Stefandav - Revolution of the Mind

Koirala Assured Prachanda of Nepal Government Fall: Gajurel

2009-11-30T09:28:00.001+08:00

Chandra Prakash Gajurel, the Unified Maoists’ Party Secretary addressing a press-meet in Itahari, Sunsari district, November 29, 2009, has revealed that “indeed talks were held between Maoists’ Party Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Nepali Congress Party President Girija Prasad Koirala in Singapore to dislodge the current government under the command of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal”.

M. Gajurel nevertheless, accepted that it was a blunder made by his party to hold talks with Koirala considering that he still holds the key to Nepali politics.

“Yes, Koirala during the talks had said that if need be, the government should be dislodged”, he continued.

He continues, “It is in this light Prachanda after his return home had said that the government will fall in a day or two.”

He adds, “After Koirala returned home, the frail Koirala was not allowed to make any moves by his party leaders”.

“Political and Constitutional crisis is round the corner”, he said adding that “In order to foil avert the impending crisis we have declared the third round of protest.”

Gajurel threatened, “If political consensus was not reached after the Third round of protests, the party will declare fourth round of protest which will paralyze the entire country.”

“We will establish Peoples’ Republic through yet another Peoples’ Revolt”, he also said.

In the course of his interaction with journalists Mr. Gajurel also revealed that the foreign power that had elevated Madhav Nepal as the prime minister of the country is now planning to sideline him.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Interview with Bhattarai: Fusing People’s War & Insurrection in Nepal

2009-11-02T22:59:00.004+08:00

WPRM: Thank you for meeting with us today. In your article in The Worker #4 ‘The Political Economy of the People’s War’ you write that “the transformation of one social system into another, or the destruction of the old by the new, always involves force and a revolutionary leap. The People’s War is such a means of eliminating the old by a new force and of taking a leap towards a new and higher social system.” Why then did the Maoist party enter the peace process and attempt to change society through Constituent Assembly elections?

Baburam Bhattarai: This is a very important question related to the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). The basic motive force of history is the contradiction between the existing level of productive forces and the production relations within society. At a certain stage this contradiction sharpens and there is a break with the old relationship and a leap to the new one. We call this social revolution. That leap necessarily confronts a certain force, because every set of productive relations is backed by a state, and the state means basically the organised force of the army. To break with the old mode of production and leap into a new one, you have to break all the relations within the state backed by the army. And that inevitably requires the use of force. This is a law of history and a basic principle of MLM which nobody can revise. If you revise or abandon it then you are no longer a Marxist. There is no question of our party ever ending this basic principle.

By adhering to this basic principle we waged armed Protracted People’s War (PPW) from 1996 to 2006. But after 2006 we made a certain departure in our tactical line. Some people are confused about this and think we have abandoned PPW forever and adopted a peaceful path of social development. This confusion needs to be cleared. What we are saying is that People’s War is a multifaceted war where both the armed and political form of struggle needs to be combined.

Protracted People’s War (PPW) is a military strategy to be adopted in a semi-feudal, semi-colonial context, and, in the different context of imperialism, could be applied in a modified form even in imperialist countries. But basically the theory of PPW as developed by Mao was to be applied in semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries. That’s why the military line adopted in the case of Nepal was basically a line of Protracted People’s War, which we developed through the course of our struggle, applying it very creatively in Nepal for ten years. And we were successful in developing this war from the stage of strategic defensive to the stage of strategic equilibrium and on to the stage of strategic offensive. We basically established the strategic offensive, which means the final stage of capturing state power and which must be meticulously calculated and applied. If you don’t take note of the existing balance of forces, both politically and militarily in the country and outside, firstly it will be difficult to capture state power and secondly even after capturing state power it will be difficult to sustain it. That’s why we introduced certain new features.

People know only the negative part, but what they forget, or what we have been unable to propagate well since the beginning of the PPW, is the new context of world imperialism and the specific geopolitical context of Nepal. In this context, our party decided that we need to adopt some of the features of general insurrection within the strategy of PPW. Therefore the basic strategy will be PPW, but some of the features of general insurrection, which relies on people’s movement in the urban areas and leads to the final insurrection in the city, the tactics of the general insurrection, should also be incorporated within that strategy. This has been the basic question within our party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) [UCPN(M)]. This idea we first introduced in our national unity congress in 1991 and after that when we had our 2nd national conference in 2001. At that time we developed the theory of fusion of PPW and general insurrection to a new level, so that in the specific context of Nepal, while adhering to the basic path of PPW, the tactic of general insurrection should be fused within that strategy. That’s why at that conference we put emphasis on this aspect. But we thought that when we developed this new political line, developed through the course of the People’s War in Nepal, that it needed to be assessed more thoroughly in the international community of Maoists.

We called this one of the features of Prachanda Path, which we regarded as a new development in the theory of MLM. After 2001 we still adhered to the People’s War but we resorted to some of the tactics of general insurrection, that’s why when we were in the People’s War we always talked of political negotiations and we actually had two rounds of political negotiations. During that time we raised the issues of Constituent Assembly, abolition of the monarchy and establishment of a bourgeois democratic republic. These were the tactics we followed while we were in the PPW. Why we did that was because in the specific conditions of Nepal, though we are in the stage of transition from feudalism to capitalism, in our case the feudal system had been basically led by an autocratic monarchy for thousands of years. In most third world countries autocratic monarchy has already been abolished, and in those countries though the basic foundation of society is still semi-feudal, semi-colonial, the political superstructure was led by bourgeois democrats. But in our case even the political superstructure was dominated by the autocratic feudal monarchy, the national bourgeoisie was very weak and they could not carry forward the bourgeois democratic revolution. It was the proletarian party which had to take the lead to abolish the autocratic monarchy and introduce a bourgeois democracy, which could be again transformed through struggle into New Democracy, a proletarian democratic system.

Therefore we adopted these tactics, and after 2001 we followed these tactics and by 2005 we had reached the stage of strategic offensive in the PPW. Then we thought it was time to focus our activity, to shift our activities to the urban areas. By that time we had liberated most of the countryside, where the poor peasantry lives, and under 25% of our population lives in urban areas. There the petty bourgeoisie class and other classes needed to be mobilised if we were to complete the stage of strategic offensive and capture the state in a revolutionary manner. After 2005 we decided to shift our activity to the urban areas, because without mobilising the masses in urban areas we couldn’t complete our strategic offensive, capturing the state. With these tactics in mind we entered into the negotiation process with certain parliamentary parties who were all struggling with the monarchy but which were too weak, their class nature was too weak, they couldn’t struggle with the monarchy and complete the bourgeois democratic revolution. When the autocratic monarchy centralised all state power in a coup, it was easier for us to have an alliance with those bourgeois democratic parties and we made the 12-point understanding. On the basis of that 12-point understanding we launched a mass movement which we called the 2nd mass movement. After the 2nd mass movement there was a huge upsurge of the people and the autocratic monarchy was forced to accept the Constituent Assembly and to step down. After that we made the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, in which we had to make certain compromises. Those compromises were made to abolish the monarchy, hold the Constituent Assembly elections and then move ahead to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution in the country.

There are some ambiguous features in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Our understanding, the revolutionary party’s understanding, was that after abolishing the monarchy and establishing a bourgeois democratic republic, the proletarian party would take the initiative and launch forward the struggle towards New Democratic Revolution. We knew the bourgeois forces, after the abolition of the monarchy, would try to resist, and our main contradiction then would be with the bourgeois democratic parties. This we had foreseen. So we have not said that after the abolition of the monarchy we’ll stop there. We never said that. What we have said is that we would align with the bourgeois democratic parties to abolish the monarchy, and after the abolition of the monarchy then the contention would be between the bourgeois forces and the proletarian forces. A new field of struggle would start. That was clearly stated in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the subsequent interim constitution and other documents we passed.

After the Constituent Assembly elections, when our party emerged as the largest force and we abolished the monarchy, there was a lot of enthusiasm among the masses of the people. Our party’s tactical line had been correctly implemented. That gave a tremendous force to the basic masses of the people and our support greatly increased. For the time being we cooperated with the interim government also, because by participating in that coalition government we thought we could work within the bureaucracy, within the army, within the police and within the judiciary, in order to build our support base through those state structures, which would help us for future revolutionary activities. With that in mind we participated in the coalition government. After the abolition of the monarchy, when the main contradiction would start with the bourgeois democratic forces, then our struggle took a new turn.

After April 2009 [when Prachanda resigned from government], that phase of the Constituent Assembly and implementation of the bourgeois democratic republic was more or less complete. Our understanding is to now carry on the struggle forwards to complete the New Democratic Revolution. So again we made a tactical shift, showing that from now on our major fight would be with the bourgeois democrat parties who are backed by imperialism and the expansionist forces. With this thinking our party left the government and now we are focusing on the mass movement, so that now we could really practice what we have been preaching. That means the fusion of the strategy of PPW and the tactic of general insurrection. What we have been doing since 2005 is the path of preparation for general insurrection through our work in the urban areas and our participation in the coalition government.

But what one should not forget was that we had never ever surrendered the gains of the PPW, what we had gained during the ten years of struggle. We had formulated the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), we had our base areas, we had a lot of mass support, and all this we have been able to preserve. But we have not been able to convey to our comrades outside the country that the gains of the People’s War were never surrendered. The PLA is still with us, and the arms we collected during that war are still with us within the single-key system, monitored by the United Nations team, but basically the key is with us and the army is with us and we have never surrendered. This shows we have not abandoned the path of PPW. What we have done is suspended that part of the activity for some time and focused more on the urban activities so that we could make a correct balance between the military and political aspects of struggle. After some time we will be able to combine both aspects of PPW and general insurrection to mount a final insurrection to capture state power. We would like to stress that we are still continuing in the path of revolution, but the main features we tried to introduce were to make a fusion between the theory of PPW and the tactic of general insurrection. After coming to the peaceful phase I think whatever confusion there was has been mitigated and people realise we are still on the revolutionary path.

Now we are preparing for the final stage of the completion of the New Democratic Revolution. In a few months when the contradiction will sharpen between the proletarian and bourgeois forces, maybe there will be some intervention from the imperialist and expansionist forces. During that time we may again be forced to have another round of armed clashes. Our party is already aware of that and we have decided to again focus on the basic masses of the people both in urban and rural areas. To strengthen those mass bases we have formed the United National People’s Movement, which will be preparing for both struggle in the urban areas and to strengthen our mass base in the countryside. In the decisive stage of confrontation with the reactionary forces we could again combine our bases in the rural areas and our support in the urban areas for a final assault against the enemy to complete the revolution.

I would like to say we have never abandoned PPW, the only thing is that there has been a tactical shift within the strategy. This is one point. The other point is that being a Maoist we believe in continuous revolution. Revolution never stops. Even when one stage is completed, immediately the new stage should be continued. Only that way can we reach socialism and communism. That is a basic tenet of Maoism. Being a Maoist, this reasoning of continuous revolution can never be abandoned. We are still in the course of PPW, though the tactics have shifted according to the nature of the time. But there is a confusion in the international community of proletarian forces, and we would like to clarify this, but I think this thing can be better done in practice than in words. Anyhow we are confident we can convince our comrades who have some doubts about our activities that we are still pursuing the path of revolution. We will complete the revolution in a new way and we have to show that revolution is possible even in the 21st century. And Nepal can be a model of revolution in the 21st century.

WPRM: Can you explain how the UCPN(M) understands the nature of the state in this transitional period? Can the New Democratic Revolution be completed through the holding of an election?

Baburam Bhattarai: The key question in any revolution is the question of the state. The state is simply an instrument of dictatorship of a certain class. Right now in Nepal the existing state is a dictatorship of the feudal, comprador and bureaucratic capitalist classes. So the task of the revolution is to smash this state and replace it with a New Democratic one. This is the basic objective of the revolution. But in the special case of Nepal, the semi-feudal, semi-colonial state was presided over by an autocratic monarchy and it was being backed by foreign imperialist and expansionist forces. Our party, the UCPN(M), therefore thought it more prudent first to do away with the autocratic monarchy and establish a bourgeois democratic republic and then immediately go towards New Democratic Revolution. Those were the tactics adopted by us. We took the initiative to abolish the monarchy under the leadership of the proletariat which was a tremendous boost for the proletarian forces within our country. It also marginalised the bourgeois democratic forces because they had not taken the lead in that phase of the revolution. After the implementation of these tactics and the abolition of the monarchy, we have established a bourgeois democratic republic in this country, which basically still is a dictatorship of the feudal landlord, comprador and bureaucratic capitalist classes. But politically, since the proletarian forces took the initiative to establish this transitional state, there is contention between the reactionary classes and the progressive classes. A sort of flux has been created, it has not been stabilised. Within this nature of the state, which is in flux, we think it will be easier for the revolutionary forces to intervene and further destabilise the state, putting pressure on it from outside the state which can be smashed to make a New Democratic state.

The nature of the transitional state is, to put it very concisely, in principle a dictatorship of the reactionary forces. But in practice, since the proletarian forces played a leading and decisive role in dismantling the autocratic monarchy and creating this transitional state, the political authority of the progressive, patriotic and proletarian forces is high. So this interim state won’t be very stable and if we can correctly mobilise the masses of people it can easily be overthrown and replaced by a New Democratic state. We think this is a new experiment being carried out in Nepal, it has not happened like in China where they directly implemented the revolutionary policies of the party and overthrew the old state replacing it with a new one. But in our case it has meant cutting up the state part by part, in fact we are devouring it part by part. Ultimately we will be able to smash it and then replace it with a new state. This does not mean we are trying to reform the whole state, indeed the whole state has to be totally displaced by a new state. There is no confusion on our part on this question. But the method of destroying the whole state is partly new in our case because it was presided over by an autocratic monarchy not by bourgeois democratic parties as seen in other third world countries. Because of this specificity of Nepal, this transitional state has been a new thing not seen elsewhere. But our party is very clear on the question that the state needs to be totally destroyed and replaced by the new state. We are working on that line and our party feels that after the formulation of the strategy of People’s War and general insurrection we will be able to finally mobilise the masses of the people in a mass upsurge and insurrection to abolish this state and replace it with a New Democratic one.

WPRM: After the resignation of Chairman Prachanda from the government and the coup by President Yadav over the affair of General Katuwal, the main revisionist party, the CPN-UML, is now leading the government and you are heading the recently formed United National People’s Movement (UNPM). Can you tell us the plan of the party in leading People’s Movement-3 and carrying out insurrection in this situation?

Baburam Bhattarai: As I told you, the basic orientation of our party is to complete the New Democratic Revolution in a new way in Nepal. By firmly sticking to that line we are practicing different tactical shifts. Accordingly, after we completed this task of elections of the Constituent Assembly and the establishment of democratic republic, now our next task is to organise a people’s movement and develop it into an insurrectionary upsurge and complete the New Democratic Revolution. Now we have entered that phase. During this phase we will focus more on organising and mobilising the masses and leading them towards a revolutionary upsurge. That means certain changes in the policy as had been practiced during the People’s War. During that time our focus was on the peasant masses, which was slightly different than the struggle in the urban areas which consists of basically the working class.

