoist NPA in the Philippines, which has a lot of support among local Catholic priests in the villages.

Liberation  Theology is pure “Jesusism” or Catholicism. It emphasizes “the preferential option for the poor,” in other words, it is completely in accord with Jesus’ socioeconomic message.

In addition to that we should support Eastern Orthodox Replacement Theology as the proper liberation theology for the people of Palestine to take back their country from the violent usurpation of the Jews.

As  you can see, the two main religious strains we support are Liberation Theology, a Catholic doctrine, and Replacement Theology, an Eastern Orthodox doctrine.

Alt Left:Massive Fail: India Is Actually More Messed Up Than Sub-Saharan Africa!

You don’t actually believe that Africa is somehow better off than India?

Yes, I absolutely do. Less outdoor shitting, lower malnutrition and starvation, fewer women dying in childbirth. I was appalled. India is even more fucked up than Sub-Saharan Africa! Talk about pathetic. You need to stop defending your shithole, man. Face it, it’s a shithole. SHI is right. Embrace the fact that it’s a shithole, drop out of Indian society, and be done with it.

Many Africans haven’t even come out of the hunter gatherer lifestyle

This is absolutely false. The White Nationalists (in other words, the nigger-haters) say this all the time. I went and did some research on it, and nope, there are only a few hunter-gatherer societies left in Africa. Almost all sub-Saharan groups are agriculturalists, either tending small plots which is the norm or growing crops on large plantations.

Africans in fact may have been the first to invent agriculture 12,000 YBP in the Gambian Highlands. As with so many things human, once again, Africans did it first. Africans have had plantation agriculture since 1,100 YBP. It started in East Africa around Tanzania and places like that.

Africa overall, may also have more land but probably has less habitable land than India, so putting all these things into perspective, I don’t see how India could have a higher rate when there is no open defecation in South India, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, there may be very little in Jammu, none in Kashmir/Ladakh, and very little in Northeast (I’m assuming Assam is the only one where it may be common).

They do. 6

Dude, stop. Defending India is a fools’ errand that leads nowhere, and you end up lying all the time because the only way to defend India is with lies. Come to think of it, that’s pretty pathetic right there.

I would also like to know where these stats are from and how did they actually manage to conclude that this number of Indians are openly defecating.

A while back when organizations were promoting the war on open defecation, I did the research. And yep, India was worst. 6

And when I did my research, not only was Africa lower (I think 25-3

In contrast when I looked into India, I found that a lot of Indians simply didn’t care or else actually preferred to be streetshitters. I don’t know what to do about India. Sometimes I think India needs Maoism. Total Cultural Revolution. Not The Cultural Revolution , which definitely had issues, but the cultural revolution that the CCP initiated as soon as they got in and which they pursue to this very day.

I am so sorry. But when you are actually more fucked up than Sub-Saharan Africa, of all places, man, you got problems. When even some of the worst failos are beating you, man, that’s fail with a capital F.

And while it may be difficult to have pride if you are a Sub-Saharan African (though I think they should anyway), Black Africans can at least take  pride in the fact that so many of the biggest milestones in the development of Homo sapiens that left us able to be this civilized were actually initiated by Africans.

All the way up to agriculture. Yep, Africans did it first once again. They started smelting iron awful early too. In fact, Africans were smelting iron even before Europeans were 2,900 YBP! Sure, Africans didn’t advance much beyond that, but still, being the first to reach so many of humanity’s milestones is pretty cool. And Africans can also be proud of the fact that they are more socially advanced than Indians!

Alt Left: It Was 70 Years Ago, or It Was Yesterday

Too bad there’s no translation.

People who are unapologetically completely critical of this Revolution have a lot to answer for. Why was it so popular? What did they propose instead? Do they realize that China had a life expectancy of 32 years in 1949? Do they realize that famines had rampaged through the countryside for decades if not centuries at this time? Do they realize that almost all of China was still in a semi-feudal if not fully feudal society in 1949?

Do they realize that India and China had the exact same level of development in 1949? Do they realize that the Nationalists had never done one damned decent thing for the vast majority of the Chinese people? Do they realize that the leaders of the past century had done nothing but sell out China to exploiting foreigners, resulting in the century of humiliation?

Do they realize that most Chinese people were peasants, not knowing where their next meal was coming from, having no shoes on their feet, working for a feudal landlord who stole from them, raped their wives, beat them up anytime he wanted with no recourse under law and held the power of life and death over them at all times?

Do they realize that after the Chinese Revolution, China grew faster than at any time in its history? Do they realize that China now has less poverty than it has ever had? Do they realize that Chinese people now have medical care and education for the first time ever? Do they realize that all Chinese have a home or a farm or a job for the first time in history?

A colleague of mine is a Sinologist. Since I am so controversial, I cannot tell you his name. He has an article about he and his wife climbing a famous mountain in Southern China. His wife can’t understand most of the dialects they hear and she comes from that region. Turns out that these are dialects from right around the mountain, of which she knows nothing. And they say there is but one Chinese language!

On the way down, they see an old man trudging up the mountainside with another man on his shoulders. My friend writes, “The Old China seems to be coming back…”

You see, this was the old China, the China of centuries of millennia. An old poor man being hired to carry a rich man on his shoulders up a mountain. This is the China of a century ago or of a millennia ago. The Revolution had overwhelming mass support. No one wanted the Nationalist warlords, the party of the Rich. Everyone wanted the Communists, the party of the Poor.

The haters of Communist China still need to respond: What would they have done differently? What did they propose in the alternative? As usual, their answer is nothing.

The CCP has mass popular support. 8

Alt Left: Egolitarianism – the Core Disease of the Left

Egolitarianism – the Core Disease of the Left

by Ernest Everhard

But we did, Nathan. And that’s precisely the problem.

In the unlikely event that Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs magazine and I were ever to sit down and discuss policy we’d like to see implemented, I’m sure we’d agree on a great deal. We Need to Revive the Fight for Overtime Pay, reads a July 9, 2019 headline.

No argument here.  Doubtlessly Robinson is an advocate of universal single payer health care, preferably with basic dental and eye care included. Probably an advocate of renewed vigor in the union movement. Probably for ending neoconservative petrodollar warfare in the middle east. Probably for overturning Citizens United and getting money out of politics. You get the picture.

At times his enlightenment goes beyond that: Discipline, Strategy and Morality, or why beating up unarmed writers is a poor way to advance left-wing ideas… reads another article, regarding antifa’s recent violent assault on right leaning author Andy Ngo.

While Robinson has no kind words for Ngo, he rightly condemns antifa’s assault on him: “The attack on Andy Ngo does not, to me, meet the criteria for justified violence. A Quillette writer with a GoPro is a nuisance. Punching him might be satisfying (to some, not me). But it is gratuitous and unjustified. It’s wrong. It does nothing helpful, and actually harms the cause of the left.”

Agreed, though to be fair and in the interests of equal time, it’s worth pointing out that there are those who claim that Ngo is no innocent angel or martyr here either.

But I digress. As far as left wing pundits are concerned, expect good stuff from Nathan Robinson. Most of the time.

However, in a recent piece in Current Affairs, Don’t Believe What They Tell You About the Left, he drops the ball, and does so in a manner that reveals the heart of what’s wrong with so much leftism, both past and present. The article criticizes Intellectual Dark Web pundit Bret Weinstein for asserting that the left’s ongoing demonization of White people will drive more and more of them to the embrace of White Nationalism.

I am not naturally sympathetic to the “Black Studies made me become a Nazi” position. Partly this is because, as a straight white male myself (and a college Black Studies major), I have no idea what these guys are even talking about. I’ve never been told “fuck you for being a straight white man.” Nothing of the kind.

The closest thing I’ve ever gotten is “perhaps as a straight white male you should exercise a bit of caution and restraint before loudly giving your opinion on matters that other people may have somewhat more personal experience with.”

But when people insist they “won’t apologize for being white,” I still wonder who has been asking them, because nobody has ever asked me to do anything but show respect for marginalized people’s perspective and critically examine my own assumptions and advantages. Which seems a fairly modest ask. 

Robinson goes on to insist that there are no such voices on the left condemning white males categorically, and that these claims come exclusively from right wing sources. The article favorably quotes one Sam Adler Bell:

These people are not getting the message “everyone hates white straight males” from left wing media. They’re not watching left wing media!! It’s absurd. They’re getting that message from right wing media *interpreting* left wing media for them.

He then goes on to suggest:

Don’t get your understanding of left concepts from Prager University videos. Get them from books! Or from leftists. Go to a DSA meeting and meet some people and listen to what they have to say.

Okay. I like the idea of going to the source. Get your views on the left from right wing sources, and what you’ll get is a telling glimpse of the private obsessions of the right wing mind. The vast majority of the time, these have little to do with the obsessions of the left.

What you’ll get instead is a Shapiroesque gish gallop or a Petersonian word salad, wherein you can count on one hand the number of inhalations the speaker takes before getting into the evils of communism, government intervention in the economy, the need for high income tax cuts and deregulation, one hundred million dead in the 20th century, and no small number of mentions of Venezuela and of course endless hosannas exalting endless private wealth accumulation and concentration.

Whatever the Koch Bro’s pay them to say, basically.

And that hasn’t changed in decades now. Listen to the right wing on any format, and what you’ll get is the clear sense that the western world reached its absolute satori around 1981 or so, when Maggie and Ronnie were slashing taxes, privatizing and deregulating left and right, and sticking it to the unions at home and the commies abroad.

From there, what we have to look forward to is a millennium of glory, as outlined in the gospels of Rand, Mises, Friedman and Hayek. If this actually sounds pretty lame, that’s because it is. An endless future of sweatshops, indebtedness and boom and bust cycles doesn’t sound that exciting to me. Sorry guys.

Plus, I should hope that we’re all smart enough not to be enticed into White Nationalism, no matter how shrill and stupid the anti-White rhetoric on the left gets. Too wrongs don’t make a right, after all.

And let’s especially give Adolf Hitler’s resurgent fan club a pass. Let’s not forget that he did start a war that got tens of millions of Europeans and white males killed, that devastated the nations of Europe and permanently ended their global hegemony. With friends like Adolf, White guys certainly don’t need enemies. Fortunately, this groundswell of neo-fascist reaction against social justice culture doesn’t seem to be a huge big thing.

And no, Trumpism doesn’t count. Neither does the Tea Party. Reactionary politics tap into impulses in the American (and European) body politic that are decades, centuries even, old. It reincarnates on a decade, maybe a generational cycle, but there’s nothing here that hasn’t been here in numerous different forms for ages now. So a surge of White supremacism as a response to social justice excess isn’t a thing, in any event.

So if you want to see what’s going on on the left, check out leftist sources. Agreed, and the reverse is true. Don’t just believe that Jordan Peterson is a Nazi and that Sam Harris is a genocidal neocon. See for yourself (said no leftist ever). Unfortunately for Nathan J. Robinson, doing precisely that actually damns his basic claim.

Frustration with the Left of the kind he’s criticizing isn’t coming from the Heritage Foundation or Liberty University. It comes from people like myself and many others who’ve had countless encounters with left wing people online and in real life and report having very similarly frustrating experiences. Common themes include:

  • Robinson has had good luck with Leftists if the only anti-White, anti-male hatred he’s encountered is strictly tongue in cheek, or hyperbolic expressions of frustration with White and male privilege. If such expressions abound, that should tell us something about the character of the Left in the social media age, and that something isn’t good. If expressions of hate for anyone (except the legitimately horrible; Hitler etc) have become acceptable on the Left, that’s a pretty clear indicator that we’ve lost the plot. Remember when we hated racism, not White people? When we hated sexism, not men? This was the cant on even the radical left as recently as the 1990s. If you don’t think the Left has a White hatred problem and a misandry problem, you’re not paying attention to a host of sources: Twitter, Tumblr, a host of woke blogs, r/socialism, most of Leftbook, a good portion of Breadtube, most online feminism, etc etc. It takes a glaring dose of willful blindness not to see that the Left has become about flagrant racial and gender partisanship. It shouldn’t be.
  • Leftists are too often not direct and honest in conversation. One wonders if protest is the only way they actually have of communicating with other people. In encounters with ideological rivals, the tendency online is to post vague expressions of disapproval in a scolding and parental tone, intended to gaslight their target into assuming a purely rational, “what did I do wrong?” kind of stance. And then eat them alive. Another is a “whew boys, look at this” sort of post, followed by mocking laughter. This is the entire format of The Majority Report with Sam Seder on YouTube. You know, the channel with the cackling asshole in the background at all times. Chapo Trap House is largely about this as well. While satirizing the right is fun and easy, if that’s all they do, one starts to come away from media like this with the impression that what leftists stand for is how smart, clever and funny they think they are. Are actual ideological and policy positions expressed on these shows? Or is it ALL gaslighting? I don’t honestly know. We’d do well to learn from the brilliant Kyle Kulinski, who always lets you know exactly what this is – or should be – about policy wise.
  • Leftists have a love of sloganeering, thought stopping rhetorical tricks, witty portmanteaus and reciting, sometimes word for word, official dogmas. I’ve read the same copy-pasta, word for word, on gender related subjects I don’t know how many times now. And as bad as the intersectional feminists are for this, they have nothing on the classical Marxist-Leninists and (worst of all) the Maoists. Now these are a thankfully small minority on the Left, but do show how we’re not immune to the ills of flagrantly cult like thinking.
  • Closed ideological systems, which contain within themselves easy means to dismiss any and all criticism of themselves. Critics are simply White males defending their privilege, reactionary capitalist roaders, kulaks, etc. They all have a stake in the maintenance of the present “oppressive” system. That the cherished dogmas of the Left, like Marxist-Leninism once upon a time and intersectional feminism today, could be flawed (while still making some correct observations) is inconceivable.

Where Robinson gives himself, and the mainstream Left away, however, is in this pair of quotes:

I am not naturally sympathetic to the “Black Studies made me become a Nazi” position. Partly this is because, as a straight White male myself (and a college Black Studies major), I have no idea what these guys are even talking about. I’ve never been told “fuck you for being a straight White man.” Nothing of the kind.

One of my colleagues, for instance, has a tendency to joke that all men should be fired into the sun. (At least, I believe she is joking.) Men sometimes email to complain, saying they do not feel “welcomed” into the Left and that these jokes are hurtful because they imply that all men are bad.

I am not very sympathetic to the men who write these notes, because I am of their gender, and I do not feel wounded about remarks advising that men be fired into the sun.

In short, Nathan J. Robinson has not himself ever been told to fuck off for being a straight White man, so we’re to assume that never happens. Nathan J. Robinson himself doesn’t feel wounded by remarks advising that men be fired into the sun. Therefore, such remarks are well and good.

Well, I hate to have to say this, Nathan, but it isn’t all about you. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not wise for Leftists to countenance White male bashing in their ranks because doing so drives away a huge potential base for support. Support the Left needs to actually win elections, take power and actually implement policy that can really help poor and marginalized minorities.

Maybe that support and the politics it can achieve is more important to the broader cause than professional educated professional activists getting to be right and dumb Rightists being wrong about a cherished point of dogma, such as ‘power plus prejudice or of the ego stroking satisfaction of displaying their unbound feminist wittiness in the face of yet another neanderthal male.

But many Leftists will never consider this, and thus the core of the problem on the Left reveals itself, and why self-reflection (except a vain sort of self criticism of one’s own ideological shortcomings, itself a very totalitarian and cultish concept) seems never to be on the table with most Leftists:

The Left Has an Egocentrism Problem

Too many Leftists are caught up in a kind of narcissism wherein their projected self-concepts as warriors fighting on behalf of the underdog (the precise origin of the derisive use of the phrase social justice warrior) must be shielded at all times from any kind of doubt or criticism.

Thus, their reactions to disagreement are always ones of emotionalism, hostility and defensiveness. Never due consideration of what their opponents actually have to say, even if the end result of such consideration would reveal the critics being incorrect and the Left’s position vindicated by the facts.

One gets the sense that, like the religious fundamentalist, many Leftists demand blind faith, and the very notion of fact checking thus offends them. To doubt is to be racist, misogynist etc.

It’s so much easier just to handwave any and all dissent as the shrill hysteria of this or that rightwing pundit, and maybe even call for their deplatforming, milkshaking or the like.

So much easier than meeting the challenge head on. The bubble of self satisfaction doesn’t get burst that way. Not to say that rightwing pundits on YouTube or elsewhere are correct in their own world views. The Right has its own problems. However, the lack of self awareness among so many on the Left is simply breathtaking.

Perhaps this is why most of the intellectual and activist vigor on the Left is poured into digging in their heels over metapolitical dogmas aimed at asserting a kind of ideological infallibility: standpoint theory, power plus prejudice, white male fragility, dissension from feminist and race theory equating to racist and sexist oppression, and “hate” speech as a form of actual violence (justifying censorship).

As opposed to fighting the good fight for actual policies that will help real people in the real world: universal health care, free education, a living wage, ending petrodollar warfare, a new new deal, getting money out of politics and so on.

Witty Leftists so love their portmanteaus, so I have one of my own: too many Leftists are egolitarians. Its meaning should be obvious. So if you are reading this, Nathan J. Robinson, or whoever else on the Left who’s reading this, let’s work at not being egolitarian.

Let’s make this about the policies we all know we need, that Kyle Kulinski and Bernie Sanders so love to repeat so often. I’m not calling for perfection, purity testing or vigorous tone policing. Rather, let’s try to make this about ourselves and our self concepts a little less and about achieving good political results for the most needy and the most marginalized a little more, if we could?

Alt Left: All That Glitters Is Not Capitalist: Various Types of Non-Capitalist Forms of Production That Work Well

Rahul:

I would argue that being pragmatic while being a communist is almost impossible. Communism doesn’t work, because humans are too greedy.

A mixture of a bunch of ideologies is probably the way to go.

If you are talking about hardcore Communism with the state running everything and no market or private enterprise as in the USSR, nobody wants to go back to that anyway. Even most Communists don’t want to go back to that.

But otherwise, you are just wrong. Most Communists nowadays see some sort of a role for a market. There are lots of ways to do this.

For instance, in Venezuela, various neighborhood groups and communities operate bread factories, farms, on and on. They sell the bread at a small reasonable profit to the community. The proceeds and profits are invested back into the enterprise and used to pay the salaries of the employees.

The farms and animal husbandry industries work along the same lines. A community will be organized as a commune. They will raise chickens for eggs or pigs or they will grow various crops.

They then sell the eggs, pigs, or crops to other communities for a reasonable profit. The proceeds and profits are invested back into the company, used to pay the salaries of the workers, and if there is anything left over, they are invested in the community itself – new sidewalks, new roads, a new health facility, water treatment, a community center, on and on.

The Venezuelan communes are considered to be a non-capitalist form of development.

Communists all around the world have supported this model. The Chinese Communists are operating a form of market socialism that utilizes a market mechanism. The Vietnamese Communists are doing the same. The Cuban Communists are doing something similar.

Most Communists also support the cooperative movement, where workers own the enterprise and compete against other firms, including capitalist firms. The enterprise either sinks or swims.

The proceeds and profits are best collected by a regional bank, which reinvests them in the enterprise, uses them to pay salaries, or even gives bonuses to the workers. So a very successful enterprise that made a lot of profits could end up having some workers who were making some good money if they were pocketing some of the profits.

When you give the workers the control over what to do with the money – whether to sink it back into the enterprise or to take it home as increased paychecks, workers tend to choose to take home the bigger checks. This is what happened with Yugoslavia’s otherwise very successful worker self-managed Communism.

The workers would not put enough money back into the firms to keep them going, and the firms would start to deteriorate to the point where they were no longer operative. So everyone was out of a job. But no worries as everyone got a bigger paycheck!

In the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Country in Spain, a similar system has unfolded and has been successful for a long time now. There, the workers elect their own management, which is a great idea in my opinion. You would think that workers would elect management that let them slide and screw off, but they elect very good managers.

The decisions about what to do with the proceeds and profits – whether to sink them back into the enterprise or to take them home in higher worker wages – is left up to management and ultimately large regional banks.

These large regional banks are the ultimate owners of all of the Mondragon cooperatives. These are public banks so they are not run on the typical profit motive. They resemble more the customer-owned credit unions in the US which give much better customer service than the capitalist banks do.

I’m not even entirely sure that credit unions are a capitalist enterprise. How can you have a capitalist enterprise that is owned by the consumers of its service? That does not seem possible.

The banks tend to make the best decisions for the firm. Keep in mind that Mondragon cooperatives utilize a non-capitalist form of development.

The problem with Mondragon is that they have to compete against capitalist firms. So all of the cutthroat behaviors that capitalists engage in to reduce costs and maximize profits – exploitation of labor, shafting consumers, investors and the public at large – means that Mondragon is forced to some extent to lower their own costs however they can to keep pace with these firms.

So Mondragon is a non-capitalist system that is still privy to the logic of capitalism in which they are ensnared.

In North Korea in the far north of the country there is a lot of private gold mining going on now in new-found reserves. They are often just one man enterprises of small groups of men working together.

The state’s footprint up there is small, and the state has stepped aside and simply lets these miners mine whatever they want. They only ask for a 2

In North Korea and Cuba there are now farmer’s markets where farmers can bring their produce directly to farmer’s markets to sell to the public. These are generally not capitalist enterprises. These are just farmers selling the product of their labor to consumers (other workers) buying their crops. There’s no tendency to maximize profits, as the prices are set by the market.

The entire cooperative sector all around the world is a non-capitalist form of development. The workers actually own the firm so there is no exploitation of labor, which is the definition of capitalism. No exploitation, no capitalism.

In this way these cooperatives have gotten rid of the division between Labor and Capital which is the backbone of any capitalist system because capitalist systems work by marking up the products of workers’ labor and then adding onto it something called surplus value when is then pocketed by the capitalist as a profit.

So a worker producing a product that is paid say $20 in labor has his product taken by the owner of the firm, which then proceeds to mark up the worker’s labor cost to $25-30, and thereby make a profit. This is called the Labor Law of Value, and it has been proven to be the backbone of the capitalist system.

As you can see here, the worker is not getting the full value of the product he produced. He produced a product worth $25-30, and he only received $20 for it, with his owner taking the $5-10 surplus value and pocketing it as profit.

Independent contractors such as electricians, plumbers, painters, attorneys, physicians, accountants, etc. are not usually capitalists at all. Instead these are just workers – albeit highly paid workers – who are simply selling their labor time to  others, mostly workers, who purchase their labor time when they hire them or use their services.

Middlemen and traders who simply intervene between the producer and walnuts and the seller of say walnuts, adding on their profit, are not capitalists. Those are simply traders or merchants. They are not exploiting anyone. They can be thought of as a form of workers who act as go-betweens vis a vis producers and sellers, adding their small amount on as a fee for helping to get the two together.

Finance capital or people who buy and sell stocks are not usually capitalists. These are like people who trade in rare books, stamps, coins, precious metals, or anything else.

The stocks and bonds are like rare coins or precious metals. They simply try to buy them at a lower rate and sell them at a higher rate, which merchants have been doing forever even long before capitalism. They have no employees so they are not exploiting anyone.

Music groups and other performers, authors, artists, sculptors, etc. are mostly just workers who sell their labor time as performers or the product of their labor as books, paintings, sculpture, DVD’s, etc. Most of these people, even bands, do not hire employees.

