The following book review by Yuri Yemelianov was suggested to

The collapse of the socialist order in the Soviet Union and some other countries in Europe, the disintegration of the socialist bloc and the USSR were preceded by active Anti-Soviet propaganda. This propaganda was sponsored by the West and organised by the local Fifth Columns (in the USSR the most influential Fifth Columnists were such leaders of the CPSU as M. Gorbachev, A. Yakovlev, B. Yeltsin and others). The goal of the propaganda was to portray capitalism as a social system of freedom and respect for human rights and to depict socialism as a system of terror, human deprivation and misery. During the end of the 80’s and beginning of the 90’s many popular journals and magazines of the USSR and all TV channels spread lies about socialism and its history. The greatest distortions concerned Stalin’s period of the Soviet history. Using the false interpretations of the Soviet history made by N.S. Khrushchev at the XX CPSU Congress (1956) the enemies of Socialism bitterly attacked Stalin and his policies. Almost all the Soviet history was limited to the story of mass arrests and executions of 1937-1938. At the same time Stalin and his supporters were made responsible for gross violations of law, arrests and executions of many innocent people.

Now 15 years after the fall of socialism in Europe the vast majority of the peoples of the former socialist countries became aware of the evils of capitalism and as a result mass nostalgia for the lost advantages of socialism develops. It makes the present capitalist rulers of Russia and other former socialist countries renew their anti-socialist and anti-communist propaganda efforts. As the Anti-Soviet propaganda continues Stalin remains its central target and the object of fantastic lies. The authors of ‘documentary’ films shown over TV speak about 100 million people killed on Stalin’s orders. (The whole population of the USSR was about 200 million at the time of Stalin’s death and it is a mystery how a country so much weakened by arrests and executions could win over Nazi Germany and its allies.) The hackneyed phrases about ‘Stalin’s reprisals’ and ‘Stalin’s camps’ are in everyday use in the modern Russian political jargon.

However, the experiences of the last 15 years have made many people in Russia to be more distrustful of the official propaganda. Despite the strong pressure of the authorities, museums and monuments dedicated to Stalin appeared in one town after another all over Russia. More and more authors write articles and books in which they refute official lies about the Soviet past and give tribute to Stalin.

Not all of these authors are Marxists. But the experience of the collapse of their country made them search for true explanations of Russia’s history. Their acquaintance with the real facts of history and their professional integrity have made them refute the falsehoods of official propaganda and bring to life new facts about the Soviet society, its development and its leaders. One of such authors is Yuri Zhukov. His book ‘Different Stalin’ (‘Inoi Stalin’, Moscow, 2003) caused a real sensation among all those who are interested in Soviet history.

Yuri Zhukov

The title of the book is somewhat misleading. Zhukov does not try to probe deeply into Stalin’s personality and his book does not represent Stalin’s biography. The book covers only 5 years of Stalin’s political activity. As it is stated in its subtitle, the book is devoted to the political reforms of the USSR in the middle of the 30’s sponsored by Stalin.

Yet to a certain extent Yuri Zhukov was right in his choice of the title for his book. Though his book, as the author recognises, does not answer all  the questions about the complicated and controversial period of the Soviet history, the facts used in it and the conclusions which follow them destroy the stereotypes which were widely spread all over the world since Khrushchev’s report at the XX Congress of the CPSU. Presenting a vast body of irrefutable facts Yuri Zhukov makes convincing conclusions which make Stalin look completely different from what he looked like in Khrushchev’s report and in the later fabrications of the Anti-Stalinist propaganda.

Khrushchev and those who repeated his false accusations tried to make people believe that the arrests and executions of many Party members in 1937-1938 were caused by the arbitrary methods of Stalin or his persecution mania. They claimed that no Communist party officials participated in subversive activity against the Soviet state and that there were no plots against the Soviet governments in the pre-war time whatsoever.

Though Yuri Zhukov does not make a detailed analysis of the subversive activities against the Soviet Government in the 30’s he shows in his book that the struggle of the Secretary of the USSR Central Executive Committee of the USSR A. Yenukidze against J. Stalin eventually led him to organise a plot in order to overthrow the Soviet government. Among the participants in this plot were the People’s Commissar for Internal  Affairs (the chief of the USSR NKVD) N. Yagoda and those who were supposed to provide the security of the Kremlin.

While according to Khrushchev Stalin together with his Politburo colleagues (V. Molotov, K. Voroshilov, L. Kaganovich) were the arch-enemies of democratic procedures, Yuri Zhukov presents quite adifferent picture: Stalin brought forth a programme of democratisation of the Soviet life, with Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich wholly supporting Stalin in his initiatives, while Yenukidze and many other Party officials were strongly opposed to Stalin’s democratic reforms.

Quite correctly pointing out the democratic principles of Stalin’s political reforms, Yuri Zhukov fails to show that they organically corresponded to the democratic nature of the Communist ideology and resulted from the natural development of the Soviet political life. While correctly reminding us of the attempts of the Soviet Government to organise a united international front against Hitler before the Second World War Yuri Zhukov tries to explain the political reforms inside the USSR by the foreign political goals of Stalin. According to Zhukov it appears that in order to consolidate the struggle against Hitler Stalin tried to build political life in the Soviet Union along the lines of bourgeois Western democracies. At the same time Zhukov considers that Yenukidze’s opposition to these reforms was caused by his fidelity to the ideals of communism and the world communist revolution and this caused his animosity both towards establishing closer political relations with the Western bourgeois democracies before the War and democratic reforms of Stalin.

Zhukov avoids dwelling on the democratic principles of communism and therefore distorts the reason why Yenukidze and others opposed Stalin’s reforms. Though A. Yenukidze and others supported Stalin in his struggle against opposition in the Party in the 20’s they eventually established alliance with the Trotskyites. This alliance developed due to the growing conflict between their personal interests and the goals of  socialist development. Yenukidze’s opposition reflected curtain unhealthy tendencies which were spread among many Party and Soviet officials at that time.

It must be said that by the middle of the 30’s most of the Party and Soviet  officials occupied their ruling posts since 1917-1918. At that time the Communist Party lacked educated members and many of the Party functionaries had an insufficient general and political education. Besides their first years of administrative jobs coincided with the Civil War. During these years they grew accustomed to resort freely in their work to military coercion rather than political arguments. This also explained to a great deal the excesses of collectivisation of 1929-1930. The much needed collectivisation of individual peasant farms turned into a veritable military campaign and many local first secretaries resorted to violence in order to make peasants join collective farms. In March 1930 Stalin censured these Party functionaries and wrote that they suffer ‘giddiness because of successes’ of the Soviet socialist construction.

Some of the Party functionaries were accustomed to their high administrative posts and many of them did their best to retain them at all costs. Many Party committees turned into hotbeds of intrigues and battlegrounds between politicians fighting for power. The competing groups accused each other of various ideological deviations. The purges which were periodically conducted in the Party in order to get rid of corrupt members were used by many of the first secretaries in order to expel from the Party those whom they consider to be their personal enemies.

Yuri Zhukov reminds that Stalin criticised the first secretaries of republican, regional and local organizations for creating ‘personal clans’, consisting of people who were devoted to them and flattered them. Stalin also said that whenever these party leaders get new appointments to other republics and provinces, they transfer ‘their personal clans’ with them.

At the same time Stalin said that the Party purges of 1935-1936 resulted in the expulsion of many Party members who were not guilty of any deviations from the Party line. Stalin pointed out that a number of those expelled from the Party by far exceeded the total quantity of those who supported Trotsky, Zinoviev and other leaders of opposition groups. He accused these Party leaders of the high-handed treatment of ordinary Party members and claimed that the purges only caused the anger of those expelled from the Party.

Yuri Zhukov also quotes the statement made by V. M. Molotov at the June (1937) plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee: ‘Lately comrade Stalin said several times that our old way of evaluating people is completely insufficient. A person may have a pre-revolutionary experience of Party membership. Then he has a good quality of having participated in the October revolution. He performed well in the Civil War. He fought against Trotskyites and the Rightists… But this is not sufficient. At the present moment we need… that the Party leaders are able to find appropriate understanding of people’s needs, to move ahead new people instead of those who have turned into bureaucrats”.

Stalin feared that the bureaucratisation of the Party may lead to its downfall. In 1937 he compared Soviet communists with Antaeus from the Greek mythology whose strength was invincible so long as he remained in contact with his mother Earth. Stalin said that until Communists ‘remain in contact with their mother — the people, who gave them birth, nourished and educated them, they have all the chances to remain invincible’. These words implied that when the Communists lose their contact with the people they may lose their strength and may be overwhelmed.

Though partly ignoring and partly distorting profound political and ideological issues behind the opposition of Party officials, Yuri Zhukov is quite right in stating that the struggle of Stalin and his opponents developed over the draft of the new Constitution of the USSR, which was worked at in 1935-1936, especially over the new order of elections.

From 1918 to 1936 deputies of local Soviets were elected by open voting at people’s assemblies. The local Soviets elected deputies to the provincial Soviets at open sessions. They in turn elected Republican Soviets, which elected the USSR Supreme Soviet. The representation of the townspeople was five times bigger than that of the villagers. Besides, all representatives of former exploiting classes as well as priests were banned from voting.

The new election system established direct and proportionate election with secret voting. The limitations put on former representatives of exploiting classes and priests were lifted. Using a Russian proverb (‘If you are afraid of wolves, you need not go to the forest’), Stalin mocked at attempts to preserve these limitations. At the All-Union Congress of the Soviets in November 1936 Stalin said: ‘First, not all former kulaks, white guardsmen and priests are alien to the Soviet power. Second, if people somewhere choose persons alien to the Soviet power, it would just mean that our propaganda work is good for nothing and we deserved such a shame. But if our propaganda develops in the true Bolshevik manner, then people would not let alien people to the supreme bodies’.

Besides, as Yuri Zhukov especially stresses, Stalin with the support of Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and others wanted to have elections on alternative basis. In the draft of the ballot for the first election to the USSR Supreme Soviet there were mentioned several candidates for one seat in the Soviet.

Yuri Zhukov correctly points out that changes in the election system to the Soviets were supplemented by Stalin’s proposals of vast changes in the Party leading personnel. Mentioning the speech of Stalin at the February-March (1937) plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee, Yuri Zhukov writes about the profound dissatisfaction of Stalin with the political and personal behaviour of many Party officials.

After the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937, which revealed many cases of sabotage, after uncovering the Yenukidze plot in February 1937, Stalin and other Soviet leaders became convinced that many of the Party functionaries were so much engrossed in personal feuds that they did not care to pay attention to the activities of the Anti-Soviet plotters. Stalin came to the conclusion that it is necessary to re-educate the Party functionaries. In March 1937 at the plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee Stalin suggested that all Party secretaries from the highest to the lowest level (over 100 thousand functionaries) should attend courses of political education.

At the same time Stalin suggested that while the first secretaries study at such courses their jobs should be filled by other Party members. By the middle of 30’s due to the fast growth of the Soviet education the number of Party members who were University graduates immensely increased. After graduating from universities and other high education establishments these Party members acquired ample experience of work at the newly built Soviet plants. They actively participated in the socialist construction and were not involved in the intrigues of the Party provincial and Republican committees. Stalin, Molotov and others perceived these people as a fast growing reserve for the Party leadership.

Stalin’s proposals were meant to change drastically the composition of the Party leadership in the spirit of the new Soviet constitution. The old leadership would get better political and general training. At the same time many of the older officials would be replaced by persons with better education and sufficient experience of work at the modern enterprises.

Yuri Zhukov brings many facts to show that while Yenukidze, Yagoda and others resorted to secret plotting, many of the Republican and provincial Party leaders began silent but active sabotage of Stalin’s reforms. Citing articles written by the first Secretary of the Transcaucasus Party organisation L. P. Beria and by the first Secretary of the Moscow Party N.S. Khrushchev, Yuri Zhukov shows that the leading party functionaries either ignored the new Constitution and the elections according to the new system, or expressed exaggerated fears that class enemies may use the elections according to the principles of the new Constitution in order to become deputies to the USSR Supreme Soviet.

Yuri Zhukov asserts that the opposition of the first secretaries of republics and provinces to the new Constitution was caused by their fears of losing their seats in the Soviets during the elections. Many peasants (and not only kulaks) remembered the excesses of collectivisation and they could vote against those who in 1929-1930 tried to overfulfil plans of collectivisation at all costs disregarding attitudes of peasants. Yuri Zhukov correctly points out that if such Party secretaries failed to be elected to the Soviets, their positions as Party leaders might be questioned as well.

According to Yuri Zhukov the major effort to undermine the democratic reforms urged by Stalin, Molotov and others was undertaken by the alternate member of Politburo and the first Secretary of the Western Siberian province Party organization R.I. Eikhe. At the end of June 1937 he presented a memorandum to the Politburo with  proposals which ran counter to Stalin’s political reforms. Though the text of the memorandum is not found, there is ample evidence of its existence in allusions and decisions taken on the basis of the memorandum.

According to Yuri Zhukov, R.I. Eikhe asserted that there are in Western Siberia many exiled former kulaks who planned to organise a counter-revolutionary uprising. Eikhe asked the Party Central Committee for a sanction to form a so called ‘troika’ composed of the Attorney of the province, the provincial chief of the NKVD and Eikhe himself. The ‘troika’ should have extraordinary powers in order to investigate the counter-revolutionary activities and take judicial decisions concerning the plotters.

Yuri Zhukov compares the Eikhe memorandum with ‘a small stone that causes an awful avalanche’. It was soon followed by a decision of Politburo of July 2 which supported the contention that many former kulaks and ordinary criminals, who returned to their original places of residence after their prison terms expired, launched counterrevolutionary activities. The decision claimed that these people ‘are major instigators of Anti-Soviet activities and sabotage acts in collective and Soviet farms, as well as at transport and several branches of industry’. The decision demanded that the most active instigators of Anti-Soviet activities and sabotage should be immediately arrested and shot, while less active enemies should be exiled. The decision demanded that in five days’ time the provincial party leaders should send to the Party Central Committee lists of ‘troikas’, number of persons to be arrested and shot, number of persons to be arrested and exiled.

Why did such a radical change in the position of Stalin and other members of Politburo take place? Yuri Zhukov contends that this occurred due to a strong pressure put by a big number of the first secretaries upon Stalin. Having mentioned a number of visits paid to Stalin and Molotov by the leading provincial Party functionaries who shared the position taken by Eikhe, Zhukov suggests that they presented a veritable ultimatum to Stalin, Molotov and others.

In order to understand why Stalin, Molotov and other Politburo members changed their policy, one should also take into account some facts which are mentioned in Zhukov’s book, but briefly. First of all one should bear in mind the exposure of Marshal Tukhachevsky’s plot which took place in May. The plotters had connections with the German generals and planned a coup d’etat. While the majority of the participants of the plot were military persons, there were several civil members of the Party Central Committee among them. The People’s Commissar for Inner Affairs (chief of NKVD after the dismissal of G.Yagoda) N.I. Yezhov made a report at the June plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee asking their members for permission to arrest 11 full members and 14 alternate members of the Central Committee involved in the Tukhachevsky plot.

For some reason Yuri Zhukov does not take into account the facts narrated in a book written by Vladimir Pyatnitsky ‘The Plot against Stalin’, which is specifically dedicated to the June (1937) plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee. Though the author of this book attacks Stalin, he recognises that during this plenary meeting there were a number of speeches made against prolonging the extraordinary powers of the NKVD and Yezhov. An especially vehement protest was made by I.А. Pyatnitsky (the father of the author) who was the chief of the Political-administrative department of the Party Central Committee and for a long time was the secretary of the Central Executive Committee of Comintern.

Stalin tried to come to terms with Pyatnitsky during the plenary meeting. After Pyatnitsky’s speech an interval was announced. Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich talked to I.А. Pyatnitsky and said that Stalin believed in his personal honesty and values, his talent as a good organiser and administrator. They asked Pyatnitsky to retract his statement. But Pyatnitsky was adamant. Afterwards 15 other Central Committee members supported Pyatnitsky and demanded the cessation of the extraordinary powers of the NKVD and Yezhov.

At this time one of the Central Committee members Filatov told Stalin that the opposition of Pyatnitsky and others to NKVD was a result of the decision reached at a secret meeting at Pyatnitsky’s apartment.Filatov was the only participant of this meeting who informed Stalin about it. Just a month ago in May Stalin got informed about the Tukhachevsky plot exposed by NKVD. Now he learned about a secret meeting attended by dozens of Central Committee members who tried to stop further investigations by NKVD.

So when Eikhe and other Central Committee members came to Stalin and Molotov with requests not to curb NKVD activities but increase them though redirecting them against former kulaks Stalin and his closest colleagues had a reason to suppose that these suggestions came from quite an opposite quarter. In reality Stalin faced opposition to his policy on two fronts. While Pyatnitsky and others demanded the end to arrests of high functionaries involved in anti-government plots and blamed NKVD of arbitrariness, Eikhe and others praised the NKVD but just wanted to direct it to other goals.

One may suppose that at that time N.I. Yezhov was not quite sure of his position. As a chief of the Political-administrative department of the Party Central Committee Pyatnitsky controlled the NKVD.Yezhov knew that Stalin trusted Pyatnitsky. Yezhov might have feared that he might lose his position as the chief of NKVD if Pyatnitsky and his supporters would prevail. Therefore Yezhov joined with Eikheand others. Zhukov is quite right in supposing that ‘Yezhov easily came to terms with Eikhe, many first secretaries and agreed with the necessity as soon as possible to do away with the those who were certain to vote against them’.

Thus Stalin and his staunch supporters found themselves opposed not only by the influential groups constituting the majority of the Central Committee members but also by the NKVD armed with extraordinary powers. This may explain why Stalin and others made a sudden turn in their policies.

Meanwhile, as Zhukov states, the first secretaries presented their requests for the exile and executions of underground counter-revolutionaries which they promised to discover in their provinces and republics. Zhukov points out that ‘the most blood-thirsty turned out to be two persons — R.I. Eikhe, who declared his intention to shoot 10,800 inhabitants of Western Siberia… and N.S. Khrushchev, who suspiciously quickly managed to find and count in Moscow province 41,305 former kulaks and criminals and then insist on their expulsion and execution’. It is noteworthy that in his report at the XX Party Congress Khrushchev said not a word either about the Eikhe memorandum, or about the requests for exiles and executions filed by Eikhe and himself. Instead Khrushchev praised Eikhe and depicted him as an innocent victim of Stalin’s terror.

Showing that Stalin and his closest colleagues temporarily lost control over the situation, Zhukov points out that many of the active supporters of Stalin in his democratisation reforms (Y.A. Yakovlev, B.M. Tal, A.I. Stetzky) lost their jobs and then were arrested. It is clear that Stalin was unable to defend some of his supporters. There is other evidence that Yezhov did not want to limit himself to executions of smaller figures among Stalin supporters. Later, when Yezhov was arrested papers were found in his personal safe which he collected in order to prepare ‘a case’ against Stalin.

At the same time Yezhov, Eikhe and others could not risk overthrowing Stalin and his supporters. The name of Stalin was the very embodiment of socialism. The popularity of Molotov, Voroshilov andKaganovich was also great. Many cities, factories, collective farms were named after them. Yezhov and others covered their opposition to Stalin by constant flattery and statements of fidelity to him. Yezhoveven proposed to name Moscow after Stalin and to call it Stalindar. The proposal was resolutely rejected by Stalin.

Paradoxically the attempt of Eikhe and others to divert NKVD activities from investigations of plots among the Party functionaries did not stop their arrests. Getting permission to uncover Anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary plots, some of the first secretaries hastened to demand arrests of their rivals for high posts. Thus the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Uzbekistan Communist Party A.I.Ikramov asked the Politburo on June 24 1937 to replace the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Uzbekistan Faizulla Hodzhaev ‘for his counterrevolutionary connections’. Later Hodzhaevwas arrested.

However, the supporters of Hodzhaev managed to incriminate Ikramov. As Zhukov points out Ikramov himself was expelled from the Party in September 1937 and then arrested. In March 1938 bothHodzhaev and Ikramov were executed on the accusations of high treason and espionage during the Moscow trial.

Many rivalries were settled in 1937 in the similar manner, as many of the Party functionaries tried to do away with those who might successfully compete with them for the vacancies in the Party and Soviet hierarchy. Soon the campaign of false accusations spread all over the country. Many people slandered their colleagues and they were arrested by the NKVD. This period of mass violations of law was later called the ‘Yezhovshina’. It is obvious that the illegal practices unleashed initially by a number of the Party functionaries ran counter to the principles advocated by Stalin and his policy of democratisation. This allows Yuri Zhukov to make a conclusion that ‘the attempt of Stalin to reform the political system of the Soviet Union resulted in a complete fiasco’.