To lead this phase of the movement we have set up the new UNPM, which is basically a revolutionary united front of the patriotic, democratic and left forces led by the Communist Party. We have put forward a list of 25 demands related to nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood. With these demands we have mobilised the masses of people. At a certain stage the contradiction with the bourgeois democratic forces and the imperialist expansionist forces will reach a higher stage. At that time there will be a decisive clash between the reactionary and revolutionary forces. That will be the insurrectionary upsurge. This is the view of the people. So with this in mind we have been organising plans and struggles, mass struggles which we will be carrying out in subsequent months. As Marx and Lenin correctly pointed out, you must believe firmly in the tactics of insurrection. If you have to organise insurrection you have to make a decisive action and take it to the final conclusion. If you can’t do that you will be defeated. To prepare for that decisive struggle you have to move through different stages, that’s why after leaving the government we are now focusing more on the issue of civilian supremacy so we can isolate the militarist section of the reactionaries. Secondly we are focusing on the question of nationalism so we can organise the broad masses of patriotic forces against imperialist and expansionist intervention. Thirdly we are raising the issue of land reform and the basic question of livelihood among the general masses of the people, so that the poor masses of the people and the petty bourgeoisie classes can be organised.

With this in mind we are carrying on a plan in the coming few months, there will be a broad unity of patriotic, democratic and revolutionary forces, which can mount a final struggle against the reactionary forces, the bourgeois democratic forces backed by the foreign imperialist forces. We think this will lead to a proper movement and a final insurrectionary upsurge of the masses of the people. If we are able to play the contradiction between the reactionary forces within the country and the imperialist and expansionist forces outside, then at an opportune moment we can organise an insurrectionary upsurge and be victorious. Therefore we have established the UNPM and put forward protest programs. In the next few months when the contradiction will sharpen among the reactionary forces while making the new constitution, during that time this new movement will arise when the people will finally come to revolt and complete the New Democratic Revolution. This is all I want to say on this for now.

WPRM: In the past you have written of the need to confiscate the land of feudals and the capital of comprador and bureaucrat capitalists, and the party has carried this out to some extent. Is this still the plan of the UCPN(M)?

Baburam Bhattarai: To complete the New Democratic Revolution you have to smash the feudal production relations and culture, that means we have to confiscate the property of the feudal landlords and distribute it to the peasants on the principle of ‘land to the tiller’. This was the basic policy of our party during the People’s War, which we practiced in the rural areas. Nepal is geographically divided between the hilly regions and the plains areas and most of the land is in the plains. But in the plains it was difficult to carry out guerilla warfare, so we just entered there and implemented some land reform policies. Since the plains border India and there is a danger of foreign intervention there, we have never been able to completely practice land reform in those areas. This will only be implemented after the final victory of the revolution. During the People’s War this policy, the principle of ‘land to the tiller’, was practiced more clearly in the hilly areas and partly in the plains areas bordering India. But we subscribe to the policy of abolishing feudal landowners because without making the real tillers of the land, the peasants, the owners of the land, we can’t bring about the land revolution and can’t complete the New Democratic Revolution. So our basic policy remains abolishing the feudal property relations and introducing a socialist-oriented national bourgeois democratic revolution. That is our policy on the question of land.

On the question of capital, for countries like ours, a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, capital is basically dominated by imperialist capital. In our case Indian expansionist capital in particular. The nature of capital in Nepal at the moment is comprador and bureaucratic. This means it is dependent, you cannot have national independence in the country. That’s why we want to do away with this bureaucratic and comprador capital and convert it into national industrial capital which can subsequently be organised in a socialistic manner. With this policy in mind, we intend after the completion of the revolution to confiscate all this bureaucratic and comprador capital and convert it into national capital which can be reorganised into a socialist mode of production. This is our policy to do away with all the remnants of feudal landlordism, abolition of bureaucratic and comprador capital, and reorganisation of the economy, firstly under a New Democratic line and then in transition towards socialism.

WPRM: The UCPN(M) has brought forward ideas around elections in a New Democratic and socialist state. In your article on ‘The Question of Building a New Type of State’ in The Worker #9, you particularly discuss the need for greater democracy among the people. How will the holding of elections solve the problems generated by the weaknesses of the experience of socialism in the 20th century?

Baburam Bhattarai: This question of democracy and dictatorship is also very important for the communist movement. In principle every state is a dictatorship of a certain class, so-called democracy is also a form of bourgeois dictatorship. This is a basic tenet of MLM and nobody can deny that. But what was practiced in the 20th century in different people’s democracies and socialist countries was, though in theory correct, in practice the real democratic institutions and processes were minimised. Democracy is a class concept, and bourgeois democracy has its own rules, but proletarian democracy also needs to be developed. What happened in the Soviet Union was that the Soviet, a democratic institution, and the working class became very functional, especially during Comrade Stalin’s time. In reality the Soviets couldn’t be very functional and they gradually turned into a bureaucratic state apparatus. After the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, Comrade Mao Zedong drew certain lessons and he wanted to expand the scope of proletarian democracy. That’s what he practiced during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. There were certain new institutions of people’s committees and Red Guards to expand people’s democracy. But this experience was very short and after Comrade Mao died, the counter-revolution in China took place.

Now it is up to the revolutionaries of the 21st century to learn from those lessons of the 20th century and develop a new concept of proletarian democracy. Our party discussed this thoroughly and made a review of the positive and negative aspects of revolution in the 20th century. We came to the conclusion that though the basic concept of MLM on state and democracy remains valid, because the Soviet apparatus was no longer functional, when the Soviet state turned into a bureaucratic state, and with the lesson of Mao’s experiment of Cultural Revolution against that negative experience of the Soviet Union, we have to develop the concept of proletarian democracy further. Our conclusion was that basically we need more room for the masses of the people to supervise and intervene in the state. If that will not happen then after the revolution the initiative of the masses will be diminished, and only the few of the bureaucratic elite will rule over the state in the name of the proletariat and the revolution would not be carried further.

To check this we have to create certain mechanisms whereby the constant mobilising of the masses and the constant vigilance and intervention of the masses is ensured so the state doesn’t turn into a bureaucratic state. To create such an institution one of the ideas is to provide democracy as was practiced during the Paris Commune days, or to again go towards the Soviet model of democracy, or draw lessons from the Cultural Revolution. We want to take lessons from all these three experiences, so our party’s conclusion was that within a socialist framework, within the framework of the dictatorship of the proletariat, competition should be organised among the masses of the people, so the masses will be constantly energised and it will prevent only a few people having a monopoly over the state.

This concept of competition within the framework of socialism, of proletarian dictatorship, we have developed this basic concept. But this is only a general concept, the actual mode of that competition we have still to work out. Our general feeling is still under discussion, we haven’t reached any final conclusion. But we have proposed multi-party competition within the socialist framework. Why do we need many parties? Though the proletarian class is one class, the proletarian consciousness is different, there is uneven consciousness. If there is competition among them then the most revolutionary section will be in a position to lead this process through democratic means. All the masses of the working class can be mobilised, and in such mode of constantly mobilising the masses of people we will limit the chance of degeneration of this democracy into a bureaucratic set-up. That’s why we are thinking one of the options is to allow multi-party competition among the proletarian and progressive classes within the framework of the leadership of the proletariat and a socialist constitutional framework.

This is one of the options that we have proposed but it just a proposal, we haven’t reached any conclusion. This is what I discussed in that article, it is a preliminary article, we have proposed this but I think it needs to be discussed in the international proletarian movement and developed further. Otherwise we will not be able to draw lessons from the failures of the teachings of socialism and proletarian revolution in the 20th century and lead revolution forward into the 21st century. The basic point of departure is still from the Cultural Revolution, where Mao went beyond the traditional framework of the state system and gave more power to the masses of the people to rebel against the bureaucratic system within the party and within the state. That is the general orientation. But the right institutions have not been developed yet. The job of the revolutionaries in the 21st century will be to develop that concept further and to develop certain institutions and procedures whereby the proletarian class gets mobilised to carry forward the revolution. With this is mind, we are putting forward this concept of competition within the New Democratic and socialist state framework.

WPRM: Elections in imperialist countries generally serve not as a way to mobilise the masses but as a formal ritual that people carry out in a very bureaucratic way. Only very seldom does the election actually mobilise people and that is in very specific circumstances, like to some extent the election of Obama in the USA, because people were so opposed to the crimes of the Bush regime. How can you make elections at all for mobilising people and helping people develop their understanding of the class nature of society and the need to push towards socialism when our general experience of elections in imperialist and oppressed countries is that they are a tool for deceiving the masses?

Baburam Bhattarai: The practice of democracy in imperialist counties is a form of bourgeois democracy, a ritual that deceives the masses of people and perpetuates the rule of their class state. But what we are talking about is not organising elections within the bourgeois state, we are talking about after the revolution in a New Democratic or socialistic framework, where there will be certain constitutional provisions whereby the reactionaries, imperialists and criminal forces will not be allowed to participate. Only the progressive forces, the democratic forces and people will be allowed to compete. That is the competition within the New Democratic or socialist framework we are talking about. This is a basic difference. After the revolution, the first thing we will do will be redistribution of property. There will no longer be rich and poor, a big gap between the haves and the have-nots. That way when we organise competition there will be an equal chance for people to compete. But in the given framework of the imperialist and bourgeois democratic system there is a huge gap between the propertied and property-less working class. The competition is so uneven that the property-less working class can never compete with the propertied, the bourgeois and imperialist class. That way, only after carrying out this redistribution of property in a socialistic and New Democratic manner can you organise political competition where there will be a fair chance of everyone to compete on an equal footing. Our idea of competition in a New Democratic and socialist framework is therefore fundamentally different from the formal competition and practice in a bourgeois democratic and imperialist state. The difference in the class nature of the state should be appreciated.

WPRM: You’ve already discussed some aspects of the Cultural Revolution but I would like to go into that in more detail. The Cultural Revolution was the pinnacle of revolution in the 20th century, so what lessons do you and the UCPN(M) take from this?

Baburam Bhattarai: Yes we think the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the pinnacle of revolution not only in the 20th century but in the whole history of the liberation of mankind. It is the pinnacle of the development of revolutionary ideas. So all the revolutionaries must make the Cultural Revolution their point of departure and develop the revolutionary idea and plan further.

The basic question of the Cultural Revolution was to continue the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the basic idea. So first you need a dictatorship of the proletarian class, and for that you have to smash the whole state and complete the revolution, that is the first thing we have to do. After the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the working class needs to be constantly mobilised in a continuous revolution. Only then can we prevent the state degenerating into a bureaucratic apparatus. That is the basic idea. That’s why after the negative experiences of the Soviet Union and the initial negative experiences in China, Mao developed this concept of Cultural Revolution, giving the masses the right to rebel. He asked all the oppressed classes and people to rebel against the authority in power and he introduced Red Guards, people’s committees, all-round dictatorship of the proletariat in every field, in politics, economics and society, in cultural space, exercising all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie to continue the revolution. This is the fundamental aspect of the Cultural Revolution and this needs to be upheld and developed further.

But in our case since our class has not completed any revolution in the 21st century and there is no revolutionary socialist state in the world, we have to draw lessons from the Cultural Revolution and try to practice them within the revolutionary parties and within the mass organisations, and then after we complete the revolution then we can practice the basic tenets of the Cultural Revolution in the state. This is the basic lesson to be drawn. And what we would like to stress is that without taking the Cultural Revolution as the point of departure we cannot complete the revolution in any country in the present day world and we will not be able to reach socialism and communism if we don’t have this idea of continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This idea of continuous revolution needs to be grasped very firmly. People generally think that once state power has been captured, the revolution is complete. But thinking like this means the initiative of the revolutionary masses will be diminished. That has been a flaw of earlier revolutions. What we need to practice now is the idea that the revolution never stops until all the classes are abolished, the state is abolished, the property system is abolished and we enter a classless and stateless society, or a commune of the masses of people is created. Until that stage is reached revolution never stops. This idea of Cultural Revolution needs to be firmly grasped and we are very serious on this issue.

WPRM: How do you practice Cultural Revolution within the party now?

Baburam Bhattarai: Within the party we allow broad and great democracy. The principle of the Communist Party is democratic centralism. We need centralism to guide the revolution, we need strong leadership, but if that leadership and centralism is not created on the broad foundation of democracy, that is not acceptable. Otherwise that leadership could degenerate into bureaucratic centralism. Right now within our party there are broad divisions on any issue, but the central leadership will mobilise the cadres and masses of people to discuss these issues and only then will the decision be taken. Once the decision is taken it will have to be carried out. But before taking the decision any issue must be broadly discussed so that the great exercise of democracy should be done first and on the basis of that the centralism will be created. Only that kind of centralism will be truly democratic centralism. This is what our party is trying to practice.

WPRM: What about the practice of two-line struggle within the party?

Baburam Bhattarai: Two-line struggle is also related to this question. Two-line struggle is the life of any party because everything is a unity of opposites in this world. Even the party is a unity of opposites. The policy of ‘one divides into two’ also applies to the party. So although there is a contention between proletarian and non-proletarian tendencies within any communist party, so there has to be a proper mechanism to organise a struggle of different tendencies within the party. Therefore two-line struggle needs to be promoted. The only thing is we have to be very careful in handling the two-line struggle. On this issue there are different tendencies within the International Communist Movement. One is very sectarian, once you enter into two-line struggle you always end up with a split. This is a sectarian or ultra-left tendency. The other is a right-revisionist tendency, which is to struggle and always compromise so that the party gets turned into a reformist group.

The correct MLM formulation is unity-struggle-transformation. We should struggle with the aim of achieving a higher level of unity. That’s the aim of the correct handling of two-line struggle in a revolutionary party. And our party has been very successfully conducting this method of two-line struggle with the aim of unity-struggle-transformation. We are interested in mainly transformation. If the aim is not transformation then it is not reaching a higher level of unity and then the two-line struggle always leads to a split. And a split of the proletarian party weakens our class and our ability to carry forward revolution. This lesson needs to be firmly grasped, especially among Maoist revolutionaries in the world today. In the name of carrying out two-line struggle they forget the aspect of reaching a higher level of unity and transformation. In that way the revolutionary parties remain as very small groups and collections and are not able to carry out revolution. I think these lessons, especially from Lenin and Mao, need to be drawn and practiced.

WPRM: As a way of concluding this interview, in the situation of continued pressure and the possibility of intervention from US imperialism and Indian expansionism in particular, do you think that socialism in one country can be developed in Nepal?