Now granted the book publishers, record companies, galleries, etc. are marking up the labor time and labor products of these entertainment workers and taking the surplus value, hence they are capitalists.

A big rock music band can be thought of simply as performers (workers) who make a musical product and sell it to fans, mostly other workers, who enjoy their entertainment product so much they are willing to pay good money for it. So most bands, artists, authors, sculptors, etc. are not capitalists. They’re just workers for the most part marketing their labor time or the products of their labor time.

Now granted finance capital and speculative capital, while generally not capitalist, are nevertheless regarded as “parasitic” industries because they don’t produce anything.

They can be thought of as gigantic casinos in the sky (the stock market in particular can be seen this way). Speculative capital produces nothing and often has bad effects on society. Look at the wildly inflated housing markets on the US West Coast and in New York and Paris for example.

In China under what they call market socialism or socialism with Chinese characteristics, a Communist party cell sits on the board of directors of every large corporation. When corporations get a certain size the state usually takes them over in a sense. However, the managers have large leeway how to operate their company.

All private enterprises are underneath the state or the Communist Party. The CP sees the market or the private sector as a tool for the development of the productive forces. However, the capitalists are underneath the state. They have to do what the state says.

They have to adhere to 5-year plans. Yes, the 5-year plans that were said to be so devastating to the USSR and other Communist countries are working great in China.

The government, the party, and the private sector all work together on economic goals. In this way it is similar to the state capitalism of South Korea and Japan or even Nazi Germany.

That state capitalism is a non-capitalist form of development because the state works closely with the capitalists on economic goals which are supposed to serve the nation and not just the petty temporal demands of capital for maximal profits come Hell or high water, forget about consumers, workers, society, the environment or the nation.

Under state capitalism, the state controls the commanding heights of the economy. In Japan this boils down to a several huge banks which effectively run all economic development in Japan.

Nazi Germany was similar. Yes, you could have your corporation but you had to do what the state said, or they would just take you over and confiscate your firm. So the firms in Nazi Germany in effect all worked for the state.

In China, if firms do not follow guidelines and do as they are told, the state will simply go in and seize the firm, confiscating all of its assets. The state will then take over the firm or hand it over to  a more obedient capitalist. You see here that the state rules capital. Capital has to do what the state says.

Here in the US, the market is not a tool for the development of productive forces. Instead it is a form of politics. In other words, the market or the corporations basically run society. The market is over the state. The state has to do what the corporations demand, or the corporations will get rid of the state and put in a new state.

The state obeys the demands of capital and not the other way around. Capital, the market, and the corporations are our true rulers in the US. The government simply acts as if they are employees of capital. The state does not rule us except to the extent that it carries out ruling directives that Capital gives to the state to enforce on the people.

In China state firms are often run by local municipalities. So if we had their system,  say Los Angeles and San Fransisco might both have steel mills. These mills would then compete against each other and against private firms both domestic and foreign. It’s sink or swim for all public firms in China.

Firms that are more successful see their incomes rise and more workers move to those cities to be part of those enterprises.

The workers still officially own the enterprises, but the city takes 9

Keep in mind that this can be a good paycheck, as cities running successful firms pay their workers more.

There are large cities in Southern China with 700,000 workers where 1/3 of the population works for one of the many enterprises that the city runs. The residents of the city, who are also workers for the city, have a say in how these firms are run.

For instance, they try to fight corruption, since it hurts the firms, which hurts the city, which hurts them in the end. So the firms of the city in a sense are under the control of the people who live and work in there in the sense that their input is used to make decisions about how to run the firms.

Alt Left: Anatomy of Two Chinese Stereotypes: Amorality and Emotionlessness or Stoicism

Thinking Mouse:

What do you make of the stereotype that Chinese are greedy amoral worker drones with no aesthetic taste and little emotion?

Lot of truth to those things. Let’s take these one by one here. Let us look at emotionlessness and  amorality and for starters. I will also look at Jews as they are accused of some of these very same thing, not to mention that Jews and Chinese have a lot in common.

 

Emotionlessness or Very Understated Emotions

 

The Chinese practice inscrutability. This is one of the hallmarks of not only their but also all other Chinese-influenced societies in Asia such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Say a wild, boisterous, screaming, hollering violent fight breaks out on a train. An older Japanese men, maybe 40, gets between the fighters and calms. He never loses his cool or gets very emotional in the process.

These Chinese-type cultures would say that that man is displaying the ultimate in masculinity. He’s the most macho guy on the train, simply because these people regard keeping cool under pressure and not caving in easily to emotions as extremely masculine behavior. And in the Nietzschian sense, the man on the train is indeed the biggest man there, the Ubermensch. He rose above everyone on the train, did he not?

However, the inscrutability, like so many Chinese habits, is largely fake, for show, or like a game. The Chinese are trained to appear inscrutable, not to be emotionless. Of course they have emotions. But they regard a wildly emotional person as akin to a beast of the jungle. After all, most beasts seem to have few emotions being fear or rage, and they are usually showing one or the other or both.

Beneath the inscrutable mask, the Chinese would say you can have any emotion you wish. But you are supposed to hide it from others, once again a form of extreme modesty and politeness taken nearly to the point of obsequiousness.

All of these China-influenced cultures are rather shy, deliberately self-effacing nearly to the point of being self-hating. This is mostly just a show or a game, but in all Chinese societies, modesty is highly valued, and braggarts, loudmouths, showoffs, blowhards and just noisy people in general are regarded as at best uncivilized and at worst barely human.

After all, many animals care nothing about raising a ruckus. Animals lack modesty by their very nature. This extreme, almost bizarre modestly of the Chinese probably comes from Confucian values, which were then overlain with Communism, which also regards showoffs, braggarts, and egotists as lousy Communists at best and downright society-destroying hooligans at worst.

Amorality

 

However, behind that stone-faced mask, the Chinese man may be hatching all sorts of devious schemes because once again like the Jews, the Chinese tend to be underhanded, sneaky, scheming, and conspiratorial nearly to the point of appearing diabolically devious. Check out Sun Tzu if you don’t believe me.

That’s how a Chinaman fights. Rules? What rules? Once again this akin to Jews who have always been accused of fighting dirty, playing hardball, and violating all rules in conflict. The intelligence branch of the Jews themselves after all has the motto of “By way of deception, though shalt do war.” The author of The Art of War himself would have been proud to have written that line.

Neither the Chinese nor the Jews for that matter  engage in savagery and barbarism (though the birth of Israel has created this very thing).

The Chinese are the Jews of Asia with the exception that they are not professional revolutionaries in every way, that they are not out to smash all taboos, and they do not want to change the societies in which they live.

Even in the Philippines and Indonesia, where

This world-changing, ever-revolutionizing nature of the Jews is one of the main drivers of anti-Semitism, especially among conservative nationalists who see Jews as undermining and destroying the moral and traditional fabric of their lands. The Jews are always rebelling. Now, I am rather sympathetic to this trend, mind you. I’m a bit of a revolutionist myself and always have been.

Both Jews and Chinese also tended to lead Communist revolutions at the same time that their ethnic group was hoarding 32-8

A Look at the Chinese Model of Communism – Market Socialism

You are starting to see a lot of articles in the capitalist press bashing China now, saying their economy is not as good as they say, that it cannot be sustained, and that it is headed for crash. They base this on a comparison to other Communist countries, but those economies fell behind far before China’s did. China has sustained Communism under various forms, including presently under market socialism, for 70 years now. That’s as long as the Soviet Union, and the Soviets started stagnating a long time before that. China is an example of a smashing success for a Communist country, and the capitalist press is freaking out because that shows that their anti-Communist propaganda has been crap for all of these years. Incidentally, Deng Xiaoping emphatically stated that he was a Communist. Deng’s idea was to create “a rich Communist country.”. In an interview in 2005, a top party official was asked if China was still committed to spreading Communism all over the world. “Of course,” the minister beamed. “That is the purpose of the Communist party (CCP).” Incidentally, China still has 5-year plans and the whole economy is planned. The business sector has to go along with the plan, and if you do not go along with it, they can confiscate your business. A party committee sits on the board of all large corporations. The government owns every inch of land in China. The state invests an incredible amount in the economy and also overseas where it makes vast investments. This is because some Chinese government companies are very profitable. A number of Chinese government companies are on the list of largest companies in the world. Capitalists in the US openly complain that they cannot compete with Communist Chinese government  corporations, crying that they get subsidies so it’s not fair. So here we have US corporations openly admitting that they can’t compete with Chinese government Communist state-owned companies. 4 Much of the state sector is owned by small municipalities, and this works very well. Further, cities compete against each other. For instance, City A’s steel mill will compete against City B’s steel mill, and both will compete against a private sector steel mill, if there is one. Successful enterprises bring in a lot of money to the city, which it uses to upgrade the city, which results in more workers moving there, which grows the economy more with more workers and more demand. There are also still a number of pure Maoist villages in China that are run completely on a Maoist line. Everything is done as it was right out of the Mao era. I understand that they do very well, and there is a huge waiting list to move to those villages. I did a lot of research on China recently, and the party is literally everywhere you look every time you turn around. The party itself still runs many enterprises all over the country, especially in the rural areas. There are party officials in every village and city, and they take a very active role in developing the municipality in every way, including culturally. They have an ear to the ground and are typically very popular in the villages and cities. Party officials lobby the state to try to solve any urgent problem in the area. The government is always spending a lot of money all over China on public works, on fixing various environmental problems, or on really any societal problem or issue you can think of. This of course includes economic development, which tends to be state-led. I read synopses of many dissertations coming out of Chinese universities, and most were on how to deal with some particular societal problem or issue. Many others dealt with technology and industry. So a lot of the research on technology and industry that is driving economic development is coming straight out of state universities. Instead of leaving it up to the private sector to deal with the problems in society, create public works, and even plan the economy, the government does all of that. Incidentally, the way the US leaves the planning of the economy, such as it is, up to the private sector is insane. All sensible economic planning in any nation will always be done by the state with a view towards allowing the country to prosper. Capitalists have no interest in whether the country profits or not, so they engage in no economic planning at all. Leaving economic planning up to the whims of the capitalists is economic malpractice. There are 1,000 protests every day in China. Yes, there is corruption and there are government abuses, but if protests last long enough, the party usually gets alarmed and tries to do something about the problem because they don’t want serious unrest. This is party that does everything it can to serve the people and try to remain popular with citizens by giving them as much as they can and doing as much for them as possible. The party spends every single day of its rule literally trying to buy off unrest and keep its citizens satisfied. It’s illegal to be homeless in China. If you end up homeless in China, they will try to put you in a homeless shelter, or if they cannot do that, they will send you back to your village because most homeless are rural migrants who moved to the city. The state is now investing a vast amount of money in the rural areas because these places have been neglected for a long time. The state still wants to own all the land because they want to keep the rural areas as a secure base where rural migrants to the city can always return if they fail in the city. How can a government in which 4 The state spends an unbelievable amount of money on public works all over the country all the time. Many projects that in the US have “conclusively proven” to be too costly to be implemented have been done in China quickly and easily. And China’s per capita income in less than 1 Most ethnic minorities are still allowed to support their culture, and in most cases they are allowed to have education in their native language. In these areas, the native language is co-official with Mandarin. In recent years, the Chinese government has begun to support a lot of the Chinese dialects, of which there are over 2,000 main ones, many of which are actually separate languages. Cantonese is still an official language in Hong Kong, and it is widely used in Guangdong. The other major Chinese languages or macrolanguages still have millions of tens of millions of speakers. Lately the Chinese government is telling people they can preserve their dialect as long as they also speak Mandarin. Many schools now have classes in the local dialect. Cheap medical insurance is available and it covers 8 This is a serious problem but it is much better than earlier in the Deng Era when millions were dying from lack of health care. However, the state still need to cover everyone. They got away from universal coverage  when they moved away from Maoism early in the Deng era. In addition, tens of thousands of schools, many of which were built during the Cultural Revolution, were closed early in the Deng era. The introduction of a market had a lot of problems in the early days. The capitalist press was cheering wildly as thousands of schools were closed all over China, medical care was cut off from or reduced for hundreds of millions of people, while millions of Chinese died from lack of medical care. This was all cause for celebration! Isn’t capitalism wonderful? What’s millions of humans dying from lack of health care as long as a few rich people can buy ridiculously expensive, useless items that they don’t even need? A recent good survey done by a Western polling firm found that 8 The economic model of China is called Market Socialism and a lot of modern day Leftists and even Communists support it and agree that this is the way forward for the left and Communist movement. Like all words, the word Communism has no inherent meaning. It means whatever people who use it say it means. So the definition of Communism can clearly change with the times as Communists update their definitions of what the word means. China cannot be called capitalist in any way. Their model is far more socialist than anything in any European social democracy. It also goes far beyond the US in the New Deal and of course beyond beyond the social liberalism and its more left analogue in Canada, not to mention beyond social democracy in Australia or New Zealand. Interestingly, Japan is not a capitalist country. They don’t have neoliberalism. That country does not operate on the capitalist mode of development. Instead the resemblance is, I hate to say, to Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany also did not have a capitalist mode of development. I’m not sure what you call it, but it’s not capitalism. For instance, in Japan, the commanding heights of the economy, including almost all of the banks, is owned by the state. The state still plans the economy. They plan the economy together with the business community and the state allocates a lot of funds and loans to areas of the economy it wishes to develop. There is probably a similar model in South Korea, which also is not capitalist and instead operates on a series of monopolies that are owned currently by large corporations and the government. The South Korean economy is also planned, and the plan is worked out by the government and the business sector working together.

Is China Faking Its Crime and Economic Figures?

While i agree that the Chinese are doing a good job, i think they fake some of their data, inst there an large discrepancy between Chinese GDP per capita and energy consumption? Crime stats are also exaggerated, china probably has an homicide rate of around 4-8 per 100K. I don’t think that anyone has made a good case that China is faking its economic figures. They never did under Mao, why would they now? And they never faked crime figures under Mao, why would they now? Most people who go to China say that it is far safer than say in the US as far as street crime goes. This implies that the homicide rate is not ~6/100,000, which is near the US rate. The crime rate in China went through the roof after the added a lot of capitalism to the economy. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, capitalist fanboys!  

The Success of America's Longstanding Propaganda War Against the Concept of Socialism

Socialism, the very concept, especially in its social democratic and democratic socialist varieties, is the ho-hum status quo on most of the planet. The war on the very concept of socialism has probably been worse in the US than anywhere else in the West. It has a 3rd World death squad tinpot dictatorship feel about it. I keep wondering when the rightwing death squads are going to show up in the US. They show up everywhere else in states with a US-style reactionary and Left-hating culture. The difference between the US war on socialism and the war on socialism waged in various death squad democracies is that the war on socialism has been more successful in the US than anywhere else on Earth other than Colombia, but the Left is armed to the teeth there. The war on socialism was just as bad if not worse due to the death squads and all of the imprisonments, beatings, tortures, murders and genocides all over Latin America and in the Philippines and Indonesia. These countries differ from the US however in that all those Latin American countries and SE Asian countries have gone Left in recent years. Even in the Philippines, Duterte calls himself a socialist and had friendly relations with the Maoist NPA  guerrillas when he held office in Mindanao. In Indonesia, the female elected President recently ran on a socialist ticket. To the south, Mexico has been officially socialist since the Revolution. The Left in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina was armed to teeth and fought vicious wars against reactionary regimes. That has to count for something. In El Salvador, the former Left guerrillas are now running the country. In Honduras, a leftwinger was recently elected President only to be ousted in a coup sponsored by the CIA and Hillary Clinton. Nicaragua of course had a successful Leftist revolution, and those revolutionaries have been holding office now there for quite some time. Haiti elected a Leftist in Jean Bertrande Aristide, only to be ousted by Bush Administration officials via a contra death squad army from the Dominican Republic. Aristide himself was arrested at gunpoint in his mansion by armed Blackwater mercenaries acting under the command of the Pentagon. A number of the island states in the Caribbean have gone Left in recent years and most were members of the Chavista Bolivarian Movement. Most political parties in the Caribbean have words like Left, Socialist, Workers, Progressive, etc. in their party names regardless of their ideology because any party that wants to get anywhere in the Caribbean has to at least dress  itself up in Left garb. Grenada had a successful Leftist revolution that was subsequently overthrown on illegal grounds by Reagan. Venezuela of course has been voting Leftist since 1999 when the Chavistas took power. They have never left. In Ecuador, a Leftist, Rafael Correa, ruled for many years. Recently a man named Lenin Moreno ran on a Leftist ticket of continuing Correa’s Left reforms, but as soon as he got into office, he immediately shifted gears and went hard Right. Right-wing parties run as fake Leftists all the time in Latin America because generally rightwingers running on a rightwing agenda cannot get elected down there because most Latin Americans hate rightwingers and don’t want them in power. Hence the Right obtains power by contra wars and fascist mob violence in the streets, waging wars on economies and currencies, judicial, legislative, and military coups, and even open fraud. The definition of conservatism is aristocratic rule. It is the antithesis of rule by the people or democratic rule. The definition of liberalism is democratic rule by the people, not the aristocrats. Not many Latin Americans want to be ruled by aristocrats, so the Right down there has to seize power by extra-democratic means. The Opposition in Venezuela recently ran on an openly social democratic platform, but most people thought it was fake they would turn Right as soon as they got in. In Brazil, the Left has been running the country for some time under the PT or Worker’s Party until it was removed by a rightwing legislature in an outrageous legislative coup. They even imprisoned a former president, Lula, on fake corruption charges. A female president was recently elected who was an armed urban guerrilla in the 1960’s. In Paraguay, a Leftist former priest was elected President, only to be removed in an outrageous legislative coup. In Chile, not only was Leftist Allende elected in the 70’s, the Left was not only armed  all through Pinochet’s rule and once came close to assassinating him. In recent years, a socialist named Michele Bachelet has won a number of elections. In Bolivia, Leftist Evo Morales has been in power for a long time. Uruguay recently elected a Leftist, a former armed urban guerrilla in the 1970’s. Argentina recently elected two Leftist presidents, the Kirchner, a husband and wife. A rightwiger was recently elected after a rightwing Jewish billionaire named Singer obtained a court judgement against Argentina in a US court. That judgement bankrupted the economy, so you could say that the Right destroyed the economy in order to get elected. So with the exception of Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, and the Guyanas, all other countries have since gone full Left at one time or another recently. Costa Rica’s already a social democracy, and Peru had an ultra-radical murderous Left for a very long time. Panama’s been reactionary since the CIA murdered Omar Torrijos by sabotaging his helicopter and killing him via a fake copter crash. The Dominican Republic and Jamaica have not gone Left since the 60’s and 70’s. But the war on socialism has been so much more successful here in the US than even in the above named backwards countries because even the world norm of social democracy was so demonized here in the US that it never even got off the ground. In some ways, the US is one of the most rightwing countries on Earth at least in terms of political economy.  

India as the True Home of White Supremacism

Another great comment by Francis Miville:

If that is your opinion, first give up your Sanskrit name, a language elaborated by Whiter than Whites and used by White supremacists. These people are far Off Whiteness, though many of them are actually off-Whites. Off-Whites as they are generally called are the real center of gravity of all White Supremacism, as they depict their Gods rather than themselves as the perfect White ones that should prevail. The genocide most needed to end White Supremacism has to take place where it came first from, that is to say among off-Whites, starting with the Indo-Gangetic Plain, and the doctrine best suited to perform it is Cultural Revolution style Maoism as it is still believed in by the Indian Naxalites, not Brown Nationalism. When the issue of money is not tackled in top priority as is the case with nationalism, Brown Nationalism always end up taken over by millionaires who will buy White slave girls to breed with, as Whiteness is valued as movable property even by those who dehumanize it most. Even the fiercest traditional German Nazi White Supremacists themselves consider their Indian counterparts as purer than themselves, endowed with more desirable features, despite their skin being somewhat darker due to the sun. However darkish you may seem, you are the dirt the plant of White Supremacism keeps on sprouting from. You are the clay the statues of White idols are made from. Whites come from Northern lands such as Russia and Scandinavia, but White Supremacism originally came from India to be taught to the former, not the other way round.

China is a Communist Country, Not a Capitalist Country

US rightwingers keep saying that China is a capitalist country or it is the most capitalist country on Earth. China is one of the most Communist or socialist states on Earth today. Fully 4 But realize that all public firms in China operate on the profit model. They all compete with each other, so you have a steel mill run by one city competing with a steel mill run by another city. Many of the fastest growing industries are run at the municipality level. Also, China’s fully state-owned firms do very well. In fact, Republicans say that China’s public firms are “not fair” because American capitalist corporations can’t compete against them. The reason is that China’s firms get subsidies from the state. Poor capitalist corporations! They’re too inefficient to compete against Communist state owned firms. Poor babies. You realize that the state owns every single inch of land in China? How is that possible in a capitalist country? Capitalism is primarily based on the private ownership of land. No private ownership of land, no capitalism. Real simple. I would also point out that the Chinese state spends a tremendous amount of money on its people. Since 4 As I understand it, US capitalists believe in a minimal state, and there is nothing they hate more than state spending. Huge state spending is seen as wasteful tax and spend policies by all capitalists everywhere. Wherever you have massive state spending, you do not have a capitalist system. But I would like to thank US rightwingers for praising China, the finest example of modern Communism.

More Support for My Theories about Hispanic Intelligence, Culture, Etc.

I would however say that this mostly applies to Mexican-Americans. I am not even sure if it applies to Mexicans in Mexico because there is actually a High Culture in Mexico. In Mexico City there is opera and the main paper has a large book review section every week. In other words, a true highbrow intellectual culture, right in the heart of Mexico. It goes without saying that the members of this highbrow culture are White or a lot Whiter than average Mexicans. But in Mexico, White and people involved in highbrow White Mexican culture extends all the way down to 60-7 The high culture of Mexico City compares starkly with the rest of Mexico. Your typical Mexican mestizo is a pretty lowbrow person – he’s probably never read a book in his life nor does he wish to. Nevertheless, even the lowliest cook in a corner market knows how to read and write. They definitely teach you that in Mexican schools and most Mexicans have been to school. And most Mexicans from Mexico,  even a lowly corner cook like I mentioned, know something about Mexican history – the Civil War of course and even the clerical contra rebellion afterwards ~1930 that most Americans have never heard of. Every Mexican knows who Emilio Zapata and Benito Juarez are. I was stunned at how many of these very uneducated people had even heard of Frieda Kahlo. How many Americans know who she was? How many Chicanos know even a parallel basics of US 20th Century history? And you will never meet a Mexican-American who knows who Frieda Kahlo is nor do they care to find out. Beyond that, we descend even lower to Mexican Indians, who not only don’t read books but may not even know what a book is. Mestizos believe in some strange saints in their profoundly syncretic Catholicism, but when you get out to the Indian villages, people actually still believe in witches. As you can see, the descent from High Culture down to beyond lowbrow is a steep one indeed. You will nearly break a leg walking too quickly down that slope. The South Americans I have met in the US are not so anti-intellectual as the Chicanos below. South America after all has a much better High Culture than Mesoamerica. South American High Culture is so intact because the culture of Spain still lingers down there to a great degree while it has nearly vanished from Mesoamerica. I have talked to rich people in Lima and Bogota who literally spent half the year in Spain. Literally. I had an Argentine girlfriend once. She often called me Senor instead of my first name (imagine an American girlfriend routinely referring to you as sir) and was in stunned awe of the fact that I was an hombre de letras or a “man of letters.” Intellectualism is a big deal in Argentina. The Salvadorans and Nicaraguans I have met in the US were highly politicized, and I was shocked at how smart they were. You think you are dealing with another “ignorant Mexican in a mini-mart” until you start them off on politics, and they start rattling away and soon leave you in the dust. Every Salvadoran I have ever met has heard of La Matanza (The Massacre), and that happened in 1932. And I’ve not met one yet who could not tell me who Farabundo Marti was (see La Matanza above).  How many Americans know who Farabundo Marti was? Most Americans don’t have the slightest idea what either of those things are. It just goes to show that you can take a society with an IQ like Chicanos and supercharge them politically and possibly even culturally if the objective conditions are right. The Colombians, Peruvians, and Chileans I met here and outside the US (not to mention the Argentine woman) had a shockingly deep knowledge of politics for an ordinary person, and the Latin Americans were often as learned as a Spaniard or at least wished to be. How many Americans know who Tupac Amaro was? But the young Peruvian woman I knew all about him and even knew quite a bit about his wife, who is a proto-feminist hero down there to some mestiza and indigena women.. I never asked her who Jose Carlos Mariategui was, but I am sure she could have told me all about him too. Another Peruvian woman I met knew all about Jose Arguedas and his famous novel The Fox Above and Below, which ties in with Mariategui, if you think about it. Arguedas was one of the most famous figures in Peruvian literature and his own daughter, incredibly enough, sat on the central committee of the Shining Path. Sendero was about indigenismo and to a lesser extent feminismo than anything else. They even his name in the formal long name of their group – El Partido Comunista del Peru en la luz del pasado sendero luminoso del Jose Carlos Mariategui or The Communist Party of Peru in the Light of the Shining Path of Jose Carlos Mariategui. Here is a recent comment from a half-Mexican American who agrees with most everything I have said about these people.