This categorical statement by Yuri Zhukov might be contradicted. First, despite stubborn opposition by the influential body of the Party functionaries the Stalin Constitution was adopted and the first election to the USSR Supreme Soviet was conducted in a new way (direct, equal, secret). Second, Stalin with the support of many Communists gradually began to restore legality, which was violated by the provincial secretaries and NKVD. In January 1938 the plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee condemned the ‘formalistic and bureaucratic approach to the appeals of people expelled from the All-Union Communist Party’ and demanded to take resolute measures in order to stop such practice. The decision of the Central Committee paid attention to a number of arbitrary expulsions of Party members in the second half of 1937. The decision proclaimed a return to the principles advocated by Stalin in March 1937 at the plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee.

Though the decision put all the blame for the violations of legal norms on the local Party functionaries, the position of Yezhov began to weaken. In August 1938 the Politburo began investigating the work of NKVD. In November 1938 Yezhov lost the post of chief of NKVD. In April 1939 he was arrested and accused of gross violations of legal norms. Eikhe and other secretaries who were active in launching a campaign of exiles and executions were also arrested.

At the same time many thousands people arrested during the Yezhovshina were released. Among them was a number of Soviet generals, including K.K. Rokossovsky, who played an important part in the Great Patriotic War.

Despite the heavy losses inflicted by the Yezhovshina, the Soviet Union was not fatally weakened by it. First, among those arrested and executed in 1937-1938 were real spies and enemies of socialism. Unlike the countries of Western Europe the USSR proved to be free from the ‘Fifth Column’ which let Hitler win victories. German generals complained during the first months of the war that they lacked true information about the Red Army and the Soviet defence industry as they did not have sufficient numbers of their agents inside the USSR. With the exception of general Vlasov who surrendered to the Germans in 1942 and later collaborated with them, Hitler failed to find support among the high ranking Soviet ruling body.

Second, many of career-minded politicians who cared only for their power lost their jobs, freedom and lives during the inner strife of 1937-1938. Their jobs were eventually taken by others. Yuri Zhukovrecognises that one of the results of the events of 1937-1938 was the emergence at the top Soviet leadership of persons who were better educated and had better experience in modern economy. The jobs of marshals and officers involved in the Tukhachevsky plot were taken by younger officers who had better military education. The new Party functionaries who replaced those arrested in 1937-1938 were sincerely devoted to the cause of communism and were better educated politically unlike many of older functionaries. The new leadership of the Party, Soviet economy and the Red Army proved its worth during the Great Patriotic War.

And the last, but not the least consequence of the events of 30’s was the consolidation of the Soviet people around Stalin and his policies. It should be noted that the mass reprisals of the 30’s touched mostly the social strata which constituted only a minority of the Soviet people. At the same time the adoption of the Stalin Constitution which proclaimed the principles of socialist democracy and embodied the achievements of socialist construction, made most of the Soviet people realise the obvious advantages of the new socialist order. The devotion of the Soviet people to this order was demonstrated by its heroic struggle during the Great Patriotic War.

Yet Yuri Zhukov is correct in pointing out that in 1937-1938 Stalin failed to implement some of the essential features of his political reforms. Zhukov specifically mentions the fact that due to the stubborn opposition of many Party functionaries in 1937 Stalin had to forsake his plan of conducting elections with alternative candidates. The only relic of Stalin’s idea was an inscription at the top of every ballot at each election held in the Soviet Union until it ceased to exist in 1991 which said: ‘Leave in the ballot the name of ONE candidate, for whom you vote, striking out all the rest’. Though in practice the inscription did not make sense, as during these elections there was just ONE candidate, the inscription reminded that in principle the voters should have a choice out of a number of candidates.

Zhukov fails to mention also an obvious fact that Stalin’s plan of political education of Party functionaries which he unveiled in March 1937 also failed to be materialised. Perhaps the difficulties of the pre-war period, the war and later the cold war did not allow Stalin to organise the education of all acting Party functionaries. As a result many important posts were still occupied by functionaries who lacked appropriate political and general education. Among them were such persons like N.S. Khrushchev and L.P. Beria. Initially they silently sabotaged Stalin’s reforms. Then they were active in the Yezhovshina. But they were quick-witted enough to see the change in the political climate and they became active in fighting Yezhov and his supporters. Though Stalin was aware of their low level of general and political education and their other faults he valued their energies. Both Khrushchev and Beria continued to occupy important jobs.

While Stalin constantly tried to move forward persons who were whole-heartedly devoted to the cause of communism, had a good education and experience in practical work, it seems that he understood the shortcomings of the existing political leadership of the Soviet Union. During the XIX Congress of the CPSU Stalin made another effort to change the composition of the high ranks of the Party. He suggested the enlargement of the body of the newly created Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee by recruiting to it a number of outstanding leaders of the Party provinces, organisers of economic production and theoreticians. In the first months of 1953 Stalin prepared a document in which he suggested that he would resign from the post of the Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and this job would be taken by the former first secretary of Byelorussian Communist party and former chief of the General headquarters of the USSR partisan movement during the War P.K. Ponomarenko.

It is known that L.P. Beria and N.S. Khrushchev were bitter enemies of Ponomarenko since the War years. Also the appointment of Ponomarenko might signify that other changes should soon to follow. The sudden illness and then death of Stalin later caused many suspicions. It was claimed that Stalin was poisoned by his colleagues. At least it is clear that Beria, Malenkov and Khrushchev who visited Stalin after he was found lying unconscious on the floor in his residence, did not even call a physician to examine him. Three years after Stalin’s death Khrushchev began his Anti-Stalin campaign.

The faults of the Soviet way of selecting persons for ruling positions became evident during the 11 years when N.S. Khrushchev occupied the job of the First Secretary of the Party Central Committee. These were the years which became notorious for a number of gross mistakes in ideology, economic and political spheres as well as in the foreign policy of the USSR. Though Khrushchev was dismissed by the unanimous vote of the Party Central Committee in October 1964, there was nothing done to modify the political system of the USSR and CPSU. The subsequent events showed that the political system of the CPSU and the USSR did not prevent coming to power such traitors of communism and their own country like Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Yeltsin. It is quite probable that if Stalin and his supporters had managed to implement the political reforms the USSR might have had a better system of selecting their political leaders and thus prevent Khrushchev, Gorbachev and others from coming to power.

It is also obvious that though Yuri Zhukov does not share the communist ideology, he, like a true Russian patriot, is sorry that Stalin’s political reforms were not completed. Though Yuri Zhukov recognises that his quest for true explanations of the events of 30’s in the USSR is incomplete as many documents related to the period are still kept secret or were destroyed on the orders by Khrushchev, his book demonstrates the falsehood of fabrications made by Khrushchev and his followers about the events of 1937-1938. With all its obvious faults and shortcomings Zhukov’s book made a new and important inroad into the study of the Soviet history.

Yuri Yemelianov is the author of ‘Notes on Bukharin: Revolution, History, Personality’, Moscow, 1989; ‘Stalin’ (Two Volumes), Moscow, 2002; and ‘Khrushchev’ (Two Volumes), Moscow, 2005, all in Russian.

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On December 22 of last year, “Fight Back! News, which often reflects the views of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), published an outstanding overview of the DPRK and US imperialism in the Korean Peninsula entitled “Korea Stands Strong: Kim Jong-Il in Context.” The piece did a tremendous job outlining the advances made by Korean socialism and the problems arising from continued Western occupation of the southern half of the Korean nation.

In response to Fight Back!’s thorough analysis, along with two other pieces by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Workers World Party (WWP), David Whitehouse of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) released a hit-piece on Kim Jong-Il and dusted off the typical Cliffite-Trotskyite arguments against actually existing socialism. Published January 12, ‘Socialism in One Dynasty’ rehashes the same anti-communist lines of the ISO that have come to characterize  Trotskyism.

Kim Jong-Il’s death prompted a discussion among the left about Democratic Korea again, and with such a high volume of anti-DPRK propaganda generated by the West, it’s important for Marxist-Leninists to accurately represent the successes and challenges facing the Korean revolution. The simple fact that the DPRK survived the wave of counter-revolution that swept through most socialist countries demonstrates the strength and resilience of the Korean masses, and Democratic Korea’s perseverance in the face of overwhelming Western aggression demands close study by Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century.

DPRK troops fighting for reunification

Korea Divided

As the Fight Back! News article points out, “Korea is a single nation that was forcibly divided by the United States immediately after World War II.” (1) The DPRK and the Republic of Korea exist as two separate countries, but the Korean people meet all of the characteristic features of a nation; “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” (2) Understanding that Korea is not two separate nations is essential to placing the actions of the DPRK in their appropriate context.

Fearing the widespread popularity of the Korean revolution in both the north and the south, the US continued to militarily occupy the Republic of Korea after World War II. Koreans were left out of the decision to divide their country and despite promises of fair nationwide elections aimed at reunification, the US intervened in the South Korean elections on behalf of the Western-educated, right-wing nationalist, Syngman Rhee.

Many bourgeois scholars and critics of the DPRK argue that the Korean People’s Army (KPA), centered in the north, initiated the Korean War by crossing the 38th parallel, the act that is often cited as the start to the Korean War. While the KPA did send troops into South Korea on June 25, 1950, calling this an act of aggression by one sovereign state towards another implicitly legitimizes the imperialist division of Korea at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Richard Stokes, the British Minister of Works, put it this way in a 1950 report on the origins of the Korean war:

“In the American Civil War the Americans would never have tolerated for a single moment the setting up of an imaginary line between the forces of North and South, and there can be no doubt as to what would have been their re-action if the British had intervened in force on behalf of the South. This parallel is a close one because in America the conflict was not merely between two groups of Americans, but was between two conflicting economic systems as is the case in Korea.” (3)

Much like the American Civil War, any so-called aggression by the North was actually an attempt to re-unite a nation partitioned by a foreign imperialist power. Any critics of the actions of Democratic Korea in initiating the conflict would have to also condemn US President Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army for sending supplies to reinforce Fort Sumter at the onset of the American civil war, which was the de facto spark that started the conflict.

Of course, Marxist-Leninists support the re-unification efforts of the North in both the American civil war as well as the Korean war because they were historically progressive and revolutionary. Korea was occupied by a foreign imperialist government at the time of the KPA’s incursion into the south, just as Japanese colonizers had occupied the nation for the previous 35 years. As such, the KPA’s ‘invasion’ of southern Korea was a campaign in the larger, protracted struggle for national liberation that began as an anti-colonial struggle against imperial Japan.

Foreign occupation of Korea continues today, and Marxist-Leninists must evaluate the actions of the DPRK within the framework of an ongoing national liberation struggle. The 28,000 US troops permanently stationed in the Republic of Korea attest to the continued imperialist domination of the southern half of the Korean nation.

Kim Jong-Il reviewing production plans

The Disgraceful Slander of Korean Socialism

Although the ISO’s article was full of attacks on Marxist-Leninists and their position on the DPRK, it presented no actual rebuttal of the piece on Fight Back! News, itself a very telling omission. The closest that Whitehouse could get to refuting that article was the following passage:

FRSO, for example, dwells on a system of social services that includes universal health coverage and education, as well as free housing. This record is remarkable for a country of North Korea’s limited resources. It is not remarkable, however, for a country where the state controls everything. The state has to provide health care, education and housing, because there are no institutions outside the state–unless you count Kim’s Workers Party, which is bound up with the state and permeates all aspects of North Korean life. (4)

Notice that Whitehouse does not challenge the factual assertions in the Fight Back! News article pertaining to Korean socialism. Whitehouse is backed into the uncomfortable position of admitting that the record of the DPRK’s social services is ‘remarkable’, a stunning admission for an organization whose statement of principles claims that actually existing socialist countries, like Democratic Korea, “have nothing to do with socialism.” (5) Instead, the ISO attempts to downplay these ‘remarkable’ accomplishments by noting that the state is the only organized entity in Korean society capable of providing these services.

Of course this begs a number of questions: What other organized entity would the ISO rather have provide these essential social services in Democratic Korea? Return to the Source, along with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other Marxist-Leninists around the world, support the decision of socialist governments to use heavily regulated market socialism to develop productive forces and provide goods and services to the people. However, the ISO explicitly rejects the strategy undertaken by China and Cuba in the last year as further evidence of the country’s ‘state capitalism’. (6) What then, in concrete terms, would the ISO like to see out of the Democratic Korean state if they already agree that their services are ‘remarkable’, complain that no private entities exist to provide these services otherwise, but simultaneously reject the application of heavily regulated markets to socialist countries?

There is an answer to these questions, but the truth doesn’t favor the ISO. Trotskyite factions – materialists should never refer to these tiny organizations as parties in the Marxist-Leninist sense – have never led the masses in revolution precisely because they understand socialism and revolution in utopian terms. The ISO doesn’t believe that Democratic Korea is a socialist country because the WPK doesn’t measure up to their abstract, and often dogmatic, catechism of Marx that uses his call for communists to ‘win the battle for democracy’. (4) They repeat ad nauseum that socialism is a society in which workers control the means of production, but their idealism clouds them from recognizing that a revolutionary society like the DPRK, while imperfect, has already achieved that end.

When examining Democratic Korea, we must critically appraise their successes but only in the context of the insufferable imperialist aggression they face from the United States and the Republic of Korea. The DPRK continues to face difficulties in socialist construction, but most of these problems stem from unfavorable external conditions and imperialist aggression. Since the cession of hostilities in 1953, the US “maintained fairly comprehensive economic sanctions against North Korea.” (7) Access to essential goods and food staples is greatly restricted by the US and Japan, who cut off the shipment of rice to the DPRK in 2003. (7)

While Whitehouse’s article pays lip-service to the sanctions imposed on Democratic Korea, along with the continued legacy of destruction brought on by the Korean war, it dismisses these adverse conditions as a way “to excuse the behavior of the regime domestically, waving aside the charge that it is an oppressive dictatorship.” (4) Indeed, the fact that any mention of the Korean war is limited to four paragraphs in the middle of a 46-paragraph article demonstrates that the ISO is more interested in slandering the DPRK and pushing their bogus state capitalism line than applying a rigorous, dialectical materialist analysis of Korean socialism.

As the Fight Back! News article aptly pointed out, you cannot understand the DPRK without a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the national question, which yields the undeniable conclusion that Korea is a single nation occupied by an imperialist force after the cession of hostilities in 1953. The often-misconstrued ‘secrecy’ of the Korean government makes perfect sense in light of the overhanging threat of destruction they face across the demilitarized border zone.

Socialist realist art depicting Democratic Korea

Korean Socialism in Action

Marxist-Leninists must study the short-comings of Democratic Korea, but they must also enthusiastically praise the outstanding gains accomplished by the Korean revolution. As Bruce Cumings, Professor of Korean History at the University of Chicago, points out in his 2003 book,North Korea: Another Country, ”Modern Korea emerged from one of the most class-divided and stratified societies on the face of the earth, almost castelike in its hereditary hierarchy.” (3) Cumings notes that slavery encompassed anywhere from 60-90 percent of society until its abolition in 1894, in which most slaves were converted into feudal peasants ruled by Korean, and eventually Japanese, overlords. (3)

The expulsion of Japanese colonialism in World War II and the establishment of socialism in the north brought these enormous class disparities and abuses by the exploiting classes to an end. Cumings cites US security reports on the situation in revolutionary Korea to prove that “For those defined as poor and middle peasants, not only did their lives improve but they became the favored class.” (3) The WPK’s commitment to bottom-up socialist revolution was reflected in their class composition at the time of its founding, in which “laborers constituted 20 percent of the membership, poor peasants 50 percent, and samuwon [white-collar workers] 14 percent.” (3)

The Korean revolution gave opportunities to workers and landless poor peasants that were unimaginable under the past oppressive conditions. Cumings again writes, “At any time before 1945, it was virtually inconceivable for uneducated poor peasants to become country-level officials or officers in the army. But in North Korea such careers became normal.” (3) He also notes that inter-class marriages became normal, common, and widespread with the establishment of Democratic Korea, and educational access opened up for all sectors of society.

 On the vital question of land reform, the WPK undertook a gradual but steady process of converting private land ownership into cooperative organizations. Beginning with the process of post-war reconstruction in 1953, only 1.2% of peasant households were organized as cooperatives, which encompassed a mere .6% of total acreage. (13) By August of 1958, 100% of peasant households were converted into cooperatives, encompassing 100% of total acreage. (13) Ellen Brun, an economist whose 1976 Socialist Korea study remains the most comprehensive to date, writes that “In spite of lack of modern means of production, the cooperatives – with efficient assistance by the state – very early showed their superiority to individual farming, eventually convincing formerly reluctant farmers into participating in the movement.” (13)

Often a point of criticism from left-communists, Trotskyites, and anticommunists, collectivization in the DPRK did not result in any famine or mass starvation. In fact, “at no time during cooperativization did the agricultural output decrease; on the contrary, the process was accompanied by a steady increase in production.” (13) Citing statistics of food production, Brun shows a sharp increase from about 2.9 million tons in 1956 to 3.8 million tons in 1960. (13) Stemming from Democratic Korea’s push for self-sufficiency, the WPK put the nation on a path to increase its food production steadily and feed the entire country.

Local people’s committees, in which any Korean worker could participate, elected leadership to guide agricultural production and collaborated with national authorities to coordinate nation-wide efficiency. (13) These people’s committees were the primary means by which “the Party remains in contact with the masses on the various collective farms, thus enabling it to gauge public opinion on issues affecting the policies of the country people’s committee.” (13) In 1966, the WPK introduced the “group management system,” which “organized groups of ten to twenty-five farmers into production units, each of which was then put permanently in charge of a certain area of land, a certain task, or a certain instrument of production.” (13) This represents another instrument of people’s democracy implemented in Korean socialist production.

No serious antagonism between the countryside and industrial centers developed in the process of socialist construction in Democratic Korea. Brun notes that “tens of thousands of demobiilized men and many junior and senior graduates as well as middle school pupils went to the countryside in the busy seasons and rendered assistance amounting to millions of days of work,” all voluntarily and without coercion by the state. (13)

Most importantly, Korean socialist construction reorganized industrial production by and in the interests of the formerly dispossessed Korean proletariat. Drawing on the mass line – the Marxist-Leninist organizing method that “is both the cause and effect of the politicization and involvement of the masses in the process of economic development and socialist construction” – the WPK implemented the Daean work system in December 1961. (13) In contrast to the past system, in which managers were appointed to oversee a workplace unilaterally by a single party member, “The Part factory committee assumes the highest authority at the level of the enterprise” in the Daean work system. (13) Brun further describes this system, and I will quote her at length:

“Ways of solving questions affecting production and workers’ activities, as well as methods of carrying out decisions, are arrived at through collective discussions within the factory committee, whose members are elected by the factory’s Party members. To be effective this committee has to be relatively small, its precise numbers depending on the size of the enterprise. At the Daean Electrical Plant, with a labor force of 5,000, the Party factory committee is made up of 35 members who meet once or twice a month, while the 9 members of the executive board keep in continuous contact. Sixty percent of its members are production workers, with the remainder representing a cross-section of all factory activities, including functionaries, managers, deputy-managers, engineers, technicians, women’s league representatives, youth league members, trade union members, and office employees. Its composition thus gives it access to all socioeconomic aspects of the enterprise and the lives of its worker.

This committee has become what is called the ‘steering wheel’ of the industrial unit, conducting ideological education and mobilizing the workers to implement collective decisions and to fulfill the production target. Through its connection to the Party it has a clear picture of overall policies and aims as well as the exact function of individual enterprise in the national context. In other words, this setup ensures that politics are given priority.” (13)

Far from the simplistic and farcical characterizations of Whitehouse and the ISO of the DPRK as “a country where one man holds dictatorial power and the vast majority of people live in poverty,” this model of socialist organization represents the highest commitment to workers democracy. (4) Workers have input and supremacy in production and interact dialectically with the state to plan and carry out collectivist production on behalf of the whole Korean people.

The workplace in Democratic Korea isn’t simply a venue for production, but as emphasized with the Daean organizing method, a center for education and enrichment. After 1950, “worker schools” organized at specific workplaces began to emerge, in which laborers would attend middle and high school education programs while working in industry in order to prepare them to continue their education in college. (13)

Korean socialism achieved an impressive standard of living for the Korean people prior to the collapse of its largest trading partner, the USSR, in 1991. As independent scholar Stephen Gowans points out in his 2006 article, “Understanding North Korea,” Democratic Korea enjoyed a comparable standard of living to their neighbors in the south well into the 1980s. (14) Living spartan lifestyles, the Korean people were nearly self-sufficient in terms of light industry and consumer goods by 1967, with goods like textiles, underwear, socks, shoes, and alcoholic beverages becoming increasingly available for every citizen. (13)

Heavy industry, however, remained “the backbone of the economy,” in the words of Brun. She notes that “although assistance from socialist bloc countries may have been substantial at the beginning of the rebhabilitation period, a few years later – after the record year of 1954 – this foreign aid began to decrease and North Korea gradually had to become self-supporting.” (13) Because of trade politics brought on by the Sino-Soviet split, the DPRK gradually lost some of the aid it received from the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, they managed to develop their heavy industry substantially, progressing 51.7% in industrial output from 1953-1955. (13)

Korean socialism suffered tremendous setbacks in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and most of the socialist bloc. Resilient as ever, the nation persevered through these difficult years despite facing famine, heinous weather conditions, and blocked access to international trade by Western imperialist powers. (14) Democratic Korea stabilized and its commitment to genuine workers democracy continues to remain as steadfast as ever.