Baburam Bhattarai: This question of socialism in one country is a theoretical question to be debated. This is the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. Imperialism always consists of uneven and unequal development, so revolution within a country is not only a possibility, it is a must, because revolution won’t break out all over the world at the same time. That’s impossible as long as imperialism remains and uneven development is there. This is a basic tenet of Leninism which still holds true and we should grasp it. But in the specific case of a small country like Nepal, sandwiched between the big countries of India and China and being dictated over by US imperialism all over the world, if you don’t have support, international support, or there is no strong revolutionary movement, it will be very difficult to sustain the revolution. It may be possible to carry out the revolution to capture state power, but to sustain the state power and develop in the direction of socialism and communism we will need support from the international proletarian movement. That way the level of international support and international proletarian solidarity is important. After the growing influence of so-called globalisation, imperialist globalisation, the reaches of the imperialist power have gone to every corner of the world. If there is no strong international proletarian organisation to fight against imperialist intervention and domination, it will be difficult to sustain the revolution in one small country.

Keeping this in mind, we must however make revolution in our country, this is a must. But to sustain it and develop it further we need the backing of the international proletarian forces. For that we have to give more importance to internet work and the international community. This need is more important in the case of small countries like Nepal. In fact, in recent months we have been discussing this issue. To complete the revolution in Nepal and sustain it and develop it further, at least in the South Asian context, we need to have strong revolutionary solidarity and we need the backing from the international proletarian movement. We feel the events of the international proletarian movement worldwide and some of the institutions that are being developed are all important, like the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), the Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties in South Asia (CCOMPOSA) and the World People’s Resistance Movement (WPRM). These type of organisations are very important for the success of the revolution and to gather support at the international level for the success of our revolution.

WPRM: Thank you for your time.

Baburam Bhattarai: Thank you and lal salam!

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Basanta Interview: Possible Victory or Collapse in Nepal’s Revolution

2009-11-01T22:41:00.000+08:00

This interview was copied from the website Revolution in South Asia. It was conducted by World Peoples Resistance Movement.

WPRM: Can you explain the current situation in Nepal since the resignation of Prachanda from the government?

Basanta: First of all I would like to say something about the situation in which we had to enter into this process. When Gyanendra usurped the whole political power, the contradiction of the Nepalese people with monarchy became the principal political contradiction. It created a situation in which all the political forces that had a certain level of contradiction with the king could come tactically together to fight absolute rule of the monarchy. It was in the Chunwang meeting held in 2005 that we adopted a new tactic of democratic republic, which became a basis for 12-point understanding between our party and other 7 parliamentarian parties. Everyone in the world knows the result, the unprecedented mass uprising in April 2006. After that the king, relinquished his absolute power and reinstated the parliament. In the Constituent Assembly election, we emerged as the largest party and the king was removed and the country was declared Federal Democratic Republic from the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly. In fact, it was basically the end of the tactics adopted from the Chunwang meeting.

We were in the Constituent Assembly and at the same time, we were the largest party, so we had a responsibility to form government. The reactionaries the world over were expecting our party to disappear in the so-called political main stream. It was logical because in the history any party that had participated in the government before completing the revolution had never returned to revolution again. But we were consciously utilising this political tactic to make our revolution go forward. That was our understanding when we were in the government where we struggled to the extent possible in favour of revolution.

It had been a long-running practice in our history that whichever party comes into the government takes to the dictates of Indian expansionism and at the same time the US imperialism. The reactionaries expected the Maoists to act on this same basis, but we didn’t, we have a goal of making revolution and we cannot deviate from this. However, we have to follow a different course as the new contradictions emerge in the society.

When we were in the government, we tried to implement some political programs but did not follow dictates mainly from the Indian expansionism. The reactionaries clearly understood that Maoists were not abandoning revolution but familiarizing their programmes within the masses. They decided to topple the government. We had either to follow expansionist dictates or we had to go with the masses. We chose the later because we could not exchange government with revolution. The resignation has become a very big political attack upon the imperialist and expansionists. They wanted us to surrender, but we didn’t. Rather we exposed the conspiracy on how they were trying to make us surrender and how they are forcing us to cede our sovereignty. When we exposed this among the masses, it has influenced a large section of the masses in favour of our party and revolution. Now a situation has come where section of compradors, which are basically pro-India and pro-America and act as puppets, are getting united against our party but a broad masses are rallying around us.

Now the sovereignty is in a real danger. We, after resigning from the government, are taking up this issue. Also, the class oppression is still unresolved, because no revolution has been accomplished. The whole country is now going towards a new polarisation, the reactionaries, mainly comprador-bourgeoisie, bureaucrats and feudal and their allies is trying to take the country in their direction, but we are trying to take the country in our own direction. Without complete polarisation amongst the masses, no revolution can take place. That’s how the country is going towards a new polarisation after our resignation from the government.

WPRM: After the recent party conference what are the strategy and tactics of the UCPN(M)?

Basanta: As a communist our overall strategy is socialism and communism, but if we analyse the strategy then we can find that we have a maximum strategy and the minimum strategy. Because ours is a country that is semi-feudal and semi-colonial, and therefore the basic contradiction is the outcomes of this socio-economic condition. The contradictions we have in this country such as class contradiction, which is principal, and the gender, national, regional and many other contradictions, all these contradictions are the outcome of the semi-feudal and semi-colonial socio-economic condition. Our immediate strategy is to resolve this basic contradiction. That’s why our immediate strategy is to abolish feudalism and imperialist domination from our country and in so doing accomplish new democratic revolution.

In fact, it is the New Democratic Revolution that resolves the basic contradictions arisen out of semi-colonial and semi-feudal socio-economic condition. That’s why our immediate strategy is to move to New Democratic Revolution against semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism. But our overall strategy is socialism and communism. This is one thing. But to reach strategy we have to take up various tactics. That was why previously; we used the tactics of democratic republic, which we decided at the Chunwang Meeting. This tactic is now over because the monarchy has been abolished from Nepal. Now we have taken up a new tactic to reach our immediate strategic goal. The new tactic is the People’s Federal Democratic National Republic or People’s Republic in short. Now we will fight for a People’s Republic which will resolve the problems related with class, national, regional and gender oppression.

Now comes the question of civilian supremacy. This is a bourgeois question, no doubt. But never in the history has there been civilian supremacy in our country. In the past the military was never kept under civilian control it was under the control of king all the time. That’s why every time they have taken up their advantage and seized the government, as a coup, by sacking the government and dissolving the parliament. Twice in the history it happened so. First, it was in 1961, king Mahendra staged a political coup with the help of Nepali army and sacked the government and the parliament both. In the same manner in 2002 Gyanendra did the same. Therefore, to keep army under civilian control has been the minimum condition to protect the achievements of people’s war and the mass movement. That’s why to establish civilian supremacy has become an important issue among the masses.

Nepalese people want a new setup, a new society. People want peace and prosperity. It is people’s constitution that can lead Nepal to peace and prosperity by doing away with all kinds of oppression. The new constitution must be written in such a way that it brings feudalism to an end, does away with imperialist and expansionist oppression, brings about peace and prosperity, and defends national sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is the content of the People’s Republic, which will lead to the completion of new democratic revolution.

WPRM: We understand there are a number of tendencies within the party could you explain to us how these struggles are taking place?

Basanta: In class society the class struggle continues. As long as there are classes and class struggle in the society there exists two line struggle in the party of the proletariat. That’s why in the party there are always different kinds of ideas coming up from different leaders, because the leaders also come from the same society. They make up their ideas from the society and the class struggles. Their way of thinking is different and therefore different kinds of ideas penetrate in the party through different leaders. That’s why different kinds of trends and tendencies come within the party. And there is always struggle among these trends.

That’s why it is very obvious that in any party there is always line struggle between different trends, but the question is how we handle the line struggle in the party. In the communist movement we have seen two wrong tendencies. One is that in the name of maintaining unity in ideology, the organisation keeps on splitting and splitting, just like an amoeba. It is a purist thinking and does not grasp the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist understanding that party is a unity of opposites. It has very much weakened our communist movement. It is one wrong trend. There is another trend that encourages, in the name of maintaining unity, to go for a compromise all the time. This also is very much wrong because compromise with wrong trends will not help one reach to a correct line. And that party which is based on compromise cannot lead any revolution. That’s why in dealing with different wrong trends and tendencies in the party, we have to refrain from these two wrong trends: in the name of maintaining purity to go into split again and again and, in the name of maintaining unity to make a compromise.

WPRM: Can you tell us more about the two line struggle between Comrade Prachanda and Comrade Kiran?

Basanta: First of all I would like to say it was not a struggle between two individual leaders. Comrade Prachanda is our Chairman; he has been leading our party and revolution for a long time. Comrade Kiran is a senior leader, even senior to Comrade Prachanda. Sometimes in the outside world it is said that it is a struggle between Prachanda and Kiran, but this is a wrong way of looking at. Definitely lines come from certain comrades and in our case comrade Prachanda and comrade Kiran are such leaders who have stood as unity and struggle of opposites i.e. they have dialectical relationship.

The way this has been reported in the external media is wrong and is aimed at dividing our party. They projected that Comrade Prachanda was a soft-liner and Comrade Kiran was a hard-liner. This kind of projection was always there because the reactionaries do not want our party to remain united. They want to destroy it. The reality is that the principal aspect between them is unity. If they did not have unity how could they lead our party together for so long years? But because they are the products of our society they have different ways of thinking so the differences in certain issues arise.

WPRM: Can you explain the various aspects of this particular Line Struggle?

Basanta: The tactics we adopted from the Chunwang Central Committee meeting was Democratic Republic. When this Democratic Republic was established from the Constituent Assembly this tactic was over. Now the previous tactic we adopted was over and we had to adopt a new tactic. It demanded to have a thorough analysis of democratic republic, its class nature etc. We had to analysis class contradictions that existed in the society. We had to look at class relations to develop a united front. In that situation comrades did have different ways of thinking but not diagonally opposite. But once we had our sharp discussion we reached to the conclusion that the Democratic Republic in place is a bourgeois republic. The whole organs of the state power including the army is in the control of the reactionaries. To comprehend this system we had to have a deeper discussion, which demanded open and sharp debate in the central committee. Debate had occurred all through the party and many different opinions were expressed. We wanted to understand the current situation deeply, and we found that the common concern of every comrade was how to develop a revolutionary line and preserve party unity. Now we have developed a correct political line tactic and achieved unity, which is conditional and time-bound. Unity is always relative while struggle is absolute. Having unity now does not mean we will have unity forever.

WPRM: Now the UCPN(M) is in the Constituent Assembly, how is the party carrying out the mass line?

Basanta: Now we are in the Constituent Assembly, we have to make a constitution to resolve the problems of the country and people. Basically we have two problems: We are still a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country. We have to destroy feudalism and imperialism and establish New Democratic Republic to facilitate national capital to flourish. At the same time we have to defend our sovereignty. These are the basic things we are fighting for in the Constituent Assembly. But this is not like the parliament which we had in Nepal before, nor is it like any parliament in any country of the world. It works to draft a new constitution and open the way to resolve the contradictions of the country. That’s why CA members are fighting in the Constituent Assembly for the rights of all people and the whole party is mobilising masses in support of the people’s constitution, whether it be urban or rural areas, plains or hilly regions everywhere. We are mobilising not only the CA members but the whole people to make them write people’s constitution.

We are in the Constituent Assembly; we are raising the issues of the whole country, the whole masses of the people. It may seem that as we are in the Constituent Assembly we don’t have a relationship with the masses, but it is wrong. What we are raising in the Constituent Assembly are the issues from society. Our party is present all across the country, in every district, every village, we have party committees. In every Village Development Committee we have party committees, and those members are among the masses. They are raising the issues of the masses and they are leading the masses. It is true that a section of the leadership is working in the constituent assembly and they don’t have time to regularly visit the masses, but the whole party structure is working throughout the countryside and the cities, the Terai and the Himalayas.

For example in the Terai, the class aspect is the principal aspect because we are making new democratic revolution of which the axis is land to the tiller. But along with this there are other aspects for example nationality question for the Madhesi peoples. No doubt they there are oppressed classes in Madhesh, but the whole Madhesi people are also an oppressed nation. They have been devoid of their national identity, and we have to let them establish themselves as a nation. They want them to establish their own identity but they have been isolated from the central power. That’s why our party in Madhesh addresses their issues. Likewise, we raise gender issues and oppressed region issues apart from the class issues all across the country.

Now we are in a transitional period and we need to go for New Democratic Revolution. We have not reached New Democratic Revolution yet. We have a bourgeois democracy now, but we think we are very close to new democratic revolution. The objective situation is ripe for New Democratic Revolution. There is a wide polarisation among the people; and the people and the whole country is basically united for the cause of revolution. People know that if they want anything done it has to be done by the Maoists. Certainly, we have weaknesses and limitations, that is one thing; but people understand that there is no other force except the UCPN (Maoist) in this country that can take things forward for revolution.

The future is very bright but at the same time the challenges are very serious. For, imperialism, mainly the US imperialism does not want any communist power in the world to emerge. The way we traverse cannot be straight forward as we wish. Communists never find a straight road they have to go through twists and turns, and take different kinds of tactics before the completion of revolution.

WPRM: What role do India and the US play in Nepali politics at this time?

Basanta: The US and India want a state in Nepal that is favourable to them. But the people who are oppressed are supporting our revolution and our cause. Now the reactionaries are trying to unite their own sections and establish a puppet government in Nepal to suppress the revolutionaries. At the same time the working class and oppressed peoples want this revolution to go ahead. Both these ideas are contending in our country.

First of all, what should one understand is that Indian expansionism and the US imperialism are doing all they can to sabotage the revolution in Nepal. As regards the new democratic revolution in Nepal under the leadership of the proletariat they have unity, which is the principal aspect. But in their strategic interest they have some differences too. India wants to control the entire natural resources and market to fulfil their expansionist ambition. They want to expand their border up to Himalayas so that they can exploit resources in an unhindered way. However, the US wants to establish a base in Nepal so that it can control the entire South Asia and encircle China, the contending economic super power in the 21st century.

WPRM: How does the UCPN(M) view the CPN(UML) and Nepali Congress at the present time?

Basanta: We have to say that Nepali Congress principally represents the comprador bourgeoisie and secondarily feudalism in Nepal. They are a status quo party; they do not want revolution. Rather they want to maintain the status quo. The present state is a reactionary state. They do not want to go ahead of this, so they are reactionaries. UML is basically the same, there is no basic difference. But they call themselves communist, so they still have some influence among the revolutionary masses. But their line cannot lead the country to revolution because they basically represent the comprador bourgeoisie and feudalism. Also, as a class, the UML mainly represents the petit bourgeoisie. Both these parties are against the revolution.

But within the UML there is a section, the petit bourgeois, which is oppressed but cannot lead revolution on its own. This section has a tendency towards radicalism. UML is therefore basically divided. One section represents the comprador bourgeoisie, and one section the petit bourgeoisie. One section fully supports whatever the US and India dictates them to do. It is crystal clear that one of their leaders, Madhav Kumar Nepal, has become the Prime Minister of Nepal with the blessing of the US and India. At the same time the other section opposes to some extent the US and India as they have some patriotic aspirations.