As a half-Hispanic raised with Hispanics, I mostly agree with this. My Mexican mother who immigrated illegally to the US paid tens of thousands for in-vitro fertilization, and that’s what pulled me out the ditch. This was evidently high-quality sperm because I still managed to turn out above average. The people around me were impressed that I actually liked to read and learn. When I was young, the other Hispanics were amused that I could memorize the times tables and recite miscellanea about science and history, besides being capable of drawing dragons properly. To give you context, my mother has been living in the US for over 25 years, and still does not understand a drop of English. They have a culture which consists of strong work-ethic (never missing a day of work and so on) followed by self-induced brain death post 9-to-5. They just watch mindless television and do not learn. I discovered my own origins at the age of ten. I also achieved standard atheism at the age of nine (which I consider a standard benchmark for the ability to display rudimentary acts of rationality.) Then it took me years of hard work to unwire all the Catholic stupidity in my mother’s brain. This culture has no concept of logical reasoning, so her mind kept swinging in repetitive loops whenever I tried to carefully and methodically pin her down to the implications of specific arguments. I succeeded in that endeavor, and am now in the process of teaching her where she is actually standing by explaining the crucial insights of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. People may laugh at the fact that she didn’t know the Earth was a sphere orbiting the sun, but yet most ‘educated’ humans alive today are just as ignorant about reality. For example, by not knowing that there is no universal now sweeping forward, or by holding the belief that we are made of little billiard ball particles bouncing around. In my experience, whites at least fake like they want to learn. They’ll say “Oh yeah, that’s cool. Schrodinger’s cat is dead and alive… lol… because it’s all probabilistic, hur dur” or something. Of course, they don’t know jack-shit and also prefer to consume mindless media, but their culture says it’s okay to be smart. Hispanics just don’t give a shit. A lack of intellectual culture is their biggest setback. The ghetto lower-middle income schools I went to were torture. The kids couldn’t do basic algebra; the teachers were underachieving whites who couldn’t get higher paying jobs in other districts or who preferred having less responsibility because black and hispanic parents wouldn’t bitch to them about grades, or have any expectations whatsoever really. And the teachers made no secret about this, they outright told us this was the reason. Also, what you say about Mexicans bringing Mexico is absolutely true. I stayed in La Villita when I went to university in Chicago because some kind family members we barely knew were willing to rent super cheap. As I walked through the dirty streets past yet another leather boot store blasting trumpet music I almost felt ashamed, like ‘How could Mexicans escape to a new country and yet prefer to make it Mexico again?”

Mao Was Right

Sisera: So what does that mean then? You believe rich people are inherently oppressors who don’t deserve rights but then White men are okay?

I dunno. There are some North Koreans worth up to $100,000. The party doesn’t seem to care much. There are many rich Chavistas and the Ortegas have plenty of money. There are some Cubans who are living quite well now – marble counter-tops and floors, etc. The state doesn’t care. I suppose a good CP would just argue that moneyed people can be kept around as long as they support the party and the basic socialist nature of the system. Progressive rich people are not unknown. The father of the famous terrorist Carlos was a life member of the Venezuelan Communist Party and a millionaire. Do the Chinese Communists (Chicoms) believe that the rich are inherently oppressive? I doubt it as the party is full of millionaires. There is even a billionaire in the party now pushing the rightwing politics of all billionaires everywhere. I think they ought to throw him out of the party. Mao said reactionary and capitalist elements would be springing up in the party all the time, and you to wage more or less constant cultural revolution to keep the rightwingers from taking over the party. That’s one of the pillars of Maoism that distinguishes it from other Marxisms. Then Deng came along, aaand… Mao was right.

Hardline or Fanatical Anti-Communism Is Nearly Always Reactionary

Sisera: I guess he would say you believe the philosophy but just not how it is being applied.

You should know by now that fanatical anti-Communists are almost always wildly irrational, typically pathological liars and usually reactionary shits. You should know by now that fanatical anti-Communists are almost always wildly irrational, typically pathological liars and usually reactionary shits. Not that Communism is great or that there is no rational reason to oppose Communism of course. There is a rational way to oppose Communism, but most anti-Commies don’t seem to abide by it much. I mean there ought to be space for pro-free speech, pro civil liberties liberals and progressives who are anti-Communists, but they never seem to pop up much. I mean, Communists do violate a lot of civil rights and there are some serious problems with democracy in Communist states. Witness the recent violent demonstrations in Vietnam for instance. Those demos are arguably leftwing or at least nationalist demonstrations protesting against objectively rightwing policy by the Vietnamese Communist government to set up more free enterprise zones with 99 year leases. The protesters fear that these will quickly be bought up by rich Chinese and Vietnam will just become a Chinese colony again as it was for centuries. I would support the protesters in this case, but here you see a Communist government enacting rightwing policy in the face of a Leftist opposition by the people. There’s a serious lack of democracy there. Those of us who oppose police state tactics, support freedom of speech and assembly, extensive civil liberties, etc. would find that these values of ours are not supported by Communists at all. But there are not a lot of good liberal or progressive rights-based people among the anti-Communists for whatever reason. Hardline anti-Commies almost always tend to be conservatives or reactionaries, and I include the Democratic Party in the conservatives here. Typically as you get further left, a lot of social democratic parties don’t really care about Communism. They are not going to implement it of course, but a lot of them think if you do, that’s your business. A lot of social democratic governments in Europe supported Cuba, the USSR and the Sandinistas and a lot even supported the FARC. The social democratic revolutionary PRI government of Mexico had warm relations with Cuba and Nicaragua. They even supported the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador. They were headquartered in Mexico City. But the modern PRI is not even social democratic anymore, or its gone over the European garbage of rightwing social democracy. Of course all the real left social democrats are gone now, and the only “social democrats” left are rightwing jerkoffs. Many of the parties in the Socialist International now would be characterized by this new rightwing social democracy. The fact that social democrats around the world have all become rightwingers and more or less neoliberals shows me that the Marxists were correct about social democracy. They always said it was bankrupt and unworkable. I think it worked fine for a while, but it probably always had the rightwing seeds of its own destruction planted within it somehow, and now they are bearing fruit. Perhaps some of my commenters can elucidate the rightwing trend in social democracy, the reasons for it, and whether social democracy was doomed from the very starts, as I suspect, weighted down with its own contradictions.

Jordan Peterson: (Most) Everything He Says Is True

I really hate this guy mostly because he’s a reactionary, but honestly, almost every single thing he says is true. He’s right that it’s insane that you can talk to a female student behind closed doors anymore. That’s insane! Way to go feminists! Way to backwards, bitches! Sexual impropriety? What the Hell is that? Can you define it? Define it. Define sexual impropriety. See? You can’t. This Orwellian concept has no definition at all. Truth is, sexual impropriety is anything a woman says it is! Isn’t that great? Now we have a real definition we can all live with. I do want to know what his sexual impropriety bullshit charges are though, just out of curiosity. Right. Women are not as interested in things as men. So women in academia are not going to be as much into those fields that focus on things. Well, that’s obvious! I don’t even think women like ideas very much. The airy world of pure ideation, the realm of the prowling intellectual, is pretty much a male thing. It’s not that women can’t conceptualize this stuff – it’s more that they think it is flat out boring. I have met women with IQ’s very close to mine – I recall one woman with an IQ of 143 – but she simply could not fathom why I would engage in some wild Herculean task of chopping up German into 138 languages. Why in the Hell would you even do that in the first place? Was her attitude. She was just as smart as I was, not one bit less, but her brain worked differently, being a typical female brain. Women are just as smart as we men are, but their brains work differently so they are interested in different things than we are. Which is fine of course. Vive la difference! Of course, the more women dress up to be sexually attractive, the more they will contribute to sexual harassment (What the Hell is that anyway?) in the workplace. The more women sexualize themselves to make them look sexually enticing to men, the more men are going to be turned on by them, so the more women will interact with them in a sexual manner because they are getting turned on. I mean, it’s not rocket science, right. And yes, lipstick does in fact mirror the swelling and reddening of the labia during sex. That’s why it exists in the first place. And I believe cheek blush is based on the same thing. And yes, high heels do indeed mimic a sort of estrus in females, more specifically, heels directly sexualize women by making them appear more as they do in the sex act. Which is, after all, why women wear heels in the first place. Of course. Women are innately competitive, of course. They especially compete for men. Anyone knows that. And they compete on the basis of beauty too. I know this because women told me so. They told me that women dress up for other women, not for men. I never believed it until I heard it from them. Of course a man has to remove about 9 Of course politeness trumps truth with women. Any man knows that. Hell, I learned that in high school! Of course women manipulate men sexually to advance in the workplace. Duh! Anyone knows that. Of course makeup is sexually provocative, but I do not agree with Peterson that makeup should be banned in the workplace. Of course there’s a war on masculine behavior among boys. Boys being banned from throwing snowballs is a straight up war on masculinity itself. Even picking up snow off the ground was seen as toxic masculinity. Of course the bad boys didn’t care and broke all of these stupid rules. Only the good boys obeyed the rules not to act masculine. The worst boys, who probably needed to act less masculine, were not deterred at all. So all you are doing is neutering the mildest displays of masculinity in the best of boys, putting at the back of the pack, while shoving the worst boys to the front. Good job feminists! And he’s correct, in such a dispensation (a topsy turvy morality turned upside down Sadean one at that) the worst boys will get the most women and the most psychopathic males will be fathering the most children while the most decent males will father few if any kids. Way to go feminists! Of course a transwoman is not a real woman! A transwoman is a man who thinks he’s a woman. His delusion that he is a woman is so fixed that he often has surgery to try to turn himself into some sort of a fake woman, but a man is a man is a man. No man can ever be transformed into a woman. Of course not. Why would anyone think a man can be turned into a woman? That’s ridiculous, I mean given our current technology anyway. Ok this moron Peterson just compared Chairman Mao, of all people, to trans activists! How ridiculous! Mao was a puritan. The single most awful thing about Peterson is his idiotic fanatical anti-Communism. This dumbass has even covered his entire home with socialist realist paintings just to remind himself, every day mind you, even evil those damned Commies are. Anti-Communism is probably the single driving force behind all of Peterson’s intellectual oeuvre. And that’s where he runs right off the cliff, just like Coyote in the cartoons, following his cartoonish Roadrunner boogeyman of Communism right over the edge of all reason and sense. And this is what I mean when I say this guy is a reactionary and he can go take a long walk on a short pier. Sure, he’s right most of the time facts-wise, but his mind is just oh so wrong. He’s motivated by sheer puerile idiocy and reaction. Take your anti-Communism and shove it up your ass, Jordan. He follows online PUA’s because he finds them interesting psychologically. Well, they are saying a lot of psychologically interesting things and most of what they say is flat out true. Look. Let’s get real. PUA’s are all about success. Men don’t mess around with BS and get lost in wildernesses of psychological defenses like women do. Men’s whole raison de etre is “do what works, and all else be damned.” Men don’t care what the theory is as long as it works. If it works and it smells like roses, fine. If it works and it smells like ordure, well, you hold your nose and plow forth anyway because if it works it works, stink or not, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. These PUA’s are absolutely not going to waste any time on bullshit that doesn’t work. That’s something a woman would do. Women would obviously waste endless time on projects that don’t work simply because the ones that did work were so awful. Women would think, “That’s awful, so it can’t possibly work,” and then focus on some feel-good solution that smells like roses but fails every time. Women aren’t concerned with the destination. They’re concerned about the road you take to get there. If it’s a horrible road, they’re not driving on it. They’re taking the scenic route to feel better about themselves, no matter if it gets you anywhere or not. The idea that these PUA’s would have wasted all these years of intense study on things that don’t work. Men are far too practical for that. These guys conduct nearly controlled double blind studies to test their theories. And at the end, Peterson violates Godwin’s Law by equating SJW boneheads and fools with literal Nazis. No, Jordan, no. SJW’s are not Nazis. If they are like anyone, they are like Commies, and Commies are not Nazis as you probably think, you silly man. Peterson gets an 8

One Man Businesses Are Inherently Noncapitalist

Stalin Tonks: All this talk about donations and paywalls makes you sound like a capitalist, Robert. I am so disappointed in you.

First of all, I live in a capitalist country. You have to do what you have to do survive in whatever country you live in. If you want to survive in a capitalist country, you have to play by the rules of capitalism. And it’s not anti-socialist to be rich or to invest in or own businesses. For instance, the FMLN revolutionaries owned and invested in businesses, farms and ranches all over Latin America. All of the money went for revolution – guns, bombs, uniforms, supplies, wages for soldiers, etc. The father of the famous terrorist Carlos was a Venezuelan millionaire and Communist. That’s not a contradiction, and he doesn’t have to give all his money away. A Communist can be rich in a capitalist country. I would like to think he would do good things with his money though and not use it to rip off the people or exploit workers. Engels was a rich businessman. I am not a capitalist. No exploitation, no capitalism. I am simply a worker selling his labor on the open market. All one man businesses are noncapitalist. It’s just one guy selling his labor on the market mostly to other workers. It’s workers paying other workers for some service. Also I am not marking anything up, although the profit motive and marking up products as a middleman is not necessarily capitalist and is completely compatible with socialism. I also feel that small businesses are an important part of a socialist country. Anyway, I’m not really a Communist. I am just a socialist, and I am OK with social democracy where you have private businesses and even corporations and where up to 9 Democratic socialism allows a lot of capitalism in it. It just modified it and regulates it, and that is the socialist part as capitalists accept no limits whatsoever on their profits. Any state that limits the profits of Capital is automatically acting in a socialist manner. All regulation of business is inherently socialist. It has to be. Capitalists do not accept the state regulating their businesses to limit their profits in any way, shape or form. That’s their nature.

Where Is Telegu Spoken?

Jason Voorhees: Mr. Lindsey Telugu meaning Tamil of Southeast India. I was there once, many moons ago.

Telegu and Tamil are two different groups and languages. Tamils are indeed in SE India, but Telegu is spoken to the northwest quite a bit in a region of Andhra Pradesh called Telegana. Telegana is the far southern portion of Andhra Pradesh. It is heavily forested. There was a movement among them to break away and form their own state a while back I think. There was also quite a bit of armed Maoist activity there, but I think most of it was wiped out. With 85 million speakers, Telegu is one of the largest world languages, but no doubt most folks have not heard of it. It has more speakers than Italian! I am not sure how far apart the Dravidian languages are from each other, but they can’t understand each other, that’s for sure. I met two Telegus in a nearby town and I have seen photos of others, including one of the leaders of the Telegana Movement, also a Maoist, after he was released from prison. These three Telegus had quite prominent Australoid features, at least as Australoid as Tamils.

How the Pentagon and the CIA De Facto Created the FARC

Colombia has a very strange political system. There are two main political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, who are striking in that there seems to be so little difference between them. They are both parties of the Colombian ruling class, possibly representing a “liberal” versus “conservative” split in the ruling class a long time ago. Just guessing, the split may have had something to do with religion with the conservatives being the more religious party and wanting a bigger role for the Church in the state and the liberals being more modernizing reformers who were more secular and dedicated to more of a church-state split. Unbelievably, these two ruling class parties who are barely different at all, spent the entire 1950’s murdering each other by the hundreds of thousands in an insane bloodletting called “La Violencia.” A Leftist politican (I think his name was Galan) was elected in the late 1940’s, but he was quickly murdered by the Colombian ruling class, which is what they always do with any Leftist who wins an election down there. This was the first time that Colombia had elected anyone even remotely resembling a progressive reformer, so of course the ruling class murdered him immediately. His killing set off huge riots all over Colombia that raged for a long time and were difficult to put down. I believe that this set off the Violencia because I think Galan, a Leftist, actually ran on the Liberal ticket. Most of the people slaughtering each other during this idiotic Violencia were just the Colombian urban poor and the poor peasants of the rural areas. The ruling classes formed armies out of these poor people and sent them out to commit mass murder on each other. After 300,000 deaths caused by the Colombian ruling class in the Violencia, the roots of the Marxist revolution down there took hold. The FARC were the remains of Violencia fighters who said the heck with this war and took refuge at a place called Mariatelia in Colombia in 1964 and set up communal farms there. They were tired of fighting and just wanted to be left alone. The Colombian media went crazy screaming about the “Communist government” that seceded from the state had formed down there. The CIA was in on this wild propaganda process from the start. Eventually the Colombian government went down to this area with a large army force and attacked these communes with massive weaponry. The Pentagon and the CIA were involved in the battle. The US and the Colombians even used chemical weapons to try to exterminate these farmers. The farmers fought back, but they were outnumbered. Maybe 90-9 The survivors realized that there was no way to live in peace with what has always been a genocidal Colombian ruling class, and they took up arms to defend themselves. This is the way that almost all Leftwing guerrilla wars got started in the Cold War. The Left got tired of sitting around waiting for the government to come out and murder them, so they decided that as long as the government was going to come out and try to kill them, they might as well get some guns and try to defend themselves. This is how the FMLN, the URNG, the FARC, the ELN, the Sandinistas and even the MRTA got started. So this was the beginning of Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda and the FARC, essentially created by the mass murders of the Pentagon and the CIA in Colombia.

"Time of Monsters," by Peter Tobin

Peter Tobin is a Marxist activist and author who is an experiment on the recent goings in in Nepal especially with regard to the Maoist revolutionaries who recently fought a brutal civil war there and are now part of the government. Turns out that with disarmament, a lot of the Maoists sold out completely on almost all of their revolutionary principles, become rightwingers and in the process become millionaires with huge mansions. In addition, as you might have guessed, all and I mean all of the Maoist leaders were Brahmins. And this was an anti-caste revolution. In this part of the world, caste is like dirt. No matter how many times try wash the dirt off, there’s always some on your skin. And no matter how many attempts are made by South Asians to cleanse the body politic of caste, there’s always some of it remaining on the skin of their culture. you can’t take enough showers to wash all the dirt off and you can’t do enough reforms to wash caste out of the culture. It’s looking like caste in now an integral part of South Asian culture like curry, saris or gurus. Warning: This work is very long. If it was a book, it would be 60 pages, long enough for a novella if it was fiction.

Time of Monsters

by Peter Tobin

The cartoon above reflects a widespread perception among many Nepalese that the four parliamentary parties are servants – in varying degrees – of New Delhi. It appeared in the 2013, August edition of Nepal – a popular monthly – showing Prachanda (UCPN(M), Nepal (UML), Sitaula (NC) and Gaddachhar (MJN), (Brahmins all!) blubbing uncontrollably as Nepal against history and the odds beat India 2-1 in the South Asia Football Championships in July 2013.

Nepal’s Brahminical State and Problems of Legitimacy

From Machiavelli:

What’s more, you can’t in good faith give the nobles what they want without doing harm to others; but you can with the people. Because the people’s aspirations are more honorable than those of the nobles: the nobles want to oppress the people, while the people want to be free from oppression. Machiavelli, The Prince, 1516, p.39. Penguin 2009.