Kim Jong-Il, who looked much scarier than he actually was

Kim Jong-Il and the Prime Importance of a Nuclear Korea

Most telling of all is the ISO’s choice to not attack the argument that Democratic Korea acquiring nuclear weapons was an essential and positive development for the long-term security of Korean socialist construction. Given that nuclear capabilities were such an important aspect of the Fight Back! News article, Whitehouse’s choice to not engage this line of argument was a deliberate and conscious choice brought on by the inconvenient holes in the ISO’s counter-revolutionary political line. From the Fight Back! News article:

“The importance of Democratic Korea acquiring nuclear weapons cannot be overstated. In 2005, the U.S. presented an ultimatum to both Libya and the DPRK, demanding that both surrender their nuclear weapons programs and cooperate with Western imperialism in the ‘war on terror.’ Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi played ball. Kim Jong-Il gave the U.S. a figurative middle finger. As we near the end of 2011, having witnessed NATO’s brutal invasion of Libya and the toppling of Gaddafi’s government, it’s painfully clear who made the right choice.” (1)

Even bourgeois journalists like Tad Daley of the Christian Science Monitor concur with this assessment by Fight Back! News. In a piece from October 13, 2011 entitled “Nuclear lesson from Libya: Don’t be like Qaddafi. Be like Kim,” Daley writes:

If Libya had possessed the capability, oh, to obliterate a major American military base in Italy, or to vaporize an entire American “carrier battle group” off the southern coast of France, it almost certainly would have dissuaded Washington (not to mention Rome and Paris) from military action. If the Libyan regime wanted to ensure its own survival, then, just like North Korea, it should have developed a nuclear deterrent – small, survivable, and just lethal enough to inflict unacceptable damage on any aggressor. (8)

The fact that both of these leaders, Qaddafi of the Libyan Jamahiriya and Democratic Korea’s Kim, died in the same year in such radically different ways provides an interest point of contrast. Qaddafi was ousted after a set of imperialist-backed rebels launched a racist campaign to topple a revolutionary government in North Africa, which succeeded precisely because of NATO’s assistance. He died beaten, broken, sodomized, tortured, and executed in a muddy sewage pipe without trial.

Kim, on the other hand, died peaceably from a heart attack on a train en route to a factory inspection and a public meeting with Korean workers. While his death rocked the Korean people with grief, from Pyongyang to Beijing and beyond, the Korean revolution continues and shows no signs of wavering. China’s proximity to Korea is a factor in Democratic Korea’s continued security, but nothing keeps the American military from an all-out war to topple the WPK more than the threat of a nuclear bomb destroying one of their many military bases across the Republic of Korea. The fact that the imperialists cannot turn a false-flag operation like the so-called ‘Cheonan incident’ last year into a Gulf-of-Tonkin-style cause for a second Korean war is the nuclear deterrence that Kim Jong-Il’s leadership made possible. (9)

The ISO cannot engage this argument. It’s objectively true and provides possibly the best evidence for the revolutionary contributions of Kim Jong-Il to Korean socialism. To harshly criticize the WPK for aggressively, and secretly, pursuing a nuclear weapons program is to invite even harsher criticism of their ludicrous line on the Libyan conflict, which made the call for ousting Qaddafi front-and-center as opposed to condemning NATO’s invasion.

Fed by their Cliffite-Trotskyite ideology, the ISO has a long history of supporting the toppling of revolutionary governments, which came to a head in 1991 when their sect called the fall of the Soviet Union an event that “should have every genuine socialist rejoicing.” (10) Most recently, the ISO spent the initial stages of the Libyan conflict ignoring the blatantly pro-Western direction of the counter-revolution that started in Benghazi and downplaying the systematic and racist terrorism practiced by the ‘rebels’. (11) After NATO invaded, this Cliffite-Trotskyite sect continued to push a ‘Qaddafi Must Go’ line as its central focus, which in practice proves again and again to function as a de facto left-cover for imperialism.

Embarrassingly, the group never retreated from this line and incorrectly summed up the Libyan counter-revolution as progressive movement co-oped by NATO. Even after Qaddafi’s death and the inescapable evidence that these rebels were Western-backed counter-revolutionaries from the beginning, ISO leader Alan Maass still performed logical gymnastics to try and twist their bogus line into something resembling anti-imperialism, claiming that, despite being the victim of an imperialist invasion to topple his government, Qaddafi was actually a puppet of the West. (12)

Anyone reading Whitehouse’s piece about Kim Jong-Il should sum this up as an admission of defeat by the ISO for both their Libya line as well as their line towards Democratic Korea. Marxist-Leninists can advance a criticism of Qaddafi’s government for giving up its nuclear weapons program in the face of immense pressure from the West, but that means that the choice by Kim Jong-Il to continue pursuing nuclear weapons was unquestionably the correct path. Daley puts it this way:

But instead, Qaddafi was seduced by the siren song of the West. Give up your weapons of mass destruction, they said, and we will welcome you into the international community. Libya did, in late 2003.

And in retrospect, said the North Korean official, it was now clear that this had been, by the West, no less than “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.” Because as soon as the now-defanged Qaddafi took actions that displeased Libya’s Western overlords, the mighty military hammer of the developed world came thundering down upon him. (8)

The ISO’s failure to advance any kind of rebuttal – or any mention whatsoever of the nuclear question – once again demonstrates the ISO’s non-materialist understanding of socialism, both in theory and practice.

Mass outpouring of grief after the news of Kim Jong-Il’s death

Mass Grief in the DPRK

Central to the ISO’s attack on the Marxist-Leninist position on Democratic Korea is their critique of the often-touted ‘cult of personality’ surrounding Kim Jong-Il. Whitehouse puts it this way:

It’s true that Korean rituals–and Koreans in everyday life, for that matter–are emotionally expressive, more so than Chinese or Japanese ones. But it’s another thing to say that it was merely “traditional” to gather people by the hundreds of thousands in the freezing cold to mourn the death of state leaders in the shadow of monuments and photos that depict them ten or 100 times life size.

That does seem “orchestrated.” And what about the soldiers marching in formation with their weapons in massive columns–didn’t they have to practice? (4)

Of course, the exclusion of any serious rebuttal to the Fight Back! News article tells Marxist-Leninists a lot about the contrived nature of the ISO’s political line. Addressing allegations that the mass display of grief was ‘staged’ by the Korean People’s Army (KPA), Fight Back!’s article begins with an anecdote in a Korean restaurant in Beijing, far away from the eyes of the KPA. Here I will quote the article at length to illustrate the contrast:

The morning of Dec. 19 started like a normal Monday for the Korean staff at the Hae Dang Hwa restaurant in Beijing. The greeting staff welcomed hungry customers at the front door, the chefs began prepping their fine selection of kimchi and other Korean dishes and the waitresses and waiters began taking down orders for their guests. All of that changed when a China Daily reporter mentioned in a conversation with a waitress that Kim Jong-Il, the head of state for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), had died that morning of a heart attack. In minutes, the entire Korean staff – from the waiters to the chefs in the kitchen – broke down in tears and, after apologizing to the customers, closed the restaurant early for the day so they could grieve the national tragedy together.

Several thousand miles away in Pyongyang, mass sorrow like that experienced in this Beijing restaurant took the swept the capital as men, women and children – from the most esteemed party official to the steel worker – took to the streets to mourn Kim’s death. (1)

This is tremendously inconvenient for the image the ISO wishes to paint. On one hand, it doesn’t make sense that any army could compel an entire nation with near unanimity to weep and publicly display grief in a public way. However, the restaurant anecdote taking place in Beijing pokes enormous holes in Whitehouse’s claim, since these restaurant employees – overcome with grief to the point of closing the kitchen early – would face no repercussions for not displaying grief.

Whitehouse attacks the FRSO using a pathetic reconfiguration of the arguments made in the Fight Back! News article that one can only classify as the most dishonest strawman. Rather than actually engaging Fight Back!’s argument, he re-writes their argument to make the aforementioned anecdote look like evidence “to certify the democratic credentials of a regime that looks to everybody else like an autocracy.” (4)

While the Fight Back! News article, as well as this author, agree that Korean socialism is supremely democratic, the last paragraph expresses the central argument of this piece:

“Why do Koreans mourn the death of Kim Jong-Il? It’s because of his courageous defiance of U.S. domination, his commitment to the reunification and the real accomplishments of socialism. In the face of those who wage war for exploitation and oppression, Kim’s decisions represented the aspirations of Korean workers, peasants, women and children – the united Korean nation – for freedom. Although Kim Jong Il has passed away, the Korean people will continue to march forward raising the banner of national reunification, self-determination and revolution.” (1)

Far from simply ‘certifying the democratic credentials’ of the DPRK, the mass outpouring of grief by the Korean people demonstrate the widespread understanding of the gains of Korean socialism and the tireless struggle for national reunification.

Democratic Korea’s rehabilitative penal system

North Korean Gulags?

Central to the ISO’s anti-communism is a heavy reliance on bourgeois sources that have proven themselves unable to withstand the most basic materialist scrutiny. For instance, Whitehouse attacks the Fight Back! News article by saying that the title, “”Korea stands strong,” they are referring to the strength of the state. It is the same state that keeps 200,000 political prisoners, according to Amnesty International. It is the same state that shot dead three North Korean citizens who were trying to cross the border into China in late December.” (4)

A more principled examination of the Korean prison system in the north – referred to as a ‘gulag’ by the bourgeoisie and the ISO alike – ironically comes from bourgeois historian Bruce Cumings. In his 2004 book, North Korea: Another Country, he notes that most claims about the Korean penal system are grossly exaggerated. For instance, he notes that “Common criminals who commit minor felonies and small fry [sic] with an incorrect grasp on their place in the family state who commit low-level political offenses go off to labor camps or mines for hard work and varying lengths of incarceration,” the goal of which is to “reeducate them.” (3) This reflects a materialist understanding of the roots of crime, arising in large part from a person’s material conditions and incorrect ideas, which can change through altering a person’s conditions. It’s important to note that the vast majority of criminals in the Korean penal system fall into this category and thus the aim is to rehabilitate and reeducate, as opposed to the punitive aims of the American penal system.

Cumings notes the contrast between Democratic Korea’s criminal justice system and that of the United States, especially in terms of a prisoner’s contact with and support from their family. He writes:

“The Aquariums of Pyongyang is an interesting and believable story, precisely because it does not, on the whole, make for the ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers in France meant it to be; instead, it suggests that a decade’s incarceration with one’s immediate family was survivable and not necessarily an obstacle to entering the elite status of residence in Pyongyang and entrance to college. Meanwhile we have a long-standing, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons, incarcerating upward of 25 percent of all black youths.” (3)

The fact that time in the Korean penal system does not result in social castigation like it does in capitalist countries reflects a stark point of contrast with capitalist penal systems. Using one’s family as a support network, the state encourages political reeducation and opens opportunities for rehabilitated prisoners to re-enter Korean society as full citizens.

—

In and of itself, Whitehouse’s hit-piece on Korean socialism isn’t worth the bandwidth it takes up because it doesn’t make any serious arguments against the Fight Back! News piece to which it was supposed to respond. However, it remains important for Marxist-Leninists to confront the ISO’s unique and disturbing blend of left-anticommunism when it arises and defend the gains of the Korean people.

Despite its challenges and shortcomings, Democratic Korea is one of the last remaining countries where workers were able to control society collectively as a class. As one of the socialist countries to survive the fall of the USSR, Marxist-Leninists must study and learn from the resilience of the Korean people.

Long live the Korean revolution!

Hands off the DPRK!

One Korea!

—

(1) “Korea stands strong: Kim Jong-Il in context,” Fight Back! News, December 21, 2011, http://bit.ly/uLybSH

(2) Josef Stalin, Marxism & the National Question, “1. The Nation,” 1913, http://bit.ly/tQjf1l

(3) Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country, The New Press, New York, 2004.

(4) David Whitehouse, “Socialism in one dynasty,” Socialist Worker, January 12, 2011, http://bit.ly/ysT2e1

(5) “Where We Stand,” The International Socialist Organization, Socialist Worker, http://bit.ly/y4ht0W

(6) Ahmed Shawki, “China: Deng’s Legacy,” International Socialist Review, Issue 2, Fall 1997, http://bit.ly/xapFEV

(7) Dianne E. Rennack, “North Korea: Economic Sanctions,” Congressional Research Service, January 24, 2003, http://bit.ly/vpv9NO

(8) Tad Daley, “Nuclear lesson from Libya: Don’t be like Qaddafi. Be like Kim,”The Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 2011, http://bit.ly/w1wO00

(9) Stephen Gowans, “US Ultimately to Blame for Korean Skirmishes in the Yellow Sea,” what’s left, December 5, 2010, http://bit.ly/xnID99

(10) Socialist Worker, September 1991; Quoted by Workers Vanguard, No. 866, March 17, 2006, “Parliamentary Cretinism ISO Goes All the Way with Capitalist Greens,” http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/866/isogreen.html

(11) Socialist Worker, editorial, March 9, 2011, “The US is no friend to the Libyan uprising,” http://socialistworker.org/2011/03/09/no-friend-to-libyan-uprising

(12) Alan Maass, Lance Selfa, “Washington celebrates Qaddafi’s death,” Socialist Worker, October 24, 2011, http://bit.ly/z8Df7r

(13) Ellen Brun, Jacques Hersh, Socialist Korea: A Case Study in the Strategy of Economic Development, 1976, Monthly Review Press, New York and London

(14) Stephen Gowans, “Understanding North Korea,” what’s left, November 5, 2006, http://bit.ly/AyDa8q

Occupy Wall Street movement: Repression and resistance 

By Freedom Road Socialist Organization

On Sept. 17, 2011, a group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City. Their intention: to expose Wall Street greed and corporate domination over the lives of working and middle class people, the 99%. Almost immediately, police responded to the protesters with repression and pepper spray. This caused thousands of New Yorkers to flood to Zuccotti Park. Occupy Wall Street was on. Protesters camped in the park and did not leave for 59 days. Support for the protest built quickly and spread across the country and around the world. Within weeks, almost a thousand cities had Occupy protests. U.S. cities big and small had Occupations, including Chicago, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Tampa and Winston-Salem.

Millions mourn Kim Jong-Il

The following is from Fight Back! News: 

The morning of Dec. 19 started like a normal Monday for the Korean staff at the Hae Dang Hwa restaurant in Beijing. The greeting staff welcomed hungry customers at the front door, the chefs began prepping their fine selection of kimchi and other Korean dishes and the waitresses and waiters began taking down orders for their guests. All of that changed when a China Daily reporter mentioned in a conversation with a waitress that Kim Jong-Il, the head of state for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), had died that morning of a heart attack. In minutes, the entire Korean staff – from the waiters to the chefs in the kitchen – broke down in tears and, after apologizing to the customers, closed the restaurant early for the day so they could grieve the national tragedy together.

Several thousand miles away in Pyongyang, mass sorrow like that experienced in this Beijing restaurant took the swept the capital as men, women and children – from the most esteemed party official to the steel worker – took to the streets to mourn Kim’s death.

Most people in the United States have a hard time understanding the sorrow of the Korean people and the Western media spent the better part of the past few days ridiculing this mass display of grief. After all, it’s inconceivable to imagine the death of any U.S. leader – President or otherwise – eliciting unanimous mourning from the American people. Nevertheless, even the harshest critics could not deny the sincerity of the tears shed by the Korean people, both in the DPRK and abroad, on the morning of Dec. 19.

The Western media tells us that DPRK government is ruthlessly oppressive, and yet the Korean people’s reaction seriously contradicts this image. What is it about Democratic Korea and its leaders that cause its people, even those far away from the eyes of government authorities, to mourn like this?

Misinformation presented by the Western media cause many to see Democratic Korea as a highly repressive, brutal regime with no accountability to the Korean people. A closer look past the slanderous – and often fabricated – claims reveal a strong nation, resilient in the face of more than a century of imperialist aggression that, against all odds, continues to mobilize the Korean masses in the process of building socialism.

Korea is a single nation that was forcibly divided by the United States immediately after World War II. To this day, the DPRK remains committed to reunification. After 35 years of horrifying treatment by Japanese colonizers, the Korean people’s brief hope for a single, unified Korea was dashed when the Truman administration launched a military campaign to violently suppress the Korean revolution. Aided by the Soviet Union and socialist China, the Korean People’s Army (KPA), led by Kim Il-Sung, pushed the U.S led invasion back to the 38th parallel, now the southern border of the DPRK.

Over the course of the Korean War, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Korea than it did in the entirety of the World War II Pacific theater, killing more than a million Koreans and destroying most of the north’s cities. Equally horrific was the execution of hundreds of thousands of suspected communist sympathizers by Syngman Rhee’s U.S.-backed fascist government, which took power in southern Korea.

Despite the destruction caused by the Korean War, the DPRK undertook an ambitious reconstruction effort that allowed them to enjoy a higher GDP and better standard of living than the U.S.-supported regime in the south, which consistently suffered from high unemployment and low wages brought on by Western sweatshops. It wasn’t until the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the DPRK’s largest trading partner, the Soviet Union, that the Republic of Korea would overtake the north in economic productivity.

Even the U.S. government cannot deny the accomplishments of Korean socialism. Written behind closed doors in 1990, a declassified CIA report admits that the DPRK administers outstanding social services for children, guarantees totally free housing to citizens, provides a highly successful country-wide public preventative medical program, oversees a police force with an extremely low level of corruption and has achieved high life expectancy and low infant mortality rates.

The same CIA report points out that there are more college-educated women than men in the DPRK, and admits that the Workers Party of Korea legitimately committed to ‘radical change’ in Korean gender relations. The facts support their conclusion: Prostitution is outlawed, women are permitted to serve in the military, state child-care programs allow women to have independent careers outside of the house and a significant number of high level political positions are occupied by women, including representation in the Supreme People’s Assembly.

The DPRK’s remarkable public health care system – which provides unconditional universal coverage for citizens – continues to perform tremendously well, even in the midst of crippling U.S. sanctions. Just last year in a report to the United Nations on the North Korean health care system, Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), called it “something which most other developing countries would envy.” She pointed out that the “DPRK has no lack of doctors and nurses,” and praised the system for its “very elaborate health infrastructure, starting from the central to the provincial to the district level.”

Imperialist aggression against this defiant revolutionary government continues to this day, manifesting itself in more than 28,000 U.S. troops permanently stationed in South Korea and the overhanging threat of U.S. Navy freighters carrying nuclear missiles in the Korean Peninsula.

Seeing the emboldened aggression of U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union, the DPRK sought to insure their protection from another Korean War by acquiring nuclear weapons. Facing an onslaught of trade sanctions and the threat of invasion, Democratic Korea preserved and announced their first successful nuclear test in 2006, an achievement spearheaded by Kim Jong-Il.

The importance of Democratic Korea acquiring nuclear weapons cannot be overstated. In 2005, the U.S. presented an ultimatum to both Libya and the DPRK, demanding that both surrender their nuclear weapons programs and cooperate with Western imperialism in the ‘war on terror.’ Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi played ball. Kim Jong-Il gave the U.S. a figurative middle finger. As we near the end of 2011, having witnessed NATO’s brutal invasion of Libya and the toppling of Gaddafi’s government, it’s painfully clear who made the right choice.

Why do Koreans mourn the death of Kim Jong-Il? It’s because of his courageous defiance of U.S. domination, his commitment to the reunification and the real accomplishments of socialism. In the face of those who wage war for exploitation and oppression, Kim’s decisions represented the aspirations of Korean workers, peasants, women and children – the united Korean nation – for freedom. Although Kim Jong Il has passed away, the Korean people will continue to march forward raising the banner of national reunification, self-determination and revolution.

U.S. Hands off the DPRK!

The following statement from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is being reposted here from Fight Back! News: 

The United States and its Western allies, along with reactionary pro-U.S. Arab regimes in the Middle East, are doing everything in their power to bring down the government of Syria. They have imposed sanctions that harm the Syrian people. They interfere in Syria’s internal affairs, with the aim of spreading disorder and chaos. Behind these attacks there is the steady drumbeat threatening foreign military intervention.

Like the U.S./NATO war on Libya, the reasons for imperialism’s ongoing assault on Syria’s government have nothing do with human rights. In fact, the U.S. government has shown time and time again that it couldn’t care less about human rights, or for that matter human life. One million plus lives were lost in Iraq. The Pentagon uses drones on the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Thousand have died. American tax dollars sponsor death squads in Colombia and finance the occupation of Palestine. From New York to Los Angles, police have been brought in to repress the Occupy movement. The U.S. government has no right to lecture anyone, anywhere, anytime about human rights.