In short Nepali Congress and UML are reactionary parties. Nepali Congress represents the comprador bourgeoisie and UML the petit bourgeoisie. UML is divided, that is why we cannot go forward with the whole party to make a New Democratic Revolution. They will obstruct this. But within these parties, mainly UML, there are revolutionary minded people, primarily in the lower strata, and some democratic people even in the upper strata. So in the days to come, there can be a kind of frontal unity with a section of the UML, but not with the party as a whole.

WPRM: We understand there have recently been defections from the UML to the Maoists, is this part of a wider trend?

Basanta: There is not yet any organisational defection. I just talked about the two trends in the UML, and now there is no political party in Nepal which is not divided in the present political issues. One trend is in support of the status quo and supports US imperialism and Indian expansionism and the other trend fights for independence and national sovereignty. Some months ago there was a vertical split in ‘Forum’ (a Terai party). The issue was the same, to surrender to US and Indian interests or take an independent stand. One section, the comprador bourgeoisie, supported US imperialism and Indian expansionism, the other section fought for patriotic issues and wanted to be closer to us. Some people have consequently quit their party and come to ours. In every party this kind of polarisation is going on. Also there is a continuous process of people with a revolutionary mind and democratic tendency leaving UML to join our party.

WPRM: Given the world-wide debate on the importance of the Nepali revolution, what message do you have for comrades around the world?

Basanta: Ever since the initiation of the People’s War there has been widespread propaganda about our revolution all across the world. As the People’s War developed, its influence spread all over the world. Now the whole world knows about Nepal and many people are concerned over the future of our revolution. These days there has been some sort of confusion and some misinterpretation about our revolution and also we have been unable to make the world people understand we are in now. That has been a shortcoming on our part. We have been mainly involved in the Nepali revolution, and have been lacking in spreading the world over what we are doing now. And different trends are interpreting it in their own ways. Some say the Maoists are taking a revisionist position.

The reactionaries are also interpreting our party this way. They say our party is divided between hardliners and soft-liners, between comrades Kiran and Prachanda. They have the intention to create confusion among the masses all over the world and divide the revolutionaries in the international level too. We should admit our weakness in propagating the reality of what is happening in Nepal. We could not publish our information bulletin or bring out The Worker regularly. We could not clear the confusion about our party and our line. But we are confident that we are moving ahead towards revolution.

Recently in our Central Committee meeting we concluded that we are at a serious crossroads of revolution and counterrevolution. Before us there is a big opportunity, but serious challenges also. If we take the correct steps there is a big possibility that we can accomplish New Democratic revolution. But if we make a mistake then the whole revolution can collapse. If we can apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in the concrete conditions of Nepal and lead the whole nation and international working class, then we have a huge opportunity. People all over the whole world expect a new world to emerge from Nepal.

We are happy that you took an initiative to come to Nepal and try to clear the doubts. We are very happy to have the chance to speak to comrades from other part of the world. Some people think we have abandoned the revolution and will not go forward from this to New Democracy. No, this is absolutely wrong. We utilised Democratic Republic as a tactic. Whether that tactic was correct or wrong we can debate, and we can reach some conclusion, maybe after several years. We don’t claim everything we did or do is correct. We are also human beings and we can make mistakes. But we are establishing a strong base among the masses for a revolutionary change. In this Central Committee meeting we are confident we have developed the correct ideological-political line, and this line will lead the whole people in our country to make revolution.

But in the present globalised world we alone are not sufficient to sustain revolution in our country. We can make revolution in our country, but it will be very difficult to sustain if there is no outside international support. There are a few aspects to this. Comrade Lenin said that the first aspect is to give internationalist support to the revolution. The second aspect is to initiate People’s War or revolutionary struggles in those countries to support the revolutionaries. As you are here in support of our revolution, we want to extend this kind of message all over the world. And we want people all over the world to study Nepal and understand by themselves why we had to have different twists and turns in the course of revolution. What we did all was for the sake of making revolution a success. Now the world situation is getting favourable to make revolution. So we have to build international support for our revolution, we have to energise our comrades working all over the world. We have to launch activities against US imperialist and Indian expansionist intervention in Nepal, because we are approaching the successful conclusion of the revolution.

But for that we need a stronger level of solidarity of people to our revolution, a stronger solidarity of the working class people from Indian, US, UK and all over the world. If there is strong support from outside Nepal for our revolution we are confident we can make revolution in our country. The contradictions are sharpening, we think that within a few months some result has to come. All these contradictions are concentrated in the writing of the constitution. But it is a difficult challenge. We cannot write our constitution, the reactionaries will not support us. And the revolutionary class will not support a bourgeois and reactionaries constitution. This is the contradiction.

The constitution can only be written if there is major compromise. If the proletariat makes a compromise with the bourgeoisie what does it mean? It means the end of the revolution. We can be flexible in tactics but not with the interests of the party and revolution. If we compromise in the Constituent Assembly, that will mean the end of the revolution for a long time to come in Nepal. So the days coming in the next nine months will see a very tough contention on an issue of people’s constitution. This is the reflection of the overall class struggle. In this crucial situation we want revolutionary internationalist help from people all around the world.

The reactionaries the world over understand this contradiction. They want our party not to place people’s constitution in the constituent assembly and initiate debate because they understand that our constitution will polarise the entire oppressed section of the people around our party and isolate them. They cannot exclude our party from the task of writing constitution. But at the same time they don’t want us to be there. Therefore the reactionary conspiracy is heightening to dissolve the constituent assembly, impose presidential rule and initiate war against our party and the revolutionary masses in Nepal. The unconstitutional move of the president and their sticking to military supremacy is nothing other than a rehearsal towards that direction. So the days ahead are challenging. But we are confident that the correct grasp of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the unity of the party based on it will be able to shatter the entire challenges imposed upon us and make the new democratic revolution in Nepal victorious in the beginning of the twenty first century.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Democracy Now: Savoj Zizek October 15, 2009

2009-10-15T23:03:00.001+08:00

Dubbed by the National Review as “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West”, and the New York Times as “the Elvis of cultural theory”, Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Zizek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history, and political theory. In his latest book, “First as Tragedy, Then As Farce”, Zizek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce of the financial meltdown.

We continue on the subject of the financial crisis with a man the National Review calls the most dangerous political philosopher in the West. The New York Times calls him the Elvis of cultural theory. Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Zizek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history, and political theory. His latest, just out from Verso is called “First as Tragedy, Then As Farce.” It analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.

Zizek’s latest offering also excerpted in the October issue of Harper"s magazine opens with the words: “The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was unpredictable.” He goes on to recall how the demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank over the past decade all protested the ways in which banks were playing with money and warned of an impending crash. They were met with tear-gas and mass arrests.

The message, he writes, was “loud and clear, and the police were used to literally stifle the truth.”

Well, Slavoj Zizek addressed a full house at Cooper Union here in New York city Wednesday night and he joins us now in the firehouse studio.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Nepal: Comrade Gaurav speaks on Democracy and Cultural Revolution

2009-10-14T21:08:00.004+08:00

Chandra Prakash Gajurel, aka C.P. Gajurel or Gaurav, indicates in the article imported from Kasama below, the real final hurdle. It is not unlikely that a third peoples uprising in the streets will reinstate Maoist led government and a coalition of oppressed classes in a form of democratic centralism exercising what could be viewed as a dictatorship over the oppressor classes represented by such parties as the National Congress and over opportunistic and revisionist tendencies such as exemplified by the UML. My interview with Gaurav is found here (the photo is one of several taken at that time).

Lead to Entry at Kasama:

This article was published on the WPRM Britain website.

Question: Do you envision a role for Nepali Congress and CPN (United Marxist-Leninists) after the New Democratic Revolution?

Answer: If they don’t change their ideological-political line, we don’t envision that they will be able to take part in those elections. The New Democratic system will not allow this if they don’t change their ideological-political line and behaviour.

* * * * * **
Nepal: Comrade Gaurav speaks on Democracy and Cultural Revolution

Gaurav has recently been made one of the secretaries in the new Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (UCPN[M]) leadership structure. Activists with the World Peoples Resistance Movement met him at the party office in Paris Dand, Kathmandu, where we tried to get deeper into the issue of democracy, specifically the UCPN(M) concept of 21st century democracy, of holding elections under New Democracy, and how this relates to the theory and practice of Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.

WPRM: In the current situation when the UCPN(M) has its sights set on New Democratic Revolution, it seems more important than ever to understand the party’s idea of 21st century democracy, competitive elections under New Democracy and socialism, can you explain this concept to us?

Comrade Gaurav: Yes we are now in the stage of completing the New Democratic Revolution.The New Democratic system is not a socialist system. It is a bourgeois democratic system. The difference is that the revolution is made under the leadership of the proletariat.

The old type of bourgeois democratic revolution took place under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, but the New Democratic Revolution will take place under the leadership of the proletariat. When it is led by the proletariat it will lead towards socialism and communism. On the other hand, if the bourgeois democratic revolution is being led by the capitalist class, it will either consolidate capitalism or, if it develops at all, it will develop towards imperialism. That is the difference. So New Democratic Revolution in this sense is not a socialist revolution, it is a bourgeois democratic revolution but it is led by the proletariat. And, when the proletariat leads this revolution and the revolution is completed, then immediately it will move towards socialism. It will not consolidate bourgeois democracy, it will move towards socialism.

This debate was seriously carried out during 1956 in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). People like Deng Xiaoping said that since it is a bourgeois democratic revolution, it is the time to consolidate capitalism. But, Mao said that it should not be consolidated, it should go forward to socialism. This is the basic division between New Democracy and socialism. And, the question of which class is leading is the fundamental question.

So far as elections are concerned, under a New Democratic system there will be a broad anti-feudal and anti-imperialist alliance. This will be the class character of New Democratic Revolution. It is certainly true that not all anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces are communists.

But there should be a broad alliance of the UCPN(M) with different political forces who are anti-feudal and anti-imperialist. We have to recognise the existence of these other political forces, because they are the ally of the proletariat during New Democratic Revolution. Therefore, we have to guarantee their political freedom, and the political freedom of those parties has already been carried out in China also.

In China, except for the CCP there were nine other political parties, all of which were anti-feudal and anti-imperialist. They competed and participated in elections with the CCP and some of them became ministers in the government. In our case also we have to recognise those forces. They are not communists but they are the allies of anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces, and they should be guaranteed political freedom.

When our party talks about multiparty competition or democracy, we are talking about our concept of ‘21st Century Democracy’.

The difference here however is that in China there was a condition, all anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces had to cooperate with the CCP. This was the precondition. But now our party is talking about allowing those political parties to compete even with the UCPN(M).

In China there was a precondition, they were not allowed to compete but had to cooperate. In elections they made some sort of compromise or negotiation and they fixed candidates by consensus. In some constituencies the other parties put forward their candidate and the CCP did not. And in most other seats they did not have a candidate but supported the candidate of the CCP.

But here in Nepal today we are talking about competition. All those political parties will be allowed to compete with the UCPN(M). We can have direct elections with those parties and the Maoists. That is the difference. We are formulating this kind of thing because the imperialists and the capitalists, who are the enemies of socialism and communism, accuse communist parties of not allowing other parties to compete. They say there is no competition, there is no democracy. And in fact, in the old way there was scope for those political parties to confuse the masses. For example, there is an election but there is only one candidate, and if everybody has to vote for the same candidate what is the meaning of this? It is something like selection. But we will make it clear that people can vote for their own candidates and that there will be more than two candidates for people to choose between.

Furthermore, we should give the people the right of recall. If the candidate elected by them is not competent, or is taking an anti-people road, the people’s right of recall will be assured.

This is the type of thing we have to introduce in an electoral system. Only then can we assure the masses that they can vote for the candidate they like and it is a real election where there are many candidates. The election will have a definite meaning. If there is only one candidate then voting is meaningless.

This is what we mean by ‘21st Century Democracy’.

WPRM: How will this democracy and use of elections develop as New Democratic Revolution develops into the stage of socialism. Will there be more than one communist party at this time?

Comrade Gaurav: We don’t envision more than one Communist Party because every political party has a class character. The proletariat should have their own party.

In the long run, ultimately, there will not be different political parties. When we achieve socialism in that case, we think there will be no necessity for other political parties, because the society will have undergone a big change. There will be no other classes at that time.

WPRM: Do you envision a role for Nepali Congress and CPN (United Marxist-Leninists) after the New Democratic Revolution?

Comrade Gaurav: If they don’t change their ideological-political line, we don’t envision that they will be able to take part in those elections. The New Democratic system will not allow this if they don’t change their ideological-political line and behaviour.

WPRM: Comrade Basanta in Worker #12 has recently written that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China is the pinnacle of application so far in practice of dialectical materialism, the science of revolution. Can you sum up for us the lessons of the Cultural Revolution as formulated by the UCPN(M)?

Comrade Gaurav: We think the Cultural Revolution is the pinnacle of the development of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

Because Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a science in the process of development, it is not something static. It is in the process of development and this development is interlinked with revolutionary practice. From this practice comes our ideology. And from revolutionary practice, the experiences of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and from the examples of counter-revolution in those countries, Mao synthesised the whole thing and developed the theory of Cultural Revolution.

What Mao developed in his life, was more than that which Lenin did in his time, because for Lenin it was not possible to carry out Cultural Revolution or theorise Cultural Revolution. During his life, in the period of revolution and after that he was trying to develop the whole revolution. He formulated so many ideas and theories regarding revolution. But in the case of Mao, during that time China was not a capitalist country, it was a semi-feudal semi-colonial country.

So the responsibility of the CCP was to carry on to accomplish the bourgeois democratic revolution and also to carry on the socialist revolution. It was a historical necessity for the CCP to carry out both these tasks. The CCP, under the capable leadership of Comrade Mao, led these two revolutions and in the process of developing socialism, learned the lessons that Mao took from the capitalist restoration in the USSR and many attempts to reverse the revolution within China itself. These were the materials for Comrade Mao Zedong to develop Cultural Revolution. With all these materials Mao developed our ideology to a qualitatively higher level. And we think the Cultural Revolution is the pinnacle, it solves the problem of revolution in that it can prevent counter-revolution. Many people say that the Cultural Revolution was a Chinese phenomenon,

it was done in China, whether right or wrong, so it is a Chinese question.

But we think it is not a Chinese question, it is a question of theory and it is a question of ideology. So it is a universal theory. And we uphold Cultural Revolution as the universal theory of communism. It holds good for China, and it holds good for Nepal also.

WPRM: Indeed, Mao said the bourgeoisie is not just outside the party but right within it. How will elections help to uncover the bourgeoisie within the party?

Comrade Gaurav: Elections will not help with this. Through elections you cannot root out the bourgeoisie within the party.