To the present day:

How can people trust them to run the state? Our boycott is therefore a political act to expose the failure of this parliamentary system. To build a new democracy and renew the revolutionary process we must go in a different direction. – Mohan Baidya, ‘Kiran’, Chairman, CPN-Maoist, October, 2013

Introduction

Political parties in all societies reflect specific histories and display the balance of social and political forces at any point in their narratives. Nepal is no exception to this truism; the classes and strata arising from the socio-economic conditions obtaining in the country’s history gave rise to caste, party and faction. The aim of this article is to provide detail of their historical gestation as a means of examining and explaining the present impasse in Nepalese society. This is presently evidenced by argument as to whether a Consultative Assembly, elected in November 2013 in a disputed ballot, has authority to promulgate a new constitution and is another issue of serious division that pervades every sphere of Nepalese society – political, cultural, social and economic – that cumulatively call into question the legitimacy of the essentially unreconstructed state founded by Prithvi Nararyan Shah in 1769. The article will argue that discord has been inherent since the state’s inception in the mid-18th century, with the campaign of unification driven by a minority elite imposing a nationality upon a multi-ethnic majority and which despite changing modalities of state power in the succeeding two-hundred and fifty years, remains the dominant power in Nepalese society, surviving monarchical absolutism, feudal clan autocracy, constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy, successively appearing as contrasting if not antagonistic systems. It is certainly the case that internecine power struggles among ruling Nepalese elites, regarding modalities of power, are crucial to understanding the forces shaping the present. However, evident systemic discontinuity should not obscure persistence of upper caste, particularly Brahmin ascendancy, surmounting every upheaval, and turning every change of polity into a vehicle for retention of power and privilege. Responding to the pressures of the modern world, and with long experience in judging the vagaries of historic authority, these same castes have melded seamlessly into the local bourgeoisie – domestically hegemonic but internationally subservient. Not every ancien regime is oblivious or impervious to demands for change from formerly subaltern classes. Note the nationalist leader Tancredi’s maxim, in di Lampedusa’s epic novel The Leopard about the 19th century Risorgimento (Italian unification):

“Things have to change so that everything can stay the same.” (“Tutto deve cambiar perche tutto reste uguale.”) (Il Gattopardo, G. di Lampedusa, 1958)

The Nepalese ruling castes are exemplars of this paradox, having survived successive changes in polity, a point underlined in contemporary Nepal where the major constitutional parties and organs of state are dominated by the same higher caste/class, as supreme in the new democratic republic as they were under the preceding Hindu God-Kingdom created through war and conquest by their Brahmin/Rajput ancestors in the 18th century. Unification was more empire than nation building, pitting a warlike Indo-Aryan warrior caste against a rural majority comprised of over sixty Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups, each with its own languages and specific Buddhist/pantheist/shamanist cultures. Over time this may not have precluded the forging of national identity: consider the example of Britain, which emerged from English subjugation and colonization of the tribal Celtic peoples that flourished on the periphery of the later named, with breast-beating triumphalism, British Isles. Similarly the English had emerged as a distinct people following military invasion and occupation by French Normans over Anglo-Saxon natives. Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism already provided a common ideology for conqueror and conquered. In the centuries following, the former lost both their French language and territories with the European feudal system they imposed upon Anglo-Saxon England taking root and dominating until the emergence of bourgeois capitalism in the Late Middle Ages. Nepal has never overcome the contradictions engendered by its violent birth which was compromised by its Hindu ruling castes retaining political, cultural and economic ties with caste peers governing India the sub-continental empire, and who, since Bhimsen Thapa, Jonge Bahadur and the Ranas, have, unlike the nation-builders of medieval Europe, proved unable or unwilling to act with national impunity. The notion of the present ruling caste elite representing the national interest is presently even more unlikely as their growing cosmopolitan class interests political, ideological and economic necessitate the country continuing as neo-colony of Brahminical India, subject to the ubiquitous, all-conquering global market and the multinational institutions established by US and other First World powers after 1945. The last serious threat to centralized caste power was the People’s War from 1996-2006, which saw a 12-point peace agreement between parliamentarians and revolutionaries, following the success of these two former bitter enemies allying to overthrow King Gyenendra in the 2006 second Thulo Jana Andolan (Great People’s Uprising/Revolution). It did not, as promised, lead to a ‘New Nepal’, instead seeing the elites of ‘Old Nepal’ regrouping, and remaining ensconced in power. This had also happened after the 1990 Jana Andolan, when the Brahmin leaders of the democratic movement summoned the Janjatis (ethnic minorities) and oppressed castes and classes to join the struggle for democracy against King Birendra and the feudal Panchayat system. Promises made, offering cultural and political autonomy to redress historical injustices, were later reneged on, with the subsequent constitution drawn up by the victorious New Delhi-backed political parties even retaining Nepal’s status as a divine Hindu Kingdom. It was not until 2008, with the declaration of a republic, that the monarchial system was finally abolished. However, that was the only tangible political gain from ten years of People’s War, while the major socioeconomic and cultural inequities that had provoked it were left in place, with attempts to ameliorate them blocked or sabotaged by a resurgent rightist bloc that seized the political and military initiative in the years following the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Nepal’s political parties are defined by which side they take in relation to this history; whether they want to either preserve the existing system, albeit with minor tweaks and modest reform, or completely replace it with a new dispensation. Conservatives and revolutionaries are adversaries in the struggle for the body and soul of the nation. First, some empirical details about the country that provide the inescapable, epidemiological conclusion that the socio-economic antagonisms fermenting in Nepalese society point inevitably to further eruption.

Economy and Society

Nepal is an aid-dependent, landlocked country, accessed principally from India, with a population of approximately 28 million. It has over sixty ethnic groups or Janjatis (called Adivasis in India) reflecting a rich linguistic and cultural diversity. Over 8 The CIA World Factbook estimates its labor force at 16 million: 7 As its contribution to GDP shows, the manufacturing sector is small, with carpet weaving dominating its light industrial sector and the rest made up of skilled handcraft production in metal, stone and wood. Since the decline of the jute industry based in Biratnagar, heavy industry is negligible, and Nepal has to import everything from cars to computers – necessities of modern life – which add to its trade deficit. Nepal has always faced the difficult situation of being a small economic power next to a big one that is denied economies of scale that accrue from size, thus insuring that Nepali companies could not compete with bigger Indian ones in the home market. This problem has, for example, caused the virtual collapse of its cotton and garment industry. Exports are inhibited because India imposes high import duties to protect its own industries. The pan-Indian Marwari Corporation/Clan dominate the domestic industrial and commercial sector in collusion with the traditional caste elites of Ranas/Shahs. A further aspect of its neocolonial status is that Nepal is forced to concede an open border with India and must endure a ‘take or leave it’ in terms of trade with India, a market that accounts for nearly 7 Nepal’s manufacturing base was further weakened by the global march of neoliberal capitalism (4) that saw, for example, Structural Adjustment Programs introduced in Nepal from the mid-1980s’. SAP’s are loans to aid-dependent, underdeveloped or economically unstable countries that have strong conditional clauses requiring adoption of rigorous free market policies, including privatization, trade and finance-sector liberalization, prices determined by the market and precluding and retreating from state intervention in any form. They were implemented by the IMF and World Bank, acting in a ‘bad cop/bad cop’ scenario and affected all sections of Nepalese society; the removal of subsidies on such items as cooking gas hit many homes, while those on fertilizers reduced agricultural production. Privatization programs ended public enterprises, many of which had been initiated by a dirigiste Rana regime in the 1930’s in a desperate attempt to modernize. There was, for example, sustained pressure from multilateral development financial institutions – the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank in particular – forcing a sale of water utilities, resulting in their complete privatization by 2006. Tariffs protecting indigenous industries were also removed and the penetration of multinational capital was facilitated across all sectors.

Inequality and Poverty

This regime, which does not even manufacture a needle in the name of a self-reliant and national economy, has handed the whole economy to a dozen families of foreign compradors and bureaucratic capitalists. This handful of plunderers has become billionaires, whereas the real owners of this country and the national property – the toiling masses of Nepal – are forced to eke out a meager existence of deprivation and poverty. – (CPN(M) leaflet, distributed on the eve of the start of the People’s War, 13th February, 1996.

The UN Human Development Report 2014 listed Nepal as the 31st poorest country in the world and among those classified low in Human Development indices with glaring inequalities in incomes and lifestyles that has the top 1 Government Household Survey statistics for 2010/11, by contrast, estimated deprivation at 2 While the majority of Nepalese are rural dwellers, the agriculture sector is weak and inefficient; hilly and mountainous topography with subsequent scarcity of arable soil apart from the southern Terai plains allows mostly for only subsistence farming. A poor infrastructure of roads and communications inhibits movement of produce. The continuing failure to reform land ownership sees huge, growing numbers of landless Dalits, Muslims and other minorities, especially in feudal and populous Terai. The failures to implement scientific management and introduce modern technology combine to render Nepal dependent on importing foodstuffs from or through India. The failure of the present system to provide necessary conditions of existence for an expanding demographic adds greater urgency to the antagonisms between the Establishment Right and Radical Left. These will be further accentuated given that India’s newly elected BJP administration has signaled the intention of pursuing more aggressively expansionist policies and is fully committed to the neoliberal economic project. The latter is being promoted as ‘shock therapy’ necessary for economic lift-off that will rescue the Indian people from poverty and deprivation. It is it problematic because it is set out as an ideological as opposed to an economically rational project deliberately masking the aim of increasing the penetration of Western monopoly capitalism into the Indian economy through the mediation of the Brahmin/Banyia oligarchy. One of the new regime’s first acts was to increase hikes in diesel prices, allowing the state subsidy to shrivel, while signaling an intention to do the same to fertilizer subsidies. It has since announced that the health budget is to be slashed in a country that already has one of world’s lowest expenditures in this sector. When all such state aid is rolled back, if wealth ‘trickles down’ perhaps by the conspicuous consumption of luxury commodities and lifestyle of a privileged cosmopolitan caste elite or charity (not a noted Brahmin characteristic) and alleviates some poverty – so be it, but it will be serendipitous. Such an outcome is not what drives au courant ‘capitalism with its coat off’ mutation, (4) so eagerly embraced by India’s caste elite as greed is a noted Brahmin characteristic. However, for all the Hindutva histrionics and bravura posturing of the demagogue Modi, his BJP regime is in fact morphing effortlessly from Mohan Singh’s Congress Party Administration’s line of march. This became apparent in 2005 US/India Memos of Understanding (MOU) which, inter alia, initiated opening up India’s agricultural research establishments to American monopolies and activated policies of ‘rapid commercialization’ of already hard-pressed Indian farmers. One commentator noted at the time:

The treaty is a partnership between two unequal partners. American agriculture is highly mechanized and organized, energy-intensive and market-centric. Indian agriculture, by contrast, has been for millennia the way of life for the vast majority of the population. (8)

The present Nepalese establishment invariably marches in step with New Delhi and accordingly rolled out the red carpet for the newly-elected PM Modi’s August 2014 official visit to Kathmandu. Addressing the Nepalese Parliament, he emphasized his government’s neoliberal economic priorities and the benefit Nepal would derive from deepening existing bilateral links by “…taking our relationship to an entirely new level.” Nepal’s establishment parties were receptive, as the post-1990 administrations had closely shadowed India’s descent into neoliberal policies, and Modi’s regime was seen as continuation of this course. The August visit was also marked by concluding agreements that increased Indian access to Nepal’s vast untapped water resources, which the revolutionary opposition denounced as a blatant example of neocolonial subservience to Indian expansionists and betrayal of the national interest. The argument over this abundant but as yet untapped natural resource constitutes a longstanding fault line in Nepalese politics that bears examination; it concentrates many existing socioeconomic and political contradictions in one issue.

The Politics of Water and Unequal Treaties

On September 6th 2014 the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist announced its intention to publicly burn copies of the Power Trade Agreement (PTA) recently negotiated between India and Nepal which allows for the construction of hydropower projects by Indian companies so as to facilitate energy trading, cross-border transmission lines and grid connections between the two countries. (9) The coalition government concluded a further agreement with the Indian company GMR to construct a 900MW hydropower project on the Upper Karnali. It was claimed that combining these two accords would enable Nepal to utilize its hydropower resources to produce enough surplus to permit the already agreed export of electricity to India and help reduce the country’s trade deficit. The extraction of Nepal’s water resources began in 1920 when the Indian Raj signed the 1920 Treaty of Sarda that secured access to the Mahakali. After independence, India’s Nehru’s Administration continued in a similar manner with the 1954 Koshi and 1959 Gandak Treaties that saw dams constructed solely to irrigate the thirsty Gangetic Plains of North India. There was outrage at these one-sided deals from Nepalese nationalists and communists, which led to greater caution by successive regimes faced with India’s insatiable water demands paralleled with failed attempts in securing international aid or a loan from the World Bank to develop the country’s hydropower resources independently. After the 1990 upheaval that ostensibly reduced Birendra to constitutional status, the fledgling democracy experienced renewed pressure from New Delhi that led to the 1996 Mahakali Treaty which was described as revealing:

“…the larger neighbor as bulldozer and the smaller one as hapless and internally divided.” (10).

While this treaty was supported by the both the constitutional communist party, the Unified Marxist-Leninist Communist Party which turned full circle from the anti-Indian position of its mother party in the 1950’s, and the always reliable pro-Delhi Congress Party (NC), it was denounced by CPN (Maoist) spokespersons who pointed out that Nepal would only get 7 out of the projected 125 megawatts output. (11) The symbolic burning of the present PTA as ‘against the national interest’ by the new Maoist party was manifestation of an ongoing campaign for retaining Nepalese jurisdiction over its water resources, resisting New Delhi’s strategy to monopolize them. This is underscored by observation that Nepal has huge hydropower potential estimated at 40,000 MW but is presently realizing only 600 MW. All of this is happening against a backdrop of daily power cuts and the fact that 6 Lenin famously stated that for USSR: ‘Communism was Soviet power plus electrification’ to which Nepal’s unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists paraphrase the end as: ‘plus hydropower’; reflecting the importance of this power source for realizing an independent socialist Nepal. The PTA is described by patriots of left and right as yet another unequal treaty among the many that began with the 1816 Treaty of Sugauli imposed by the East India Company. This is now seen a British land grab that resulted in Nepal ceding one-third of its territory to the Company, including Sikkim and what is now called Uttarakhand. The reduction of ‘Greater Nepal’ to its present territory resulted from military invasion and defeat. Treaties covering trade and resources have been facilitated by the Nepalese ruling caste/class acting in collusion with first imperial Britain then Brahminical India . The Brahmin/upper caste supporters of the power deal tend either to not recognize or to remain oblivious to the idea that any treaty agreed with brother India has ever been ‘unequal’. The same political class once again faced a 2011 furor over by the ‘Bilateral’ Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (BIPPA) which allowed for greater penetration and increased security for Indian capital in Nepal. This sellout document earned the parliamentary apparatchiks, parties and the Bhatterai Administration who negotiated and agreed to it epithets from the stooges and hirelings of the extra-parliamentary Maoist opposition and royalist factions. The definition of unequal agreement is where an imbalance of power, political, military or economic, exists between the parties to the agreement. Chinese nationalists and communists in the 20th century used the term to describe all treaties extracted from China in its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of Western imperialists in the 19th century. These treaties between Nepal and India involved loss of Nepalese sovereignty over territory and domestic markets and facilitated imports of commodities, including, notoriously, opium produced by East India Company, accompanied by the threat or use of superior military force. The period also saw the emergence of indigenous merchants acting as East India Company agents/intermediaries described as ‘compradors’. Nepalese patriots use the term “unequal treaties” to describe a history that began with Sugauli, was carried over from the East India Company to the Raj and continued in postcolonial India with the 1950 Peace and Friendship Treaty formalizing Nepal’s neocolonial status by allowing India increased access and control of the Nepalese economy and veto over Nepal’s foreign relations with third parties. It guaranteed Nepal as a captive market for Indian commodities and along with further revisions and succeeding agreements allowed exploitation of Nepal’s natural resources, principally water as described above, and access to cheap Nepalese migrant labor. New Delhi was driven as much by geopolitical considerations; Nehru saw Himalayan Nepal as a bulwark on India’s northern frontier against Communist China, and serving along with Bhutan and Sikkim as part of a “chain of protectorates,” so described by Curzon, a particularly bellicose, expansionist Raj Viceroy at the turn of the 20th century. Nehru was a ruthless autocrat and saved his fine words regarding nonintervention and non-aggression for the Pansheel Principles set out as a stratagem to bamboozle Mao’s Communists, burnishing India’s Gandhian credentials and non-aligned status in 1954 Treaty with the PRC. Nehru accordingly extracted the 1950 Treaty from the last Rana PM three months before he authorized an invasion of Nepal from India by a joint royalist/ democratic army which signaled the beginning of the end for Rana rule. Independent India under the imperious Pandit owed more to the martial warrior spirit of the Maharbarata than it ever did to the myth of Hinduism’s essential ahimsa (pacifism) peddled by the casteist charlatan Gandhi. Recent information shows that Nehru may have slaughtered even more Muslims in Manipur in 1947 than Modi managed in Gujarat in 2001.

Constitution or Revolution?

The new Maoist party, the CPN-M, is extra-parliamentary and does not accord legitimacy to the present institutions of state, distinguishing it from the three major parties in the Constituent Assembly, who supported and negotiated the PTA. In descending order of electoral strength, they are: Nepali Congress, Unified Marxist-Leninist CPN; and Unified CPN (Maoist). The first two are in coalition government, with the NC leader GP Koirala as Prime Minister. Koirala’s family is a Nepalese political dynasty akin to India’s Gandhis. A split in the third biggest party, the UCPN(M), in 2012 led to the launch of the CPN-M by cadre led by veteran Maoist leader, Mohan Baidya (‘Kiran’) (12), increasingly disillusioned with perceived growing revisionism of the UCPN(M) under the leadership of Prachanda and Bhatterai. They concluded that following the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the UCPN(M)’s political practice had degraded into reformism, conforming to Lenin’s bitter reasoning for the ultimate treachery of the German SPD’s voting for war credits in 1914:

…by making a fetish of the necessary utilization of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bourgeois legality.

In the view of many cadre, the party had lost its revolutionary edge and has been remade to suit New Delhi’s requirements. The party was guided by two leaders, Dahal (Prachanda) and Bhatterai, reconnecting with their Brahminical caste roots. The final betrayal was the surrender by Bhatterai’s ostensibly Maoist-led administration of the People’s Liberation Army and its weapons to the Nepalese Army in 2011 after being laagered in UN cantonments following the 2006 CPA. In reaction to this and policies such as handing back expropriated land to the feudal landlords, the new CPN-M declared a return to revolutionary first principles and building on the foundation of the principle of People’s War as a precondition for future political work. A fourth political bloc represented in the Constituent Assembly (the National Assembly – an upper house created in 1990, was abolished in 2007, and Nepal now has a unicameral system) is the United Democratic Madeshi Front representing landed property class parties from the Terai, a region of flatlands in southern Nepal and topographically an extension of the Gangetic Plains of North India. Ethnically and culturally the Terai’s upper castes are closer to India, so this group’s political support for increasing bonds between the countries is guaranteed. The Terai was formally a NC fiefdom, but party membership collapsed when leaders and activists principally drawn from the Bhadraloks (Terai upper castes) deserted the party which they believed had become dominated by the Brahmins of the Kathmandu and the Central Hill regions referred to as Pahadis (Hill People). This political bloc, following the 2006 Peace Agreement, appeared to upper caste Madeshis to be too weak to stand up to the Maoists, perceived as all-powerful after ten years of People’s War and a real threat to feudal and zamindar (landlord) interests in the Terai. Madeshi parties subsequently emerged seeking either regional autonomy or direct integration with India. The more militant among them advocated armed struggle and were instrumental in driving the 2006/7 murderous conflict with the Maobaadi (Nepali for Maoists) in order to defend the status quo in the region. Indian security services were rumored to have been heavily involved in arming and funding these groups, signaling New Delhi’s growing alarm at the threat to Indian interests posed by the Nepalese Maoists as they stood on the verge of a takeover. There are 22 other parties represented in the CA, the largest two being royalist – the Rastriya Prajantra Party (Nepal) and the Rastriya Prajantra Party – representing the ancient regime and seeking in one form or another a return to divine Hindu monarchy abolished when the Prachanda’s 2008 UCPN(M)/UML coalition government declared the republic. However, many monarchists are patriots with a deep distrust of India to the extent that some prefer China in all circumstances. After the RRP(N) and the RPP, there are many small socialist, communist and peasant parties reflecting the patchwork and multirepresentational nature of Nepalese politics. This plethora of parties is also apparent among the forces outside the CA led by CPN-M in a 33-party alliance. The CPN-M (13) and its allies – other communist, socialist and social democratic parties along with Janjati (ethnic) organizations – came together in 2013 to boycott the November election for a second Constituent Assembly. They argued it was a ‘phony, rigged election’, promoted by the same forces that had blocked a progressive federal constitution in the first CA. Now the parliamentary ‘Four Party Syndicate’ was seeking a mandate to forge an anti-people constitution ensuring that power was retained by upper castes and that in any event, asserted the boycotters, would be written in New Delhi. Among the international supporters of the second CA election were the US, China, EU, India, the UN, NGOs like the Carter Center, ANFREL etc. 70,000 police, army and paramilitaries along with 50,000 temporary police personnel were mobilized to counter the campaign organized by the CPN-M, leading a 33 party alliance around the slogan:

Boycott this corrupt/so-called election (Kathit nirbaachan bahiskaar gare).

The election duly took place, pre-weighted through the creation of a High Level Commission that excluded all other parties, ensuring the ‘Four Party Syndicate’s unchallenged control of proceedings. Rs 30 billion was allocated to pay for it, a staggering amount considering only Rs 2.8 billion was spent on the 2008 election. The election was further tainted as turnout figures were disputed, with nearly five million voters disappearing from the 2008 election rolls. There was also no postal vote provision for the estimated two million émigré workers scattered through the Gulf States and South East Asia. Each side claimed higher or lower percentage turnouts, but the significant result was the major setback for Prachanda and Bhatterai’s revisionist UCPN (M). The party lost its place as the biggest party gained by a shock victory in 2008 election, where it garnered 4 In any event, the CPN-Maoist ‘Dashists’ did not halt the election, but held their nerve in spite of powerful domestic and international enemies, a sustained hate campaign from the Brahmin/bourgeois controlled media sequestered in Kathmandu led by the Kantipur Corporation, Nepal’s largest media house, and internal party tensions. Notwithstanding the final number of votes cast, the election showed that the boycotters represented a critical mass of the citizenry. Whatever the outcome of the charade, Kiran said emphatically, they would burn any constitutional declaration emerging from the new CA and “write one in the streets.”

The Caste System & Democratic Deficit

However, it may also be stated that most Dalit leaders are right when they blame the ‘Brahminical’ order of society for the grievous discrimination practiced against them…the reification of the caste system, even to this date, depends for its authority on the socioreligious observances of Brahmins, the high priests of Hinduism. – V. Rajan “Dalits” and the Caste System in India, p 3, 2010)

As in India, it is formally illegal under the Nepalese Constitution to discriminate on grounds of caste, and the education system is also nominally open to all. In reality though, the caste system remains pervasive with the upper castes constituting 70-8 The Kathmandu Valley Newaris, for example, form A more recent study in 2004 showed little change. Brahmins, while forming 1 Nepalese Brahmins in politics, culture and business defer easily to fellow Brahmins ascendant in India, claiming a realism similar to the pragmatism of a small boy before a bigger sibling. This assumes that Nepal and India are ‘family’, albeit one where might confirms right. They also note admiringly that Indian Brahmins have since Independence retained power and privilege in alliance with the Kshatriyas, the military caste, and the Banyias, the commercial and merchant caste, making a mockery of the great Dalit scholar/statesman Ambedkar’s 1947 Constitution prohibiting discrimination on grounds of caste and guaranteeing equality for all citizens. Words were also cheap in the 1972 Amendment to the Indian Constitution that added the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ to the original declaration of ‘sovereign, democratic republic’. Against the evidence and from the beginning India was also touted in the capitalist West as rival to Red China’s ‘totalitarian ant heap’ and gushingly described as the ‘World’s Biggest Democracy’. Yet caste and democracy are mutually exclusive; caste rule is anti-egalitarian, and democracy requires equality. India and Nepal are clear examples, still controlled by the same caste configuration that in the political sphere refracts into parties and factions with acquired skills, resources and enough cohesion to collectively jump through regular electoral hoops. Effective democratic camouflage disguises elective oligarchy. A lesson well learned from the White Sahib’s mastery over and increasing sophistication in the dark arts of electoral manipulation and illusion, important because the popular mandate confers legitimacy to uninterrupted ascendancy of the bourgeois capitalism. The Dashists and their allies program the end of the upper caste monopoly of state power by establishing a New Federal People’s Democracy that represents the hitherto excluded Janjatis, Dalits, minorities, working classes and urban underclasses. Federalism is crucial to New Democracy as it means breaking up the centralized Brahminical state by devolving power to previously oppressed national minorities. It will correct the historic wrong that began with the autocracy founded by Narayan Shah and extended by the Ranas through King Mahendra’s Panchayaat and continued since 1990 with elective dictatorship coalescing around establishment parties as they cartelized political and state power. It was significant that one of the organized manifestations that followed victory in the 2006 Andolan was the mocking of Prithvi Narayan Shah’s statue in Kathmandu by Janjatis, indicating both that there is continuing antipathy to the oppressive central power he founded and that this historical wound remains very much open. The event was complemented by royalist outrage at such desecration, further testament to the irreconcilability of contending forces in Nepalese society.

Maoist “New Nepal”

From Marx:

…the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation… Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 73

To the present day:

Gender, Dalit and regional issues are important, and they are tied into the class struggle. But working to solve just these issues will not bring a full solution. This can only be reached by completing the class struggle. – KB Bishwokarma, Prakanda.