What Washington does care about is controlling the resources of the Middle East. Syria stands in the way of the Western empire builders, so they have determined that the government of Syria must go. It’s really that simple.

Syria plays a positive role in the Middle East. Its people and government are supportive of the struggle to free Palestine and assist the patriotic forces in Lebanon. Syria opposes Zionism and imperialism. The point here is not that the government of Syria is perfect or without fault. The point is this: It would be a sad setback for the collective efforts of the Arab peoples to achieve national liberation if Syria was pushed into a civil war, or delivered into the hands of those who have sold their soul’s to Washington and the West.

It’s important for the anti-war movement in this country to learn from what happened in Libya – where the United States and NATO rained down death and destruction on the Libyan people.

We should oppose the sanctions on Syria. Sanctions pave the way to war. We should support an independent Syria and demand the U.S. stop its interference in Syria’s internal affairs. And we should raise our voices against any attempt use military force, be it by the U.S., the European powers or their proxies, against Syria. Those who want peace with justice cannot do otherwise.

Hands off Syria!

Lyrics: 

All that you have taken
You will return tenfold
All that we have lost
We will reclaim

This is our unyielding
Declaration of war
Against this society
Of hypocracy and lies

This is our warcry
Hear it chill the bones
Of the crusaders
On their shattered battlements (trembling)

Prepare for battle comrades
Their final hour is at hand
Under banners of blood
We storm the heavens

Only a few cowards
Stand in our way
With torches in hand
We unleash the wrath of a new dawn

The following is from Zimbabwe’s Herald: 

PRESIDENT Mugabe yesterday said the indigenisation and economic empowerment programme would take centre stage at the Zanu-PF 12th Annual National People’s Conference, which starts in Bulawayo today.

Speaking during his photographic exhibition at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) last night, the Head of State and Government and Commander-In-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces said the time has come for ordinary Zimbabweans to have a say in the national economy.

He said the liberation struggle was fought in order to repossess the land from the white minority and empower black people economically.

“Our sovereignty would not exist unless we own the land. We must be masters of our destiny and manage the natural resources below and above the earth’s surface. We must train ourselves hand skills and pride ourselves in being able to manage our affairs.

“Let us not be content with being employees. Let us fight to be employers and owners of companies. The big companies should cede shares to black people,” said President Mugabe.

“We will not drive away those companies that brought investment into the country but we will not allow them to be our masters. This is what we will be discussing in our conference meetings, which start tomorrow.

“Each one of us must feel proud to be a Zimbabwean, feel proud to have a role in ensuring that our past does not destroy the revolution.”

The Government has already started the indigenisation programmes in the country through the Community Share Ownership Scheme Trust (CSOS/T), a countrywide initiative meant to spearhead development and empower rural communities by giving them a 10 percent stake in all businesses that exploit natural resources in their respective areas.

So far, three initiatives have been launched.

These are Unki Mine, which presented a US$10 million cheque to the community and a certificate for the 10 percent stake in its mines, Zimplats, which launched the Mhondoro, Chegutu and Zvimba CSOS/T in October and Schweppes, which launched the Employee and Management Share Ownership Trust in Harare last week. Under the Trust, workers own 51 percent of the company while Delta, the parent company retains 49 percent.

President Mugabe also urged Zimbabweans to work together and remain united in the spirit of the 1987 Unity Accord signed between PF-Zapu and Zanu.

He said Zimbabwe was a country with diverse tribes and urged people to respect each other and desist from perpetrating divisions.

He said different tribes had a common ideology and unity of purpose when they fought during the liberation struggle.

“The struggle we fought was a Zimbabwean struggle. We were all equal and we had a common denominator. This common denominator refuses that one tribe should dominate others,” said President Mugabe.

He, however, said belonging to a tribe and celebrating one’s cultural identity was in itself healthy as it demonstrated the diversity of the people in the country.

“What they do in Plumtree, in Kezi or in Beitbridge is their culture. Let us bring that diversity together. We should remain united today and tomorrow. Sisonke, simunye.”

President Mugabe took the huge crowd attending his photographic exhibition down memory lane as he narrated his history and how he assumed the leadership of the party and the Government.

He said he has learnt that leadership was all about putting people first and listening to their wishes.

“Pictures are necessary as well as our deeds of the past but the present must be taken seriously. The youth should always know that as the leaders we always regarded the people’s interests.

“No one should think he is the authority or kingmaker. Our revolution should give us a sense of humility. As a leader you must obey the people and be part of the people. The people, the people, the people. We considered the land issue as paramount during the Lancaster House Conference and that is why we had a deadlock in our initial talks until the whites agreed to give us back the land. That is what we fought for,” said President Mugabe.

He said the exhibition has reminded him of his past years and commended the Friends of Joshua Trust for organising the event, which he described as an overwhelming presentation.

President Mugabe urged the youths to do more research about the history of the country and reflect the truth about the country’s revolutionary path.

DAMASCUS, – The Syrian Communist Party (Unified) on Wednesday denounced the United States’ prompting armed groups to continue committing murders and not surrender their weapons after the amnesty announced by the government for those who turn in their weapons to the Syria authorities as long as they haven’t committed murder.

In a statement, the party said that the inflammatory US stance reaffirms the US administration’s involvement in the events taking place in Syria.

The statement also underlined the importance of the agreement between the Syrian government and the Arab initiative, saying that this inspired optimism among Syrians since it allows for adopting dialogue a political solution and restoring stability and calm to areas witnessing violence.

The party affirmed that the biggest hurdle before the implementation of the agreement is the stances of the armed group that reject dialogue entirely and the opposition abroad which promotes foreign interference, while Syrian national opposition welcomed the idea of dialogue.

The statement concluded by affirming that the party and the Syrian people support any Arab effort that stops bloodshed and consecrates the principle of national dialogue, affirming that the Syrian people will confront any attempt at foreign interference in Syria’s internal affairs.

H. Sabbagh

Public Statement from The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

We hear from the Colombian oligarchy and its generals the official announcement of the death of comrade and commander Alfonso Cano. Their guffaws and enthusiastic toasts still resound. All of the voices of the Establishment agree that this means the end of the guerrilla struggle in Colombia.

The only reality that symbolizes the death in combat of comrade Alfonso Cano, is the immortal strength of the Colombian people, who would rather die than live on their knees begging. The story of the struggles of this people is full of martyrs, women and men who never let their arm be twisted in the pursuit of equality and justice.

This will be neither the first time that the oppressed and exploited in Colombia are mourning one of its greatest leaders, nor the first they replace this mourning with the courage and absolute conviction of victory. Peace in Colombia will not be born from any guerrilla demobilization, but from the abolition of the causes that give rise to the uprising. There is a policy laid out and that is the one that shall continue.

Comrade and Commander Alfonso Cano has died. He has fallen most fervently convinced of the need for a political solution and for peace. Long live the memory of commander Alfonso Cano!

Original Text, in Spanish:

Declaración pública.

Escuchamos de la oligarquía colombiana y sus generales el anuncio oficial de la muerte del Camarada y Comandante Alfonso Cano. Resuenan aún sus alegres carcajadas y sus brindis de entusiasmo. Todas las voces del Establecimiento coinciden en que ello significa el final de la lucha guerrillera en Colombia.

La única realidad que simboliza la caída en combate del camarada Alfonso Cano, es la inmortal resistencia del pueblo colombiano, que prefiere morir antes que vivir de rodillas mendigando. La historia de las luchas de este pueblo está repleta de mártires, de mujeres y de hombres que jamás dieron su brazo a torcer en la búsqueda de la igualdad y la justicia.

No será esta la primera vez que los oprimidos y explotados de Colombia lloran a uno de sus grandes dirigentes. Ni tampoco la primera en que lo reemplazarán con el coraje y la convicción absoluta en la victoria. La paz en Colombia no nacerá de ninguna desmovilización guerrillera, sino de la abolición definitiva de las causas que dan nacimiento al alzamiento.Hay una politica trazada y esa es la que se continuará.

Ha muerto el Camarada y Comandante Alfonso Cano. ha caido el mas ferviente convencido de la necesidad de la solución política y la paz. ¡viva la memoria del comandante Alfonso Cano!

[Source: International Business Times]

BOGOTA, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) — The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) said Saturday that despite the death of its top leader Alfonso Cano it would continue its guerrilla struggle and not give in to the government’s demand to surrender its weapons.

In a brief statement posted on the website of the New Colombia News Agency, the guerrilla group said that “the only reality that symbolizes the death in combat of comrade Alfonso Cano is the immortal strength of the Colombian people.”

Guillermo Leon Saenz, known within rebel ranks as “Alfonso Cano,” was killed Friday in a clash with government troops in the jungle near Suarez city in southwestern Cauca province. Two other rebels were also killed.

FARC is Colombia’s largest rebel group and has been at war with the government since its establishment in 1964. FARC’s leaders declined Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s offer to hand over their weapons and return to civilian life.

“Peace in Colombia will not be born in any guerrilla demobilization, but in the abolition of the causes that give rise to the uprising,” said the statement, which closed with a tribute to Cano.

The statement did not name Cano’s successor. According to intelligence information, the two most likely candidates are Luciano Marin, also known as “Ivan Marquez,” and Rodrigo Londono, also known as “Timoleon Jimenez.”

Cano, 63, became the leader of the illegal armed organization in 2008 after the death of FARC’s commander and founder Pedro Nel Marin.

Pyongyang, October 18 (KCNA) — The working masses’ struggle against capitalism was staged all at once across the world on Oct. 15 and 16. This was the biggest organized one ever in history of capitalism spanning more than 300 years.

Taking part in it were millions of people from all walks of life in more than 1 500 cities in 80 odd countries.

This struggle was erupted at Wall Street in Manhattan of New York in the United States, the heart of the capitalist economy and a synonym for monopolistic capital on Sept. 17. Under the slogan of “Occupy Wall Street!” dozens of protestors set up tents outside a stock exchange in New York to go into an action of protest. This turned in a twinkle to a chain movement across the U.S. including Washington, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Occupy Wall St movement was an eruption of the exploited classes’ pent-up wrath at the exploiters. It was also an expression of the will to remove the stronghold of capitalism as a whole which brings only exploitation, oppression, unemployment and poverty to the popular masses. In San Diego, California, a man in his forties jumped down from a high-rise building to death to protest against the corrupt society where the rich get ever richer and the poor get ever poorer.

Young Americans formed a mainstream of the ranks of demonstrators at first. But they were joined by people from all walks of life who varied in their ages including day laborers, poor and unemployed Americans as well as employees of companies and housewives.

Their actions included marches, sit-in strikes, occupation of bridges and various other forms of protests and non-stop protests at night.

The protesters are now expanding their ranks after setting forth such slogans clearer in nature as “equality, democracy and revolution”.

Ruling quarters in the U.S. are crying in distress that the “class struggle has been launched.” The authorities have arrested and cracked down upon the demonstrators with mobilization of huge armed police to soothe over the class contradiction but failed to check the spread of the struggle.

The U.S. chief executive formally recognized that this is a manifestation of feeling of frustration toward the U.S. society.

The American protestors set October 15 as “day of international movement”, calling on the working people the world over to respond to it.

In response to this call anti-capitalist demos took place all at once in Britain, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, Australia, Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, etc. on October 15 and 16.

The protestors contended that the blame for the capitalist economic crisis is on the greedy financial capital and corrupt politicians. They demanded final end to poverty and economic inequality, chanting such slogans as “Reject capitalism!” and “Give us jobs!”

In south Korea more than 400 civic and public organizations and workers’ organizations launched protest, chanting “Occupy Seoul!”

These unprecedented actions of the working masses in capitalist countries are attributable to the extremely acute socio-class contradictions created after the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007.

Various relief measures taken by the Western countries after the financial crisis eruption were, in essence, for saving the huge monopolistic capitals on the maw of bankruptcy. Those steps deepened concentration of capital only on big monopolistic enterprises while bringing the popular masses’ life to worse phase.

Suffering biggest are working masses laid off due to the wholesale dismissal measure taken by the business side to make up for the loss.

401 000 people were registered as unemployed in the U.S. for first one week in October. The number of the unemployed reached 22 785 000 in EU countries in August.

The unemployment is bound to lead to the increase of the poor.

The number of people under poverty stood at 46.2 million last year, an increase of 2.6 million from the year before. The income of the U.S. families showed nearly 10 % decrease for the past four years. Economists estimate that the living conditions of Americans are the worst in scores of years and the economic slowdown has not stopped yet.

About 80 million people are living under the poverty line in EU countries.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner, voicing his support for the protest sweeping the capitalist world, clarified that the society is covering the losses caused by the avarice of financial capitalists while a few bankers are raking in the profits.

Occupy Boston march, Oct. 10. (Fight Back! News/Staff)

Across the country, the movement sparked by Occupy Wall Street has caught fire. This movement, identified by the slogan, “We are the 99%” targets the 1% of rich and powerful who are running the country for their interests and profit, at the expense of the rest of us who face high unemployment, lower wages, soaring tuition costs, home foreclosures and lack of affordable health insurance. In addition, servants of Wall Street are pushing to dismantle Social Security and Medicare and to raise taxes on the poor while cutting taxes even more on the rich. They say that they have no money, but are sending bombers and troops to more and more countries, so that military spending is now the single largest expense of the federal government, costing more than $800 billion a year.

So who are the 1%? The movement has targeted Wall Street, and indeed, before the recession and financial crisis, the financial industry was making 40% of profits of big corporations. But while the pain inflicted by Wall Street on the housing market (while getting bailed out itself) is historic, corporations across the board have shifted jobs to other countries (cutting some 4 million jobs in the United States while creating 3 million in other countries) and amassed some $2 trillion dollars in profits that they are not spending.

While there are millions of small businesses that are owned and operated by a single person, these small businesses only do about 5% of all sales in the economy. On the other hand, corporations make up only 10% of all businesses but do more than three-quarters of all sales. An even smaller group of less than 1000 big corporations with sales of more than $2.5 billion each make up half of all sales in the economy. The domination of the economy by a small number of giant for-profit corporations is what is called “monopoly capitalism.“

The most common yardstick of one’s position in the economy is income. The U.S. Census Bureau, the government agency in charge of collecting statistics, does not report much on people with very high incomes. They do say that households making more than $250,000 in income make up 2.1% of all households, but this is a much broader group than the top 1%.The Internal Revenue Service did report that the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers had an Adjusted Gross Income of $380,000 in 2010. So one way to define the top 1% would be those making more than $400,000.

But there are problems with using income to define the top 1%. For example, many professional football players make more than $400,000 a year. But on average, they only play three and a half seasons, so their high incomes are temporary. In addition, studies show that the average pro football player only lives 52 years, some 25 years less than the average American male. So they are making a sacrifice that the real rich and powerful don’t make. In contrast, oil billionaire John Rockefeller lived to be 98 and billionaire investor Warren Buffett is still going strong at 81. Last, and perhaps most importantly, last year the football owners locked out the players in a dispute over pay and working conditions, showing the power of the wealthy individuals who own the teams over their highly paid employees.

A better measure of economic power is wealth. Wealth can be more long-lasting than income, and can be passed from parents to children, unlike income. Finally, wealth gives economic power and control, as opposed to income, which allows one to buy more, but doesn’t give one economic power. Those whose wealth controls the big corporations who dominate the economy are the“monopoly capitalists.”

According to the IRS estimates based on estate taxes, there were about 2.2 million people, or about 1% of the adult population, whose net worth was $1.5 million or more in 2004. Net worth is a measure of wealth that takes a person’s total assets (home, real estate, stock, bonds, businesses, retirement savings, etc.) and subtracts all debts (mortgages, credit card, etc.). This top 1% owned almost $3.3 trillion in stocks, or more than half of the $6 trillion in stock owned by households that year. This means that the top 1% controlled the big corporations that dominate the economy.

An earlier study by economist Edward Wolff, based on statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank’s “Survey of Consumer Finances,” showed that the top 1% owned 47% of the net financial wealth (stocks, bonds, and businesses but not cars and home equity) in 1998. Wolff found that the concentration of wealth was increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, hand in hand with the increasing concentration of income as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

The rich not only control the corporations, but also the government. Over 40% of congress people, a majority of senators (54 out of 100), and three of the last four presidents were millionaires (and the only one who wasn’t, Bill Clinton, is a millionaire now), far more than the 4 to 5% of households with net worth of more than a million dollars estimated by Wolff. In addition, campaign contributions from the rich and corporate elite, combined with the influence of lobbyists who work for them, make sure that only those who serve the elite can be elected to high political office.

The electoral system as a whole is stacked against working people. Both major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are parties of the rich. The Occupy Wall Street movement, by breaking away from the confines of our two-party political system and appealing directly to the people, offers real hope for a mass movement that can beat back the right-wing and corporate attacks on our jobs, homes, schools and social programs.

Read more Fight Back! coverage of Occupy Wall street and follow @fightbacknews for live updates from #OccupyWallStreet protests around the country.

Protestors shout slogans during a rally outside Houston's City Hall Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Dallas, Houston and Austin on Thursday as cities around Texas joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations demanding an end to corruption in politics and business. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

The following editorial is from Fight Back! News: 

On Sept. 30, the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) publicly stated that the United States economy was tipping into a new recession. This adds to the growing evidence of a serious slowdown in the U.S. economy, including the zero job growth and falling personal income in August as well as falling prices and sales of homes in August.

Republican presidential candidates have taken the free market view that the government is to blame for economic instability and have called for, for example, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a ‘job-killer.’ Unfortunately Democratic politicians from President Obama to California Governor Brown have also adopted this view of sacrificing the health and welfare of people in the interests of corporate profits.

These right-wing, free market views even go as far as trying to blame the boom and bust in housing prices on government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie. In fact, the big boom in housing was driven by Wall Street and big banks that pushed risky and exotic mortgages from 2003 to 2007 while pushing Fannie and Freddie to the sidelines. The right wing also tries to put blame for the housing crisis on federal government efforts to increase homeownership among African Americans and other oppressed nationalities under the Democratic Clinton administration, when the big boom and bust came under Republican George Bush.

Backers of the free market view are calling for more austerity. Republican presidential candidates complain that the poor, working parents and seniors on Social Security often pay no income tax, while ignoring the payroll and sales taxes that lower income folks pay. Free marketers claim that extending unemployment insurance benefits causes unemployment by reducing people’s interest in finding a job, ignoring the fact that there are almost four people looking for a job for every job opening. They have also proposed at different times to do away with Social Security and Medicare and turning people’s retirement funds over to Wall Street and health care to private insurance companies.

Keynesian economists such as Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman have argued that these policies of austerity are cruel and that the federal government should have spent even more, as the $800 billion economic stimulus under Obama barely offset the spending cuts and tax increases by state and local government, adding little stimulus to the economy. They correctly point out that the large U.S. government budget deficits have not increased interest rates, as the interest rate on long-term government bonds have dropped to the lowest levels in 70 years.

But the example of Japan shows that even massive government spending can fail to revive an economy. In the early 1990s the Japanese economy suffered a triple whammy of recession, a stock market crash and a bursting real estate bubble. The Japanese government borrowed and spent huge amounts, driving Japanese government debt from the lowest among the wealthier nations to the highest – it is now more than twice the size of the Japanese economy (in contrast, the U.S. government’s debt is still smaller than our economic production as measured by GDP). Nevertheless, the Japanese economy has remained in the doldrums, with only a strong export sector boosting the economy.

Marxist economics sees recession as neither caused by the government nor as curable by government spending. Rather, recessions are part and parcel of a capitalist economy where profit is the motive force. Businesses cut workers’ pay and benefits to increase their profits. But this limits their workers’ ability to buy back what they create. At the same time, these profits are reinvested in developing new technologies and expanding production. This clash – between limited ability to buy and growing ability to produce – leads to periodic crisis of overproduction, or what are called recessions.

Over the last 30 years a vast expansion of debt, especially credit cards and mortgages, has allowed workers to buy more and more despite having stagnant wages. At the same time it has been a profitable investment for capital that has had a hard time finding enough productive investments to turn a profit. But this pile of debt began to collapse with the financial crisis triggered by the collapse of the Wall Street investment bank three years ago.

Without more and more debt to stimulate the economy, it should be no surprise that the recovery from the last recession has been so weak. More than two years after the official end of the last recession, there are almost 7 million fewer jobs than before the recession started and many parts of the country are still mired in depression. More frequent recessions and quite likely worse ones are in the near future, as governments lose their will to bail out the economy and austerity measures cut spending.

The ultimate solution is that we need socialism, which includes an economy based on people’s needs, not profit. But in the meantime we also need to build a mass movement to defend the unions and social programs that have helped people raise their standard of living. Instead of cutting Medicare, we need a national health insurance program for all. Instead of cutting Social Security, we need to restore Social Security taxes on higher income individuals. Instead of closing schools and raising tuition at public colleges, the U.S. must get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Carlos Montes

The following statement is from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and is being reposted here Fight Back! News: 

On Sept. 24, 2010 the FBI launched a series of coordinated raids against anti-war and international solidarity activists in the Midwest. More than 70 agents of the FBI, ATF and Joint Terrorism Task Force were involved. Also raided that day was the office of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee. In concert with the raids, the FBI made attempts to intimidate activists in California, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

That day, the authorities started the process of serving subpoenas for activists to appear in front of a Chicago-based Grand Jury. Subpoenas mounted in the days and months following – until a total of 23 activists were ordered to appear in front of the grand jury witch hunt headed by U.S Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Simultaneously, more FBI ‘visits’ took place in the Midwest and Southwest.