To root out the bourgeoisie within the party you have to carry out Cultural Revolution, to find out who are the capitalist roaders within the party. The process of elections will not determine all these things. The process of elections relates to the time when there are other political parties who are the allies of the proletariat.

We will compete with those parties only, not with the puppets of feudalism and imperialism. There is no point competing with reactionaries. Competition means to compete with allies, friendly competition only. So dictatorship will still be applied against reactionary political parties, pro-feudal and pro-imperialist parties.

So far as capitalist roaders within the Communist Party are concerned, this question will not be resolved through elections. That is different. Elections are concerned with forming the government and some matters of state.

But the party of the proletariat should resolve the contradictions within the party in a different manner. In that case we have to apply Cultural Revolution. Cultural Revolution means the party should be interlinked with the masses. The masses will be given full rights to expose the leaders of the Communist Party. If they are really capitalist-roaders, they have to be exposed. This is the mass line as formulated by Mao. He made the slogan ‘bombard the headquarters’. Headquarters means your own headquarters, not the headquarters of other parties, but the headquarters of the Communist Party. Because in the headquarters there are many capitalist roaders, so people have every right to bombard that headquarters. People should be mobilised to expose the capitalist roaders. Only through Cultural Revolution can we root out capitalist-roaders.

WPRM: The Cultural Revolution involved many examples of the practice of democracy, such as the right to bombard the headquarters, the four great freedoms, big-character posters, the formation of Red Guards, the 3-in-1 committees, and even the Shanghai commune, not to mention the reorientation of health care, education and development towards rural areas. Why do you think elections under New Democracy can best provide democracy to the people?

Comrade Gaurav: Democracy as defined by the capitalists or imperialists is, according to their own definition, only political freedom, or competing in elections.

But for us this is not the only characteristic of democracy. Democracy means the rights of the people for food, healthcare, education, all the economic requirements. These are fundamental things for our democracy. So we prefer a different definition of democracy.

What Mao put forward in the Cultural Revolution, these are definitely things of democracy. We uphold all these things. But despite all of these requirements, we think elections are also necessary. In the nature of electing the representatives we prefer competition, but only during the stage of New Democracy. When the society changes totally to socialism, then elections will maybe not be necessary. We are talking about New Democracy. When the society has been changed to socialism, the situation will be different.

We cannot claim now that the same method of elections will be applied during socialism. When there are various different political parties during the stage of New Democracy then there is competition between the political parties. But in socialism the class character of society will have changed, fundamentally changed. In that case there will be no need for various different political parties. And clearly the existence of political parties will be actually not necessary. They will not exist. In that case elections will not be needed.

WPRM: How will the practice of Cultural Revolution and the holding of elections prevent capitalist restoration? Which will be decisive?

Comrade Gaurav: As I have said, we cannot predict the form of elections under socialism. But the method of elections will definitely not be decisive to prevent capitalist restoration. Only Cultural Revolution can do that.

WPRM: According to Mao, not one but many Cultural Revolutions will be needed during the stage of socialism, which will last for many generations.

Comrade Gaurav: Yes, we very much agree with this principle that the Cultural Revolution should continue.

When the Cultural Revolution was terminated in China, the result was capitalist restoration.

This history is there for everyone to see. After the death of Mao, the revisionists said the Cultural Revolution was not necessary. They called those ten years a decade of catastrophe, the revisionists, that was their summation. But during the time of Mao the Cultural Revolution was not always directly carried out. Mao was almost bedridden, and immediately after his death it was reversed. If the Cultural Revolution had been carried out further, definitely it would have prevented the restoration of capitalism. So from the practice of China, we can realise that to prevent capitalist restoration we have to continue the Cultural Revolution. In China, the Cultural Revolution was carried out for ten years, but that was not enough. It was only enough for that period. We must directly carry out a continuous process of Cultural Revolution.

WPRM: Elections in imperialist countries at present are a bureaucratic procedure that hide the dictatorial nature of capitalist society. How will elections under New Democracy provide a mechanism for the continuous revolutionisation of the masses as well as mobilisation against the danger of capitalist restoration?

Comrade Gaurav: We think that on the issue of what type of election and how the election will be carried out, there is one fundamental question: who is leading the state? Which class is leading the state?

Now the election to the Constituent Assembly was only possible because the state was in some sort of transition. But we are not always in the period of transition. It is a temporary period.

In this period the state is not so powerful. It was possible for our party to take advantage of this because of the revolutionary intervention of the masses, during the People’s War and the 2006 People’s Movement. It was possible for our party to win, to be victorious in the elections. But the same situation will not continue for a long time. The state will consolidate itself and its own class character. In that case it cannot be in transition. So it all depends on which class is in power. That is the fundamental question.

This will be defined by the constitution, so now our struggle is concentrated on the question of constitution. What type of constitution will there be? Basically there are two positions: whether it will be a People’s Federal Republic, in short a People’s Republic like that in China but taking into account some particularities of Nepal, or a bourgeois republic, a capitalist republic.

Our struggle is concentrated on this point, the major point of struggle in our country at this time. Our party is for a People’s Republic, the other parties are for a bourgeois republic. If a People’s Republic wins, then that means the proletariat will have won, they will be in power and they will hold their elections under those conditions. And since they will already be in power there will be freedom for the people to vote according to their choice. But if the proletariat is defeated, if there is a bourgeois republic in power, then the capitalist class will have won, and definitely they will use the same method that the capitalists of the world use during elections. We are in the transitional period and the constitution will define what type of system there will be in Nepal and which class will be in power. The type of electoral system will also depend on the outcome of this fight or struggle for a new constitution.

WPRM: Now that there is increasing talk of the third People’s Movement and the coming insurrection, can you explain how the UCPN(M) envisions the New Democratic Revolution taking place? Is it possible to do this through elections?

Comrade Gaurav: When we talk about Jana Andolan (People’s Movement) 3 we are talking about mobilising the masses. In the mobilisation of the masses, there are a few things that we have to take into account.

In the revolution in Nepal at this present moment, talking about a People’s Republic is not an illegal matter, an illegal political question for accomplishing the revolution. It is a legitimate question. The other political parties can fight for their republic, why can the Maoist party not fight for a People’s Republic?

We have every right to fight for the achievement of the people’s revolution.

People’s Republic means New Democracy, because when New Democratic Revolution was accomplished in China the state was called a New Democratic Republic. New Democratic Revolution and People’s Republic are the same. There is a chance that through the constitution-making process we can write a new constitution of People’s Republic. But that cannot be achieved without mass upsurge.

This is because in the given situation, the Maoist party is in favour of a People’s Republic, but we do not have enough support in the Constituent Assembly to write our type of new constitution. On the other hand, all the other political parties except for the Maoists also don’t have enough support to write their type of republic into the constitution.

In this specific situation in Nepal, only Jana Andolan 3 can resolve the problem of writing a constitution. The new constitution cannot be written only in the Constituent Assembly. This is neither possible for us nor for them.

When we have to write the new constitution, only Jana Andolan, a people’s upsurge, can put pressure on and create the situation whereby all the other forces excluding the reactionary forces would support the Maoist proposal. There is thus some possibility of a People’s Republic. But in all cases only the people’s upsurge, or people’s movement, will complete the revolution. And our party is in favour of Jana Andolan 3.

Now we call it people’s insurrection, or people’s revolt. But only a people’s revolution can play the decisive role in making New Democratic Revolution.

WPRM: What role do you think Maoists and anti-imperialists around the world can play on these questions of democracy and the construction of socialism, and the successful completion of New Democratic Revolution in Nepal? How can we raise the debate on these questions in the international arena to a higher level ?

Comrade Gaurav: At the present stage we are not going to carry out socialist construction. The present task of the revolution is to accomplish New Democratic Revolution. Only then can we carry out socialist transformation. Now we are in the stage of New Democratic Revolution.

And the international proletariat should support the Maoist movement in Nepal to accomplish the New Democratic Revolution. We think that a revolution cannot be replicated, only developed. It cannot be a photocopy of other revolutions. It will not be a stereotype of revolution. The Nepali revolution is based on certain fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, but it will have its specific character.

In the case of China, Mao called this the ‘Sinification of Marxism’. We have to accomplish the revolution, based not on exactly what has happened with any other revolution of the world, which took place in history under the leadership of a Communist Party. Although the basic and fundamental guiding principles remain the same, there are many different aspects, including the security of that country, the international situation and other developments in the last decades.

Our party thinks that in the given situation the present line of the party can lead to the completion of New Democratic Revolution. So our class internationally should support the forms put forward by our party to accomplish the revolution. They can make suggestions. But we are formulating tactics on how to achieve the revolution and this does not exactly correspond to other revolutions. Our comrades are in different countries. They read the newspapers and the documents and all the other things, and they find the weaknesses and start to say that we are no longer communists, that we are revisionists.

From outside analysis they will find differences. But what is the reality? The reality of the situation is quite different. And in the present reality we have to accomplish the revolution. That is the major task of the UCPN(M).

We have formulated our line based on the concrete reality of Nepal, the present national and international situation. We think other comrades can make suggestions, because there is danger. When we are in a new experience there is also risk, there is also danger, of deviating towards the right.

Our comrades should give their sincere suggestions, which we will accept. But they should not condemn the revolution. If this revolution will be condemned or will not be cooperated with by our class internationally, it is hard for us to succeed. And we feel that communists will not help on these questions by doing that.

In fact we expect from our comrades internationally that they should give suggestions, they should express their political concerns about whether the party or line has been deviated. But it is their responsibility to always support us. Condemning the revolution as a whole, or not making any positive contribution to the revolution, that is not a good thing. That is not proletarian internationalism.

And if we succeed then communists around the world should welcome our revolution, and our comrades should celebrate. But more important is to think of what is your own contribution? Making revolution, that is your contribution. Communists have to continue accomplishing their own revolution. And we very humbly request this from the comrades of the world.

We are doing our duty to accomplish the revolution in Nepal. We have no other objectives than to accomplish the revolution. We are struggling for that, and we believe we will be successful in making revolution in Nepal. We are confident.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Interview of Prachanda, Chairman, UCPN (Maoist)

2009-10-09T01:01:00.003+08:00

Interview of Prachanda, Chairman, UCPN (Maoist) by Anand Swaroop Verma

Following is the transcript of an interview of Prachanda, Chairman of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).

Q : There has been a sudden stop in the political process of the country which was witnessed after 12 point agreement of November 2005 till announcement of republic. Confusion has gripped both the countries, Nepal and India and it appears that the process of development has been caught in a bind. Who is responsible for it and what is the road to come out of it?

A: Thanks. You have asked important question. The main aim of the 12 point agreement was to establish a new democratic constitution through constituent assembly. At that time the main aim of the peoples movement was to have a joint struggle against the autocratic monarchy. This is clear that monarchy was abolished and democracy could be brought in. We succeeded in our immediate task. The election to the constituent assembly was accomplished and the Maoists emerged as the single largest party. The government was also formed under the leadership of the Maoists. But while we were moving forward to take the peace process to a logical conclusion and working with an all round strategy to write the constitution, a debate on the issue of the supremacy of the military and the people erupted. What ever orders I issued on behalf of the government, the army general repeatedly violated those instructions of an elected government. He refused to accept them. He challenged them. This created a piquant situation for me. If the army refused to accept the supremacy of an elected government, the supremacy of the peoples, and does not come under the peoples’ government then a major problem would crop up. And for this reason I decided to remove the army general. Other people meaning the Nepali Congress and UML supported the army’s supremacy. As a result the situation acquired a complicated shape. This is the reason that a debate is still going on: should it be civilian supremacy or military supremacy? We have been consistently telling the parties which claim to uphold the supremacy of parliamentary system that since you talk of parliamentary supremacy then on the issue of army general and the unconstitutional steps taken by the President in this connection should be debated in the parliament. But they are not ready for this. They are completely going against the democracy, peace process and drafting of constitution. Obviously those persons who favour the army general and oppose the peoples government are responsible for this situation.

Q : Yesterday I talked to prime minister, Mr Madhav Nepal and sought to know his views on this issue. He told that there was no provision in the constitution under which the parliament could debate the steps taken by the President. Is it so?

A : Certainly not. This is not a monarchy where in the decision of the king could not be debated in parliament. During the days of monarchy no debate in parliament could be permitted on any step of king. There is no such provision now in the constitution. We can debate about President. There is no problem. These people are intentionally pursuing dogmatism.

Q : The prime minister, Mr Madhav Nepal has assured you people that he would rectify the unconstitutional decision of the President and for this he had sought one month’s time so that you should allow the parliament to function. What the government so far has done in this direction.?

A : We talked to him with responsibility and he in the parliament told that he would evolve a consensus on this issue after talking to various political parties within a month and try to solve the problem. This was the assurance of the prime minister and it was our expectation too that it would be solved within a month. But so far he did nothing. After five days were left I told him emphatically that it is imperative to talk or else the problem would continue to exist. However one talk was held with the leaders of Nepali Congress and UML but the prime minister does not appear to be keen to solve this. Today is the last day of the time frame. Since nothing substantial has emerged we would now be raising this issue in parliament and on streets. We are raising this issue in a peaceful and democratic manner. But these people are not showing any seriousness.

Q : I have been witnessing since the days of Raja Tribhuvan that the politics of Nepal has been to a major extent India centric. Whoever has been in power while taking a decision looked towards India. This was for the first time that you refused to accept the dictate of India. The disappointment of India could be understood but other political parties did not support you either. Do you think that the politics of Nepal being India centric has been the prime reason for most of the problems?

A : Your question is of strategic importance. Not only from the days of King Tribhuvan instead this situation has been prevailing when British ruled India. You will recall that a war took place between British India and Nepal and following that in 1815 the Sugauli Treaty was signed. After that the influence of ruling elite of India continued to increase here. Nepal is an independent country but the fact is after the Sugauli treaty it turned like a semi colony of India. When the peoples movement was going on against Ranas (Ranashahi) at that time King Tribhuvan took shelter in India and with the help of India through the " Delhi agreement" the rule of Rana was abolished. This helped strengthen the rule of Shah dynasty. India played a major role. After that in the move for bringing democracy, which started in Nepal, the Nepali Congress often adopted a stance of compromise, understanding and surrender towards India. In this backdrop democracy was installed but its functioning continued to follow the old pattern. The moment the main leader of the Nepali Congress Mr B P Koirala started talking of little freedom he was ousted. India encouraged the autocratic move of the King. The autocratic panchayati system, independent authoritarian establishment could keep its identity in Nepal only due to the support extended by India. Due to the struggle of CPN (Maoist) the process of major transformation of Nepal’s economic, social and political condition has emerged. Now when the Maoists emerged as the major political party in the constituent assembly elections to address this process of transformation then again problem has cropped up. On my tour to India I had in specific words told that there was imperative need to address this transformation. Nepal has undergone a major political change and with this there is need for some change in our historical relation with India. I had told in clear words that people of Nepal are not happy with the 1950 friendship treaty. They view it as unequal treaty. This needs to be changed as it is not based on equality. We don’t want any bitterness with India instead we long for good relation. But keeping in view the revolutionary change that is going on in Nepal the relation between the two countries should be changed, should be developed accordingly. Only then we can improve the relations between the two countries. Our special economic, political, geographical, cultural and historical relations should be rearranged according to the prevailing time. But unfortunately this is not happening. Delhi has a psychology that Nepal has to obey what India dictates. No change has taken place in the psyche though a number of changes have taken place in India. End of the British rule and strengthening of India through sustained economic growth did not have desired impact on the mind set of the ruling class of India. The amount of change which should have taken place has not occurred. Nepal has witnessed a major political change but India is not serious to understand this and also to reshape the relation between the two countries in the perspective of the changed scenario. This is the reason problems keep on emerging. I wish the India Nepal relation should be redefined in the background of the recent political and socio-economic changes. This should be developed further.