The CPN-M Dashists affirm their wish to break with global capitalism and establish economic autarky featuring tariff walls to protect infant industries along with land reform and infrastructural development, all through socialist state planning and ownership. Nepal, they argue, has failed to straddle the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and its traditional ruling classes have been incapable and unwilling to provide effective governance to tackle deprivation, poverty and inequality. Since 1990 it has increasingly aped India’s development, a huckster capitalism overseen by wholly corrupt caste elites dressed in “emperor’s new clothes” of bourgeois Western multiparty democracy. Maoists maintain that socialist transformation will improve conditions for the people and ensure genuine national sovereignty. Kiran, citing Mao and Stalin, argues that the national question in the case of Third World countries like Nepal is a class question. These weaker states have become subject to the interests of a dominant First World requiring them to be maintained in various stages of underdevelopment and to enable open markets for imported goods and foreign investment and to increase the plunder of their natural resources to feed insatiable Western consumer societies. Third World countries are further valuable sources of low-paid indigenous labor for production of cheap commodities intended for the Western market, dramatically highlighted by the 2013 Rana Plaza clothing factory tragedy in Dhaka. These nations also provide a reservoir of migrant labor for international capital projects, graphically exposed by the slave-like conditions endured by émigré workers, many of them Nepalese, on the notorious Qatar World Cup project. Even if not dramatically affected as migrant workers, neoliberalism, through international institutions led by IMF and World Bank, impacts on the Nepalese masses by shackling its government along with those in other impoverished, underdeveloped Third World countries to market-based austerity policies and denying whole populations benefits of modernity, decent infrastructure, modern schools, basic health care, access to clean water and sanitation, decent housing &c. Measuring everything by market criteria also blocked welfare programs, food subsidies and all state intervention aimed at reduction of poverty or stimulating domestic growth. In Nepal it has led to growing numbers of Sukumbasi (squatters), increasing, persistent mass unemployment, landlessness, rural flight to towns/cities, especially Kathmandu, exacerbating already high urban poverty, bonded, émigré and child labor; all salient features of a failed state, where a traditional elite continue to flourish, retaining social and economic privilege. This elite increasingly lives in ‘forts of gold’, while the world and the city outside crumbles over the head of the excluded and increasingly impoverished majority. Kathmandu is symptomatic, where, as in many Third World urban centers, the spectacle of private affluence for the few contrasts starkly with increasing public squalor for the many. Hope for a more egalitarian Nepal following the 1990 transition from monarchical absolutism to multiparty democracy was quickly dashed in the years of corruption and reaction that followed, when a newly empowered political elite proved even more venal than the Panchas they had supplanted. Ideologically colonized, like the Brahmins of Congress India, they were transfixed by western liberal democracy, whose representative institutions and personal freedoms, they were conditioned to believe, enshrined universally applicable and superior European Enlightenment values. Whereas imperialists once hawked a Christian Bible, their contemporaries now peddle the snake oil of capitalist democracy as salvation for, in Kipling’s infamous phrase from the poem Recessional, “lesser breeds without the Law”. Just as missionary societies once flourished, now Human Rights industries thrive and NGO’s promoting Western values and practices proliferate, employing some indigenous educated and enlisting them into the comprador class while sustaining patchwork schemes in a parody of development. From the beginning the conditioning of native elites through education invariably inculcated western values and ideologies which, on one hand informed and articulated claims to national independence and produced the leadership for anticolonial struggle, while one the other, ensured the same leadership was sufficiently psychologically colonized to slavishly adopt after independence the parliamentary model, including the flummery. An exotic plant in wholly unsuitable conditions. (16) As Franz Fanon caustically opined:

 The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course.(17)

Bourgeois parliamentary institutions emerged in the Europe of the Late Middle Ages as a revolutionary and contingent challenge to residual feudal control by divinely mandated monarchs scattered across the kingdoms of Europe. Increasingly, with bourgeois power assured, they became functional requirements for regulation of class interests and instruments of chauvinist aggression against other nations, initially in Europe. In their early gestation they provided an arena for systemic compromise where differences could be aired and reconciled by parties representing old and new forms of propertied ruling classes in given historical transitions. This occurred in England following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, establishing a constitutional rapport between Whigs, the nascent bourgeoisie, and Tories, the old landowning class, but significantly this same transformation did not emerge from Les Etats Generaux of Bourbon France, making inevitable the 1789 Revolution and bloody, bourgeois victory over L’Ancien Regime. However, modern First World states, despite the potential democratic threat of universal suffrage, increasingly stabilized, and bourgeois capitalism established unchallenged supremacy. Parties are now even less class-based, representing sectional interests within the ruling class competing for control of the state apparatus, with elections determining which of the intraclass rivals accedes to government, enabling exercise of executive power and policy implementation until the next poll. Among the mature Western democracies this increasing homogenization of parties barely masks elective bourgeois dictatorship, now tricked out in ballot box ritualism, steeped in what Marx derided as ‘parliamentary cretinism’ and nailed by Engels as:

…an incurable disease, an ailment whose unfortunate victims are permeated by the lofty conviction that the whole world, its history and its future are directed and determined by a majority of votes in just that very representative institution that has the honor of having them in the capacity of its members. – Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, 1852, ME Selected Works, Vol 1, p. 370)

Yet this system was adopted by the ex-colonies of the British Empire in Asia and Africa, all of which have signally failed. India is the worst example, especially after the collapse of Nehru’s dreams of socialist democracy involving state ownership, five year plans, and deficit spending within integument of a mixed economy, etc. all evaporated in the early 1960’s, following the disastrous defeat in the war of aggression launched against China in the Kashmir Aksai Chin. Nehru had always allowed for a degree of corruption, but after him it was unchecked; reflected in the Lok Sabha which degenerated into the kleptocracy presently extant. In Nepal, similarly, after 1990, the new democratic state institutions quickly became synonymous with cronyism, nepotism and carpetbagging. A pervasive corruption disfigured Nepalese society and subsequently Nepal scored 2.2 on the 2011 World Corruption Perception Index, where 10 is ‘very clean’ and 0 is ‘highly corrupt’. (18) The economist Arun Kumar further estimated that the Nepalese black economy, in 2006, accounted for $4 billion in contrast to an official GDP of $7 billion, an even higher percentage than India where the same phenomenon accounts for a still eye-watering 5 Like a fish stinking from the head, the godfathers or Thulo Hakimharu of NC and UML contributed to this state of affairs by pursuing a brazen policy of enrichessez-vous as vigorously as the state campaign of terror and foreign-funded mayhem they unleashed before and during People’s War against the Left and rural agitators who challenged the new corruption. Nevertheless, communists are not anarchists, grasping that participation in bourgeois elections is often a tactical necessity, so that if on occasion normative bourgeois control of electoral process as a result of political, economic or military crises is problematic, then communist parties should participate, particularly if it offers them the possibility of advancing proletarian interests. It was on such practical eventualities as well as principles that Marx and Engels campaigned for universal suffrage in the Communist Manifesto. They saw communists using the extended franchise to subvert the elective dictatorship of the bourgeoisie:

Transforme, de moyen de duperie qu’il a ete jusqu’ici, en instrument d’emancipation. (Changed by them from the usual means of deception, into one of transformation.) (K. Marx, Manifesto for French Workers’ Party, 1880. ME Selected Works, Vol 1, p. 546)

It was in this spirit that the  CPN (M) following the CPA entered the 2008 election campaign for a Constituent Assembly from which it emerged as the biggest party with 4 The Maoists were aware that they had considerable support in towns and cities but could not connect with it as People’s War had reached military stalemate, with the PLA controlling the countryside and the RNA and Armed Police Force (APF) paramilitaries the urban centers, particularly Kathmandu. It was a logjam that had to be broken if the Prachanda Path strategy, the fusion of Maoist protracted rural struggle and Leninist urban insurrection, was to succeed and the revolution carried through. In any event, the CPN (M) formed an administration in alliance with the UML with Prachanda as Prime Minister. The administration’s first act was to abolish the monarchy and declare a republic, but an attempt by Prachanda to bring the army under civilian control by sacking the insubordinate CoS, Katawal and the royalist generals around him for refusing to integrate PLA ex-combatants en corps into the NA as per the CPA provoked a virtual coup openly orchestrated from New Delhi involving its Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) foreign intelligence service acting in collusion with NA officers and apparatchiks from NC, UML and UDMF. This resulted in Yadhev, Nepal’s first President, significantly one of the few remaining prominent NC Terai Madeshis, exceeding his constitutional authority and reinstating the insubordinate Katawal. The UML, following instructions from New Delhi, pulled out of the coalition, and with the Maoists now unable to secure a majority in the CA, Nepal’s first Maoist-led government collapsed after only eight months in office. What provoked New Delhi to act with such speed and malice was triggered by Prachanda’s challenge to India’s right of veto over Nepal’s foreign policy by ‘playing the China card’, repeating Birendra’s ‘mistake’ with an attempted arms purchase from the PRC. Any hint of a China/Nepal alliance was anathema also to the Nepalese officer class and high command, who were historically close to India, and had, post-9/11, forged a deep relationship with Washington and the Pentagon, based on dollars, weaponry and training in return for allowing Nepal to become another link in the US chain surrounding the People’s Republic. When Biplav (Netra Bikram Chand) was asked during the 2013 boycott campaign why he opposed elections, he replied that Maoists were not opposed to them per se as they were a ‘relative matter’. He opposed this specific one as political and financial larceny on a grand scale, attesting: “It is a criminal conspiracy against the Nepalese working class.” The 2009 coup showed that electoral results as democratic expressions of the popular will are also, when the occasion demands, a ‘relative matter’ even for those who peddle democracy as a universal panacea at least when it serves class interest but are as quick to ignore or subvert it when it doesn’t.

Class and Patriotism

It would not be incorrect, if very insulting, to say that Nepal’s top leadership vis-à-vis India, has been morally bankrupt, greedy, hypocritical and have served as no more than errand boys. People are tired of these slick, fast-talking politicians. In fact their reputation has gone down the drain. In a culture aimed above all at seizing power, with material motivations, political democracy and thereby sustained peace is unlikely. – G. Thapa, Republica, Nepalese daily newspaper, September 30, 2013.

Marxist-Leninists argue that nation and class are linked in Third World countries. In these countries, traditional ruling elites and the emerging bourgeoisie have been suborned by transnational capitalism and accept neocolonial status as preferable to revolutionary change and national independence. It is therefore not in their increasingly cosmopolitan class interests to seek genuine self-determination; only the exploited working and marginalized classes have a genuine interest in such an outcome. (19) The symbiosis of communism and patriotism is therefore contingent to the epoch of imperialism. The lack of concern of the present ruling elite for its people is shown in the case of Nepali migrant workers in Qatar, cited above, because their remittances contribute over 2 Aside from BOP advantages, the money sent back also reduces governmental responsibility for the alleviation of poverty, especially in rural areas. Consequently there has been little or no representation from successive governments for the rights and well-being of the estimated 2.2 million émigré Nepalese presently working in India, Malaysia and the Middle East. (20) This echoes an early initiative of Jonge Bahadur, who established Rana power after 1846 Red Kot Massacre by reducing the monarchy to titular status. He negotiated a payment per head for every Ghurkha recruited into the British Army. (21) This was one aspect of a new strategic alliance with the East India Company through which the new rulers began to draw material benefit from trading their subjects as commodities in the form of mercenaries, while being left unchallenged in Nepal to establish Rana monopoly control over all trade and to plunder state coffers and lands with impunity. The arc that connects the establishment of Gurkha mercenaries with migrant labor is one where benefit accrues to the same high castes exercising state power, albeit under superficially different political systems by different means of extraction in different epochs. Kiran’s Maoists, in this sense, expand the concept of patriotism beyond concern for territory and existing culture into one that includes the justice and welfare of the people. This criterion goes beyond but does not ignore traditional concerns: the defense of borders against constant Indian encroachments, ending the shameless political obedience to Delhi, the rolling back of foreign ownership in vital economic sectors, and protecting Nepal’s largely untapped vast hydro resources from continued Indian predation. The CPN-M Dashists are equally quick to point out that they are only anti-Indian to the extent that they oppose the Indian government’s neocolonialist meddling in Nepal. The hatred of Brahminical expansionist policies does not extend to the Indian people, who they argue have and are beginning to make their own revolution against the same enemy. This internationalist perspective is axiomatic for the patriotism of national liberation struggles in countries oppressed by imperialism and distinguishes it from bourgeois chauvinist nationalism that breeds racist hatred and jingoist aggression. This was the ideology that fueled rivalry between the nascent European states and then mutated into the racial superiority engendered by the subsequent colonization and subjugation of native peoples in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Imperialism no longer requires direct colonial occupation but operates in neo- or semi-colonial form. Exploitation of peoples and resources continue, and even intensify, but are now fronted by local ruling elites, comprador upper castes and classes, conditioned and rewarded to front for and spare imperialist powers from the obloquy and resistance engendered by 19th century European colonial empires. Mao described the modus operandi:

When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war but by milder means – political, economic and cultural – the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. – Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, Selected Works, Vol 1, p.331

The present Nepalese ruling class, in this respect, cannot represent the national interest, Maoists aver, as they constitute an anti-patriotic bloc sustained by and servant to international capital and great power geopolitics. Kiran concluded:

Both the King and the Nepali Congress Party represent the feudal, bureaucratic and comprador bourgeoisie.

Patriotism in Nepal and similar Third World countries, is not, argue the Maoists, ‘a refuge for the scoundrel’, but rather a home for the homeless and the hope of the hopeless. In this regard Pushpa Lal, when founding the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) in 1949, absorbed Mao’s definition of patriotism and learned how the Koumintang degenerated from the patriots of Sun Yat Sen into the quislings of Chiang Kai Chek. He also derived lessons from the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Germany’s virulent, fascist imperialism. Patriotism in the modern age was, by these examples, anti-imperialist by definition. Therefore, in the epoch of imperialism, the mantle of patriotism falls upon the shoulders of the proletariat in the oppressed Third World. The bourgeoisie in the metropolitan heartlands invoke it to mask imperial aggression and aggrandizement, while the big bourgeoisie of monopoly financial and industrial capital have transcended the nation-state and its parochial ideology, instead pledging allegiance to the ascending global megalopolis of money.

Communist Politics: 1949-2014

Inspired by China’s liberation in 1949, the newly founded Communist Party of Nepal took up arms against the Rana regime, which was in power via an alliance with NC led by the Koirala brothers and royalist forces under King Tribhuvan (Nepal’s Ivan the Terrible to the Ranas’ Boyars) Together they forged a Mukti Senaa (Liberation Army) which invaded from India in 1950/51. These activities were supported, with arms, funds and facilities and funded by Nehru’s Congress government, and even included providing officer staff from Bose’s recently demobilized Indian National Army. Nehru had already godfathered the creation of Nepali Congress in 1948 from progressive Nepalese democrats exiled in India, and wanted to settle accounts with the pro-British Ranas. In the final event India limited their support to the NC, forcing it into a three-way peace agreement with the Ranas and the King. There followed a short-lived NC/Rana coalition government, the collapse of which signaled a decade of political struggle between the NC and the King, followed by thirty years of monarchial executive government, with New Delhi steering a seemingly contradictory ‘Two-Pillar’ policy of supporting the monarchy and the aspiring democrats of Nepali Congress. Lal, who, in 1949 first translated the Communist Manifesto into Nepalese, linked armed struggle to a domestic program, principally advocating a ‘Land to the Tiller’ policy in tandem with breaking up big feudal estates and following the example of China’s ‘New Democracy’ also proclaimed the intention of promoting state-sponsored national capitalism. The party also advocated a Constitutional Assembly, which was agreed among all the parties, foreign and domestic, but reneged on by Tribhuvan’s successor, Mahendra, who, following the 1960 coup, replaced the parliamentary system with a feudal Panchayat, a series of interlocked consultative committees, starting at village level and ending with the King as final arbiter. It was in these conditions of a Shah/Brahmin autocracy and the international US-led post-1945 onslaught to roll back Communism that saw the Communist Party and movement grow, recruiting from the intelligentsia, disillusioned radical NC members, urban workers, Dalits and oppressed rural minorities. However, aside from having to operate underground, it faced the same problem as that of succeeding communist parties and cadre in maintaining a united revolutionary line. Lal’s CPN split in the early 1960’s between pro-Moscow reformists such as Tulsi Lal Amatya and pro-Beijing revolutionaries. There was a parallel split between the Rayamajhi faction which scuttled off to serve the Panchayat system and Puspha Lal, who remained committed to proletarian revolution against domestic reaction and international US imperialism, supported by Mao’s communist China,  at least until Deng Xiaoping’s 1976 Rightist coup left the proletariat at home and abroad to its own devices. After the Japha Uprising in 1971, Nepal’s first communist armed struggle, the UML emerged. But by 1990, it was fully committed to multiparty democracy and conciliation with Delhi, following the lead set by its homologues in Communist Party of India (Marxist). Its transformation into a comprador bourgeois parliamentary party epitomized when the short-lived 1994 UML Adhikary administration instigated the Integrated Mahakali Treaty, which, under its NC successor, signed after an orgy of corruption, ceded sovereignty of the river to India. The UCPN (Maoist) path from People’s War into parliamentary politics and accommodation with Delhi has already been noted. However, Nepalese communism, while disputatious, has shown great vigor, and unlike the post-1945 Western communist parties has never surrendered intellectual or political hegemony to the bourgeoisie. Schisms and splits followed deviations, but the result always ensured that the torch of patriotic, anti-imperialist revolution was passed to a new generation and party. The CPN-M is the latest manifestation of this cycle of action and reaction and may not be the last, but it has inherited the legacy of Puspha Lal Shrestha at a time when Luxemburg’s historical option of ‘Socialism or barbarism?’ confronts with even greater urgency, a century after she coined her prophetic question.

Jo Chor Usko Thulo Sor (Proverb: ‘He Who Steals Shouts Aloud’)

The feudal system was by no means brought complete from Germany, but had its origin, as far as the conquerors were concerned, in the martial organization of the army during the actual conquest, and this evolved after the conquest into the feudal system proper through the action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries. – K Marx, Feuerbach – Opposition of Materialist and Idealist Outlook, Selected Works, Vol 1, p.72)

Nepal was unified in 1769 when the Gorkhali warrior state subdued the three kingdoms in the Kathmandu Valley and created a myriad of fifty or more smaller principalities under the leadership of Prithi Narayan, who became its first Shah and centralized royal power in Kathmandu. It was not an organic process with common national identity evolving from a shared history, economy, language or culture but one of force majeure that involved conquest and subjugation over many indigenous ethnicities, each with their own language and customs. Narayan Shah’s ruthless empire building was partly driven by desire to forestall the inexorable northeastern expansion of the East Indian Company, then easily colonizing small kingdoms in its path. The creation of a martial Greater Nepal did indeed halt the feringhees (foreigners) advance, which appeared unstoppable following Clive’s decisive victory at Palashi (Plassey) over the Nawab of Bengal in 1757. This battle secured Company rule over India until the precise centennial challenge of the first War of Independence in 1857, denigrated by the British using the euphemism, ‘The Indian Mutiny’. However, a decade after Plassey, in 1767, Narayan Shah’s Gurkhali army routed a British expeditionary force under Captain Kinloch at Sindhulighadi and kept the greedy, expansionist British in the guise of the East India Company out of Nepal until the second decade of the 19th century and, many claim, helped ensure that the country was never formally colonized. It necessitated creating a domestic power imbalance with a minority ruling a majority that, apart from some cosmetic modification, exists to the present day and for a century was marked by Rana regimes so servile to British interests that invasion and colonization were rendered unnecessary.

1769 – The Dawn of the Hindu Kingdom

The extent of dominion had been acquired entirely during the last fifty years, by the systematic prosecution of a policy likened by the Goorkhas themselves, and not inaptly so, to that which had gained for us the empire of Hindoostan. – HT Prinsep, The Goorkha War, p 9, 1825)

Prithvi Narayan Shah established a state in Nepal that in many way was analogous with those of European feudalism that emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire and lasted until the rise of capitalism in the late Middle Ages. It also was an agricultural society presided over by a divinely ordained monarch, nobility and priesthood existing on the labor and produce of a mass of serfs. Even the manner of its inception by force of arms echoes Marx’s comments on the origins of feudalism in Northern Europe as a response to anarchy and decay of the times:

From these conditions and the mode of organization determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. (Marx-Engels, Feuerbach – Opposition of Materialist & Idealist Outlook, p.23. ME Selected Works, Vol. 1)

In this respect, Narayan Shah’s unification of Nepal was similar to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, where advanced military forces involving disciplined infantry and cavalry in integrated battle tactics was decisive in sweeping aside patchy and ill-coordinated Anglo-Saxon resistance. In terms of comparative logistics and technical support, it was complemented by Narayan Shah’s adoption of modern weaponry and training of a third of his army along British lines that proved crucial to eventual success in a grueling twenty-year campaign culminating in the declaration of Nepal as a Hindu Kingdom in 1769. Gorkhalis and Normans conquered foreign lands and peoples, and Kings William and Narayan used countrywide grants of confiscated lands to their warrior and clerical castes as both reward for past service and to secure the future of the central regime. In each case repression was used to entrench the system and reduce respective populations to serf/Shudra servility. The speed and ruthless nature of Norman expropriations was such that by the end of William’s reign in 1087, 2 It was a more attenuated process in Nepal, but by the time of the Ranas in mid-19th century, similar patterns in ownership and access to land were firmly established that, despite some fragmentation and formal abolition of feudal land titles, remain into the 21st century for want of serious reform. A 2004 Human Development Report, UNDP, reported the top From the birth of the new state, each of the subjugated peoples were subject to feudal rent in labor, goods or money in the case of Nepal where a sizable portion took immediate monetary form, while in Europe such remittance mode emerged gradually, attenuated by feudal society fragmenting under the impact of a growing urban society of flourishing markets and small-scale commodity production. In this situation money’s use-value as means of facilitating commodity exchange enriched and accelerated the rise of an increasingly prosperous merchant burger class that finally burst the constraints of European feudalism.

Land Tenure Post-1769

Should the direct producers not be confronted by a private landlord, but rather, as in Asia under direct subordination to a state which stands over them as their landlord and simultaneously as sovereign, then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances there need exist no stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. – Marx, Capital Vol 3, p 791, New World edition)

Aside from the geopolitical considerations of blocking the feringhees, the Gorkha state was driven by hunger for land, and Narayan Shah particularly desired the fertile Kathmandu Valley. Brahmins and Rajputs who had settled across Nepal, having being uprooted from North India by Mughal invasion and settlement, were also instrumental in securing the new system established by Narayan Shah from the Kathmandu center. They were particularly enthusiastic participants in the abolition of tribal land rights and the creation of a royal monopoly over all land under the Raikar Law. This allowed for individual/family use and transfer as long as taxes were paid to the King’s state treasury. Private ownership of land eventually mutated from this private use, creating a largely Brahmin landlord class. When Raikar was abolished in 1950, the system accounted for 5 The Guthi system further allowed for state or private grants of land to religious institutions and was free from tax and repossession by the donor. This continues to the present time but accounts for only A specific subset of Birta was Jagir tenure, which was land in lieu of pay to army personnel, both officers and privates, which intensified expropriations of a scarce resource and entrenched the new order by, as one historian notes:

…granting of Jagir lands to such of them as received appointments in the government and army was an important factor contributing to the stability and organization of the newly established regime. Without the Jagir system it would have been virtually impossible for the government to distribute rewards to its nobility and military personnel. – Land Ownership in Nepal, p 74, MC Regmi).