In November and December 2010, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Illinois made threats against three anti-war activists from the Twin Cities, telling them in no uncertain terms: Cooperate with the prosecution – or else.

Then on May 17, 2011 the attack was extended to veteran Chicano leader Carlos Montes, whose home was raided by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. The raid was an initiative of the FBI, who tried to question Montes about Freedom Road Socialist Organization. He is now facing up to 18 years in jail on a false pretext of firearm charges.

All of the above is well known to those who have followed this case, and much of it has been covered, at times extensively, in the national and international press. That said, it is important to recall just how large this assault has been to date, if we are to understand the gravity of the situation in the future.

Get ready for more storms ahead

While the future is unwritten, every progressive person should understand there is a real danger of more attacks in the coming period. The U.S. Attorney Office in Chicago has told lawyers for the activists to expect multiple indictments of multiple people. A number of the activists have had their passports seized. Very little of the property that was taken away on Sept. 24 has been returned.

For two years before the raids, an undercover law enforcement officer going by the name “Karen Sullivan” invested thousands of hours into spying on, and lying about, those targeted in this investigation.

The violent attack on the home of Carlos Montes and the ongoing attempt to put him in prison underscore the need to take the government’s threats seriously.

A powerful resistance

The repression is one side of the coin. The other is the powerful response.

Even while the Sept. 24 raids were taking place, a strong, broad and multifaceted pushback was underway. Activists whose homes were still full of FBI agents gave interviews to the media. Within hours, press conferences and demonstrations were underway to demand, “Hands off anti-war and international solidarity activists.” In the days following the raids more than 60 demonstrations took place around the county. In past year, there were waves of protests, nationally and internationally, at every important juncture in the case – of special importance are the actions responding to the attempt to jail Carlos Montes.

The foundation of this response resides in this fact: In the face of immense pressure and real danger, not one of the activists who was called to grand jury agreed to go. And no one cooperated with the FBI. The lesson is simple; those who stand up and do the right thing will find support.

Likewise the approach of uniting all who can be united was and is vital in building a broad defense. As it is, thousands of people in the anti-war, Palestine and Latin America solidarity, and other progressive movements have spoken out against this repression. So have trade unions, civil rights organizations and some members of congress. More than 50 communist and workers parties from Cuba to Democratic Korea have condemned these attacks.

Anyone who holds that people have the right to organize, speak out and to from political associations has a place in this movement to defend everyone’s democratic rights.

A clear agenda

It’s clear that that the FBI, the misnamed U.S. ‘Justice Department’ and the forces that pull their strings have an agenda.

Since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, a wave of repression has been unleashed on Arab and Muslim people in this country. This is an attempt to extend that attack. It is aimed at people who stand in solidarity with Palestine, including some who are Palestinian Americans.

It is an attempt to criminalize international solidarity. From Palestine to Colombia, people want to be free of oppression. It is a great thing that there are people in the United States who support these struggles. The U.S. government is treating solidarity as if it were a crime, while supporting death squad governments like Colombia. The U.S. military kills on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and many other countries. Yet our rulers have the nerve to turn around and say those who fight for freedom and independence are ‘terrorists.’ They are incapable of telling the truth; they make a practice of confounding right and wrong.

Another element is the anti-communist character of this attack, which takes aim at Freedom Road Socialist Organization. FBI documents discovered in a raided home in May 2011 read like something written by Joe McCarthy; “Who do you know? What do you talk about? Where do you hold meetings? Tell us about steps taken to overthrow the government.” It is like the calendar has been turned back 60 years.

We in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) have long worked to build the anti-war and international solidarity movements. We are proud of the work we have done to stand with the people of Colombia, Palestine, the Philippines and other countries who are fighting to free themselves from U.S. domination. It is no surprise that among the activists who were raided, subpoenaed and questioned, there were members of the FRSO who are longtime anti-war and international solidarity activists, as well as others who are active in the labor movement and the oppressed nationality communities.

Seize the time

The time is now to defeat those who want to jail activists, organizers and leaders of the people’s struggle who are standing up for what is just.

A sense of urgency is needed. All of those targeted have made real contributions to making this world a better place to live. They have done nothing wrong.

Carlos Montes is facing a very long time in prison. He is 64 years old and has devoted the whole of his life to the liberation of the Chicano people and working and oppressed people everywhere. Every effort must be made to keep him free.

The months ahead are critical. The enemies of freedom are strong. We need to be stronger. Let’s lift our voices to demand an end to the repression. The time has come to fight back!

The following editorial is from Fight Back! News: 

The U.S. economy continues to stagnate with almost no economic growth or job creation more than three years after the great financial crisis of 2008 and more than two years after the recession officially ended in 2009. The official unemployment rate is still over 9% nationally, and millions of workers who have stopped looking for work are not included in this count. Even worse, the Obama administration projects unemployment to stay above 8% for all of 2012, which would be four years of near double-digit unemployment.

The U.S. is not the first to face economic stagnation. In the 1980s, European unemployment rates were also near double-digit levels. U.S. economists blamed this on the European social-welfare state, with universal health insurance and unemployment insurance, early retirement and long paid maternity leaves. But here in the United States more than 50 million people have no health insurance at all, millions of unemployed have no benefits, the retirement age is rising and there is no mandatory paid maternity leave. Still, the U.S. economy stagnates.

In the 1990s, the Japanese economy entered what is now 20 years of stagnation, marked by deflation or falling prices. Deflation can poison an economy as prices and incomes fall, making it harder to pay off mortgages and other debts. As more and more loans go bad, the economy is dragged down even more. Again, U.S. economists blamed the Japanese Central Bank for not printing enough money to prevent deflation and stagnation. Here in the United States, the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, has printed more than a trillion and a half dollars over the last three years, yet was able to stop the deflation in 2009. But still the U.S. economy stagnates.

The problem here in the United States (as well as Europe and Japan, which also have economies that are going from bad to worse) is not the limited social safety net or central bank policy. The problem is that our monopoly capitalist economy, dominated by a smaller and smaller number of gigantic corporation and Wall Street financial institutions, is dedicated to increasing profits at all costs. Over the last two years corporate profits have soared to record levels, while at the same time there are 7 million fewer people working than when the recession began in late 2007. These gigantic profits are not reinvested to create more jobs, but rather are flowing to the financial casino known as Wall Street for massive speculation.

Republicans are trying to use the continuing economic stagnation to try to eliminate what is left of the U.S. safety net. In Congress, Republicans have proposed to end Medicare and replace it with more expensive private health insurance. The leading Republican presidential candidate, Texas Governor Rick Perry, is attacking Social Security and wants retirees to depend on Wall Street. In states such as Wisconsin, Republicans have led the charge to chop pay, retirement, and collective bargaining rights of teachers and other government workers. They are also leading efforts in Arizona, Georgia and other states to scapegoat immigrants and pass racist laws targeting Chicanos and Latinos. These efforts are backed by the Koch oil billionaires and others who want corporations to be able to run amuck over working people and the environment.

The Democrats also have close ties with Wall Street, and spearheaded the bailout of big banks and corporations during the financial crisis. But to bring along their supporters among working people, African Americans, and other oppressed nationality communities, the Democrats have promoted programs that have been at best too little and too late and at worst crumbs compared to the hundreds of billions spent on corporate bailouts. While millions of home owners have been foreclosed and millions more have gone underwater – with their prices falling below their mortgages – the Obama Home Ownership Modification Program (HAMP) has only helped 63,000 severely underwater homeowners.

The latest Obama proposal for payroll tax cuts and extending unemployment insurance could add 2 million jobs if all of it is passed (there is almost zero chance of this happening with the Republican controlled Congress). With the labor force down by 7 million jobs since the recession started, this is still not enough to restore the economy to full employment.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats support continuing costly wars abroad. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost over a trillion dollars and counting, while the U.S. military is attacking Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen with bombs and drones. Trillions more have been spent on military bases, naval fleets and nuclear weapons so the United States is spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military. In the meantime college tuition is up, K-12 teachers are being laid off, roads and bridges are crumbling and even disaster relief is being questioned in Congress.

Both the Republicans and Democrats have committed themselves to cutting the federal budget deficit. But this is not going to help the economy; just look at what is happening in Europe where efforts by countries to cut spending and budget deficits are just leading to more and more unemployment and suffering by working people.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will restore the economy to health. The Republican austerity proposals will only make the economy worse and deepen the suffering of working people. The Democratic practice of big bailouts for banks and corporate America combined with big announcements of programs to help working people that turn out to be little more than the status quo only serve to make the rich richer while trying to keep the poor and working people quiet.

Only a grassroots movement to fight back against austerity and for real relief for working people can protect our livelihoods and communities. We need a real government jobs programs that can put millions of unemployed to work like the WPA in the 1930s. We need to allow homeowners to reduce their mortgages and keep their homes through bankruptcy courts. We need to defend and expand Medicare, to provide universal health insurance for all and eliminate costly private health insurance. We need to defend Social Security and pensions so that working people can retire with peace of mind. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats will do the job if left in the clutches of Wall Street and billionaires. Only a massive fight back can force Congress and the administration to provide the jobs, education and services that working people need.

Now that ten years are passed since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, we would do well to look back and take note of some of the causes and consequences. We need to sum up and draw lessons. Immediately following the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, the Bush administration began cynically manipulating events to launch an expansive and ongoing war on the peoples of the world and an escalating campaign of repression here at home under the guise of a ‘war on terror.’ This two-pronged approach to reasserting the power of the U.S. empire at the expense of working and oppressed people is continuing, and in some ways accelerating under the Obama administration.

On the heels of the attacks on 9/11, the U.S. launched its criminal war in Afghanistan in October with the stated purpose of hunting down Osama Bin Laden. They launched their bombing campaign in the face of Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s expressed willingness to cooperate in capturing Bin Laden. Come October 2011, this war will have dragged on for a decade, costing nearly $500 billion and the lives of 1670 U.S. troops, with tens of thousands of Afghans killed and seriously injured.

The illegal war in Iraq was instigated by Bush’s lies regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In the political climate following 9/11, the corporate media supported and parroted whatever the White House and Pentagon said. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq cost $800 billion, the lives of 1.4 million Iraqis, more than 4000 U.S. troops dead and more than 100,000 wounded. It is noteworthy that more than 300 times as many deaths occurred in these two wars than in the 9/11 attacks. Likewise, since 9/11, under the guise of the ‘war on terror,’ the U.S. has expanded wars and interventions in Colombia, the Philippines, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Sudan and elsewhere.

Most recently, the U.S./NATO attacked Libya, seeking to establish a firm foothold in North Africa. All of these wars and interventions are about nothing more than strengthening the power of U.S. imperialism and of lining the pockets of the U.S. ruling class with the spoils of war in the form of oil and other natural resources. For the people of these countries, it means war, occupation and repression, along with the complete violation of their national sovereignty.

All the while, the people of the world, from Afghanistan and Libya, to Colombia and the Philippines continue to fight for self-determination and national liberation. We in Freedom Road Socialist Organization, along with progressive people everywhere, support them with the knowledge that our struggles are linked. The U.S. ruling class, oppressor of nations all over the world, likewise stands on the backs of working and oppressed people here. While the economic depression creates havoc at home for working people, the rich and powerful act as war criminals overseas.

The U.S. government was quick to shift public opinion in its favor following the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush’s “with us or against us” mentality left no room for sane discussion in the mainstream media. This fueled the fire for the notorious Patriot Acts that were quickly pushed through as part of the package deal of repression and war. As a result, an era of state terror against Arabs and Muslims began. Tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims were subject to ‘special registration,’ put on no-fly lists, placed under surveillance and persecuted by the U.S.’s racist response to 9/11.

Not long after, it became clear that the web of domestic spying was being widened to include the progressive and anti-war communities generally. We understand this particularly well since the law enforcement officer “Karen Sullivan” infiltrated Freedom Road Socialist Organization, along with other groups we are active in, in the build up to the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota. This infiltration led to the FBI raids on the homes and offices of 11 activists on Sept. 24, 2010, subpoenaing them to testify in a grand jury investigation concerning alleged “material support for terrorism.” Today, a total of 24 activists are targets of the investigation, with the threat of indictments looming.

U.S. imperialism is in decline, and the rich and powerful are growing more desperate by the day. As we said in our 2010 Main Political Report, “The ‘war on terror’ launched by the Bush administration was a dramatic attempt by the rulers of the United States to counteract the long running decline of Wall Street’s empire, by using military means. It ended in a series of defeat and stalemates, causing the phrase ‘war on terror’ to be quietly dropped from the Pentagon’s lexicon. The result is that on every continent, the U.S. finds itself struggling to find the methods and forms to maintain its domination, in the context of a declining ability to do so.”

The tragedy of 9/11 happened as a direct consequence of U.S. imperialist policy around the world. As long as these policies, which are part and parcel to the capitalist system itself, are allowed to continue, we will see further tragedy. The U.S. government repression, resulting from the cynical manipulation of this tragedy, has come down on FRSO and our friends because we have steadfastly resisted the ongoing wars and repression, both here and around the world. Likewise people around the world are continuing to fight back against the forces of empire. Despite all of the obstacles that face us in the days, months and years to come, we will continue to resist with all our might until, through mass struggle, a new era of peace, justice and equality is won.

The following editorial is from Fight Back! News: 

As the US/NATO-led rebel forces assault the Libyan capital of Tripoli, it is important for antiwar and progressive forces to recognize a few key points. The development of events since the popular North African revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt led to some divisions among progressive forces as the imperialist countries maneuvered to take control of the situation and develop contradictions in North Africa in their favor. In Libya the U.S., France, the U.K., and Italy joined together to take advantage of the discontent among certain sections of the Libyan people, and thereby develop an armed rebel movement to topple the Gaddafi government. This criminal action taken by US and NATO forces should be condemned by all people of conscience. The success of the NATO-led rebels would certainly mean an end to an independent Libya.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization pointed out some of the contradictions at work in a statement on March 17, the day of the UN Security Council vote to intervene in Libya: “Since day one of the crisis in Libya, the corporate media has been in motion, preparing public opinion for war with Libya. Likewise, since the beginning of the crisis, the western, imperialist powers have been maneuvering militarily to take advantage of the situation. Meanwhile, it is clear that the rebels in Libya are not of one mind. Some of their leaders are tied to the old CIA-funded National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which would like to see Libya’s oil industry completely privatized, meaning an end to the current free health care and free education programs enjoyed by the Libyan people. Some are monarchists and others who wish to turn back the clock on Libyan social progress. Undoubtedly, war with Libya will mean the most reactionary forces among the rebels coming to power if Gaddafi’s government is defeated by the guns and bombs of the west.” We are now seeing this nightmare approaching reality.

The reasons behind this war are both economic and geostrategic. On the one hand, the Western powers wish to divide among themselves Libya’s vast oil wealth, the greatest in Africa. “We don’t have a problem with Western countries like the Italians, French and UK companies. But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil,” Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager at Libyan rebel oil firm AGOCO, told Reuters. The National Transitional Council led by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil has likewise been clear that it wants very much to align itself with the U.S. and the other Western powers. On the other hand, the Western powers want to strengthen their dominance in the region, which is threatened by the political unrest that has swept North Africa and the Middle East since the beginning of the “Arab Spring”. If US/NATO forces are successful in Libya, they will be in a much better position step up their attempts to topple the government of Syria.

To give cover to this war of aggression and domination, they are cynically manipulating the political discontent of a section of the Libyan people, and utilizing bought and paid for puppets. And yet despite the intense attacks, including thousands of bombing raids, drone attacks, commando operations, and global economic sanctions, the patriotic people alongside Gaddafi’s government have resisted heroically and will certainly continue to do so. That they have held on for as long as they have is a tribute to the Libyans’ will to fight, their tenacity in the face of adversity, and the real commitment to maintaining national independence.

This conflict has now sharpened to the utmost degree, and at this point it must be clear that there are but two sides. On one side stand the forces of colonial domination, represented by all the might of the great powers–the U.S., the U.K, France and Italy. On the other side stands all who steadfastly oppose the forces of Empire. Despite whatever strengths of weaknesses the patriotic forces in Libya may have, progressive people everywhere should stand on the side of an independent Libya, for self-determination and against national oppression and domination.

In the early morning of 5 June 2011, after a long and lingering illness, Ludo Martens, former president of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, passed away.

Together with Paul Goossens and Walter De Bock, Ludo Martens was one of the better known student leaders of May 1968 in Belgium. He translated the worldwide progressive current at the universities into the foundation of the Student Trade Union Movement (SVB), developed solidarity with the equal rights movement of black people in the United States, resisted narrow nationalism and exerted efforts to enhance the movement of solidarity between students and workers.

In 1979, Ludo Martens was instrumental in founding the Workers’ Party of Belgium (WPB), born from the merger between the student movement and the workers’ movement in the turbulent 1970s. Ludo Martens helped to put the principle of « serve the people » into practice by actively stimulating Kris Merckx in setting up Medicine for the People. Today’s eleven people’s clinics of Medicine for the People, providing free health care to more than 25,000 patients, remain one of the WPB’s major achievements. Today, the WPB counts 4,500 members and has chapters in 30 cities and 120 workplaces all over Belgium.

Ludo Martens led the WPB until 1999. The last decade of his life he was mainly active in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With his writings about Congolese liberation fighters Patrice Lumumba, Pierre Mulele and Leonie Abo he wanted to support the progressive movement in Congo. Returning history to those who made it, as he would put it.

Today however, unfortunately, we have to return history itself to Ludo. Ludo Martens is survived by two children. On Sunday morning 26 June, a simple commemoration will take place in Brussels.

For a more complete overview of Ludo Martens’ life and work, read more here (in French).

Building A Communist Party in the United States, 2011

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization Faces U.S. State Repression

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is currently facing a campaign of repression by the United States government.  On September 24, 2010, under orders from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided homes and activist offices in Chicago, Illinois, and Minneapolis, Minnesota.  14 anti-war and international solidarity activists, including two in Michigan, were subpoenaed to appear at a secretive Grand Jury investigation.  Nine more Palestine solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear on January 25, 2011, bringing the total to 23.  The 23 refuse to appear at the Grand Jury inquisition where U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald claims to investigate “material support for terrorism”, focused on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).  In actuality, the FRSO is the target of political repression by the U.S. government.  Comrades are facing indictments, a trial, and possibly Federal prison.  The main issues are free speech and the right to organize, recently narrowed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project case.  The trial will center around the testimony of a Federal Agent who infiltrated the mass groups and the FRSO.

The international solidarity activists and the FRSO have done nothing wrong and refuse to be criminalized.  Threatened with fifteen-year and longer prison terms, the FRSO is fighting back by organizing a broad front opposed to war and political repression.  In the face of U.S. government repression, the FRSO is attempting to unify in struggle all the forces, especially Arabs and Muslims, who are under attack from the U.S. legal system and repressive apparatus.  While defense work is the main mass activity of the FRSO, the repression is bringing significant interest to our politics and organization, and providing new opportunities for party building.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization is an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist group founded in 1985.  As reported in our newspaper Fight Back! and at www.FRSO.org, the members of FRSO are very active in movements fighting for justice–particularly in labor, oppressed nationality, anti-war and anti-imperialist, and student movements.  Our strategy for revolution is to form an alliance of the workers and oppressed nationalities movements, especially the African-American and Chicano national movements, led by a communist party to seize state power.  We want the working class and its allies to rule society instead of the small class of wealthy elites.  Our central task is to build a new Communist Party.

The FRSO 6^th Congress

Six months prior to the FBI raids and Grand Jury repression, the FRSO held its 6^th Congress, our most successful ever.  We assessed that in the previous five years growth was faster than at any time since the group was founded.  While most new recruits are students, some are workers.  Prior to the raids, spirits were high and cadres were excited about recruiting to the FRSO and other aspects of party building.

In the context of the great economic crisis, the FRSO 6^th Congress decided it was important to focus on fusion–the unity of the Marxist party and the working class movement.  With the recruitment of many students, our policy is for them to concentrate in working class jobs, to transform their class and participate directly in the class struggle.  Like other imperialist countries, the American communist movement is very swayed by petite-bourgeois and bourgeois ideology.  Again and again, revisionism raises its ugly head.  Disguised as “new thinking” or “fresh ideas”, the corruption of scientific socialism degenerates into reformism, and eventually into counter-revolutionary activity.  Historically the Communist Party in the U.S. made a temporary comeback from the revisionist ideas known as Browderism and “American Exceptionalism”, only to take the path of revisionism in the late 1950’s again.  As a new revolutionary movement swept the U.S. in the 1960’s and 1970’s, there was renewed interest in Marxism-Leninism and the New Communist Movement arose.  In the 1980’s, as the period of struggle receded, many groups fractured, folded, or turned to reformism and Social Democracy.