Q : After you formed the government in August 2008 it appeared that the government of India has accepted the situation and its attitude towards your government was quite cordial and cooperative. But its displeasure on the Katwal issue came out openly. What mistake did you commit during your rule that changed the approach of India? Were you careless while dealing with China that made India unhappy?

A : I don’t think so. My party and I too seriously thought over this. But the more I think, the more I am clear that neither my party nor me committed any mistake. When my government was installed, in the neighbouring country China Olympic games were on. On the inaugural day my government was formed. The President of Nepal was invited to participate at the inauguration but he could not go. Before the Olympic concluded my government was formed and I was invited to participate at the closing ceremony. I thought it would not look nice if being the neighbouring country I would not had participated at the event where American President, Mr Bush, Ms. Sonia Gandhi and her family from India, the Prime Minister of UK and rulers of many other countries would be present. What mattered most was being the leader of the party, which had brought about such a change in Nepal it was proper to go there for interacting and meeting with more people. Nepal has a tradition that after swearing in of the government the Prime Ministers undertake their first visit to India. I did not give so much of credence to that tradition. I felt this was not a good tradition. But it did not imply that I have first visited China. Any visit should be in conformity to the necessity. According to need we can go to India first and even to China. I felt the Olympics closing ceremony was being held for which I have been invited and so I should go there. In fact some people had put pressure on me that I should not go to China, it would break the tradition, India will feel bad etc. But I sought to know why the relation with India sour? If Mr Bush and Ms. Gandhi could go why cannot I? China is our neighbouring country and I decided to go and went. When I turn back and look at the event I have the feeling that this had a some psychological impact on India. In my perception what happened was a natural development but the ruling elite of India did not like it. Besides this before formation of my government one major incident had taken place in Tibet. Some incidents of vandalism had taken place. Some people had died in Lhasa. Chinese government nursed the impression that people active in creating disturbances in Tibet were using the land of Nepal. I feel that in view of that incident some intellectuals and officials of China started frequently visiting Nepal. They wanted to know that the political changes that were taking place in Nepal whether would benefit China. China from the beginning has been supporting monarchy as it felt stability in Nepal could be possible through monarchy. From the days of Mao Tse Tung China maintained a cordial relation with monarchy. Now we have uprooted monarchy and created a new political set up. However India felt that since Maoists have come to power in Nepal the flow of the Chinese visitors to Nepal had increased and Maoists were tilting towards China. But these were mere coincidences: end of monarchy, vandalism in Tibet and Maoists coming to power in Nepal. And even if the Chinese have been frequently coming to Nepal to understand the changes that took place it should not have been enough to become suspicious. According to me it is wrong. Because this was happening not due to us, but due to them. I repeatedly made it clear that I would strive to maintain the good relations between the two countries. Besides I did not want to do any thing in haste. I was firmly committed to address the aspirations of the people. I was gradually and steadily moving in the direction of giving a concrete shape to the peoples’ aspiration of change. People wanted a reform in security sector. Keeping this in view I brought about certain changes in the police department and armed constabulary department. Naturally in this background the issue of Katwal cropped up before me. People were aware of the fact that Katwal was not in favour of change, he was not in favour of integration of army, he was not in favour of constitution, he was not in favour of democracy and was regularly challenging the government. Obviously some action has to be taken against him. May be some of my friend did not like it. I don’t think that I ever took any action which should have been the factor for straining the relations with India. I tried to develop the relations with China and India keeping in view the needs of the Nepali people and Nepali nation.

Q : Do you think that you adopted liberal stance in the matter of Katwal? Did you agree that just after becoming prime minister if you had acted on the Raymajhi Commission report and removed Katwal then in that case you would had received massive public support? What was the reason?

A : Girija Babu’s government was in power when the Raymajhi Commission report came. I had raised this question but Girija Babu was not ready to take action. Of course people ask me why I did not take action soon after I came to power. My endeavour was to evolve a consensus among the coalition partners before taking any action. I tried but other parties did not agree. I held with other parties giving consent the task would be easier; particularly with giving consent by the UML. I was having talks with the UML. They told me to wait till their Congress. After the Congress concluded a serious talk was held with their president Jhalnath Khanal, vice president Bamdeo Gautam and general secretary Ishwar Pokhrel and all of them gave their consent. They told me to take action against Katwal and assured me of their help. Once UML supported, the Madhesi forum also agreed. After this Sadbhavana Party and others also consented and then only I took action. Had I known that they would succumbed to the internal and external pressures and retreat from their positions then in that case I would have taken action within a month of my becoming the prime minister. Even children of Nepal know from where the pressure was coming.

Q : Yesterday I had asked prime minister Madhav Nepal that your party president had given his consent for removal of Katwal and I had also read a statement purporting to it. But he refused and said that his party president never gave consent for it.

A : He is misleading. Now it is clear to the parliament also.

Q : On the issue of integration of both the armies nearly one month back I had read the statement of Indian ambassador, Mr Rakesh Sood in which he said that there is no reference to integration of two armies in the peace accord and integration meant integration of the PLA soldiers in the Nepali society. Recently Mr Girija Prasad Koirala also repeated the same line. In this background are you apprehensive of peace process getting derailed?

A ; This is the reason that I have been repeatedly saying that the unconstitutional step taken by the President was not his own instead it is a part of the well thought out strategy against the peace process and also against the process for creation of constituent assembly. That is why I have been consistently saying that till the issue of civilian supremacy is not resolved, till the wrong step taken by a ceremonial president, who has been pretending to work as the functional president is not rectified, this issue could not be resolved. I am saying this only for the reason that this action was against democracy and also against the democratic traditions. But these people are not ready to take any corrective measure. They intend that the issue of army integration should be completely dropped as in the detailed peace agreement it is specifically mentioned that the army integration and rehabilitation would take place. Army integration meant unification of both armies. This is clearly written in the agreement. But when people like Rakesh Sood, Girija Prasad Koirala speak one language, speak against the peace accord and resort to distorted arguments on the issue of integration of army as the integration of soldiers in the society and try to create confusion in the world then it obviously implied that we are left with no other option but to resort to movement. Which is why we have decided to go for movement; inside the parliament and also outside. If they go against the peace accord and oppose the interim government, democratic values and supremacy of the people then we are left with no option but to start movement and we are actually doing that from today. But side by side we would keep on talking to other parties. We would continuously strive to evolve a national consensus on this issue. Our stand is there is only one solution to this issue: we should be allowed to place our views in the Parliament. A formal atmosphere should be created inside the house to debate our issue. We are saying only this much but they are not agreeing to this proposal. It simply meant that they want confrontation. They don’t want peace. They don’t want democracy. Instead they want autocracy.

Q : The central committee of your party had decided for national government of general consensus which would be led by the Maoists. How is it possible in the present situation?

A : The central committee of our party debated various aspects of this issue and we reached at the conclusion that we should firmly stand in the favour of the peace process and in the creation of constituent assembly and form a national government with general consensus under the leadership of Maoists. We feel this is possible. The first thing is the question does not arise to form the government with any party which justifies the unconstitutional action of the President. If they don’t agree to rectify the presidential action then in that case we will not take in the new government. They have to change their old stand on the issue of army general. In spite of this we visualize the possibility of the government as majority of the members of parliament of UML are opposed to the President’s step. They want to debate the issue in the Parliament as they are aware that the majority would be in the favour of the Maoists. We believe even if they are not agreeable for a debate we can protest the step of President with the help of the MPs of UML and other parties. The Madhesh parties will also join us and by then we will come into the position of forming the government. We have majority in parliament.
Q : Does it imply that the issue of civilian supremacy is the biggest issue for you?

A : Certainly. Civilian supremacy in comparison to the military supremacy is the biggest issue.

Q : Two line struggle has often been going in your party. Without trying to know who represents which line I would like to ask what are the two lines.

A : The reply is complicated. It is not so easy, even then I will explain about the two lines. Certainly our party had two line struggle and the just concluded central committee meeting had a long discussion. At this meeting through discussion the two line issue has been resolved. Now based on a new foundation a new unity has developed in the party. In fact a good number of comrades were sceptical whether the party was following in the lines of UML. Is it drowning in parliamentarism? Is it moving towards reformism? They were quite disturbed due to these questions. Our cadres were seriously anxious. This was a bigger problem. We were telling them that we were advancing only after making a thorough analysis of the basic principles of Marxism; concrete analysis of the concrete situation. We were advancing keeping in view our socialist and communist ideals and also our strategy for peoples revolution. One section held this view. Other section felt that instead of moving towards revolution we were inching towards compromise and parliamentarism. This is the essence of debate. But after my resignation our comrades have come to believe that there was no deviation in the party. They felt that the party in the correct manner was progressing towards revolution by taking the people alongwith it. From outside my resignation would appear to be a negative step but whereas the unity of the party and the confusion in the party are concerned this has left a significant positive impact. Comrades who nursed the feeling that the leadership has developed lust for power are now feeling relieved. Their misconceptions have been removed. I had resigned with the commitment to struggle against the counterrevolutionary and reactionary elements and not to surrender to the dictates of foreign lords. I had told that I would not tolerate any kind of foreign intervention. This has created an atmosphere inside the party that the leadership was pursuing the correct line towards revolution. As a result of this not only the unity of the party has been strengthened but also credibility amongst the people has enhanced. After my resignation even the urban middle class has come to realize that our party could protect the national interest and preserve its sovereignty and pride.

Q: Your critics say that you have abandoned the base areas and disarmed the Janamukti Sena (PLA). How far is it correct?

A : This is not true. When we came in peace process and also came for democracy then it broadly implied that we were successful. We dislodged monarchy, constituted the constituent assembly and emerged as the biggest party in the constituent assembly. Obviously I don’t find any weakness. As for as the issue of base area and PLA are concerned; PLA is in the cantonment and the arms are with them. The keys of the boxes having the guns are with the PLA. This makes clear that we have not surrendered the arms. If the other side is willing to abide the peace accord then we are also ready for integration of the army. But we are not for surrender. Which is why the people who criticize us on this count are wrong. They fail to understand the true situation prevailing in Nepal. They are not able to comprehend the development of the revolution and its dynamics. They look at the entire scene in a narrow and mechanical manner. Our base areas are intact and the people in those areas are firm. The organization in those areas is also strong. I in fact believe that we have succeeded in expanding our base areas. It has been spread through out the country. At present in a way the whole country has become our base area. Our victory and the manner in which we have amalgamated with the people, for me this is expansion of the base area. For this reason I don’t believe that we have left our base areas.

Q: If the integration of the army takes place and if a unified National Army is constituted as the result of the merger of the Nepali army and the PLA, in that case are you conscious of the impending dangers? What I want to say cannot that army be used against you once you are out of power? The reason for this is what is the guarantee that the army constituting of the revolutionary cadres of the PLA and regular armymen nursing feudal would stand in the favour of people?

A; That danger is there, but we have faith in people. I have faith in integration of the army. If the integration of the army takes place then it should be viewed as the victory of the situation created through the peoples struggle. Obviously the entire army will stand in favour of the people. The army will stand in favour of the nation. And under the leadership of the party we could lead the country in a better way. This is my belief. Just some time back you wanted to know why the Indian ambassador, Mr Rakesh Sood and Mr Girija Prasad Koirala of Nepali Congress has been opposed to integration of army. Do you think they would have opposed this if the reactionary forces have visualized that the integrated army would stand in favour of reactionary forces? Once the integration takes place this army would ceased to be theirs. This would be completely the army of the people. Which is why they are speaking against it and trying to create hurdles. One should realize that the integration of army is not against Maoists. This is not against the people. This is in favour of people. This is the reason that the reactionary forces outside the country and also inside quite active against it. One should understand this.

Q: What is the programme for insurrection? And what should be its character?

A : I believe that Nepal would not have that nature of insurrection that took place in Russia under Lenin or the peoples revolution that was witnessed in China under Mao Tse Tung. A new type and new form of insurrection is possible in Nepal. We cannot import any revolution in a mechanical manner. We would have to show the courage and strength of developing it. We are striving in this direction. And for this we are advancing in the right direction by pursuing a completely new style, in our own way and keeping in view the global situation. We have to chalk out the programme and strategy of the Nepali revolution keeping in view the global and regional balance of power and also in the background of relations with China and India. We are striving in this direction. Which is why we do not understand the insurrection in a mechanical way. I don’t think proper to speak more than this on this issue at this stage.

Q : The movement which you are going to launch may create the law and order situation, the government would also resort to repressive measures and the people may also take to resistance movement. In this background do you visualize that the movement may turn violent? Do you think that the situation would go to such extent that you would be forced to take to armed struggle of the days of the peoples’ war?

A : The programmes of movement that we have announced are of peaceful nature. We would steer it in constitutional and peaceful manner inside and outside the parliament. In case the government resorts to repression then in that situation the people would come to realize that the Maoists intended to place their views in a peaceful manner but were not being allowed. The Maoists has been struggling for democracy and civilian supremacy through the constitutional means. The people would also see that the Maoists have been demanding to have a debate on this inside the parliament. If the government resorts to repression the people would find out their own way to resist. We are talking of ‘Jan Andolan 3’ (third peoples’ movement). We will proceed through peoples’ movement and they would be forced to accept the peoples’ demand. We don’t have any plan to resort to violent or arms struggle. The people will certainly resist in case the state perpetrates violence and repression. In this situation the Maoists would support the peoples’ resistance movement.
Q: Don’t you think this is hindering the process of drafting of the constitution for which you people have been elected.?

A : No. The work of drafting of constitution is going on smoothly. Both the movement and drafting of constitution will continue. We will not create any obstruction in the task of constitution drafting. We are obstructing its parliamentary part. There are separate committees for drafting of constitution with different functioning and we are not creating any obstruction in that. We would continue to take active part.
Q: How do you visualise the future of Nepal in coming days?

A : The people of Nepal will win. We are trying for taking forward the revolution of the country in a different manner and confident of getting success.