Certain ethnic groups in Eastern Nepal had traditional rights to common land under the Kipat system. The Limbus in particular had these rights as quid pro quo for their agreement in 1774 to accept merger with Nepal under Narayan Shah’s sovereignty, which extracted a pledge that Kipat land would remain outside the Raikar system in perpetuity. This was never honored by succeeding shahs and particularly the later Rana regimes that relentlessly encroached upon these lands during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Limbus suffered especially as literate and legally informed Brahmins exploited their skills to dispossess them of their traditional lands. It was comparable to the enclosures of Tudor and Georgian England, where the gentry used Acts of Parliaments to dispossess an equally unwitting rural people of their common lands. Rai Kipat land was largely untouched, reflecting the uneven development in the extension of royal autocratic hegemony mingled with deliberate divide et impera strategy. It shows how oppression was relative, with some national minorities eventually binding to and serving Narayan’s state, even applying stratification by caste among their own peoples, acquiescent in their deities’ acceptance as avatars of the Hindu God, &c.

Caste and the Feudal State

When born in the same way – all are one. None superior –none inferior. What is the use of caste that discriminates between human beings? – From Basavanna’s Vachanas, written by a 12th century Indian philosopher/statesman.

The modalities of tenure imposed by the first Shah were pivotal in creating the economic and political sinews of a strong central state and went hand-in-hand with the imposition of the Hindu caste system throughout the country. This showed that feudalism in Nepal, while it shared features with the European variety, was deeply rooted in the culture of Indian tributary societies which flourished in the Middle Kingdoms between the first and thirteenth centuries. The caste system originated as a means for a colonizing group of light-skinned Indo-Aryans to distinguish themselves from the indigenous dark aboriginal peoples (Adivhasis) they were colonizing by establishing three Varnas (Varna denotes color) – Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishaya in order of superiority. However, according to scholars, by the time of Gupta Dynasty around 100 AD, this structure was recast as a socioeconomic hierarchy after large grants of land were given to the Brahmin priests, administrators, astrologers, temples and monastic institutions. This largesse had earlier been declared a sacred duty in the Dharmashastra, Hinduism’s foundational scripts where Brahmins are declared Pratigraha, the one caste entitled to receive gifts. There are further references along these lines in the epic poem Mahabharata. The fourth caste, Shudras, were called forth during this period as an agricultural labor force in servile symbiosis with a rapidly expanding landlord class. Slaves at worst, chattel at best; a Shudra could be killed by a Brahmin with impunity. They were untouchables, subject to enforced endogamy and exclusion. The peasantry of contemporary village India are their descendants. Eventually a fifth category evolved, Dalits (Hindi for oppressed) which took over menial tasks connected with bodily waste, pollution and dirt – they and other tribal subgroups became the ‘Untouchables’. This essentially was the system that Narayan Shah and his Gorkha warriors imposed upon Nepal, notwithstanding the Shah’s attempt at inclusivity by describing his Kingdom as ‘a garden of four castes and thirty-six subcastes’. No rosy description could, however, mask the reality of a ruthless struggle for land (intensified by salient, topographical fact that only 2 Janjatis were accorded the same status as Shudras and Dalits, and aside from extractions of surplus and rent, had to provide free labor for specified periods and military service as necessary, under the Jhara Code, comparable to Corvee Labor in European feudalism. Hindu patriarchal law deprived Janjati village and farmstead women of property rights. This was accompanied by a sustained campaign to ban ethnic languages and culture that culminated in the Panchayat slogan: ‘One nation, one king, one language.’

Religion in Tributary/Feudal Society

In Kalikot, Hinduism has incurred into disfavor after the Maoist uprising, temples have been abandoned or even demolished. There was no use for them after the upper castes lost their land and moved to the city. In this place we had a temple of Dedhedu, and we were not allowed to enter the temple from this area onward. If we are not allowed to worship the idols that we ourselves made, then there is no point. We came to understand this and stopped maintaining the place.” – Interview with Dalit Kalikot resident.

The Panchas did not add ‘One God’ to the attributes of the Khas nation as this was axiomatic to the state’s divine Hindu conception where religion was integral, functioning as means of ideological control over the laboring masses. It is strikingly similar to the role played by the pre-Reformation, Roman Catholic Church in European feudalism. The Church of Rome preached that serfs were chattel, a property category introduced into the world as divine retribution for the original sin of Adam and Eve and carried from birth by their descendants. However, by virtuously accepting his/her lot and offering it up as penance in this life, a serf could attain a ‘state of grace’, ensuring admittance in the next life to Heaven at Dies Irae (Judgment Day). The Church was also a great land and serf owner and had a vested material interest in the temporal status quo. As is so often with organized religion, the basest of motives were tricked out as divinely inspired credo by ferocious, proselytizing clergy. Their Hindu Brahmin homologues achieved the same end by teaching Shudras, Dalits, and other lower castes that their reward for accepting low caste in this life and creating good karma would be reincarnation into a higher one in the next. There is a potentially endless cycle of life, death and rebirth expressed in the concept of Samsara until the totality of Karma, achieved by soul’s migration through various physical manifestations is sufficient to achieve final mukti (liberation). There are, of course, significant differences between Catholicism and Hinduism – one a transnational, centralized, corporate entity, the other a syncretic, subcontinental, decentralized network, but in credal terms of ‘justifying the ways of God to Man’ as mechanisms for strict hierarchical control, they were equally prescriptive. The Brahmins are as fanatical about  prohibiting intercaste marriage or upholding Sati as Catholic clerics were about burning heretics for denying the Trinity or Transubstantiation doctrines. Each presented priestly castes functioning to reconcile the exploited and submerged masses to their inferior position by rationalizing the respective socioeconomic systems as ‘divinely ordained’ and eternal. The historian Kosambhi’s assessment below on role of caste in Hinduism could be equally applied to that of the Catholic Church in medieval Europe.

Caste is class at a primitive level of production, a religious method of forming a social consciousness in such a manner that the primary producer is deprived of his surplus with the minimum of coercion. – D. D. Kosambhi, Combined Methods in Indology, p 59.

Consensus and Conquest

Whatever the arguments concerning the urban genesis of Indian feudalism (25) in the Gupta period (300-600 AD), there is no doubt that in Nepal it was driven from a central urban power in Kathmandu. Whereas towns and cities in Europe rose in opposition to the feudal countryside, in Nepal the city of Kathmandu was instrumental in superimposing a unified feudal system in a region, and the process was marked by an uneven impact upon urban and rural populations. For the former it was consolidation or even preservation, for the latter – a ’Big Bang’ whose reverberations, like the cosmic microwave background, are still detectable. In this regard, the unification of the petty principalities, city states and major kingdoms within the Gandaki Basin of Central Nepal ranging from Pokhara to Kathmandu was facilitated by shared Indo-Aryan ethnicity, religion and language among the various protagonists. The regional ubiquity of Hindu upper castes – Brahmins, Chetris, Newaris, Thakuris and Rajputs – in various independent micropolities, petty principalities and kingdoms thus enabled Narayan Shah to develop a strategy that allowed for guile, diplomacy or force of arms to be juggled as necessary on a shared terrain as predominantly a manageable political or dynastic problem. Most of the town and city statelets absorbed were, nolens volens, either feudal or proto-feudal, with rural lower castes and untouchables producing the agricultural surplus appropriated by urban higher castes. Devout Hindus obviously welcomed the extension of the caste system that underpinned their privileged conditions of existence but were also roused by the Gorkhali King’s call to defend Hinduism against the Christian feringhees’ inexorable advance – Bible in one hand, rifle in the other. The warrior castes, forged in the wars against Buddhism and the later Mughal incursion, responded with particular fervor, ensuring them an influential position in the ruling elite thereafter. For the Janjati Tibeto-Burman (26) peoples it was a military conquest by Indo-Aryans subjecting them to economic exploitation and cultural coercion. It created multifaceted oppression based on ethnicity, caste and gender that intensified under the Ranas who, led by Jonge Bahadur Rana, seized power in 1846. The Ranas were Rajput warriors (the name means, ‘field of battle’) raised originally by Narayan Shah, and their century-long rule was marked by persecution, corruption, and debauchery. In return for being left alone to plunder the country, a succession of mostly Shamsher Ranas developed a neocolonial relationship with the British that began seriously starting with the 1857 War of Independence. Domestically, they used the Birta system extensively in order to seize more land, which increased rural deprivation and landlessness. Birta was particularly applied to award large tracts of the fertile Terai Plains to the Rana clan and other upper castes such as Thakhuris, Brahmins, Chhetris and Rajputs. The 1854 Muluki Ain (Country/Civil Law) was essential to the process of freezing Nepal in the Middle Age. This set of laws derived from orthodox the Hindu sanctions and laws of the Dharmashastras, giving legal validation to the caste system by, inter alia, prohibiting intercaste mixing, regulating submission of peasants before landlords, and generally preserving the sociocultural and economic status quo. It also continued the tradition of Brahmins being exempt in law from capital or corporal punishment. There was always resistance in some form to Rana autocracy – for example, the Gurung and Magar Risings in the 19th century and the mass movement inspired by a young widow, Yog Maya, a campaign for rural justice and against caste discrimination which lasted for two decades until the early 1930s. The response to any challenge to the existing order, whether socioeconomic or political, was always repression. In 1940 activists from the Prajaa Parisad (Citizens’ Council) Party were hung for daring to advocate a constitutional monarchy. While the Ranas’ political grip was loosened after 1950, it has maintained military influence in the officer class and high command of the Nepalese Army, with the present Chief of Army Staff, J. B. Rana, one of the seven Ranas out of eleven occupants of the post since 1974.

Failure of Post-1950 Land Reforms

Towards the end of the uncertain 1950s’, Nehru’s duplicitous Delhi Compromise disintegrated, with the Ranas retiring from political, but not military, power. Nepali Congress and King Mahendra entered a struggle to determine ascendancy, as the democratically elected 1959 Koirala government tentatively began land reform with the twin aims of raising agricultural productivity and alleviating rural poverty. This was undermined in 1960 by Mahendra’s military coup, proroguing parliament, banning political parties and trade unions, and beginning direct monarchical rule through a Panchayat system of ‘managed democracy’, and in 1962 implementing a pro-landlord program. This provoked the American agronomist who had helped draft the previous NC administration’s progressive legislation complaining, in a 1963 letter,that landlords were an obstacle to reform because:

They opposed any attempt to improve the situation of tenants. They were content with low productivity because it generated enough surplus that would be at risk from reform. They were pursuing narrow caste/class sectional interests at the expense of national prosperity and advancing the forces of agricultural production. (27) Garibiko Bahas. Discussion on Poverty

However, by this time Mahendra had consolidated power with help of a ruling elite that included a significant tranche of landlords and therefore substantial reforms such as setting upper limits on land ownership, increasing access to land for marginalized groups, and greater legal protection for poorer tenants were rejected. Subsequently, his successors, kings and democrats alike, emulated this approach, paying lip service to land reform and radical transformation of the agricultural sector. Probing Mahendra’s support for the landlords encapsulates the premise of this essay, limning a ruling elite that established its caste predominance by force majeure in 1769 and was still clinging to political power and economic privilege. Looking at the composition of the landlord class extant at Mahendra’s accession provides a microcosm of Nepalese history, with soldiers and high civil servants from established Brahmin and Chetri castes forming a core of absentee landlords. This was leavened by in situ landlords who became the activists and officers (Panchas) of the Panchayat system and were instrumental in implementing the 1967 ‘Back to the Village’ campaign and generally eliminating rural opposition to the absolutist regime. From 1964 on there were a succession of five Land Acts, none of which led to any perceptible change to the basic inequities suffered by the rural masses. Hopes for restructuring the sector were dashed when both NC and UML’s ‘Land to the Tiller’ policies failed to survive the transition from underground to legality, following the 1990 Andolan that humbled King Birendra and established for New Delhi a more amenable multiparty system. The short-lived 1996 Adikhari UML-led coalition administration tried to pick up the pieces and set up the Badal Commission which recommended measures to increase access to land by hitherto marginalized rural peoples. Its recommendations fell with the government that commissioned it, and reform was off the agenda, as successive administrations preferred stasis to reform. The NC-led Deuba regime, in 2002, did propose a program of radical change, ostensibly to aid poor farmers and tenants but which in reality turned out to be a political stratagem rather than a serious reform initiative, the purpose of which was to neutralize and outbid support for the Maoists’ truly radical rural agenda at the height of People’s War. The only changes attempted by the many governments from 1990-2006 were guided by neoliberal policies enforced on loan-dependent Nepal by the IMF and World Bank. Permitting only market mechanisms, they enabled the landlord-moneyed class to acquire even more land through a Land Bank. Furthermore, land registration and government improvement grants were designed to benefit big Hindu landlords. Meanwhile, the governments resisted ceilings on land ownership aimed at sharing land more equably by creating tenancies among the hitherto landless and marginalized rural populations and also rejected improving rights and security of tenure for existing small and single family tenancies.

Failure of Post-1990 Land Reform

It was significant that the landlord class, following the collapse of the Panchayat system in 1990, flocked into the ranks of Nepali Congress, entrenching it further as a formidable conservative bloc, winning the 1991 election that, after a hiccup, saw the ferocious anti-communist GP Koirala installed as Prime Minister. He needed little urging to launch a harsh campaign of state repression against the urban Left and their Janjati allies in the countryside. This commenced in April 1992 with police shooting demonstrators in Kathmandu and led remorselessly to the notorious 1995 Operation Romeo which subjected the western district of Rolpa to sustained police terror, lasting weeks and featuring arbitrary killing, rape and mass arrests, followed by detention and often torture. This insensate, brutal operation was decisive in swelling the ranks of a nascent Maobaadi (Maoist) PLA, and provided the spark that ignited a prairie fire of rural revolution marking the decade following 1996. Dr. Bhatterai provided an overview:

The most disadvantaged regions within the country include those inhabited by indigenous people since time immemorial. These regions, which were independent tribal states prior to the formation of the unified state in the latter half of the 18th century, have been reduced to the most backward and oppressed condition due to internal feudal exploitation and external semi-colonial oppression. They have been left behind in the historical development process because of the blockade of their path to independent development and the imposition of sociocultural oppression along with economic oppression with the backing of the state, by forces that came from outside. B. Bhatterai, Political Economy of People’s War, 1997, from PW in Nepal, Seddon-Karki, p 153)

It was no accident therefore, that the Maoists in 1996 chose to launch People’s War from rural West Nepal, beginning with the ransacking of an Agricultural Development Bank office located, with appropriate historical symmetry, in Gorkha District. Loan agreements lodged there, which extracted rent from tenant farmers by usurious repayments, were seized and torched, while ownership documents, held as collateral against the loans, were carefully retrieved and returned to respective titleholders. It was no accident that land reform was a key element in 2006 negotiations for CPA, where Maoists wanted further confiscation of land from the big landlords without compensation and the application of ‘scientific management’ to agriculture. In so doing they were echoing longstanding communist aims of land reform, highlighted in the 40 demands promulgated in 1996 by CPN (M) and whose anticipated rejection was the trigger for People’s War. Communists and anti-imperialists argue land reform is crucial for underdeveloped Third World countries if they are to gestate into modern genuinely independent societies. Forgetting the propaganda about it being the ‘world’s biggest democracy’, India is presently the world’s greatest failed state, with staggering levels of poverty and deprivation. This stems from the failure to transform its inefficient feudal land system after independence, because, prior to it, Gandhi and Nehru had made an alliance with the feudal landlords and guaranteed their property and privilege. The much vaunted ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960’s came and went without altering the systemic depressing reality noted by a leading economist:

Famines in India were very frequent during the period 1940’s to 1970’s. Due to faulty distribution of food and because farmers did not receive the true value of their labors, the majority of the population did not get enough food. Malnutrition and starvation were a huge problem. Sen, A. Poverty and Famine, 1981

In 2008 the World Bank estimated the global poor at 1.29 billion, of whom 400 million were in India. Communist China by contrast expropriated its landlord class and created over 70,000 communes that overcame residual difficulties and not only eliminated famines by 1970, but also, against the background of the mid-1960’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, provided the springboard for Deng Xiaoping’s launching China in the direction of state capitalism (28) after 1976. Other socialist countries have followed this path: DPRK, Vietnam, and Cuba. Even Japan, post-1945, under MacArthur’s US imperium – initiated land reform clearing away feudalism as precondition for a capitalist future and a bastion against the march of communism in Asia. In all cases it was intended as precursor to industrial development and national autonomy. It is the only way for semi-feudal (29) and feudal societies to advance beyond  subsistence agriculture – by planning, collectivization and ‘scientific management’ in order to expand reproduction and accumulate the surplus necessary to feed the urban populations. It is especially crucial in supporting a growing working class engaged on infrastructural projects or in domestic industries that hopefully flourish when protected behind tariff walls. The nature of the society shapes its revolution’s priorities; as Dr Bhatterai, then in camp of revolution, detailed:

In a semi-feudal agriculture based economy like Nepal, the New Democratic revolution means basically an agrarian revolution. Revolutionary land reform, is, therefore, the biggest and the most important economic program of the New Democratic revolution. (B Bhatterai, ibid, p 158)

Summary – Historical Constituents of Discord

The imposition of a feudal system from the urban center created unresolved contradictions in Nepalese society. These contradictions are intensifying under pressurized conditions effected by the modern global capitalist market, but their provenance lies in Narayan Shah’s successful, ruthless unification campaign. More conquest than consensus, it seeded the antagonisms that continue to flourish in a divided, heterogeneous society and are recapitulated below. 1). The urban and rural paradox, which saw an urban center dominating the countryside as was touched on earlier, was an inversion of European feudal experience where towns and cities grew in dynamic opposition to the stagnant nature of rustic society. This caused Marx to remark in the Communist Manifesto that the one thing you could thank the bourgeoisie for, was that they built cities and rescued the mass of the people from ‘rural idiocy’. On the contrary in Nepal, unification and comprehensive extension of Hindu feudalism/Brahminism was driven by an autocratic, central state that remains largely intact and unreformed. As with many capital cities in the developing world, Kathmandu has also come to epitomize uneven development, with the city growing into a First World citadel, in a Third World society, a progression expedited because its ruling elites in politics, the civil service, the armed forces, business and, increasingly, the media have been suborned by global and regional imperialism, manifested in mixtures of military, economic and cultural Soft Power. In today’s Nepal, continuing resentment of central power, even dressed up as ‘democracy’, is revealed in dissension between those defending it against federalists seeking to liberate national minorities in the regions. The CPN (M) placed decentralization among its 40 demands in 1996, and it has since provided detailed policy necessary to establish a federal state. The major parliamentary parties are opposed, wanting to either retain power in the Kathmandu center or gerrymander a federal state that ensures continuing upper caste/class hegemony. 2). Narayan Shah’s triumph is echoed in the confrontation between Hindu Khas chauvinists and Janjati national minorities, with the former from the outset dressing up socioeconomic oppression of the latter in religious and linguist garb. The Rana record of attempting to stamp out the many ethnic languages and cultures is attested, but successive Shahs and soi disant democratic politicians were no better. As late as 1994, the Adhikari UML administration launched a Sanskrit radio station and tried to make its teaching compulsory in schools. Something to note – Sanskrit, the root of all Indo-Aryan languages as Latin for the European ‘Romantics’, has no linguistic connection with any ethnic minority language in Nepal, and the strategy of its imposition was another cultural humiliation, provoking an anti-Sanskrit campaign led by Janjatis. This event was a particularly salutary example of the gulf between the UML’s communist appellation and its political practice, which in this case was distinguished by arrogant, implicit Hindutvaism. Reflecting back to the 1066 conquest of England, Marx, quoted earlier, noted that the Norman system was grafted onto a pre-existing embryonic form of Anglo-Saxon feudalism. It could also be said that the two peoples shared the Catholic faith, perhaps offset by the Papal blessing given to William, rewarding his Ultramontanist credentials and the Church’s temporal interest in extending this more efficient and proven pious Norman feudalism and its own theological-political hegemony. However, even points of concurrence did not disguise a brutal invasion followed by a century of military oppression at the hands of a French-speaking army and a new nobility ensconced in castle, on expropriated land. The evolution of feudalism into the more benign form of manorialism and the consolidation of Royal and Papal power in England was greatly facilitated by fact that within four generations, the hitherto alien invaders, kings and nobles alike, had abandoned the French language for an evolving English one. This linguistic event was crucial to the formation of the modern English language and vital in establishing a cohesive national identity. It was not, therefore, unification by force-of-arms at the behest of foreign invaders that has precluded a similar Nepalese national identity from appearing; rather it is the failure to heal the original divisions created between vaunting conqueror and resentful conquered. 3). Landlord and tenant antipathy is rooted in the appropriation and expropriation of land that continued until the second half of the 20th century. The abolition of feudal land tenure and its subsequent mutation from private use to private ownership under market conditions benefited upper caste landlords by enabling them to consolidate their lands, with access to capital giving them immediate preference in acquiring released former royal/state lands. As shown previously, the pattern of land ownership has scarcely changed since the covetous Ranas and upper castes used the state and its repressive apparatus to monopolize swathes of it. Reforms such as setting ceilings on land holdings were either resisted or circumvented. Small tenants were given few protections, and they either fell prey to usurers or were driven into sharecropping and landlessness. This last group have swollen to include almost 3 4) The crucial component defining the relations of production in the tributary system established by Prithvi Narayan Shah was the rigorous application of the Hindu caste system and the enforcement of it on Buddhist, pantheist, or shamanist Janjatis. The ideas of the ruling class, as Marx observed, tend to constitute the dominant ideas in any society, and in the subcontinent, caste was the Brahmin elite’s mechanism for maintaining and rationalizing oppression and exploitation. It expressed a fusion of ideological and economic function in a society characterized by the rigid hierarchy of caste and rendered immutable by divine genesis and command:

The rich man in his castle The poor man at his gate God made them high and low And ordered their estate

This Christian hymn’s maxims are paralleled in the precepts of Hindu casteism as set forth, among other sources, by the God Krishna in the Bhavagad Gita:

“The caste system has been created by me…According to the differentiation of…Karma” Ch 4, Verse 13 “…of (the castes) the duties are distributed according to the qualities born of their nature” Ch 18, Verse 41

The continuing grip of this system, however informal, is evidence of residual feudal mindset and practice. A contemporary Brahmin is just as likely today to be a newspaper editor, political boss, professional, or civil servant, as a Pujaari (priest) or Jyotisi (astrologer), but this has not diluted the influence of the caste; rather it has equipped it to expand into the many crevices of power in contemporary civil societies. In all events, the secular opinion-former or the Thulo Hakim (party godfather/boss), laagered in Kathmandu, is no less the arrogant, prescriptive Brahmin, than is the cleric, functioning as interlocutor between humanity and God, under the gold roof of Pashupatinath Temple, on the banks of the Bagmati River that flows through Kathmandu and from where Dalits, as with all temples, are barred from entering. Caste in Nepal often overlaps with class, with Brahmins and Kshatriya morphing into bourgeoisie, and Dalits in their designated laboring and semi-skilled occupations recalibrating as workers and forming unions. Whatever the taxonomy, caste discrimination remains deeply ingrained in a society dominated by upper caste Hindus, despite the advent of multiparty democracy. Dalits and their organizations and unions have consistently supported the Maoists, seeing the revolution as the means of consigning the system into the dustbin of history. In this respect the CPN (M) were decisive in purging caste-discriminatory practices in liberated base areas, setting an example that stills cries out for general application. 5). The creation of Nepal under the auspices of deeply patriarchal culture was a qualitative setback for gender equality as post-pubertal females under Hinduism were regarded as domestic chattel to serve and gratify male needs and reproduce the species. This conflicted with the more liberated mores of Janjati societies based the villages and valleys of the hinterland. They represented the close-knit, gemeinschaft ideal, where survival in a harsh, unforgiving environment, was problematic for both sexes, precluding prejudice and requiring cooperation and mutual respect. Consequently women were influential in the community and could obtain and inherit property. This was prohibited under Hindu religion and law; women were also stopped from working in the fields under this rubric and generally subject to humiliation and constraints that marked their low status. They suffered the twin oppressions of class and gender, expressed in economic, social and political forms. The Maobaadi slogan was:

Working Women of the World, Unite. You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Double Chains!!