Through the 1990’s, Marxist-Leninists in the FRSO argued polemics against the so-called “Left Refoundationism”, an Americanized Euro-communism.  In 1999, the older folks adhering to “Left Refoundationism” held a split meeting.  Other “rejectionists” soon followed, and the FRSO moved forward, re-affirming Marxism-Leninism with a stronger, highly unified core of leaders.  The FRSO charted a revolutionary path and began to grow steadily.  Today, the FRSO is able to attract and unite with Marxist-Leninists–both new ones and veterans from other parties and groups.  Given the modest size of the revolutionary movement in the U.S., the FRSO is meeting with success in party building.  While conditions and spontaneous struggles inside the U.S. provide many opportunities for revolutionaries, the state repression against FRSO is disruptive.

Current Conditions in the U.S. for Party Building

The United States is an imperialist state, the sole superpower today, ruled by a dangerous criminal class.  This monopoly capitalist class seeks to dominate the world in pursuit of ever more profit.  Currently the U.S. imperialists are confronted by the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  They are gripped by the fear of losing their ill-gotten gains, blaming workers, teachers, immigrants and oppressed people for the crisis.  The U.S. imperialists tremble in the face of powerful workers marches, peoples’ rebellions, and the coming revolutions around the world that threaten their ability to exploit labor and rob natural resources.  The U.S. Empire is in crisis and its domination of whole regions like the Middle East and Latin America is threatened.  White House strategists are scrambling to contend with and suppress the growing mass rebellions, national democratic movements and anti-imperialist governments, and armed revolutionary insurgencies led by communists.  Country by country, the people’s movements are advancing, unity against imperialism is growing, the socialist countries are developing and strengthening, while revolutionary and communist parties deepen their ties to the masses and extend their influence.

Bailouts, Cutbacks, and Workers’ Struggle

In the U.S, the Federal government bailed out Wall Street and the Big Banks, giving away $700 billion in one day.  Hundreds of billions more were spent in secretive bailouts, and the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank) flooded the financial system with more than a trillion dollars of cash.  But once the worst of the crisis was over, there was a shift to put the burden of the economic crisis onto the working class.  The Federal government is slashing funding, pushing the financial crisis down onto State governments.  State Governors are pointing to the budget crisis and cutting workers jobs, lowering pay, and taking away benefits.  The politicians give tax cut after tax cut to the wealthy capitalists and corporations, while slashing programs that benefit working people.  Everyone knows where the money is though.  It is sitting in the big banks and corporations who have more than a trillion dollars of profits that they are hoarding.  So while the bosses make huge profits and take home millions of dollars in bonuses, the workers are made to pay for the capitalist system’s crisis.  The bought and paid for politicians are implementing the austerity program of the billionaires and multi-millionaires.  In Wisconsin, Governor Walker unleashed the biggest capitalist offensive against unions and the working class since before World War Two.

Due to the extreme attacks by the rich and powerful, the American workers movement has come alive again, starting in Madison, Wisconsin, but also in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and many other states.  When Governor Walker and the Republican Party attacked the right to collective bargaining, union members saw themselves being made outlaws and mobilized by the tens of thousands to fight back and occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol building.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization mobilized from around the Midwest to help take the protests as far as militants were willing to go.  FRSO student and union cadre responded immediately, encouraging local union leaders to take to the streets with mass protest marches.  In a good example, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in coalition with campus workers, graduate employees, and professors, led a walk out that 3000 joined, the largest mobilization since the Vietnam War protests.  High school students walked out in small towns and big cities in support of their teachers, the unions, and their own education.  Hundreds of schools closed as students and teachers rushed to the Capitol.  The University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate teachers’ union occupied the State Capitol, and then public sector union members by the tens of thousands soon surrounded it.  The FRSO mobilized union workers from Minneapolis, Minnesota and Chicago, Illinois to join the fight in Madison and other towns around Wisconsin.  At the peak of the struggle, there were 150,000 workers, farmers, and their supporters chanting, “Kill the bill!  Shut it down!”

For the first time in decades the possibility of a general strike was raised, but the leadership and conditions do not exist yet.  It is also clear that the class-consciousness of American workers is rising due to the battle in Madison.  The movement spread to a dozen states, from Illinois to New Jersey, and from Florida to California.  Every week public sector protests are making national news.

Given its growth in capacity, the FRSO is able to position itself to support and sometimes lead major struggles of the workers and oppressed in the U.S.  With cores of determined revolutionaries we are able to make an impact on the mass movements, sometimes nationwide.  The FRSO does this by working well with others, and finding ways to persuade even the reluctant.  The FBI raids and Grand Jury investigation by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is serious and threatening, but we have a historic task as Marxist-Leninists to live up to, and we have friends throughout the world who we are calling upon for solidarity!

Stop FBI raids!

Call off the Grand Jury!

Down with the new McCarthyism!

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following resolution adopted by workers and communist parties gathered at the International Communist Seminar in Brussels, Belgium, May 13-15. The statement expresses solidarity with Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), along with other anti-war and international solidarity activists who are facing repression in the United States. The resolution was signed by 42 parties.

Resolution in solidarity with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization against new McCarthyism

The undersigned participating at the 20th International Communist Seminar in Brussels, Belgium, May 13-15, 2011, denounce the U.S. Government repression of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), its leaders, and its allies in the anti-war and international solidarity movements.

The FRSO members are under attack due to their support for the struggles of the people of Palestine and Colombia. The FRSO members and friends are accused of “material support for terrorism” because they organize protest against U.S. wars for Empire in the Middle East, against U.S. aid to Israel, and against U.S. military intervention in Colombia. The U.S. Government is claiming the publishing of articles and opinions favorable to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the newspaper “Fight Back” constitutes a crime. We reject this criminalization of political speech and organizing.

We denounce the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) raids targeting the homes and offices of progressives and revolutionaries. We demand an end to secretive Grand Jury where there is no judge and activists are not even allowed a lawyer. We applaud the 23 solidarity activists’ refusal to appear and speak at the Grand Jury despite the threat of imprisonment.

As internationalists, we support organizing in solidarity with people and movements struggling against U.S. imperialism.

We stand in solidarity with the FRSO against this new McCarthyism.

List of signatories

1. Albania, Communist Party of Albania

2. Azerbaidjan, Communist Party of Azerbaidjan

3. Belarus, For the Union and the Communist Party of the Union

4. Belgium, Workers’ Party of Belgium

5. Brazil, Partido Pátria Livre

6. Bulgaria, Party of Bulgarian Communists

7. Congo, Democratic Republic of, Congolese Communist Party

8. Cuba, Partido Comunista de Cuba

9. Egypt, Communist Party of Egypt

10. El Salvador, Partido Comunista de El Salvador (PCS)

11. France, PRCF – Pôle de Renaissance communiste en France

12. France, URCF – Union des Révolutionnaires-Communistes de France

13. Greece, Communist Party of Greece (KKE)

14. Guyana, People Progressive Party

15. Hungary, Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party

16. Italy, Rete dei Comunisti

17. Korea, Democratic People’s Republic of, Workers’ Party of Korea

18. Latvia, Socialist Party of Latvia

19. Lebanon, Parti Communiste Libanais

20. Lithuania, Socialist Party of Lithuania

21. Lithuania, Socialist People’s Front

22. Malta, Communist Party of Malta

23. Martinique, Parti Communiste Martiniquais

24. Mexico, Partido Comunista de México

25. Mexico, Partido Popular Socialista de México

26. Morocco, Voie démocratique

27. Pakistan, Communist Party of Pakistan

28. Palestine, Palestinian Communist Party

29. Peru, Partido Comunista Peruano

30. Philippines, Communist Party of the Philippines

31. Russia, Communist Party of the Russian Federation

32. Russia, Russian Communist Workers’ Party – Revolutionary Party of Communists

33. Russia, Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)

34. Slovakia, Communist Party of Slovakia

35. South Africa, South African Communist Party

36. Spain, Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España

37. Sweden, Communist Party (KP)

38. Syria, Syrian Communist Party

39. Tunisia, Parti du Travail patriotique et démocratique de Tunisie

40. Turkey, Communist Party of Turkey

41. Ukraine, Union of Communists

42. United Kingdom, Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

Fire spits from the muzzle of a Russian-made machine gun. Assault rifles join the fray.

Leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas and Colombian counterinsurgency troops trade shots across a gorge.

On a nearby plateau, 100 metres of thick brush separate two other rebel squads from their adversaries.

Grenades echo as they explode.

“It’s tough fighting in all this mud,” said a guerrilla named “Adrian”, who flinched with every shot he or his comrades fired. ” This is to slow the army’s advance. Within two or three days they’ll take up new positions and we’ll fight them,” he added.

The battleground that day was an insignificant hilltop in El Porvenir, a tiny hamlet in eastern Meta province. The firefight lasted close to an hour – another skirmish in a string of anonymous battles that, these days, rarely make the media headlines.

Another testimony, too, to the cat-and-mouse nature of this, Colombia’s almost five-decade-old conflict.

No surrender

On paper, government security forces currently appear to have the upper hand.

The lethal 2008 strike on Raul Reyes, a member of the FARC’s seven-man leadership council, was a warning of the devastating military air campaign ahead.

Months later, the army’s “Operation Checkmate” freed kidnapped former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and 14 fellow hostages and was a severe blow to the FARC’s domestic and international political ambitions.

Then, when the air force – backed by army and police commandos – killed the FARC’s top field marshal Jorge Briceno, alias “Mono Jojoy”, in a “pinpoint attack” in September 2010, the government began to trumpet the end of the road for the rebel force. Officials estimate FARC membership has dropped from more than 20,000 fighters a decade ago to fewer than 7,000 now. The guerrillas themselves have not published their own figures.

In April, the head of the Colombian armed forces, Admiral Edgar Cely, said: “The FARC is in its death throes – although this perverse organisation refuses to believe that and fights using terrorism, explosives and minefields.”

Those military setbacks in the years following the collapse of peace talks in 2002 propelled the FARC back to the depths of the jungle, virtually beyond the reach of the media.

It was only after several weeks of driving an old Jeep through remote corners of eastern and southern Colombia, leaving notes in obscure farmhouses, that I was able to reestablish contact with the guerrillas.

When they responded it was with a rare invite to spend ten days marching alongside one of their so-called “mobile companies”, a unit whose main function is to fight.

Despite the string of recent defeats inflicted by the government, none of the 54 young men and women combatants of this FARC unit, the “Marquetalia Company”, were talking about surrender.

“Mono Jojoy dies and it’s like everybody is dead. Comrade Manuel Marulanda (a veteran FARC leader) dies and again it’s like everybody is dead. That’s what they think but it’s not true,” said “Jagwin”, commander of the newly reformed Marquetalia Company. At 35, he’s the oldest in the unit. He said he was the son of peasant farmers and joined rebel ranks some 20 years ago.

“We’re sad because Mono Jojoy was like a father to us. But it’s like what happens at home if your father dies, there’s always a brother who will replace him and run the farm,” he added.

Helicopter gunship

The conversation with “Jagwin” is cut short.

An Blackhawk helicopter gunship clatters overhead, searching for the rebel column that just attacked army troops in El Porvenir. As it whirls overhead it spits up to 4,000 rounds a minute into the jungle canopy from its six-barrel Gatling gun.

The rebels call this helicopter the “harpy”, a reference to the violent winged spirits of Greek mythology.

The Marquetalia Company pulls back with just one walking wounded.

Colombia’s war is not a war of positions. In hamlets like El Porvenir there is little to defend. Steep cattle pastures, a humble schoolhouse with broken-down desks and pockets of thick rainforest.

The retreat is laboured. After heavy tropical storms, mud is ankle deep. Fighters clamber up and down slippery hillsides carrying backpacks full of clothes, ammunition and food – weighing around 30kg.

Air strikes

Camp that night was a banana grove. Government aircraft constantly circled.

Guerrilla commanders ordered a total blackout and confiscated flashlights from fighters. All spoke in hushed voices.

As they listened to engines droning overhead they would whisper “the explorer”, reference to a reconnaissance plane, or “the pig”, a Vietnam-era AC-47 gunship bristling with weaponry and night vision equipment.

Their lives depend on spotting those aircraft in time and avoiding detection.

Under the tin roof of an abandoned peasant shack, Jagwin explained how he survived an aerial bombardment.

It was past midnight back in August 2009. He and his comrades heard the whine of a fleet of fighter-bombers approach and then their camp exploded in flashes of light and a storm of shrapnel. He saw the silhouettes of fellow fighters and heard their screams as they tried to flee.

“Our only option was to dive into the trenches. When the bombardment started we practically buried ourselves in those holes and when they started to strafe with gunfire and troops began disembarking then we ran to escape,” he said.

In that attack alone, he said, 33 of his fellow guerrillas were killed.

Willinton, deputy commander of the Marquetalia Company, has also felt the fury of air raids. He gave few details but confessed that he had no option but to leave dead and wounded behind – a taboo in any military force.

“It’s tough to have to flee the battlefield or escape a bombardment and leave wounded or dead companions behind. They were my comrades. It’s tough but it was an exceptional circumstance. Sometimes you just have to do what you can to escape,” he said.

For that reason, this night and every night, commanders briefed combatants – and me – about evacuation routes in case of bombardment. They instructed us on using shallow riverbeds and small foxholes dug alongside their sleeping quarters to shelter from a potential shower of shrapnel.

Long march

The following two days were a series of gruelling marches.

These combatants were mostly in their twenties, from poor backgrounds and very fit.

But rainy season had set in in Meta province and they advanced at little more than two kilometers an hour.

Nobody was much in the mood for talking en route, weary under backpacks, assault rifles and mortar tubes.

Their rubber boots squelched, half-filled with brackish river water, half-filled with sweat.

Vast tree roots formed natural staircases down muddy banks. Electric blue butterflies flit between the trees. Howler monkeys swung overhead and occasionally lobbed down branches.

With limited access to TV and radio and marching for days under a thick jungle canopy, it’s easy to lose track of time. Days become weeks and blend into years. The FARC’s revolution has become a war with no apparent end.

Beyond the confines of the rainforest, these young men and women would have been part of the Twitter generation. Yet most, like 21-year-old Eliana, had joined rebel ranks before they were 15 and were way too poor to afford a computer.

Eliana said she joined the FARC when she was just 13. She ran away from home after a fight with her mother and roamed the streets of an eastern Colombian town “getting into trouble”, as she described – without further elaboration.

She’s slim built and admitted she could “hardly carry the groceries home from the store” before becoming a guerrilla. Now she boasts she can march for days with a 30kg backpack and her AK-47 assault rifle. She’s also developed a love of gunfights.

“I know I wasn’t born to live forever. So when there’s a fight I move forward and blast away. That way my nerves disappear. I’m always careful though to save one or two magazines for the retreat in case there’s any trouble,” Eliana explained.

That bristling confidence evaporates into a girlish giggle when I ask her if she’s ever heard of Facebook or Twitter.

“I have no idea what Facebook is and I’ve never heard of Twitter,” she said.

Mines

One morning during a break in the march, company commander Jagwin explained the FARC has managed to keep arms supply routes open.

He was sporting a new assault rifle he said was a South Korean-made version of the US military’s M-16.

That, he said, had been smuggled into Colombia in oil barrels – the cost some 17 million pesos ($10,000).

The Russian-made PKM machine-gun used in the firefight at El Porvenir was also new.

And the previous afternoon, Jagwin had taken delivery of 100 rounds for a multiple grenade launcher. Price tag – 140,000 pesos ($83) each, he said.

All the ammunition appeared to be stamped with the brand and serial numbers of Indumil, the state-run munitions factory.

Getting hold of 81mm mortar bombs was proving a little more problematic, he confessed. A weapons smuggler was demanding 500,000 pesos ($295) each, he said.

As the latest rainstorm subsided, Jagwin issued orders to a four-man unit.

Scouts indicated the army was once again close by and he had decided to employ what is probably the most controversial weapon in the FARC’s armory – homemade landmines.

“We use these mines to slow the enemy advance. We place them in the path of the army. Once they’ve passed we go and collect them again,” Jagwin said.

Prior to the year 2000, all sides in Colombia’s conflict used anti-personnel mines.

Since the Colombian government ratified the Ottawa Convention to ban landmines in 2000, the main culprits have been the FARC.

Colombia’s legacy is bloody with one of the highest number of landmine victims after Afghanistan.

According to Colombian government figures, more than 7,000 people were mutilated by mines between 1990 and 2010 – and around 2,000 were killed. Of the total 9,000 victims, about two-thirds were military personnel and the remaining third were civilians.

A young fighter spread around 20 mines on the grass – each with a diameter of about eight centimeters, made from a short section of PVC piping and packed with explosives.

“Take the GPS and mark where you’re placing the mines. Give them each a name, for example, Flower One, Flower Two etc so you can find them again,” Willinton instructed as he helped prime the devices.

“We tell the peasants they should not move around after a certain time of day or in certain areas,” Jagwin said.

It’s a warning that is clearly far from effective. In the first two months of this year, 23 civilians fell victim to landmines.

Hearts and minds

The company’s destination was a wooden shack nestled in the jungle. Pasted on the wall was a hand-written poster with the words “Jorge Briceño Civic-Military Brigade”.

Guerrillas from a sister unit had set up a clinic to offer dental treatment and minor surgeries to peasant farmers and their families.

Plastic camouflage ponchos formed walls around the dental surgery. Another poncho marked the entrance to a side room where FARC medics set up, ready to operate using local anesthesia.

A civilian mother brought her three children along. Her previous attempt to get them treated by a civilian dentist in the town of La Julia, about three hours away, was a wasted journey.

“I took them to town but the nurse who pulls out teeth was not there that day so I had to bring them home,” said the woman. She, like others at the FARC clinic, said dental treatment in town is free but poor quality under a government-subsidised health scheme.

While rebel clinics like these may be a useful stopgap measure for poor peasants, they are unlikely to be a comprehensive long-term solution to the precarious health conditions of Colombia’s isolated rural communities.

Clearly this is a campaign by the FARC to win civilian “hearts and minds”.

“What we’re always looking to do is to win the support of the masses. Whoever wins the masses, wins the war. We also do this because we’re working for the people,” said Yesid, one of the rebel medics.

It’s a time-honoured tactic by any military force, especially those engaged in guerrilla warfare.

The clinic had already been operating for around an hour that day and a dozen civilians had gathered. Then news came that the army was approaching – treatment would have to be suspended immediately.

Art of war

The predicted clash with advancing army troops never took place. Guerrilla scouts had no clear idea of how many soldiers there were or their exact route.

Instead, the Marquetalia Company opted to move camp and outmanoeuvre its opponents.

“In a guerrilla war you choose where you will fight. We decide we can fight here or not, or decide to ambush them somewhere else,” said Jagwin, expounding one of the key tenets of the art of guerrilla war. It’s a sign this low-tempo conflict could drag on indefinitely, at least here in the countryside.

A day later the guerrilla clinic was back in business, several kilometers away.

By early morning there was already a list of 17 adults and children hoping for treatment.

There’s no electricity in this region. Only a lucky few have portable generators or a solar panel.

So seeing neighbours having teeth pulled or getting sliced open for minor surgeries proved to be as much an attraction as TV for patients and idle onlookers alike.

A little girl watched her neighbour, “Don Luis”, a peasant farmer, getting a hernia fixed.

Shafts of light streamed through the wood board walls. Medic Yesid and his three assistants worked under the light from battery-powered headlamps. The operating table was a wooden board partly propped up on a tree stump.

Once surgery started, the medics had no option except to continue – even if the army staged a surprise attack.

“If bombs start to fall or bullets start to fly we don’t have much choice. We have to finish the job because we can’t just leave the patient cut open on the operating table,” medic Yesid said.

In an adjacent room, dentist Marta pulled teeth and replaced fillings. She has been in the FARC for 19 years and, like many others here, said she had joined up when she was just a child.

“I only studied until third grade in primary school. My mum abandoned us when I was just six and she left us with an alcoholic uncle,” Marta explained.

“I used to sell ice-creams in the wholesale food market and scrounged for food for my brother. Then I went to work with my brother in Meta province on a farm – and that’s where I came into contact with the guerrillas,” she said.

Marta said she dreamed of becoming a dentist in civilian life when the conflict ended.

But she is adamant she will only lay down her weapon once the FARC takes power. That may seem like a hopeless illusion to the Colombian government and political analysts.

But Marta and her comrades cannot contemplate any other option.

“Some day this has to come to an end. Maybe I won’t see live to see that day but it will come,” she said. “I can’t believe my struggle has been in vain.”