(Published in the October 2009 issue of Hindi journal Samkalin Teesari Duniya, New Delhi.)

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Chomsky: Coups, UNASUR, and the U.S.

2009-10-05T00:08:00.004+08:00

Coups, UNASUR, and the U.S.

October 2nd 2009, by Noam Chomsky - from Venezuela Analysis and originally published at Znet

The last time I had the opportunity to speak in Caracas-at long-distance that time-was about a year ago, right after the UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) meeting in Santiago in September 2008. That meeting was called "with the purpose of considering the situation in the Republic of Bolivia," after an uprising backed by the traditional elites who had lost power in the impressive democratic elections of 2005. UNASUR condemned the violence and the massacre of peasants by the quasi-secessionist elements, and declared, "Their fullest and decided support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales, whose mandate was ratified by a wide margin in the recent referendum." These are the words of the final Declaration, which also warned that the participating governments-all of the South American Republics-"energetically reject and do not recognize any situation that implies an intent of civil coup d'état, the rupture of institutional order, or that compromises the territorial integrity of the Republic of Bolivia." In response, President Morales thanked UNASUR for its support and observed that, "For the first time in South America's history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems, without the presence of the United States."

True, and a fact of historic significance.

It is instructive to compare the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) with that of the African Union (AU). The latter permits intervention by African states within the Union itself in exceptional circumstances. In contrast, the Charter of the OAS bars intervention "for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state." The reasons for the difference are clear. The OAS Charter seeks to deter intervention from the "colossus of the North"-and has failed to do so. That is an enduring problem in the Western hemisphere, nowhere near solution, though there has been significant progress. After the collapse of the apartheid states, the AU has faced no comparable problem.

South American Process of Integration

Last year's UNASUR meeting in Santiago took a step forward in the difficult process of integration that is taking place in South America. This process has two aspects: external and internal. The external process establishes bonds among countries that had been largely separated from one another since the early European conquests, each one oriented towards the West. The internal process seeks to integrate the vast impoverished and oppressed majorities into the societies that took shape under colonial and neocolonial domination. These societies have typically been ruled by small Europeanized elites who had amassed enormous wealth and were linked to the imperial societies in many ways: export of capital, import of luxury goods, education, and many other dimensions. The ruling sectors assumed little responsibility for the fate of their own countries and their suffering people. These critical factors sharply distinguish Latin America from the developmental states of East Asia. The processes of internal integration in South America, quite naturally, are arousing great concern among the traditional rulers at home and abroad, and strong opposition if they go beyond minor reforms of the worst abuses.

In early August, UNASUR met in Ecuador, which assumed the presidency of the organization. The announced goal of the meeting was to carry forward the process of integration, but the meeting took place under the shadow of renewed U.S. military intervention. Colombia did not attend, in reaction to broad concern in the region over its decision to accept U.S. military bases. The host of the meeting, President Correa of Ecuador, had announced that the U.S. military would no longer be permitted to use its Manta base, the last major U.S. base remaining in South America.

Bases and Coups

Establishing U.S. bases in Colombia is only one part of a much broader effort to restore Washington's capacity for military intervention. In recent years, total U.S. military and police aid in the hemisphere has come to exceed economic and social aid. That is a new phenomenon. Even at the height of the Cold War, economic aid far exceeded military aid. Predictably, these programs have "strengthened military forces at the expense of civilian authorities, exacerbated human rights problems and generated significant social conflict and even political instability," according to a study by the Washington Office on Latin America. By 2003, the number of Latin Americans troops trained by U.S. programs had increased by more than 50 percent. It has probably become higher since. Police are trained in light infantry tactics. The U.S. Southern Military Command (SOUTHCOM) has more personnel in Latin America than most key civilian federal agencies combined. That again is a new development. The focus now is on street gangs and "radical populism": I do not have to explain what that phrase means in the Latin American context. Military training is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon. That shift is of some importance. It frees military training from human rights and democracy conditionalities under congressional supervision, which has always been weak, but was at least a deterrent to some of the worst abuses.

Military bases are also being established where possible to support what are called "forward operations"-meaning military intervention of one or another sort. In a related development, the U.S. Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950, was reactivated a few weeks after Colombia's invasion of Ecuador in March 2008. With responsibility for the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the surrounding waters, the Fleet's "various operations...include counter-illicit trafficking, Theater Security Cooperation, military-to-military interaction and bilateral and multinational training," the official announcement says. Quite properly, these moves elicited protest and concern from the governments of Brazil, Venezuela, and others.

In past years the U.S. routinely helped carry out military coups in Latin America or invaded outright. Examples are too numerous and familiar to review and are awful to contemplate. That capacity has declined, but has not disappeared. In the new century there have already been three military coups: in Venezuela, Haiti, and now Honduras.

The first, in Venezuela, was openly supported by Washington. After a popular uprising restored the elected government, Washington immediately turned to a second plan to undermine the elected government: by funding groups of its choice within Venezuela, while refusing to identify recipients. Funding after the failed coup reached $26 million by 2006. The facts were reported by wire services, but ignored by the mainstream media. Law professor Bill Monning of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California said that, "We would scream bloody murder if any outside force were interfering in our internal political system." He is, of course, correct: such actions would never be tolerated for a moment. But the imperial mentality allows them to proceed, even with praise, when Washington is the agent.

The pretext, invariably, is "supporting democracy." In the real world, the measures employed have been a standard device to undermine democracy. Examples are numerous. To mention just a few, that is how the ground was prepared for the U.S.-backed military coup in Haiti after its first democratic election in 1990, bitterly opposed by Washington. And in another part of the world, it is happening right now in Palestine where the outcome of a free election in January 2006 was counter to Washington's wishes. At once, the U.S. and Israel, with Europe tagging politely along as usual, turned to severe punishment of the population for the crime of voting "the wrong way" in a free election, and also began to institute the standard devices to undermine an unwanted government: "democracy promotion" and military force. In this case, the military force is a collaborationist paramilitary army under the command of U.S. General Keith Dayton, trained in Jordan with Israeli participation. The Dayton army received great acclaim from liberals in the government and the press when it succeeded in suppressing protests in the West Bank during the murderous and destructive U.S.-backed Israeli military campaign in Gaza earlier this year. Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, was one of many close to the Obama administration who saw in this success a sign that Israel may at last have a "legitimate negotiating partner" for its U.S.-backed programs of taking over what is of value in the occupied territories, under the guise of a "political settlement."

All of this is routine, and very familiar in Latin America, where U.S. invasions have regularly left what remains of the country under the rule of brutal National Guards and collaborationist elites. The policies were initially developed with considerable sophistication a century ago after the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, which left hundreds of thousands of corpses. And these measures have often been successful for long periods. In the original testing ground, the Philippines, the impact still remains a century later, one reason for the continuing ugly record of state violence, and the failure of the Philippines to join the remarkable economic development of East and Southeast Asia in recent years.

Returning to coups in Latin America in the new millennium, the first one, in Venezuela, was unsuccessful. The second was in Haiti two years later. The U.S. and France intervened to remove the elected president and dispatched him off to Central Africa, actions that precipitated yet another reign of terror in this tortured country, once the richest colony in the world and the source of much of France's wealth, destroyed over the centuries by France and then the U.S. I should add that the harrowing history, in Haiti and elsewhere, is almost unknown in the U.S.-worse, it is replaced by fairy tales of noble missions that have sometimes failed because of the unworthiness of the beneficiaries. These are among the prerogatives of power, and facts that cannot be ignored by the traditional victims.

The third coup is of course the one taking place right now in Honduras, where an openly class-based military coup ousted left-leaning President Zelaya. This coup was unusual in that the U.S. did not carry it out or directly support it, but rather joined the Organization of American States in criticizing it, though weakly. Washington did not withdraw its ambassador in protest as Latin American and European countries did, and made only limited use of its enormous military and economic influence, as it could easily have done by simple means-for example by canceling all U.S. visas and freezing U.S. bank accounts of leaders of the coup regime. A group of leading U.S. Latin American scholars recently reported that "not only does the administration continue to prop up the regime with aid money through the Millennium Challenge Account and other sources, but the U.S. continues to train Honduran military students at the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation-the notorious institution formerly known as the School of the Americas," from which much of the top Honduran military has graduated. Amnesty International has just released a long and detailed account of extremely serious human rights violations by the coup regime. If such a report were issued concerning an official enemy, it would be front-page news. In this case it was scarcely reported, consistent with the downplaying of coups to which U.S. political and economic power centers are basically sympathetic, as in this case.

The U.S. surely hopes to maintain and probably expand its military base at Soto Cano (Palmerola) in Honduras, a major base for the U.S.-run terrorist war in Nicaragua in the 1980s. There are unconfirmed rumors of plans for other bases. (The best source of information and analysis is the consistently outstanding work by Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who also reviews the media's refusal to rise to minimal journalistic standards by reporting the basic facts.)

Imperial Mentality and Drug Wars

The justification offered for the new military bases in Colombia is the "war on drugs." The fact that the justification is even offered is remarkable. Suppose, for example, that Colombia, or China, or many others claimed the right to establish military bases in Mexico to implement their programs to eradicate tobacco in the U.S., by fumigation in North Carolina and Kentucky, interdiction by sea and air forces, and dispatch of inspectors to the U.S. to ensure it was eradicating this poison-which is, in fact, far more lethal even than alcohol, which in turn is far more lethal than cocaine or heroin, incomparably more than cannabis. The toll of tobacco use is truly fearsome, including "passive smokers" who are seriously affected though they do not use tobacco themselves. The death toll overwhelms the lethal effects of other dangerous substances.

The idea that outsiders should interfere with U.S. production and distribution of these murderous poisons is plainly unthinkable. Nevertheless, the U.S. justification for carrying out such policies in South America is accepted as plausible. The fact that it is even regarded as worthy of discussion is yet another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, and the abiding truth of the doctrine of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish and the weak suffer as they must-while the intellectual classes spin tales about the nobility of power. Leading themes of history, to the present day.

Despite the outlandish assumptions, let us agree to adopt the imperial mentality that reigns in the West-virtually unchallenged, in fact, not even noticed. Even after this extreme concession, it requires real effort to take the "war on drugs" pretext seriously. The war has been waged for close to 40 years and intensively for a decade in Colombia. There has been no notable impact on drug use or even street prices. The reasons are reasonably well understood. Studies by official and quasi-official governmental organizations provide good evidence that prevention and treatment are far more effective than forceful measures in reducing drug abuse: one major study finds prevention and treatment to have been 10 times as effective as drug interdiction and 23 times as effective as "supply-side" out-of-country operations, such as fumigation in Colombia, more accurately described as chemical warfare. The historical record supports these conclusions. There is ample evidence that changes in cultural attitudes and perceptions have been very effective in curtailing harmful practices. Nevertheless, despite what is known, policy is overwhelmingly directed to the least effective measures, with the support of the doctrinal institutions.

These and other facts leave us with only two credible hypotheses: either U.S. leaders have been systematically insane for the past 40 years; or the purpose of the drug war is quite different from what is proclaimed. We can exclude the possibility of collective insanity. To determine the real reasons we can follow the model of the legal system, which takes predictable outcome to be evidence of intent, particularly when practices persist over a long period and in the face of constant failure to approach the announced objectives. In this case, the predictable outcome is not obscure, both abroad and at home.

Abroad, the "supply-side approach" has been the basis for U.S.-backed counterinsurgency strategy in Colombia and elsewhere, with a fearful toll among victims of chemical warfare and militarization of conflicts, but enormous profits for domestic and foreign elites. Colombia has a shocking record of human rights violations, by far the worst in the hemisphere since the end of Reagan's Central American terror wars in the 1980s, and also the second-largest internal displacement of populations in the world, after Sudan. Meanwhile, domestic elites and multinationals profit from the forced displacement of peasants and indigenous people, which clears land for mining, agribusiness production and ranching, infrastructure development for industry, and much else. There is a great deal more to say about this, but I will put it aside.

At home, the drug war coincided with the initiation of neoliberal programs, the financialization of the economy, and the attack on government social welfare systems, real, even though limited by international standards. One immediate consequence of the war on drugs has been the extraordinary growth in scale and severity of incarceration in the past 30 years, placing the U.S. far in the lead worldwide. The victims are overwhelmingly African-American males and other minorities, a great many of them sentenced on victimless drug charges. Drug use is about the same as in privileged white sectors, which are mostly immune.

In short, while abroad the war on drugs is a thin cover for counterinsurgency, at home it functions as a civilized counterpart to Latin America limpieza social cleansing, removing a population that has become superfluous with the dismantling of the domestic productive system in the course of the neo-liberal financialization of the economy. A secondary gain is that like the "war on crime," the "war on drugs" serves to frighten the population into obedience as domestic policies are implemented to benefit extreme wealth at the expense of the large majority, leading to staggering inequality that is breaking historical records, and stagnation of real wages for the majority while benefits decline and working hours increase.

These processes conform well to the history of prohibition, which has been well studied by legal scholars. I cannot go into the very interesting details here, but quite generally, prohibition has been aimed at control of what are called "the dangerous classes"-those who threaten the rights and well-being of the privileged dominant minorities. These observations hold worldwide, where the topics have been studied. They have special meaning in the U.S. in the context of the history of African-Americans, much of which remains generally unknown. It is, of course, known that slaves were formally freed during the American Civil War, and that after ten years of relative freedom, the gains were mostly obliterated by 1877 as Reconstruction was brought to an end.

But the horrifying story is only now being researched seriously, most recently in a study called "Slavery by another name" by Wall Street Journal editor Douglas Blackmon. His work fills out the bare bones with shocking detail, showing how after Reconstruction African-American life was effectively criminalized, so that black males virtually became a permanent slave labor force. Conditions, however, were far worse than under slavery, for good capitalist reasons. Slaves were property, a capital investment, and were therefore cared for by their masters. Those criminalized for merely existing are similar to wage laborers, in that the masters have no responsibility for them, except to make sure that enough are available. That was, in fact, one of the arguments used by slave owners to claim that they were more moral than those who hired labor. The argument was understood well enough by northern workers, who regarded wage labor as preferable to literal slavery only in that it was temporary, a position shared by Abraham Lincoln among others.

Criminalized black slavery provided much of the basis for the American industrial revolution of the late 19th and early 20th century. It continued until World War II, when free labor was needed for war industry. During the postwar boom, which relied substantially on the dynamic state sector that had been established under the highly successful semi-command economy of World War II, African-American workers gained a certain degree of freedom for the first time since post-Civil War Reconstruction. But since the 1970s that process is being reversed, thanks in no small measure to the "war on drugs," which in some respects is a contemporary analogue to the criminalization of black life after the Civil War-and also provides a fine disciplined labor force, often in private prisons, in gross violation of international labor regulations.

For such reasons as these, we can expect that the "war on drugs" will continue until popular understanding and activism reach a point where the fundamental driving factors can be discerned and seriously addressed.