There is also significant empirical evidence that discrimination has deleterious health effects, especially to lower-caste women. Nepal is unique because female life expectancy has always lagged a few years behind that of males, an inversion of the normative death rate gender differential obtaining in most societies. Up to 2000, the country had one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world – 875 per 100,000, and it is little better now. Lower caste women suffer further sexual oppression, are subject to rape with impunity by high caste males and are forced into sex slavery and prostitution. Hindu women, especially in urban centers, are made to observe Teej (husband worship), and the fifth day Tihar (Nepal’s Deepawali) is set aside for Hindu sisters’ Bhai Tikka (brother worship). However, People’s War raised a challenge to the subordination of women in Nepal; the CPN (M) was committed to female liberation, from Marx to Mao a consistent communist principle, and proved this in the red base areas. There were dramatic effects on women in these zones, both indirect and direct. In the first place the conflict caused male displacement into PLA and militia and accelerated the increasing flight of men into migrant work, leaving the work traditionally assigned to them, from plowing the fields to repairing roofs, to be carried on by females. That many women enthusiastically took up these challenges and supported the revolutionary cause is further demonstrated by the fact that by the time of CPA, one-third of the 30,000 PLA ranks were women serving alongside men in the front line. As with caste, the Maoists promoted and enforced equality, in stark contrast to the patriarchal and chauvinist Hindu culture of towns and cities. Even these urban centers were affected, as there was an increase in women’s’ organizations and agitation which owed as much to the impact of cosmopolitan petit bourgeois feminism as it did to urban Maoist women engaging in those legal or semi-legal campaigns for women’s rights that were open to them. However, there remains a long struggle for full equality between the sexes on the subcontinent. The appalling treatment of many, especially Dalit, women in India, highlights the worst effects of Hindu male chauvinism. It is also apparent in culture with the Soft Power of Bollywood and in politics with the election of a Hindutva BJP government showing that patriarchalism is systemic and pervasive on the subcontinent. For Nepal, it forms part of Narayan Shah’s enduring legacy, and for those of Indo-Aryan stock, secular or Hindu, male chauvinism is reinforced by cultural and political mores emanating from ‘Mother India’.

Patriots and Compradors

The major divide between patriots and compradors is not directly attributable to the first Shah but began with the deliberate neocolonialist turn taken by the military clan he had called forth as the monarchy’s Praetorian Guard, the Ranas. Following Jonge Bahadur’s precedent, their subservience to the British rendered direct colonization unnecessary. In the light of the post-1857 rebellion which the Ranas helped the British put down, the new Raj was more concerned with consolidating what he held than advancing into new territory and he actually returned to Nepal parts of the Terai seized following the 1814-16 Anglo-Nepalese war and Sugauli Treaty. While the Ranas suffered for their pro-British proclivities in 1950, with Nehru aiding the King and NC invasion, the returned Shahs from Tribhuvan to Gyenendra were always ambivalent towards India. Mahendra, for example, was quite willing to play the China card after its decisive military victory over India in 1962 by securing Peking’s aid in constructing a modern highway from the Tibetan border to Kathmandu. Birendra’s humbling in the events of 1990 Andolan was precipitated by an Indian blockade on Nepal that closed four out of the five major roads and quickly brought hunger to Kathmandu. This was prompted by the King’s attempt to purchase anti-aircraft equipment from China without consultation with and the agreement of New Delhi. These and other royal stratagems were nevertheless exercises and attempts at national sovereignty opportunistically exploiting interstices in the bedrock of Nepalese general political, cultural and economic deference to India and pragmatic royal acceptance of India’s strategic interests as the regional superpower. This ambivalence continues today as even the two RPP royalist parties are divided by pro- and anti-Indian sentiment. It is all the more surprising that, from Nehru onward, Indian administrations maintained a ‘Two Pillar’ policy towards Nepal following the collapse of the Delhi Compromise which supported the king and the political parties. It was never a rational option; attempting to balance the conflicting interests of Royalist absolutism and popular democratic sovereignty was destined to end with the victory of one group or another. Tigers want blood – not grass, and New Delhi appears naïve not to have understood this. It was especially puzzling that it involved India, as mentioned, supporting frequently freewheeling monarchs and marginalizing its natural allies in NC, and latterly UML, who had followed their Indian CPI comrades onto the parliamentary road and establishment status. New Delhi had a major geopolitical stake in ensuring a compliant regime in Nepal as a bulwark against the threatened proletarian expansionism of the PRC and yet tolerated often opportunist, awkward Nepalese monarchs who, in their turn, were trying to maintain neutrality and pursue and independent foreign policy. They were conscious of Narayan Shah’s warning that: ’Nepal was like a yam between two stones’, therefore, cunning and room for maneuver was required to avoid being crushed. Why successive Indian administrations continued to tolerate an, at best, ambivalent monarchy, when it had much more congenial partners in waiting is puzzling, especially given that the policy was not abandoned until 2005, when New Delhi finally lost patience and facilitated talks in India allowing the prorogued seven parliamentary parties and the Maoists to forge an anti-Gyanendra alliance. NC, after all, was created under Nehru’s aegis, and he effectively betrayed the party in the aftermath of the 1950 invasion, with first the Delhi Compromise and next with the subsequent Two Pillar policy. It may be argued that as the supreme arbiter of power on domestic and international issues, Nehru’s quixotic and capricious nature – if not Brahmin presumption – led to unchallenged contradictions. But even that does not fully explain the persistence of this approach post-Nehru, especially after the 1990 Andolan, which New Delhi precipitated and again drew back from by agreeing to having King Birendra stay on condition of accepting constitutional status (yet crucially allowing him to keep control of the army) in a ‘parliamentary democracy’. A former Indian diplomat turned critical establishment sage noted in exasperation in 2003:

“There is a serious inherent conflict between the interests of multiparty democracy based on the concept of popular sovereignty and the King’s political aspirations and self-perceived divine role to rule. Even in 1990 the coexistence between the King and the political parties was neither natural, nor sincere nor honest.” (31) – S. D. Muni

As this essay has argued, it was obvious from 1990 on that the parliamentary parties, governments and upper castes were either supine or in active collusion with Indian interests against the interests of the nation. They stood in even greater neocolonial submission to India than the Ranas before the British Empire. Their anti-national character was reinforced by functioning as agents/functionaries/transmission belts for imperialism in all its manifestations. There is no role for independent states under the present global imperium. The modern state was called forth by the European bourgeoisie during the early progressive birthing struggles against feudalism. These states later degenerated into a struggle between these new nations across the European continent. It was nationalism distinguished by a xenophobic hatred, intensified when rivalry spread from the continent to a world stage in the age of mercantilism and colonialism as each European power fought rivals for a ‘place in the sun’. The aim of these various rampaging states was to either exterminate or exploit native peoples and by blocking independent development maintain their subjugation. The aim of the First World has always been to kick away the ladder of protection it climbed up, from under Third World countries preserving them as arenas for super-exploitation. If there are domestic capitalist sectors in underdeveloped countries, they are crushed by unfair competition or leveraged out by multinationals using the dominant financial and political institutions and instruments of international capitalism. Since national capitalist sectors are not permitted in underdeveloped countries like Nepal, no national bourgeoisie can exist. Only one that is comprador can flourish. Individuals from upper caste/bourgeois backgrounds do at times betray their caste/class interest and join the struggle for national liberation, and their contribution is not negligible, but patriotism finds critical mass among the rural and urban working masses because it is materially intertwined with class interest and takes political counteroffensive against oppressive conditions created by international capital. For the ‘wretched of the earth’, Fanon’s memorable, passionate characterization, in Nepal and other Shudra states of the present global dispensation, there is no ‘trickle-down’ from the engorging imperial heartlands. The much-touted benefits of capitalism are chimerical, a Coca-Cola sign on a Third World shanty mocking poverty inside. The gap between a banker on Wall Street and a sharecropper in an Assamese paddy field is as wide and unbridgeable as that between a patrician Brahmin or Newari Thulo Hakim in the gated Lazimpat area of Kathmandu and a barelegged Dalit sanitation operative sifting city filth and inhabiting a hovel in a less salubrious quarter. Capitalist imperialism has overseen Brahmin and bourgeois class rule equalized by mutuality of greed and hierarchical praxis.

Material Basis of Social Contradiction

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history; the simple fact hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even on ideas of religion, have been evolved,…..” – F. Engels, Speech at the Graveside of Marx, 1883, Selected Works, Vol 3, p 162.) “…an economic rationale can be provided for the origins of the Indian caste system as it can for European feudalism. All the great Eurasian civilizations being dependent on plow intensive agriculture needed some institutional means to tie labor…..Serfdom, indenture, slavery and the caste system were all ways to do so.” D. Lal, The Abuse of History, p. 2.

The genesis of Nepal’s divisions principally lies in the system imposed by Narayan Shah after 1769. This was an economic process galvanized by political means, with a ruling elite extracting surplus from downtrodden peasantry in an agricultural society through control of the land. Following Professor R. S. Sharma’s taxonomy (32) of this phenomenon in India during the first millennium AD, the appellation feudalism is used. Asok Rudra created the term ‘Brahminism’ (33) to emphasize the unique nature of the Indian system, rejecting parallels with European feudalism. What unites them, however, is mutual recognition that, whatever its discrete mechanisms and subsequent nomenclature, this was a tributary society. In other words, a type of pre-capitalist economic formation marked Eurasian history in this period. It was characterized by two main classes – first, a peasantry deployed in communal production, and second, a ruling class comprised of a priesthood, a nobility/military and an absolute monarchy that appropriated the surplus product/labor through control of land by repressive and extra-economic mechanisms There were marked divergences in the forms taken by these societies in Europe, India and China, but all instantiate the level of class struggle at this historical stage, albeit subject to differential momentum, development trajectories and cultural configurations. This is applying the methodology of historical materialism, précised in Engels’ quote above, which posits a sociopolitical superstructure arising from and sustained by an economic infrastructure which is appropriate to specific historical stages and the development of the forces of production therein. These successive modes of production encompass therefore not just the technological level of the productive forces but the corresponding relations of production under which they operate. The conditions under which social formations organize immediate physical necessities such as food and shelter shape their culture and provide a dominant worldview consistent with specific modes of reproduction. There have been qualitatively distinct historical stages in systematizing preconditions of physical existence, each sustaining its appropriate ideology. Marx reasoned:

“The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations.”(34) – Karl Marx.

Therefore European feudalism gave rise to Roman Catholicism with all souls subsumed in the Corpus Christi (Body of Christ) and with divinely ordained functions complementing hierarchical society. Capitalism, for its part, produces bourgeois individualism as an appropriate ideology for a dynamic or even unbridled society that is in constant flux. Similarly the caste system on the Indian subcontinent, as has been argued earlier and noted by Lal above, is a socioeconomic phenomenon brought forward by exploitative elites applying superstitious doctrine to rationalize and mask their extraction of surplus. It is, as Dr. Ambedkar rightly concluded, a mechanism for the ‘social division of labor’ within an ’unequal hierarchy’. Just as Hindu metaphysics spawned numerous avatars and manifestations of Para Brahman (the Supreme Being), increasing refinement in allocation of fixed, discrete socioeconomic functions gave rise to a plethora of subcastes and Jatis that remain determinate to this day, despite the impacts of urban cosmopolitanism and the phenomenon of many Dalits and lower castes forming their own organizations and joining trade unions. Hinduism’s credal syncretism contrasts strikingly with the rigidity of its hierarchical stratification by means of caste. Religion is an ideological component within a general culture and along with political and legal systems is a constituent element of the superstructure which consistently corresponds to the economic base. It is called forth and shaped by ruling classes to serve the base and changes accordingly as it does. It cannot be otherwise. It is not economic determinism, acknowledging there is a reciprocal relationship between the two. So, for example, changes to the social relations of production in the base give rise to distinct world views; while conversely, political activity in the superstructure such as revolutionary upheaval can transform the base. Feudalism gave way to capitalism, which reduced religion to residual role and developed education as mode of enculturation. These are Blake’s “mind-forged manacles,” prefiguring Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in civil society, showing how a dominant class maintains ideological control over exploited classes and thereby complements its monopoly of the physical means of repression. Human societies have always commingled consent and coercion in varying combinations according to circumstances and history, but all rest on specific, sequential economic infrastructures that are ‘determinate in the last instance’:

“… According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining factor is the production and reproduction of life.” (Engels to J. Bloch, 1890. ME Selected Works, Vol 3, p.487)

Conclusion

The ideal for any ruling class is where its ideology takes root and is accepted by the subordinate classes as expressing normative, eternal human verities. The lower classes then, as Marx held, “…share the illusion of that epoch” (35). In this essay I have argued that the brutal genesis of modern Nepal continues to engender resistance that precludes mass popular consent to such ‘illusion’ because its inceptional arrangements remain largely intact. The caste system therefore remains pervasive and influential, if sotto voce, because the upper castes it benefits retain political and economic power, despite changes in polities from monarchy through the Ranas back to the return of monarchy and finally culminating in the multiparty parliamentary system, with each in turn representing a different modality of Brahminical predominance. This elite has lasted nearly two-hundred and fifty years, and it has managed to preserve a feudal/tributary mode beyond its epochal termination elsewhere. Although circulation of money, small scale commodity production and burgeoning private property penetrated this society assisted by inherent Brahmin avariciousness mediated as hucksterism, it did not produce a strong national capitalist sector. Therefore, it was easily sold out by entrenched upper caste interests ready to accommodate the socioeconomic and geopolitical authority and objectives of India’s Brahminical oligarchs and international capitalism’s power elites and institutions. Consequently the heirs of Narayan Shah via the neocolonial Ranas have mutated into today’s comprador ruling class, equally marked by cupidity, corruption and cultural capitulation. The Seven Party Alliance was squeezed between Gyanendra’s royal coup complete with dissolution of parliament and banning of parties on the one hand and the Maoists, strengthened by the gains of Protracted People’s War, on the other. The parliamentary parties in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement gave formal assurances to the latter in order to defeat the former regarding restructuring the state and army. In the following years, re-energized as a reactionary bloc and assisted/prompted by New Delhi and Washington, the same parties, led by NC and UML, decisively reneged on those commitments which they had conceded in a moment of weakness. Those promises, if translated into effective policies, would have effectively ended their role as Nepal’s traditional governing class functioning from the Kathmandu center. Thus discord continues to disfigure Nepalese society and is characterized by a plurality of contradictions reflected variously as antipathy between landlord and tenant, Brahmin and Dalit, Khas Hindu and Janjati, comprador and patriot, casteist and egalitarian, capitalist and worker, patriarchalist and feminist, centralist and federalist, Maoist and Status Quoist. They are all aspects and expressions of fundamental class antagonism, with a ruling elite on the right confronting the interests of the popular masses on the left. Finally, I will conclude with a quote from an assessment made just after the 2006 CPA outlining the steps necessary to avoid a repetition of Protracted People’s War. It encapsulates the arguments made at greater length in the preceding pages. It is not from class warrior ‘usual suspects’ or any of more erudite and equally committed Nepalese specialists, but it hails from a well-meaning and of course well-funded Norwegian ‘Conflicts Resolution’ NGO:

The long-term conflict trends in Nepal are linked to whether or not one succeeds in replacing social, political and economic exclusion with more inclusive institutions, processes and practices. Continued exclusion on the basis of caste, ethnicity, gender or other means of distinction will provide the basis for continued armed conflict, including the possibility for further violence. In political terms the key issue revolves around the ongoing efforts to establish legitimate political institutions accepted by all groups in society. In socioeconomic terms, this system will also have to, over time, succeed in becoming more genuinely redistributive that the current system. In the short term, several factors might trigger increased violence in Nepal, including: Increasing poverty: As noted above, the poverty and exclusion issue will remain central, in particular for the new regime when it will be established. Meanwhile, the government should succeed in providing at least some symbolic progress on the economic front in order to encourage belief in the system and indicate the way forward. Ethnic mobilization: With widespread exclusion and discrimination still the norm across Nepali society, the danger will remain that some groups may mobilize on the basis of violence. This danger will grow unless the government and Maoists succeed in driving the negotiations forward and ensure redistribution in broad terms. (36)

These aims, necessary for Nayaa Nepal (New Nepal), have been either ignored or had their implementation blocked by a revived Brahminical status quo that despite its rampant corruption and its inability to provide functional government or generally represent the national interest still clings to power and privilege. Meanwhile the country decays and the people grow poorer while a younger generation takes up the challenge of the unfinished revolution.

“The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” (Gramsci, A. State and Civil Society, Prison Notebooks, p 276)

Gramsci’s apercu applies to the present right/left impasse in Nepalese society – for the moment.

Postscript

In these poor, underdeveloped countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty, the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime; an army and a police (another rule which must not be forgotten) which are advised by foreign experts. The strength of the police force and the power of the army are proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk. By dint of yearly loans, concessions are snatched up by foreigners; scandals are numerous, ministers grow rich, their wives doll themselves up, the members of parliament feather their nests, and there is not a soul down to the simple policemen or the customs officer who does not join in the great procession of corruption. – F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, p. 138)

At the turn of the millennium, the Royal Nepalese Army had a complement of approximately 35,000 front line personnel, and bolt-action 303 rifles (first issued to the British Army in 1892) were the standard infantry rifle. Now, post-2008, as the Nepalese Army is 105,000 strong the and standard issue weapon includes the much more deadly American M-16 fully automatic, state of the art, high-velocity, assault rifle, replacing the substandard, fault-prone INSAS light machine gun, India’s generic AK-47. This results from Washington’s geopolitical strategy of encircling a rising China with a chain in which Nepal forms an important potential link. Egyptianizing the Nepalese Army was important in advancing this aim. Under the pretext of post 9/11 ‘War On Terror’, following the 2002 Powell mission to Kathmandu, Washington agreed to help Gyanendra by equating Maoist rebels with Jihadis in a spurious world ‘crusade’. In the following years, except for the brief blip of Gyanendra’s absolutist rule, guns, guidance and greenbacks have flowed in to the army as US military advisors implemented a strategy of re-equipping the army. The US has supplied the army with improved weaponry. In the air, the US is supplying aerial reconnaissance and attack capability with helicopters and short take-off-landing aircraft (STOL). And the US has introduced counterinsurgency training. All of this for an army that, prior to being sent into serious action against the PLA following the pro-Maoist King Birendra’s assassination, was only experienced in UN peacekeeping duties in various hotspots. Through the Office for Defense Cooperation, Nepal’s top military convene monthly at one of the two US Embassies in Kathmandu under the auspices of the US Commander in Chief – Pacific (CINPAC). (37) Many of the NA high command and officer class are Sandhurst trained, and like their Indian Army homologues are willing Koi Hais, the Indian colonial term for a native servant. Collusion with Uncle Sam, allowing him a forward base in Nepal in return for practical assistance turning the NA into a primarily domestic counterinsurgency force, came easily with this pedigree. Aside from the Pentagon’s infantry weaponizing of the NA, most of the army’s supplies have come from India. In 2013, India resumed its role of supplying most of the army’s other military requirements, including means for ground and air mobility. This followed an eight year break that had begun in protest against Gyanendra’s coup but was also motivated by suspicion and resentment at growing US presence in India’s traditional sphere of influence. The recent unity of purpose between Washington and New Delhi in regard to Nepal is evidence of a broader and deeper economic and strategic partnership between the two countries. This has been extended into the military sphere with the Pentagon providing guidance for Operation Green Hunt, a counterinsurgency campaign launched in 2009 aimed at defeating Maoist and Adavasi rebels who are resisting the plunder of resources and destruction of their traditional lands by insatiable multinational corporations in the five states comprising India’s ‘Red Corridor’. There is also a 40,000 strong paramilitary group, the Armed Police Force (APF). This group was originally set up under Deuba’s NC 2001 administration to offset Gyanendra’s NA monopoly of state repressive potential. With the advent of the republic, it morphed into common purpose with NA, giving the state nearly 150,00 armed personnel at its disposal. The UK, with twice the population of Nepal, has an army half its size of the NA. Further, Britain’s imperial heritage marks it as a singularly bellicose state, permanently at war with someone somewhere, usually as faithful deputy in various American campaigns of international aggression. Apart from the People’s War, the Nepalese Army fought a minor war in the 1970’s, routing a marauding Khampa rabble in Mustang Province that had been trained and primed by the CIA to cross into Tibet and continue America’s war-by-proxy against the People’s Republic. Nepal is not threatened by imminent military invasion from either of its neighbors and has a particularly casual arrangement of an open border with India without even a dedicated border guard. The Nepalese Army’s UN peacekeeping duties involve 4,000 personnel at most at any one time. It is obvious that the NA and APF are primarily intended as forces for domestic repression; they are ostentatious and ubiquitous across the country, with six fixed army divisions straddling the regions, backed up by three mobile specialist brigades. They have used the years since 2006 to improve fortified positions and entrenchments in rural areas and are everywhere in urban centers. Katmandu City itself is like a military camp, with never less than 20,000 personnel in barracks dispersed across the City like chocolate chips in a cookie. Soldiers regularly patrol streets and thoroughfares, man major chowks (public squares and intersections) and parade in Tudikhel Park, a private army marching ground in the center of the city which, apart from the national football stadium is the only grass covered area in Kathmandu. Strutting their stuff, the soldiery are designed as much to intimidate as impress. The army is the elephant in the room in the Nepalese situation, and has been referenced throughout this paper for its role and influence at key points in Nepal’s history from its birth under Narayan Shah, to the early years of the 21st. century. In the last decade it has become bigger and better armed, equipped and trained than at any point in its history. It proved politically decisive in forcing Gyanendra’s surrender that signaled the victory of the April 2006 Andolan, and crucially succeeded in overthrowing Prachanda’s administration when it attempted to enforce the CPA provision that the PLA regulars be integrated as a corps into the NA. The further seizure of PLA weapons from the UN cantonments in 2011 on paper cemented the Brahminical state’s monopoly of violence in Nepal. Its comprador officer corps and high command, well-groomed by American and Indian patrons, have demonstrated in such interventions decisive executive ability; dumping a malfunctioning, hubristic King, blocking army reform, martialing the phony 2013 election, and holding an informal veto over policies or proposals inimical to the status quo. The officer corps is dominated by Chetris and Thakuris and represents a military ascendancy formed under the banner of Narayan Shah. It stands ready for counterrevolution either as a state of emergency or military dictatorship as possible options should the existence of the state be problematic or in imminent danger of collapse. The State’s political class presents no coherent power, and in any event is presently sunk in corruption, paralyzed by the specific difficulty in getting the existing order ratified in a bogus constitution and its sheer general uselessness in providing clean, functioning government.