The following article is from Fight Back! News:

Minneapolis, MN – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder got a cold reception in Minneapolis May 27, where the Committee to Stop FBI Repression dogged him all day about FBI and grand jury attacks on anti-war and international solidarity activists. 100 people gathered outside his event at the University of Minnesota. The shouts of protesters outside could be heard inside, “Hey Holder, hear our fury! Stop the FBI, end the grand jury!”

In September of 2010, 14 peace and international solidarity activists in the Midwest, including Minneapolis, were subpoenaed to testify at a secret grand jury investigating material support for terrorism. In December, nine more activists were subpoenaed. The 23 activists have declared their refusal to testify and have declared their First Amendment right to protest, to free speech and to assemble. Last week, the FBI stepped up its repression when it participated in a raid on the home of Los Angeles immigrant rights activist, Carlos Montes.

As Holder began to speak at the University of Minnesota event, several people stood up to interrupt him with questions demanding that he explain his why his Department of Justice is pursuing activists.

The first to challenge him was Tracy Molm, one of the targeted activists and a member of Students for a Democratic Society. Holder talked with her after his speech, saying they would have to “agree to disagree” on whether international solidarity activism like hers is constitutionally protected.

Afterwards, Molm told the protesters gathered outside, “He can disagree all he wants, but people around the country believe these attacks need to end because they’re killing our free speech rights, our ability to question our government and our ability to speak out.”

All those who interrupted his speech were ejected by University police, but none were arrested.

Speaking for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, Deb Konechne said, “It is disgusting that Eric Holder, who once defended Chiquita Banana’s payments to right-wing death squads and Colombia’s AUC – a designated ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization’ – is today the head of a grand jury fishing expedition against anti-war and international solidarity activists. This fishing expedition is, according to secret FBI documents released last week, predicated on the work of activists in the U.S. to publicize and advocate on behalf of Colombian trade unionists that have been AUC targets.”

Protesters also gathered outside a second speech by the attorney general at Augsburg College, but were barred from entering. When Holder exited the event, protesters sent him packing with these final words, “Hey Holder, you crossed the line. Political dissent is not a crime!”

Door kicked down by SWAT team at Carlos Montes' home. (Committee to Stop FBI Repression)

The following is being posted here from the International Action Center website. To see the petition please go here:

Petition Text

To: U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder,

cc: Vice President Biden, DOJ Inspector General Fine, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus, U.N. Secy Gen Ban, and members of the media

** Drop All Charges against Carlos Montes, and immediately return all of his property!

** Stop the attack on the Chicano and Immigrant Rights Movements!

** Call Off the Chicago Grand Jury and Stop the Expanding Witchhunt against Anti-war and International Solidarity Activists!

** Hands Off Palestine Solidarity Activists!

** Throw Out the reactiviated subpoenas against Tracy Molm, Ann Pham and Sarah Martin in Minneapolis, and ALL of the 14 subpoenas from the September 24 FBI raids of homes of anti-war and international solidarity activists.

**Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.

**End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.

I am writing to oppose the continuation and expansion of the FBI campaign of harassment of immigrant rights, anti-war and Palestine and other International Solidarity Activists, including the raid on the home of Carlos Montes and his arrest and the confiscation of his property, the 9 added subpoenas in the Chicago area, and reactivation of 3 of the original 14 subpoenas from the September 24 FBI raids of anti-war and international solidarity activists’ homes.

These activists are guilty of no crime but opposition to U.S. foreign policy. On Friday, September 24, 2010 the FBI raided seven houses and an office in Chicago and Minneapolis. The FBI served subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury to 13 activists in Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. The FBI also attempted to intimidate activists in California, Wisconsin and North Carolina. This is not the action of a lone prosecutor. The raids were coordinated nationally, spanned several cities, and many other activists have been visited and personally threatened by the FBI.

The FBI confiscated computers, email and mailing lists, cell phones , cameras, videos, books, and passports. This is a dangerous attack on the constitutional rights of free speech of every social justice, antiwar and human rights activist and organization in the U.S. today. The right to speak, meet and write opinions is guaranteed under the constitution.

This suppression of civil rights is aimed at those who dedicate their time and energy to supporting the struggles of the Palestinian and Colombian peoples against U.S. funded occupation and war. Grand Jury subpoenas investigating material support of terrorism are being used to silence highly respected and well known human rights activists. This is a dangerous national effort to shut down growing opposition to U.S. wars. It cannot be allowed.

The FBI and the Grand Jury are threatening courageous individuals who have written and spoken publicly to broaden understanding of social justice issues of war and occupation. The activists are involved with many groups, including: the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Colombia Action Network, Students for a Democratic Society, and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These activists came together with many others to organize the 2008 anti-war marches on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

The FBI and the U.S. government must end this campaign of intimidation against anti-war and international solidarity activists. I am outraged at this disrespect of democratic rights. I ask that you intervene immediately to:

**Stop the Grand Jury Witchhunt!

**Stop the expanded repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists.

**Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.

**End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.

Sincerely,
(Your signature will be appended here based on the contact information you enter in the form above)

You can also call the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353-1555 and U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 or write an email to: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov demanding an end to the FBI raids, return of all confiscated materials and an end to the Grand Jury witchhunt. Fitzgerald is in charge of the Northern District of Illinois and responsible for the FBI raids and Grand Jury investigation.

Contact the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
at stopfbi.net
stopfbi@gmail.com

updated May 24, 2011Campaign to Stop FBI Repression of Anit-War Activists

Sponsored by:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
stopfbi.net
stopfbi@gmail.com

International Action Center
www.iacenter.org
c/o Solidarity Center
55 West 17th St 5C
New York, NY 10011
For further information call: (212) 633-6646

After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the socialist countries tragically fell to the onslaught of Western imperialism. Among the horrific blows dealt to the international communist movement, five socialist states resisted the tide of counterrevolution and, against all odds, maintain actually existing socialism in the 21st century.

Though each face very specific obstacles in building socialism, these five countries–the Republic of Cuba, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the People’s Republic of China–stand as a challenge to the goliath of Western imperialist hegemony. Among them, however, China stands unique as a socialist country whose economic growth continues to supersede even the most powerful imperialist countries.

Though an embarrassing number of Western “left” groups challenge the designation of any of these five countries as socialist, no country raises greater opposition than China. Many Western “left” groups claim that modern China is a full-fledged capitalist country. Owing their ideological heritage to bogus theoreticians like Leon Trotsky, Tony Cliffe, and Hal Draper, some groups argue that China was never a socialist country, claiming instead that the Chinese state is and has been state capitalist.

I counter their outrageous reactionary assertions with six theses:

First, Chinese market socialism is a method of resolving the primary contradiction facing socialist construction in China: backwards productive forces.

Second, market socialism in China is a Marxist-Leninist tool that is important to socialist construction.

Third, the Chinese Communist Party’s continued leadership and control of China’s market economy is central to Chinese socialism.

Fourth, Chinese socialism has catapulted a workers state to previously unknown economic heights.

Fifth, the successful elevation of China as a modern industrial economy has laid the basis for ‘higher’ forms of socialist economic organization.

And sixth, China applies market socialism to its relations with the Third World and plays a major role in the fight against imperialism.

From these six theses, I draw the conclusion that Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century should rigorously study the successes of Chinese socialism. After all, if China is a socialist country, its ascension as the premiere world economic power demands the attention of every serious revolutionary, especially insofar as the daunting task of socialist construction in the Third World is concerned.

Market socialism is a method of resolving the primary contradiction facing socialist construction in China: backwards productive forces.

The Chinese revolution in 1949 was a tremendous achievement for the international communist movement. Led by Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) immediately charted a course of socialist reconstruction in an economy ravaged by centuries of dynastic feudalism and imperial subjugation from both Europe and Japan. The CCP launched incredible campaigns designed at engaging the masses in constructing socialism and building an economy that could meet the needs of China’s giant population. One can never overstate the incredible achievements of the Chinese masses during this period, in which the average life expectancy in China rose from 35 years in 1949 to 63 years by Mao’s death in 1975. (1)

Despite the vast social benefits brought about by the revolution, China’s productive forces remained grossly underdeveloped and left the country vulnerable to famines and other natural disasters. Uneven development persisted between the countryside and the cities, and the Sino-Soviet split cut China off from the rest of the socialist bloc. These serious obstacles led the CCP, with Deng Xiaoping at the helm, to identify China’s underdeveloped productive forces as the primary contradiction facing socialist construction. In a March 1979 speech at a CCP forum entitled “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles,” Deng outlines the two features of this contradiction:

First, we are starting from a weak base. The damage inflicted over a long period by the forces of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism reduced China to a state of poverty and backwardness. (2)

While he grants that “since the founding of the People’s Republic we have achieved signal successes in economic construction, established a fairly comprehensive industrial system,” Deng reiterates that China is nevertheless “one of the world’s poor countries.” (2)

The second feature of this contradiction is that China has “a large population but not enough arable land.” Deng explains the severity of this contradiction:

When production is insufficiently developed, it poses serious problems with regard to food, education and employment. We must greatly increase our efforts in family planning; but even if the population does not grow for a number of years, we will still have a population problem for a certain period. Our vast territory and rich natural resources are big assets. But many of these resources have not yet been surveyed and exploited, so they do not constitute actual means of production. Despite China’s vast territory, the amount of arable land is limited, and neither this fact nor the fact that we have a large, mostly peasant population can be easily changed. (2)

Unlike industrialized Western countries, the primary contradiction facing China was not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie–the proletariat and its party had already overthrown the bourgeoisie in the 1949 revolution–but rather between China’s enormous population and its underdeveloped productive forces. While well-intended and ambitious, campaigns like the Great Leap Forward would continue to fall short of raising the Chinese masses out of poverty without revolutionizing the country’s productive forces.

From this contradiction, Deng proposed a policy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or market socialism.

After Mao’s death in 1975 and the end of the Cultural Revolution a year later, the CCP ,under the leadership of Chairman Deng Xiaoping, launched an aggressive campaign of modernizing the underdeveloped productive forces in China. Known as the four modernizations–economic, agricultural, scientific & technological, and defensive–the CCP began experimenting with models for achieving these revolutionary changes.

Modernization wasn’t something extraneous to socialist construction in China. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward and the turbulent unrest of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP understood that building lasting socialism required a modernized industrial base. Without such a base, the Chinese masses would continue to live at the mercy of natural disasters and imperialist manipulation. Deng outlined this goal in an October 1978 speech before the Ninth National Congress of Chinese Trade Unions:

The Central Committee points out that this is a great revolution in which China’s economic and technological backwardness will be overcome and the dictatorship of the proletariat further consolidated. (3)

Deng continues by describing the necessity of re-examining China’s method of economic organization:

Since its goal is to transform the present backward state of our productive forces, it inevitably entails many changes in the relations of production, the superstructure and the forms of management in industrial and agricultural enterprises, as well as changes in the state administration over these enterprises so as to meet the needs of modern large-scale production. To accelerate economic growth it is essential to increase the degree of specialization of enterprises, to raise the technical level of all personnel significantly and train and evaluate them carefully, to greatly improve economic accounting in the enterprises, and to raise labour productivity and rates of profit to much higher levels.

Therefore, it is essential to carry out major reforms in the various branches of the economy with respect to their structure and organization as well as to their technology. The long-term interests of the whole nation hinge on these reforms, without which we cannot overcome the present backwardness of our production technology and management. (3)

These proposed reforms launched market socialism in China. Beginning with the division of the Great Leap Forward-era People’s Communes into smaller private plots of land, market socialism was first applied to China’s agricultural sector to boost food production. From the 1980s to around 1992, the Chinese state delegated greater authority to local governments and converted some small and medium sized industries into businesses, who were subject to regulations and direction from the CCP.

Since the implementation of market socialism, China has experienced unprecedented economic expansion, growing faster than every other economy in the world. Deng’s market socialism decisively lifted the Chinese masses out of systemic poverty and established the country as an economic giant whose power arguably exceeds the largest imperialist economies of the West.

Market socialism in China is a Marxist-Leninist tool that is important to socialist construction.

While Deng’s concept and implementation of market socialism is a significant contribution to Marxism-Leninism, it’s not without precedent. Proletarian revolution has historically broken out in the countries where the chains of imperialism are the weakest. One of the uniting characteristics of these countries is backwards productive forces; underdeveloped because of decades of colonial and imperial subjugation. Far from the first instance of communists using markets to lay an industrial foundation for socialism, China’s market socialism has its roots in the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the Bolsheviks.

Facing similar levels of underdevelopment and social unrest, the Bolsheviks implemented the NEP, which allowed small business owners and peasants to sell commodities on a limited market. Designed and implemented by Lenin in 1921, the NEP was the successor to Trotsky’s policy of war communism, which prioritized militarizing agricultural and industrial production to combat the reactionary White forces. Because of their economically backward material conditions, peasants overwhelmingly resisted war communism, which resulted in food shortages for the Red Army. Correctly perceiving the importance of forging a strong alliance between the peasantry and the urban working class, Lenin crafted the NEP as a means of modernizing Russia’s rural countryside through market mechanisms.

In a piece explaining the role of trade unions in the NEP, Lenin succinctly describes the essence of the concept that Deng would later call ‘market socialism’:

The New Economic Policy introduces a number of important changes in the position of the proletariat and, consequently, in that of the trade unions. The great bulk of the means of production in industry and the transport system remains in the hands of the proletarian state. This, together with the nationalisation of the land, shows that the New Economic Policy does not change the nature of the workers’ state, although it does substantially alter the methods and forms of socialist development for it permits of economic rivalry between socialism, which is now being built, and capitalism, which is trying to revive by supplying the needs of the vast masses of the peasantry through the medium of the market. (4)

Do not neglect the gravity of Lenin’s words in this passage. He acknowledges that the introduction of markets into the Soviet economy does nothing to fundamentally alter the proletarian character of the state. More provocatively, however, is his characterization of the Soviet economy as an “economic rivalry between socialism, which is now being built, and capitalism.” (4) According to Lenin, capitalist relations of production can exist within and compete with socialism without changing the class orientation of a proletarian state.

Recall that Deng argued that market socialism was essential to modernizing China’s productive forces and consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin would have agreed wholeheartedly with Deng’s assessment, as articulated in an April 1921 article entitled “The Tax in Kind.” Lenin writes:

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries). (5)

The ideological roots of Deng’s market socialism go back farther than Lenin, however. In an August 1980 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, she asks Deng if market reforms in rural areas “put in discussion communism itself?” Deng responds:

According to Marx, socialism is the first stage of communism and it covers a very long historical period in which we must practise the principle “to each according to his work” and combine the interests of the state, the collective and the individual, for only thus can we arouse people’s enthusiasm for labour and develop socialist production. At the higher stage of communism, when the productive forces will be greatly developed and the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” will be practised, personal interests will be acknowledged still more and more personal needs will be satisfied. (6)

Deng’s answer is a reference to Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Marx describes the process of socialist construction in terms of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ stages:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it.

…

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. (7)

Agree with market socialism or don’t, but the facts are in:

Fact: Market socialism is in accordance with Marxism-Leninism.

Fact: Lenin’s view is that markets and some capitalist relations of production do not fundamentally alter the proletarian class character of a socialist state.

Fact: Lenin believed that countries could build socialism through the use of markets.

Fact: The principle that informs Deng’s market socialism–”to each according to his work”–comes directly from Marx.

The Chinese Communist Party’s continued leadership and control of China’s market economy is central to Chinese socialism.

Western commentators have predicted that China’s market reforms would lead to the downfall of the CCP since Deng announced market socialism in the late 1970s. These same commentators have repeated this claim for the last 30 years and are constantly proven wrong as China lifts itself out of poverty with the CCP at the helm. Market reforms have not altered the fundamental socialist underpinnings of Chinese society because the masses and their party continue to rule China.

The so-called ‘privatization’ of small and medium-sized state industries in the mid-1990s and early 2000′s provoked an outcry from Western ‘leftists’, claiming that this represented the final victory of capitalism in China. But since ‘left’ groups are so often subject to bickering over obscure definitions and irrelevant (but no less verbose!) debates about distant historical questions, let’s see what the capitalists themselves have to say about ‘privatization’ in China. In a May 2009, Derrick Scissors of the Heritage Foundation lays the issue to rest in an article called “Liberalization in Reverse.” He writes:

Examining what companies are truly private is important because privatization is often confused with the spreading out of shareholding and the sale of minority stakes. In China, 100 percent state ownership is often diluted by the division of ownership into shares, some of which are made available to nonstate actors, such as foreign companies or other private investors. Nearly two-thirds of the state-owned enterprises and subsidiaries in China have undertaken such changes, leading some foreign observers to relabel these firms as “nonstate” or even “private.” But this reclassification is incorrect. The sale of stock does nothing by itself to alter state control: dozens of enterprises are no less state controlled simply because they are listed on foreign stock exchanges. As a practical matter, three-quarters of the roughly 1,500 companies listed as domestic stocks are still state owned. (8)

While the so-called ‘privatization’ process of allows some private ownership, whether domestic or foreign, Scissors makes clear that this is a far cry from real privatization, as occurs in the United States and other capitalist countries. The state, headed by the CCP, retains a majority stake in the company and guides the company’s path.

More striking are the industries that remain firmly under state control, which are those industries most essential to the welfare of the Chinese masses. Scissors continues:

No matter their shareholding structure, all national corporations in the sectors that make up the core of the Chinese economy are required by law to be owned or controlled by the state. These sectors include power generation and distribution; oil, coal, petrochemicals, and natural gas; telecommunications; armaments; Aviation and shipping; machinery and automobile production; information technologies; construction; and the production of iron, steel, and nonferrous metals. The railroads, grain distribution, and insurance are also dominated by the state, even if no official edict says so. (8)

No capitalist country in the history of the world has ever had state control over all of these industries. In countries like the United States or France, certain industries like railroads and health insurance may have state ownership, but it falls drastically short of dominating the industry. The importance of this widespread state ownership is that the essential aspects of the Chinese economy are run by the state headed by a party whose orientation is towards the working class and peasantry.

Particularly damaging to the China-as-state-capitalist argument is the status of banks and the Chinese financial system. Scissors elaborates:

the state exercises control over most of the rest of the economy through the financial system, especially the banks. By the end of 2008, outstanding loans amounted to almost $5 trillion, and annual loan growth was almost 19 percent and accelerating; lending, in other words, is probably China’s principal economic force. The Chinese state owns all the large financial institutions, the People’s Bank of China assigns them loan quotas every year, and lending is directed according to the state’s priorities. (8)

The People’s Bank of China (PBC) highlights one of the most important ways in which the CCP uses the market system to control private capital and subordinate it to socialism. Far from functioning as a capitalist national bank, which prioritizes facilitating the accumulation of capital by the bourgeoisie, “this system frustrates private borrowers.” (8) The CCP floods the market with public bonds, which has a crowding-out effect on private corporate bonds that firms use to raise independent capital. By harnessing supply and demand in the bond market, the PBC prevents private firms, domestic or foreign, from accumulating capital independently of socialist management.

Although modern China has an expansive market system, the CCP uses the market to both secure and advance socialism. Rather than privatizing major industries, as is often alleged by detractors, the state maintains a vibrant system of socialist public ownership that prevents the rise of an independent bourgeoisie. Deng talked specifically about this very deliberate system in the same interview with Fallaci:

No matter to what degree we open up to the outside world and admit foreign capital, its relative magnitude will be small and it can’t affect our system of socialist public ownership of the means of production. Absorbing foreign capital and technology and even allowing foreigners to construct plants in China can only play a complementary role to our effort to develop the productive forces in a socialist society. (6)

Western analysts seem to believe that the CCP has accomplished this goal. The capitalist Australia-based Center for Independent Studies (CIS) published a July 2008 article that says that those who think that China is becoming a capitalist country “misunderstand the structure of the Chinese economy, which largely remains a state-dominated system rather than a free-market one.” (9) The article elaborates:

By strategically controlling economic resources and remaining the primary dispenser of economic opportunity and success in Chinese society, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is building institutions and supporters that seem to be entrenching the Party’s monopoly on power. Indeed, in many ways, reforms and the country’s economic growth have actually enhanced the CCP’s ability to remain in power. Rather than being swept away by change, the CCP is in many ways its agent and beneficiary. (9)

While the CIS goes on to cry crocodile tears about the lack of economic and political freedoms in China, Marxist-Leninists read between the lines and know the truth: China isn’t capitalist, the CCP isn’t pursuing capitalist development, and market socialism has succeeded in laying the material foundation for ‘higher socialism’.

Chinese socialism has catapulted a workers state to previously unknown economic heights.

While the Great Leap Forward was an ambitious attempt at laying the industrial foundation necessary to build socialism, the facts are in: China’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1960, after the GLF, was $68.371 billion. (10) In 2009, China’s GDP sits just under $5 trillion, making it the second largest economy in the world. (11) In other words, the modern Chinese economy is about 73 times the size of its economy following the Great Leap Forward, which was previously the largest socialist economic overhaul in Chinese history.