Unfinished Revolution

War hath determined us, and foil’d with loss Irreparable: terms of peace yet none Vouchsafed, or sought: for what peace will be given To us enslaved, but custody severe, And stripes, and arbitrary punishment Inflicted? And what peace can we return, But, to our power, hostility and hate, Untamed reluctance, and revenge though slow Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice In doing what we most in suffering feel? Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, lines 330/40.

However, the People’s War may resume in some form based on the announcement in early December that barely two years after the CPN-M (Dashists) broke from the UCPN(M) (Cashists), the CPN-M (Dashists) haves also split, with a faction led by Biplav (Netra Bikram Chand) forming the CPN Maoist. At the time of writing, the Two-Line Struggle’s policy differences that prefigured the rupture are not fully understood, but the new party is driven by what it perceives as the treachery and reversals of the eight wasted years since 2006 and declaring that if provisions given by SPA on behalf of the status quo are not honored then struggle will resume, and organs of dual power will be revived in re-established liberated zones. The split does not appear as politically and ideologically rancorous as that between the Cashists and Dashists and may exhibit a generational difference regarding timing; Biplav and many around him are in their forties but have considerable battlefield experience from the People’s War. On the other hand, Kiran’s close comrades are in their fifties and sixties, and while many are primarily political figures, they also include active-service veterans. Each party recognizes that the stalled revolution is certain to recommence at some point, but the lack of technical support makes any attempt in the short term to ‘go back into the jungle’ or resume any form of armed struggle against a new, domestically refocused, re-equipped, and expanded state repressive apparatus militarily inadvisable if not suicidal. A more immediate likelihood is military and police repression of the party that, whatever its evident caution, has openly declared the task of completing the revolution, sooner rather than later. That is why its launch was held at a secure location in the Kathmandu Valley, but there was still a palpable sense of urgency behind Biplav’s opening statement that, failing the NC-led elite unblocking and implementing the reforms of the 12-point agreement of 2005 between the SPA and CPN (M) that were ratified the following year with the post-victory CPA, there would be a return to:

Armed struggle in order to protect national unity, integrity, sovereignty and rights of people. (38)

The Nepalese security establishment and its foreign advisers have every reason to take Biplav seriously. He was an effective military leader during the People’s War. With his close ally Khadga Bahadur Bishwkarma, Prakanda (Mighty) offered a vision of a reformed PLA with the creation of a youth wing in the CPN-M, the National Volunteers, that made a strong impression during the 2013 election boycott with uniform red T shirts and formation marching. It is a proto-army and significantly, most of its cadre have gone over to the new party. State surveillance agencies will also note Kiran’s statement:

We will meet if Chand will raise arms and fight for people (39).

All of which makes a pre-emptive strike by security forces a rational option. It also demonstrates that the understanding that ‘political power comes out of the barrel of gun’ is the one point of agreement between implacable enemies. This is not only perceived in abstraction, an axiom that distills a precondition for establishment and maintenance of power in human society from its tribal origins to the contemporary nation-state, but it is directly informed and shaped by Nepal’s recent history since unification in the late 18th century. The major and inescapable lesson is that violence was the midwife of the new state and has marked every significant subsequent upheaval since. From Prithvi Narayan Shah to Jonge Bahadur’s seizure of power in the Red Kot Massacre that established a century of brutal Rana despotism to the NC/Royalist 1950 invasion and uprising to Mahendra’s 1960 feudal coup to the People’s War and Andolans of the last decades to the 2001 assassination of Birendra which paved the way for Gyanendra – all of these events combine to confirm that there has never been any significant change in Nepal without the use of physical force. All of the present political parties have their roots in violence; the RPP, NC, UML, UMF, and UCPN(M) all emerged sequentially from Nepal’s history through force of arms. This paper commenced with Machiavelli’s comment on the right of the people to engage in struggle against the ruling class nobility of his time and so will conclude with an equally apposite rubric from the first great European political scientist. It expresses a truth understood by revolutionary communists everywhere on necessity for the revolution to have an experienced, disciplined, combat-ready armed wing, and is reflected in the author’s his rueful conclusion on witnessing the execution of the charismatic Florentine preacher Savonarola in 1498 following Rome’s condemnation of heresy:

That is why the visionary who has armed force on his side has always won through, while unarmed even your visionary is always the loser. – Machiavelli, The Prince, p 23, Penguin ed.

Peter Tobin, December 2014

Citations/Footnotes

(1) Index Mundi, Nepal Economic Profile, 2014. (2) Karobar National Economic Daily, 05/10/2013. (3) Economist, “The Trouble With Ghee”, June, 2008. (4) A political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and restore the power of economic elites. See A Brief History of Neoliberalism, D. Harvey, p 19. Harvey provides further elaboration of neoliberalism’s elevation of market criteria over all aspects of life, particularly the shrinking of the state’s responsibility for welfare, economic planning, subsidies, &c. From the 1970’s on, it began dethroning Keynesian policies, with neoliberals believing that the Keynesians’ emphasis on state deficit spending as means of stimulating employment and production distorted the market and lacked fiscal rectitude. The phenomenon has also been described in popular parlance as, “Capitalism with its gloves off.” (5) OPHI Country Briefing: Nepal,  2010. (6) B. P. Bhurtel. 17/10/2013. “Rich Man’s World as Wealth Gap Grows in Nepal.” The Nation/Kathmandu Post. (7) However, it can be argued that the link between bourgeois capitalism and bourgeois democracy is purely contingent, with neoliberal capitalism flourishing equally in dictatorships and democracies both. It is worth noting in this respect that Pinochet’s Chile was chosen by Washington as an experiment in extreme free market capitalism, dispatching Friedman monetarist acolytes of the ‘Chicago School’ to Santiago and placing them in charge of the Chilean economy. This is not because contemporary transnational capital is neutral but because it has become a superior executive power reducing political systems and governments to irrelevance. A review in Le Monde, 10/10/2014, of the German scholar Wolfgang Streeck’s Du Temps Achete – La Crise Sans Cesse Ajournee Du Capitalisme Democratique (Borrowed Time – The Postponed Crisis of Capitalist Democracy) quotes his comment describing advancing global capital as class avatar:

“…elles est inapte a tout fonctionment democratique, par le fait qu’elle pratiquee en tres grande parti, en particulairement en europe, comme une politique international – sous la forme d’une diplomatie financiere interetatique.” – Wolfgang Streeck. Borrowed Time – The Postponed Crisis of Capitalist Democracy.

A rough translation of which argues that it is incapable of functioning democratically, because it is, in fact a politically dominant power, especially in Europe, in the guise of interstate financial diplomacy. He uses the word ‘post-democracy’ to describe this stage of the present era. (8) K. P. Prabhakaran Nair. February 2006. Grist for US Mills. GMWATCH. It is salutary to note that up until 2014, over 250,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide as a result of such policies reducing rural populations to immiseration and destitution. (9) Republica (English language Nepalese daily newspaper) 07/09/2014. (10) D. Gywali/A. Dixit. April, 2000. “How Not to Do a South Asian Treaty.” Himal South Asian. (11) H. Yami/B. Bhatterai. 1996. Nationality Question in Nepal. (12) ‘Kiran’ is a nom de guerre for Mohan Baidya. It means Ray of Light. All Maoist leaders adopted one during People’s War. ‘Prachanda’ (P. K. Dahal) means ‘Fierce’, ‘Biplav’, (N. B. Chand), means ‘Revolt’, &c. (13) Colloquially known as ‘Dashists’ because of the –M in their name. Conversely, the UCPN (M), the party the Dashists split from, are called the ‘Cashists’ by their opponents because their leaders and many cadre were accused of falling before ‘sugar-coated enemy bullets’ after ‘coming out of the jungle’ and decamping to Kathmandu and corruption in 2006, following the CPA. (14) 1991. “Caste and Ethnicity,” Ch. 7 in Nepal – A Country Study. (15) R. Dangal. Administrative Culture in Nepal,  p.95, Table 9: Caste Distribution of Higher Civil Servants. 16) This needs an essay in itself! Briefly parliamentary/presidential, multiparty systems emerged as systems to meet needs of emerging bourgeois capitalist society in the West. The various parties represented class interests devising contingent institutional solutions. Part of Western hubris is claim their necessity in all circumstances. It was applied unilaterally by an indigenous elite in many postcolonial situations. Apart from a democratic deficit, adoption of this project indicated loss of nerve and residual ideological colonization among otherwise resolute anticolonial political leaders of independence struggles such as Nehru, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Kaunda, and Bandaranaike, &c). But the main reason it proves ‘wholly unsuitable’ is total failure to provide effective governance in postcolonial situations anywhere and to have descended into nests of thieves and similar mechanisms of naked class aggrandizement when not replaced by sanctioned western ‘strongmen’ or red revolution. Going hand in hand with capitalism and its contingent institutions demonstrated how indigenous elites were fostered and suborned by their colonial masters. Marx, enthused, saw the inception of the program:

From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. – Marx, Future Results of British Rule in India, 1853, M/E Selected Works p. 495.

Nehru is an exemplar of the success of this project:

“By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim and Hindu only by an accident of birth.”

He epitomized Macaulay’s ‘Brown Englishmen’. His pretensions, along with his secularization of Hindutva, are set out in his 1943 magnum opus, The Discovery of India, (written in English of course) where he establishes the existence of a precolonial Hindu ‘golden age’ civilization and his particular ancestral call to restore its historic harmony expressed in language reflecting his Cambridge education in the classics with references to Pericles, Demosthenes, et al, although when required he could refer to:”..the old Vedantic spirit of the life force.” (17) Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 36. Marx benignly notes emerging use of education as conditioning and improvement mechanism, A hundred years later Fanon is responding to its deleterious postcolonial effect as the ideological component of a comprador class. Vide (16) above re Nehru shows how this strata were eventually conditioned to reproduce bourgeois polity, albeit in ersatz, parodic form. (18) WCPI, 2011. Transparency International, (19):

…the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement…there is no national movement without the peasant army, nor can there be. That is what is meant when it is said that, in essence, the national question is a peasant question. – J. V. Stalin, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Works, Vol 7, pp. 71-72.

(20) Prachanda’s short-lived 2008 administration might be excused, as it was forced out by a military coup orchestrated by New Delhi in league with NC & UML. But Bhatterai’s second ‘Maoist’ administration, 2011-13, had less excuse for being so supine. (21) Ghurkhas are not an ethnic group but, according to their websites are a warrior caste claiming descent from the Hindu Rajputs and Brahmins of Northern India. Their valor, tenacity and loyalty deeply impressed the British enemy. After a successful invasion and defeat in 1814-16, the East India Company began recruitment into a specially created regiment that, in modern times, has been mainly drawn from the Rai, Limbhu, Magar and Gurung ethnic nationalities. The added glory of Hindu provenance (possibly a retrospective embellishment), but their cry “Jaya mahakali – Ayo gurkhali!”  (“Glory to great Kali – Gurkhas are coming!”), shares an evocation of Kali as the goddess of destruction and death with the Rajputs, belonging to the Kshatriya warrior caste, spread across Northern India, many driven into Nepal by the Muslim invasion of North India. In the Terai they became one of the ruling Bhadralok castes mutating into professional occupations as doctors, lawyers &c. Also Narayan Shah was from a Kshatriya jati, although he was pragmatic enough to recruit given national ethnicities into his army while raising up Hindu upper castes and establishing a divine Hindu Kingdom. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the etymological root of Gurkha as:

 ORIGIN name of a locality, from Sanskrit goraksa ‘cowherd’ (from go ‘cow’ + raks – ‘protect’), used as an epithet of their patron. – Oxford English Dictionary

This lends credence to Gurkhas’ claims of provenance from Hindu warrior castes. (22) J. Adhikari. 2008. Land Reform in Nepal, p. 23. (23)  CPN (M). 1997. One Year of People’s War in Nepal. GS’s Report. (24) J. Adhikari. Land Reform in Nepal, p 39. (25) The early Marx claimed centralized despotism as the essential feature of the Asiatic Mode of Production – a pre-capitalist form that he believed existed in static, ossified, oriental societies. He infamously commented:

Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. Marx – Future Results…ME Vol 1, p. 494. 1853.

and, while acknowledging the base motives of the English colonizers, he thought that imperialist incursion would, nolens volens, drag it into the modern world. However, after the first War of Independence in 1857 and subsequent study he revised AMP and undermined the despotic, stagnant society premise by declaring the uprising a ‘national revolt’, and expressed support for the insurgents. Though he never accepted that India, precolonial incursion, was feudal, he conceded that it could be described as in transition to feudalism. In this respect he wrote in 1859:

In broad outlines, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. Marx – Preface to Critique of Political Economy, ME Selected Works, Vol 1, p. 504, 1859

The concept has been an issue for polemic and debate among Marxists and communists and survives more as an analytic than a descriptive term. Whatever the taxonomy, Marx, by looking at the relations of production, outlined how an elite could appropriate surplus using the state as a mechanism for generalized exploitation. Dalits and Sudras stood before their Brahmin masters in the same relationship as a slave before a slaveowner, a serf before a lord, or a worker before an employer. (26) These are linguistic categories used by modern ethnographers, and while there were obvious physical differences between the two groups that added to perception in the case of Nepal, they are not a racial classifications. For example, the other linguistic group in South India is Dravidian, with minimal physical differences between its speakers and those of the Indo-Aryan bloc. (27) J. Adhikari. 2008. Land Reform in Nepal, p. 25. (28) ‘State capitalism’ is as fraught a term as feudalism, with multiple definitions, inspired by political polemics not only expressed between left and right but also a lively source of debate within the left denoting ultimate political allegiance . For the right, it can mean any state intervention either through ownership or control such the post-1945 policy of Dirigisme in France where, apart from extractive and heavy industry, private ownership dominated in a free market but was subject to indicative planning from a government setting national objectives. It could also be applied to the Scandinavian and British mixed economy model that was discarded after the 1980’s. In the case of France, state intervention predated capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and in the form of Colbertism, was initiated under Louis IV’s first minister, J. B. Colbert. The concept of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ has also been applied by left wing and extreme rightwing free marketeers to describe the state protection and support for the big corporations in the USA. The Military-Industrial Complex that emerged in the new triumphal global imperium following the Second World War is often cited as example because huge contracts are awarded rather than won, characterizing a cozy symbiotic relationship between business and the political functionaries of the American ruling class. For anarchists, Neo-Trotskyites and the Ultra Left, it is what happened after 1917 in Russia and 1949 in China, or indeed anywhere else there has been a socialist revolution. It assumes that party apparatchiks and bureaucrats inevitably become a new ruling class, owing to their control of the means of production and the appropriation and direction of the resulting ‘social dividend’ (surplus value). For Marxist-Leninists/Maoists it is what occurred in the USSR after Stalin’s death with Khrushchev’s failed attempts to follow Yugoslavia’s ‘market socialism’ and re-occurred with a vengeance in the PRC after Deng Xiaoping’s seizure of power in 1976. Apologists for China’s system describe it as a ‘socialist market economy’, where the commanding heights of the economy, the banking sector and land are state owned and where the state is responsible for macroeconomic policy with microeconomic decisions left both to management of state enterprises and licensed capitalists operating as private companies in designated Special Economic Zones. Therefore the political decision to allow free market mechanisms to determine price and allocations of goods and services with retention of profit by private companies, commentators opine, is more indicative of state capitalism especially when set against the background of scrapping the egalitarian, ‘Iron rice bowl’, full employment guarantee from the heroic period of socialist construction and mass mobilization. Therefore, it should be said that, like feudalism and indeed semi-feudalism, the concept of state capitalism is often used subjectively, indicating class or political orientation. See following note. (29) ‘Semi-feudal’ obviously relates to accepting the thesis of pre-existing feudalism on the subcontinent, Samantabaad is the Hindi and Nepalese word for feudalism and derives from the nobility of the Gupta Period, which some historians claim led the emergence of feudal society in India. The Samantas were also influential during the Licchavi Dynasty (400-750 AD) who established the first central state in Nepal. Even those who do accept the taxonomy applied recognize that it was a tributary society of a type that flourished the early city states, empires and later, nascent nation-states. European feudalism was one type of tributary society, with the exception that it enabled the growth of classes and productive forces that eventually burst its integument and established the capitalist society and mode of production. Marx did not recognize this dynamic in the Orient, and his AMP was his initial response in distinguishing its ossified despotisms with those of medieval Europe. It was this formulation that, while recognizing the utter venality and brutality of the British, nevertheless led him describe them as unwitting agents of progress, in breaking down the ‘Chinese Walls’ of societies incapable of generating internal change. Subsequently it has been argued that Indian society, pre-colonization, was subject to change, but that compared to Europe’s historical transformation it was imperceptible (as indeed was most of its history at that time). This had important political ramifications for Indian communists because they refused acknowledging any positive results from imperialist incursion and applying the term feudal to describe periods of Indian history implicitly underpins this position. Plus ‘Down with feudalism’ is less of a mouthful than, ‘Down with the Asiatic Mode of Production! The notion of semi-feudalism follows this thesis because it posits transitional developments. In the case of Nepal, it is marked by backwardness of the productive forces, sharecropping, increased tenancies and the growth of usury. The last are linked, representing the dominance of money payment in feudal rent, reflecting generally growth of a market economy but specifically the transition of feudal owners into capitalist rentier landlords. Semi-feudal is also used to describe relations of production continuing after their originating conditions of existing have changed, as expansion of agricultural capitalism has led to increasing numbers of landless and sharecroppers, who are objectively proletarianized but are learning to recognize residual feudal deference as subjective flight from their objective class reality. As descriptive tools, these terms are a continued source of argument not only between Marxists and bourgeois, but also intestinal within these respective groupings. As a slogan, however, ‘Down with Feudalism’ and the commitment to abolish ‘neo/semi-feudalism’ is a political call to the oppressed to break free of feudal/exploitative relations in order to confront the reality of capitalist modes of employment and exploitation in the agricultural sector. (cf: Pushpa Lal’s CPN’s program and Mazumdar’s for the Naxalite struggle in 1960s.). (30):

The informal rural credit markets of Nepal seem to be characterized by an aggregate constraint at the village level and oligopolistic collusion on price discrimination. Entries of new lenders are likely to be rare, due to high initial information cost. Lenders need to interact with the borrowers for a long period to be able to screen the borrowers and enforce payments…. Although it is reasonable to target poor households, the analysis indicates that one may as well target the higher priced segments. The analysis thus supports credit programs that target low status castes. Examples from Nepal are programs that target ethnic groups living in Terai. These households pay real interest rates that are almost double of the rates paid by high castes living in the hills. – M. Hatlebakk. 2000. “Will More Credit Increase Interest Rates in Rural Nepal?” Technical Report and Recommendations, pp. 42-43. Nepal Rastra Bank.

(31) S. D. Muni. 2003. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal, p.61. Muni is perhaps too close to see the Brahminical tree from the wood, he is a pragmatic, secular ex-diplomat critical of and puzzled by the ambivalence of Nepalese policy that allowed King Mahendra, e.g. to block: “India’s legitimate and enlightened interests in Nepal.” (ibid, p 62). His views are an apologia for Indian expansionism, pitting progressive capitalism against residual feudalism, which synchronically informed the position of Dr. Bhatterai, earning him the sobriquet of ‘Mr. India’ in anti-revisionist Maoist ranks. I would also speculate that the attitude towards the last divine Hindu monarchy was schizophrenic, with even ostensibly Westernized secularists like Nehru acknowledging the weight of Brahminical Chaturvarna tradition and unconsciously deferring to caste supremacy, however apparently exotic and uncongenial to a Cambridge-conditioned cosmopolitan world statesman. Nehru was a Hindutva with an occidental humanist face. Successive Indian administrations, particularly Rajiv Gandhi’s administration, elided further into more open Hindutvaism, which, mixed with growing accommodation with Western capitalism in triumphalist form following the suicide of Gorbachev’s USSR and collapse of Soviet Bloc, was Modiism avant la lettre. (32) R. S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism, 1965. (33) A. Rudra, Non-Eurocentric Marxism and Indian Society, 1988. (34) Marx. 1847. The Poverty of Philosophy, p.105. (35) Marx, Feuerbach. 1846. Opposition of Materialist and Idealist Outlook, ibid, p 43. (36) NORAD. 2007. Report on Conflict Sensitivities, pp. 67-68. (37) Tobin, P. 2011. “Balance of Military Forces in Nepal” Beyond Highbrow – Robert Lindsay, website. (38) http://www.ekantipur.com, Chand Announces CPN Maoist, 02/12/2014. (39) Republica, D. B. Chhantyal, 06/12/2014.

References

Adhikhari, J. Land Reform in Nepal – Problem & Prospects. Bhatterai, B. Monarchy vs. Democracy & Articles, Essays from People’s War. Dangal, R. Administrative Culture in Nepal, 1991. Fanon, F. The Wretched of the Earth. Karki/Seddon, (eds.) The People’s War in Nepal – Left Perspective. Kumar, A. The Black Economy in India. Lecomte-Tilouine, M. (ed.) Revolution in Nepal, Collected Essays. Marx/Engels, Selected Works. 3 Vols, Poverty of Philosophy, Anti-Durhring, Capital, Vols 1 &2. Maxwell, N. India’s China War. 1970 Muni, S. D. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Nehru, J. The Discovery of India. Prinsep, H. T. The Gurkha War – 1814-16. Regmi, M. C. Land Ownership in Nepal. 1976 Sharma, R. S. Indian Feudalism. Thapa, D. A. Kingdom Under Siege – Nepal’s Maoist Insurgency – 1996-2003. Upadhyaya, S. P. Indo-Nepal Trade Relations – 1858-1914 .

General

Rough Guide to Nepal. Studies in Nepali History & Society, Vol. 15.

Reports/Commissions

NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) Report on Conflict Sensitivities in Nepal – 2007. Transparency International. “Nepal.” World Perception Corruption Index – 2011. UN Human Development Report – 2014.

Articles

Ambedkar, R. B. The Annihilation of Caste. Basnyat, P. S. Nepalese Army in the History of Nepal. Dak Bangla, Nepal’s Civil and Military Relations and the Maoist Insurgency. Habib, I. Kosambi. Marxism & Indian History. Lal, D. The Abuse of History. Puniyami, R. Hiding the Truth About Caste. Rajan, V. ‘Dalits’ and the Caste System in India. Tobin, P. Balance of Military Forces in Nepal – in Relation to PLA Integration – 2011.

Newspapers/Journals/ Periodicals/Websites

Dak Bangla – website. Democracy & Class Struggle – website. Economist – magazine. Himal – South Asia – magazine. Himalayan – newspaper. Kathmandu Post. Nepal Monthly – magazine. Red Front – One-off English language version of Krambaddha (Continuity) Pro-Kiran 2012 journal, editor, Prem Darnal, Bikalpa (Alternative). Republica, newspaper. Worker, English-language journal of CPN (Maoist).

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