The cruel irony of Chinese socialism is that the bulk of its international admirers are not ‘leftists’, but rather capitalists. Far from approving of socialism, these capitalists are in awe of China’s manipulation of markets to build a thriving modern society without resorting to free markets. They hate China’s accomplishments and its socialist path, but they cannot deny its thriving success. Even Scissors acknowledges in the same Heritage Foundation article that, “between June 2002 and June 2008, China’s GDP more than tripled and its exports more than quadrupled.” (8)

China’s incredible GDP growth is of vital importance to socialism. Scissors continues:

This rapid GDP growth has created jobs: by the end of June 2008, the unemployment rate among registered urban voters was a mere four percent — even lower than the government’s ambitious target of 4.5 percent. That figure may understate true joblessness by ignoring rural and unregistered urban employment, but it accurately reflects trends in the broader job situation. So many migrant workers from rural areas were absorbed into the urban labor force that the 20 million such workers reported to have lost their jobs in late 2008 still left well over 100 million rural migrants with jobs in cities. (8)

That China can essentially guarantee full employment for workers highlights another way in which the CCP uses markets to advance socialism. In addition to achieving de facto full employment, “Urban wages have climbed significantly, by 18 percent between 2007 and 2008,” representing serious material gains for the Chinese working class. (8)

Unlike the dispossessed masses of capitalist countries, the Chinese masses are consistently more satisfied with and favorable to their own nation’s economy. A July 2008 study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project polled a diverse cross section of people in 24 developed countries, including China prior to the Beijing Olympics. Pew’s findings confirm the popularity of market socialism among the Chinese masses:

“As they eagerly await the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese people express extraordinary levels of satisfaction with the way things are going in their country and with their nation’s economy. With more than eight-in-ten having a positive view of both, China ranks number one among 24 countries on both measures in the 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Global Attitudes Project.” (12)

Incidentally, Pew finds that “Chinese satisfaction with these aspects of life has improved only modestly over the past six years, despite the dramatic increase in positive ratings of national conditions and the economy.” (12) While the Chinese masses celebrate the recent dramatic increase in the nation’s standard of living, the longevity of their satisfaction reflects a deeper relationship with the state.

Among Pew’s most interesting findings was the level of people in China concerned with growing income inequality. While inequality is a chief concern for the dispossessed masses in capitalist countries, the wealthy are not concerned with income inequality at all, as it constitutes the cornerstone of their class. The Chinese masses, however, respond to this critical concern very differently. Pew finds:

“About nine-in-ten (89%) identify the gap between rich and poor as a major problem and 41% cite it as a very big problem. Worries about inequality are common among rich and poor, old and young, and men and women, as well as the college-educated and those with less education. In that regard, despite economic growth, concerns about unemployment and conditions for workers are extensive, with 68% and 56% reporting these as big problems, respectively.” (12)

The universality of concerns about income inequality, concerning even wealthier citizens, demonstrates the continued supremacy of socialist values in China. Cultural norms and values arise from the material conditions and relations of production. If China was a capitalist country, the widespread prevalence of socialist values–cutting across income levels–would not exist. To contend otherwise is to abandon a materialist analysis of culture.

The successful elevation of China as a modern industrial economy has laid the basis for ‘higher’ forms of socialist economic organization.

The proportion of planning to market forces is not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too. Planning and market forces are both means of controlling economic activity. (13)

Markets are neither capitalist nor socialist, just as economic planning is neither capitalist nor socialist. Both of these forms of economic organization are just tools in the toolbox, and in some situations, markets are a useful tool for socialist construction.

For 30 years, the CCP has successfully used markets as a tool for revolutionizing the country’s productive forces. Precisely because of this success, the state is rapidly moving towards more advanced forms of socialist industrial organization to replace the market mechanism.

Market socialism was first implemented in the agricultural industry with the same aim as Lenin’s NEP: to aggressively expand and modernize food production. However, the CCP introduced markets as a tool to build socialism, rather than as a permanent functioning mode of economic organization. This is a very important distinction because it means that Deng and the CCP viewed market reforms as a transient form of ‘lower socialism’, to borrow a term from Marx, that they would replace with collectivized agriculture after the material conditions changed. Deng explains this in a talk delivered to the Central Committee in May 1980. Entitled “On Questions of Rural Policy,” Deng addresses concerns about contemporary market reforms to the agricultural sector:

It is certain that as long as production expands, division of labour increases and the commodity economy develops, lower forms of collectivization in the countryside will develop into higher forms and the collective economy will acquire a firmer basis. The key task is to expand the productive forces and thereby create conditions for the further development of collectivization. (14)

Deng understood that building a socialist agricultural economy capable of meeting the needs of China’s enormous population required developing the productive forces in the countryside, which markets could accomplish. Only after revolutionizing the productive forces of the entire country could the material basis for a full-scale collective economy–’higher socialism’–exist.

Mao said that “Practice is the criterion of truth,” and after 30 years of practice, Deng’s statements have come true. In 2006, the CCP announced a revolutionary overhaul of the Chinese countryside and pledged to use China’s newly acquired wealth to transform rural areas into what President Hu Jintao calls a “new socialist countryside.” (15) Even today, most of China’s population remains in rural sections of the country, but the application of modern farming techniques and mechanized agricultural practices have generated a net surplus of grain production in China. Among this new policy’s many provisions, China’s new rural policy promises “sustained increases in farmers’ incomes, more industrial support for agriculture and faster development of public services.” (15) Additional provisions allow peasant students to “receive free textbooks and boarding subsidies,” and the state will “increase subsidies for rural health cooperatives.” (15)

Massive state investment in agricultural infrastructure is “a significant shift away from the previous focus on economic development.” (15) Because of the success of modernization, “greater weight will be given to the redistribution of resources and a rebalancing of income.” (15) Instead of viewing market socialism as an end in itself, the CCP has harnessed the market as a means to generating an industrial base sufficient to build ‘higher socialism’. China’s extraordinary GDP growth and technological development via market socialism makes it possible to implement these sweeping revolutionary changes.

On health care, Austin Ramzy of TIME Magazine reported in April 2009 that “China is laying out plans to dramatically reform its health care system by expanding coverage for hundreds of millions of farmers, migrant workers and city residents.” (16) These plans consist of spending “$125 billion over the next three years building thousands of clinics and hospitals and expanding basic health care coverage to 90% of the population.” (16) Rather than a reversal of the Deng-era reforms, China’s move back towards public health care is the logical progression of the more modernized and expansive health care system achieved through 30 years of market socialism.

As foreign capital entered China, the corporations of imperialist countries–attracted by China’s vast labor pool–exploited some Chinese workers through capitalist relations of production. The exploitative behavior of foreign corporations constitutes a major contradiction in the Chinese economy that the CCP has taken concerted steps towards resolving. While all people in China retain access to essential goods and services like food and health care, the CCP places restrictions on foreign corporations’ ability to operate in China that severely curtail their politico-economic power in China.

Far from abandoning Chinese workers in the pursuit of modernization, the CCP announced the Draft Labor Contract Law in 2006 to protect the rights of workers employed by foreign corporations by ensuring severance pay and outlawing the non-contract labor that makes sweatshops possible. Viciously opposed by Wal-Mart and other Western companies, “foreign corporations are attacking the legislation not because it provides workers too little protection but because it provides them too much.” (17) Nevertheless, the Draft Labor Contract Law, which “required employers to contribute to their employees’ social security accounts and set wage standards for workers on probation and overtime,” was enacted in January 2008. (18)

The recent series of labor disputes between Chinese workers and foreign corporations testify to the working class orientation of the Chinese state. In response to widespread strikes at Western factories and manufacturing plants, the CCP undertook an aggressive policy of empowering Chinese workers and backing their demands for higher wages. Beijing’s regional government raised the minimum wage twice in six months, including a 21% increase in late 2010. (19) In April of this year, the CCP announced annualized 15% wage increases with “promises to double workers’ wages during the 12th five-year plan that lasts from 2011 to 2015.” (20)

Dramatic increases in wages and benefits for Chinese workers, particularly migrant workers, is a serious blow to foreign corporations and makes China a decisively less attractive hub of cheap labor for foreign investors. (21) Contrary to the actions of a capitalist state in the face of labor unrest, which generally consists of petty reforms or brutal repression, China’s response is to launch an offensive against the hoarding of wealth by foreign corporations by forcing them to pay substantially higher wages.

The state is an instrument of class oppression. Bourgeois states reluctantly give the working class reforms, like minimum wage, when no other course of action is possible. Their orientation is towards improving conditions for the bourgeoisie and subordinating labor to capital. Proletarian states boldly support and immediately respond to the collective demands of the workers because they constitute the ruling class in the society. Greater willingness by the CCP to confront and attack foreign capital in the interests of the working class is the deliberate product of market socialism’s success in developing China’s productive forces. Having resolved the primary contradiction–backwards productive forces–the CCP is breaking ground on the contradiction between foreign capital and labor.

Turning to the macroeconomic situation, China’s application of market socialism has led to serious disparities in income. While undoubtedly a defect of ‘lower socialism’, the Chinese state takes this contradiction very seriously and announced an unprecedented government spending campaign in March 2011 aimed at closing the income gap. (22) By increasing public spending by 12.5% in the next year, the CCP will allocate enormous government resources “for education, job creation, low-income housing, health care, and pensions and other social insurance.” (22) Far from a move designed to placate any social unrest, this monumental boost in social spending demonstrates the Chinese state’s continued proletarian and peasant class orientation.

A correct position on China requires above all else a holistic examination of the country’s economy placed within the context of the CCP’s path towards modernization. Focusing too narrowly on China’s market economy and its defects clouds the most important facts, which is that the working class and peasantry still rule China through the CCP and the success of modernization via the market economy has paved the way for ‘higher socialism’.

China applies market socialism to its relations with the Third World and plays a major role in the fight against imperialism.

Though bourgeois news sources decry China’s economic relationship with Africa as ‘imperialist’, this is a reflection of the Western trade mentality that cannot understand any economic relations in terms other than ruthless exploitation. Premier Wen Jiabao said at a 2006 summit in Cairo that Chinese-African trade relations are designed to “help African countries develop by themselves and offer training for African professionals.” (24) The focus of the summit, according to Wen, is “reducing and remitting debts, economic assistance, personnel training and investment by enterprises.” (24) Wen continues:

“On the political front, China will not interfere in internal affairs of African countries. We believe that African countries have the right and capability to solve their own problems.” (24)

This is not the attitude of imperialism. Wen’s declaration here doesn’t even reflect the rhetoric of imperialism. The US and its allies in Europe constantly uphold their right to pursue their own interests in other nations, specifically those nations that have received substantial Western capital. China’s approach is markedly different, as it uses trade as a means of developing African social infrastructure–underdeveloped because of centuries of Western colonial oppression–and functions chiefly on a policy of non-intervention. This reflects the CCP’s commitment to the Marxist-Leninist understanding of national self-determination.

China’s relationship with Africa reflects these principles in practice. In November 2009, China pledged $10 billion in “preferential loans directed towards infrastructure and social programmes” to the entire African continent. (25) In addition to providing the resources for infrastructural development, “the financing would go to cancelling debts” and “helping states cope with climate change.” (25) These new loans represent a 79% increase in Chinese direct investment, which has mostly come in the form of “Chinese companies building roads, ports, railways, housing and oil pipelines.” (25)

Geopolitically, China offers an entirely separate international camp for nations at odds with US imperialism. As the US ratchets up tensions with Pakistan and continues to violate its national sovereignty in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s assassination, China announced on May 19, 2011 that it would remain an “all-weather partner” for Pakistan. (26) Premier Wen added, “Pakistan’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.” (26) Coupled with an editorial published the same day in China Daily, the official state newspaper of China, entitled “US actions violate international law,” one can easily see the mammoth discrepancies between the imperialist camp and China. (27) These positions are virtually identical to the minority of left academics in the US, like Noam Chomsky, and contrast sharply with any mainstream account of US military involvement in Pakistan.

China has continually acted as a bulwark against US aggression towards other socialist countries, like the DPRK and Cuba. (28) (29) In neighboring Nepal and India, China has provided geopolitical support for the two communist insurgencies during their respective periods of people’s war. (30) (31) After the Nepalese Maoists overwhelmingly won the country’s parliamentary elections, Chairman Prachanda visited China immediately after he was sworn in as Prime Minister. (32) Even in Latin America, China forged deep economic and military ties with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, as the country continues to move forward in resisting US imperialism and advancing towards socialism. (33)

While China has its shortcomings in terms of foreign relations, particularly its refusal to veto the UN Security Council resolution against Libya, it pursues a qualitatively different foreign policy from any capitalist countries. In terms of trade, China promotes independence and self-determination, where the West promotes dependence, exploitation, and subjugation. Geopolitically, it supports genuine people’s movements against imperialism and provides support to the other existing socialist countries. This is a foreign policy of cooperation deeply influenced by Marxism-Leninism.

Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century should rigorously study the successes of Chinese socialism.

Rather than echoing the counterrevolutionary lies of Trotskyite and left-communist groups about China’s lack of commitment to their abstract and utopian definitions of ‘socialism’, Marxist-Leninists should embrace China as a model of successful socialism whose economic power outstrips that of the greatest imperialist countries. At the core of these Trotskyite/left-communist falsehoods is a chronic pessimism about socialism that reflects the capitalistic cynicism towards proletarian revolution. China’s socialist economy is thriving and more than 1/5 of the worlds population were lifted out of poverty, and their silly irrelevant faction isn’t in power yet! According to them, China must be doing something wrong!

Of course, Marxist-Leninists know otherwise. China is a socialist country and is arguably the most economically successful in history. That realization carries tremendous magnitude and should push Marxist-Leninists to seriously study the model and the works of Deng Xiaoping. Even today, other socialist countries are experimenting with variations of China’s model and see similar successes. If Deng’s concept of market socialism is a correct policy for proletarian states facing severely underdeveloped productive forces, then revolutionaries must recognize him as a significant contributor to Marxism-Leninism.

As China ascends into building ‘higher socialism’, revolutionaries across the world should look East for inspiration as they struggle to throw off the chains of imperialism and actualize people’s democracy.

Long live the universal contributions of Deng Xiaoping to Marxism-Leninism!

Stand with the Chinese masses, and their party, in the exciting process of socialist construction!

Swift victory to the international proletarian revolution!

——-

Endnotes

(1) Mobo Gao, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao & The Cultural Revolution, Pluto Press, 2008, pg. 10

(2) Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles”, March 30, 1979, http://bit.ly/iwhKsE

(3) Deng Xiaoping, “The Working Class Should Make Outstanding Contributions to the Four Modernizations,” October 11, 1978, http://bit.ly/ijepY4

(4) V.I. Lenin, “Role and Function of Trade Unions Under the New Economic Policy,” December 30, 1921 – January 4, 1922, http://bit.ly/mu8hhg

(5) V.I. Lenin, “The Tax in Kind,” April 21, 1921, http://bit.ly/frx9dW

(6) Deng Xiaoping, “Answers to the Italian Journalist Orianna Fallaci,” August 21 and 23, 1980, http://bit.ly/mtccjD

(7) Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” Part I, May 1875, http://bit.ly/m4HR2o

(8) Derek Scissors, Ph.D. “Liberalization in Reverse,” May 4, 2009, Published by The Heritage Foundation, http://bit.ly/jkSBcR

(9) John Lee, “Putting Democracy in China on Hold,” May 28, 2008, Published by The Center for Independent Studies, http://bit.ly/mLqeM1

(10) World Bank, World Development Indicators, Gross Domestic Product, Accessed through Google, http://bit.ly/g6QkN0

(11) Justin McCurry, Julia Kollewe, “China overtakes Japan as world’s second largest economy,” February 14, 2011, Published in The Guardian, http://bit.ly/eySIQ4

(12) Pew Global Attitudes Project, “The Chinese Celebrate Their Roaring Economy as They Struggle with its Costs,” July 22, 2008, Published by The Pew Research Center, http://bit.ly/9nNJC9

(13) Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai,” January 18 – February 21, 1992, http://bit.ly/lTgK64

(14) Deng Xiaoping, “On Questions of Rural Policy,” May 31, 1980, http://bit.ly/kSLYnM

(15) Jonathan Watts, “China vows to create a ‘new socialist countryside’ for millions of farmers,” February 22, 2006, Published in The Guardian, http://bit.ly/mjO6Ki

(16) Austin Ramzy, “China’s New Healthcare Could Cover Millions More,” April 9, 2009, Published in TIME Magazine, http://ti.me/2xdi0

(17) Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, Brendan Smith, “Labor Rights in China,” December 19, 2006, Published by Foreign Policy in Focus, http://bit.ly/ck9lVy

(18) Xinhua, “New labor contract law changes employment landscape,” January 2, 2008, Published in People’s Daily Online, http://bit.ly/mA7wJm

(19) Jamil Anderlini, Rahul Jacob, “Beijing city to raise minimum wage 21%,” December 28, 2010, Published byFinancial Times, http://on.ft.com/l0uPu3

(20) Caijing, “China Targets at Annualized Wage Rise of 15Pct,” April 19, 2011, http://bit.ly/ery12l

(21) Zheng Caixiong, “Wage hike to benefit migrant laborers,” March 3, 2011, Published on China Daily, http://bit.ly/dYsLls

(22) Charles Hutzler, “China will boost spending, try to close income gap,” March 6, 2011, Associated Press, Published on boston.com, http://bit.ly/kTH80G

(23) Dr. Armen Baghdoyan, “Part 1: The Relevance of Marx’s Das Kapital To the Contemporary Chinese Market Economy,” April 26, 2011, Published on Nor Khosq, http://bit.ly/leZKrX

(24) Xinhua, “Chinese premier hails Sino-African ties of cooperation,” June 18, 2006, Published on China View, http://bit.ly/mL3RVo

(25) Mike Pflanz, “China’s $10 billion loan for African development ‘motivated by business not aid’,” November 8, 2009, Published by The Telegraph, http://bit.ly/3KjLPr

(26) Li Xiaokun, Li Lianxiag, “Pakistan assured of firm support,” May 19, 2011, Published by China Daily, http://bit.ly/izgWyQ

(27) Pan Guoping, “US action violates international law,” May 19, 2011, Published by China Daily, http://bit.ly/m68qwV

(28) Andrew Salmon, “China’s support for North Korea grounded in centuries of conflict,” November 26, 2010, Published by CNN, http://bit.ly/dYbxHm

(29) Reuters, “China restructures Cuban debt, backs reform,” December 23, 2010, http://reut.rs/jwO09l

(30) M.D. Nalapat, “China support spurs power grab by Maoists,” May 4, 2009, Published by United Press International, http://bit.ly/l2HALo

(31) RSN Singh, “Maoists: China’s Proxy Soldiers,” July – September 2010, Published in the Indian Defence Review, Vol. 25, Issue 3, http://bit.ly/cXIgOv

(32) The Times of India, ”After Maoists, China woos Nepal’s communists,” April 16, 2009, http://bit.ly/iXvo1Q

(33) Simon Romero, “Chávez Says China to Lend Venezuela $20 Billion,” April 18, 2010, Published in The New York Times, http://nyti.ms/bfg1gg

Door kicked down by SWAT team at Carlos Montes' home. (Committee to Stop FBI Repression)

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement from the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.

Los Angeles, CA – On May 17, 2011 at 5:00 AM the SWAT Team of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and members of the FBI raided the home of Carlos Montes, a long time Chicano activist and active member of theCommittee to Stop FBI Repression. The SWAT Team smashed the front door and rushed in with automatic weapons as Carlos slept. The team of Sheriffs and FBI proceeded to ransack his house, taking his computer, cell phones and hundreds of documents, photos, diskettes and mementos of his current political activities in the pro-immigrant rights and Chicano civil rights movement. Also taken were hundreds of historical documents related to Carlos Montes’ involvement in the Chicano movement for the past 44 years.

Carlos was arrested on one charge dealing with a firearm code and released on bail the following morning. His first court appearance is set for June 16, 2011.

This attack on Carlos Montes is part of the campaign of FBI harassment taking place against the 23 peace and justice activists which has until now been centered in the Midwest. Carlos Montes’ name was listed on the subpoena left in the office of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee last September 24. When Carlos Montes was placed in the LA County Sheriff’s car, an FBI agent approached and asked him questions about the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Carlos Montes has done nothing wrong. This is an attack on him and an attack on the Chicano movement for equality. Carlos has been involved and a committed leader in the immigrant rights, anti war, solidarity, and quality education movements his whole adult life.

Stop the Attacks on the Chicano and Immigrants Rights Movement!

• We demand all charges be dropped against Carlos Montes. We call for the immediate return of all his property.
• Please call and write US Attorney General Eric Holder (202) 353-1555 and demand Hands Off Carlos Montes and other activists.

Join the LA Committee Against FBI Repression on May 24, 2011, at 7 PM to hear first hand about this attack and discuss the FBI repression targeting political activists and movements. The program will take place at F Square Printing, 519 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

For more information

• Los Angeles Committee to Stop FBI Repression
• National Committee to Stop FBI Repression