Last February, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy issued its analysis of the U.S. "war on drugs" in the past decades. The Commission, led by former Latin American presidents Cardoso, Zedillo, and Gavíria, concluded that the drug war had been a complete failure and urged a drastic change of policy, away from criminalization and "supply-side" operations and towards much less costly and more effective measures of education, prevention, and treatment. Their report had no detectable impact, just as earlier studies and the historical record have had none. That again reinforces the natural conclusion that the "drug war"-like the "war on crime" and "the war on terror"-has quite sensible goals, which are being achieved, and therefore continue in the face of a costly failure of announced goals.

Returning to the UNASUR meeting, a dose of realism, and skepticism about propaganda, would be helpful in evaluating the pretexts offered for the establishment of U.S. military bases in Colombia, retention of the base in Honduras, and the accompanying steps towards militarization. It is very much to be hoped that South America will bar moves towards militarization and intervention, and will devote its energies to the programs of integration in both their external and internal aspects-establishing effective political and economic organizations, overcoming the terrible internal problems of deprivation and suffering, and strengthening varied links to the outside world.

But Latin America's problems go far beyond. The countries cannot hope to progress without overcoming their reliance on primary product exports, including crucially oil, but also minerals and food products. And all these problems, challenging enough in themselves, are overshadowed by a critical global concern: the looming environmental crisis.

Current warnings by the best-informed investigators rely on the British Stern report, which is very highly regarded by leading scientists and numerous Nobel laureates in economics. On this basis, some have concluded, realistically, that "2009 may well turn out to be the decisive year in the human relationship with our home planet."

In December, a conference in Copenhagen is "to sign a new global accord on global warming," which will tell us "whether or not our political systems are up to the unprecedented challenge that climate change represents." I am quoting Bill McKibben, one of the most knowledgeable researchers. He is mildly hopeful, but that may be optimistic unless there are really large-scale public campaigns to overcome the insistence of the managers of the state-corporate sector on privileging short-term gain for the few over the hope that their grandchildren will have a decent future.

At least some of the barriers are beginning to crumble, in part, because the business world perceives new opportunities for profit in alternative energy. Even the Wall Street Journal, one of the most stalwart deniers, has recently published a supplement with dire warnings about "climate disaster," urging that none of the options being considered may be sufficient and that it may be necessary to undertake more radical measures of geoengineering, "cooling the planet" in some manner.

Meanwhile, however, the energy industries are vigorously pursuing their own agenda. They are organizing major propaganda campaigns to defeat even the mild proposals being considered in Congress. They are quite openly following the script of the corporate campaigns that have virtually destroyed the very limited health care reforms proposed by the Obama administration so effectively that the business press now exults that the insurance companies have won-and everyone else will suffer.

The picture might be much grimmer even than what the Stern report predicts. A group of MIT scientists have just released the results of what they describe as, "The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century, [showing] that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago-and could be even worse than that [because the model] does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane." The leader of the project, a prominent earth scientist, says that, "There's no way the world can or should take these risks," and that, "The least-cost option to lower the risk is to start now and steadily transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies." There is little sign of that.

While new technologies are essential, the problems go far beyond. It will be necessary to reverse the huge state-corporate social engineering projects of the post-World War II period, or at least severely ameliorate their harmful effects. These projects quite purposefully promoted an energy-wasting and environmentally destructive fossil fuel-based economy. The state-corporate programs, which included massive projects of suburbanization along with destruction and then gentrification of inner cities, began with a conspiracy by manufacturing and energy industries to buy up and destroy efficient electric public transportation systems in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities; they were convicted of criminal conspiracy and given a light tap on the wrist. The Federal government then joined in, relocating infrastructure and capital stock to suburban areas and creating the interstate highway system, under the usual pretext of "defense." Railroads were displaced by government-subsidized motor and air transport.

The public played almost no role, apart from choice within the narrowly structured framework of options designed by state-corporate managers. One result is atomization of society and entrapment of isolated individuals with self-destructive ambitions and crushing debt. A central component of these processes is the vigorous campaign of the business world to "fabricate consumers," in the words of the distinguished political economist Thorstein Veblen, and to direct people "to the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption" (in the words of the business press). The campaign grew out of the recognition a century ago that it was no longer as easy as before to discipline the population by force, and that it would therefore be necessary to resort to propaganda and indoctrination to curtail democratic achievements and to ensure that the "opulent minority" is protected from the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," the population. These are crucial features of really existing democracy under contemporary state capitalism, a "democratic deficit" that is at the root of many of today's crises.

While state-corporate power was promoting privatization of life and maximal waste of energy, it was also undermining the efficient choices that the market does not provide-another destructive built-in market inefficiency. To put it simply, if I want to get home from work, the market offers me a choice between a Ford and a Toyota, but not between a car and a subway. That's a social decision and in a democratic society would be the decision of an organized public. But that's just what the dedicated elite attack on democracy seeks to undermine.

The consequences are right before our eyes, in ways that are sometimes surreal-no less surreal than the huge resources being poured into militarization of the world while a billion people are going hungry and the rich countries are cutting back sharply on financing meager food aid. The business press recently reported that Obama's transportation secretary is in Europe seeking to contract with Spanish and other European manufacturers to build high-speed rail projects in the U.S., using federal funds that were authorized by Congress to stimulate the U.S. economy. Spain and other European countries are hoping to get U.S. taxpayer funding for the high-speed rail and related infrastructure that is badly needed in the U.S. At the same time, Washington is busy dismantling leading sectors of U.S. industry, ruining the lives of the workforce, families, and communities.

It is difficult to conjure up a more damning indictment of the economic system that has been constructed by state-corporate managers, particularly during the neoliberal era. Surely the auto industry could be reconstructed to produce what the country needs, using its highly skilled workforce-and what the world needs-and soon, if we are to have some hope of averting major catastrophe. It has been done before, after all. During World War II, the semi-command economy not only ended the Great Depression, but also initiated the most spectacular period of growth in economic history, virtually quadrupling industrial production in four years as the economy was retooled for war, and laying the basis for the "golden age" that followed.

But all such matters are off the agenda and will continue to be until the severe democratic deficit is overcome. In a sane world, workers and communities would take over the abandoned factories, convert them to socially useful production, and run the factories themselves. That has been tried, but was blocked in the courts. To succeed, such efforts would require a level of popular support and working class consciousness that is not manifest in recent years, but that could be reawakened and could have large-scale effects.

These issues should be very prominent right here in Venezuela, as in other oil-producing countries. They were discussed by President Chavez at the meeting of the UN General Assembly in September 2005. I will quote his words, which unfortunately were not reported, at least in the U.S. press: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing an unprecedented energy crisis in which an unstoppable increase of energy is perilously reaching record highs, as well as the incapacity of increased oil supply and the perspective of a decline in the proven reserves of fuel worldwide.... It is unpractical and unethical to sacrifice the human race by appealing in an insane manner to the validity of a socioeconomic model that has a galloping destructive capacity. It would be suicidal to spread it and impose it as an infallible remedy for the evils which are caused precisely by them."

These words point in the right direction. To avoid the suicide of the species there must be coordinated efforts of producers and users, and radical changes in prevailing socioeconomic models and global organization. These are very large and urgent challenges. There can be no delay in recognizing and understanding them, and acting decisively to address them.

This article is from a talk given in Caracas, Venezuela on August 29 (updated September 9). Noam Chomsky is a leading linguist, a long-time professor at MIT, a social critic, and author of numerous articles and books, including his latest, Failed States.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Haiti: Dialogues With Tim Ives (1) - Activist Author and Filmmaker

2009-10-01T03:17:00.001+08:00

Kim Ives is a writer and editor with Haiti Liberte newspaper and a documentary filmmaker who has directed and worked on many films about Haiti (Bitter Cane, The Coup Continues, Rezistans). He also works with the Haiti Support Network (HSN) and has led numerous delegations to Haiti. He frequently speaks about Haiti before church, student, and community audiences and on Haitian and U.S. radio programs. He is also a producer and host with the program "Haiti: The Struggle Continues" on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York

I write this as an introduction to what I hope will be a continuing series on Tim Ives and his involvement and knowledge concerning the Haitian Diaspora in Brooklyn and other parts of New York City, and also on what can be learned from him about his long involvement and filmmaking as an activist addressing the Haitian crisis. I recently had an opportunity to meet Tim at the setting of what appears to be a central location for meetings and events and actions by the Haitian community and its supporters in Brooklyn South of the Prospect Park area.

The story begins as I found that the important article I have been inspired by, Peter Hallward’s , had been posted at the site of Haitain Analysis, and referenced to a previous posting by one Tim Ives at the website Haitian Liberte, also a Kreyol /French language newspaper – which I was excited to find was physically located nearby where I am staying at this time in Brooklyn. The same location sports a bookshop, where I hoped to immediately get my hands on a copy of Hallward’s book, The Will of The People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism. I also thought it might even be possible to meet people there who could be instructive regarding my interests in a foray to Hispaniola to explore living conditions there for an extended stay for the purposes of learning directly about the struggles of the Haitian people, its potential for a Haitian Revolution (similar to the line of involvement I have taken in visits to Nepal with respect to the Maoist Revolution there).

Blissfully ignorant, I did not know Tim Ives was a significant activist when he answered the phone at Haiti Liberte and agreed to meet me for an informal discussion of my interests. It was good fortune or blind justice I suppose. I biked across Brooklyn to the warehouse type setting, and rang the buzzer to walk up the stairs where the first impression is that of a union hall. Some middle-aged Haitian men were meeting at a table speaking in Kreyol, the walls were adorned with ethnic art and there was a bulletin board and literature table featuring community events and the like. There were large stacks of the newspaper Haitian Liberte on the floor and against the wall. I was told Tim would be in a minute and I walked around a corner to find a small but well stocked small bookstore with lots of other available paraphernalia for sale to the wide-eyed supporters of the Haitian cause with some money in their pockets for coffee cups and a Che T-shirt, etc. I had spotted my book and an interesting series of DVD films when I was asked to go to an adjoining room to meet Tim Ives.

OK.. I was surprised to meet the guy you see in the picture above, a 53 year old fair haired white guy fluent in Kreyol, highly articulate native English speaker, in obvious good health and condition and quickly and most evidently somebody who knew what he was talking about from many years going in and out of Haiti in a long career of political filmmaking and writing on the topic central to his life purpose. I was delighted of course. Perhaps in time I will have the opportunity to elaborate and expand though further interviews what was the beginning of what is for me an important dialog.

This first meeting was rather brief and our starting point was the Hallward thesis as it was that article and the book in question that had perpetrated the meeting. Tim was also interested in the Nepal Maoist story, about which I was happy to share my small expertise.. he was struck my the many similarities, as I have been already, between many of the basic structures of the struggle in both countries , Haiti and Nepal. For example, the essential core of the struggle being between the will of the people and the “MRE” (what the author Herbert Gold termed the Morally Repugnant Elite). Then also, there is the constant underlying need for the establishment of civilian supremacy over the military, the absence of which is the foundation of MRE oppression. The kind of political and economic hegemony exercised by India over Nepal is not at all unlike the methods employed by Western governments in the Caribbean. It’s too much the same story again and again in the struggle everywhere for a democracy of the people. We find again the common theme in the strategies of neo-colonial imperialists as well articulated by Noam Chomsky, that for them “.. it is only when the threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely contemplated”.

I am not as yet prepared to provide a more detailed account of Tim Ives background and current projects. I would like to share this in time. There is an interesting story here beginning with his roots as the son of a woman who for many years was an activist for the Haitian cause, his upbringing as part of a commune of Haitian’s in New York State, his subsequent scholarship, his long series of documentary filmmaking trips and the interactions with the people of Haiti. It’s an interesting story that I should share I think. A bit of irony if not a bit of chagrin: here I was speaking to Tim Ives about Hallward’s book, unknowing that Hallward cites Tim Ives in that book no less than 18 times.

What can be known about his present opinions may be approached from the following articles he has recently published – I will find whatever else is available and add to my public bookmarking system at Delicious:

http://delicious.com/stefandav/tives

As for what is the immediate circumstances and struggle from the Brooklyn eye of the storm.. this also is an very compelling line of investigation. I only know that Tim Ives describes his own desire as trying to organize and bring together the efforts of the Brooklyn Diaspora. This seems to have something to do with a new development of party organization combining diverse elements in the population. It’s not clear what he means, I’d like to know. There are at work here some political struggles between factions of the Fanmi Lavalas. There are some Marxists in the mix. Tim has a background also with certain factions in the Aristide camp, but there is a constant and shifting evolution of the will of the people. Interestingly, Tim Ives makes reference to the suggestions of direction proposed by Peter Hallward in the conclusion of his book. I have had a look for this.. maybe what he means can be seen in the following exerpts:

“.. the Lavalas.. has.. begun to confront some of its own internal limitations, by becoming less dependent on Aristide’s personal charisma and influence, and by purging itself of many of the opportunists.. younger grassroots leaders are more important now than when they were in office.. have learned from Aristide’s example as well as from his mistakes.. that Lavalas also remains bitterly divisive is a consequence above all of the fact that it was the only large scale popular mobilization ever to address the massive inequalities of power.. that Lavalas has so far managed to do little to reduce these inequalities says less about the weakness of the organization than it does about the extraordinary strength, today, of the forces that preserve inequality.. Haiti’s independence from the contemporary version of slavery will.. in addition to the remobilization of Lavalas.. require the renewal of emancipatory politics within the imperial nations themselves.”

That last sentence calling for the international movement of emancipatory politics strikes a strong chord for the likes of philosophical activists, revolutionary warriors like Peter Hallward and Kim Ives.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Tick-Tock What’s on the Clock?

2009-09-30T01:09:00.007+08:00

Well, the timing of things has been changed by an unforeseen, somewhat bizarre, event: during a recent back-packing trip in Upper New-York, I was bitten by a tick and contracted Lymes disease! Fortunately it was diagnosed early enough (I hope) so no evidence was found in my spinal fluid and a course of rest and antibiotics should lead to my recovery. It was a good thing I did not leave for the Dominican Republic thinking it was just a bout of severe flu, for indeed I was feeling better and was only tipped off to the possibility of a lingering problem by a tell-tale rash that made its appearance just in time.

So much for the personal medical drama – for the present entry, the important issue is what this has meant for the recently announced intentions of studying and writing and taking some action in my net activism with respect to the crisis in Haiti. Because of the severe headaches and extreme fatigue for the prior two weeks to the scheduled departure September 23, I had in fact failed to complete my scheduled meetings and research with the Haitian Diaspora in Brooklyn or the online development of contacts in Santa Domingo. Even without the diagnosis, I had contemplated delaying the trip. In the last week or so I have made some progress here in Brooklyn.. in a sense, the delay, which will be protracted while I see about my recovery, the opportunity to more fully prepare is a kind of blessing in disguise.

Here are the guidelines to the present activism in the new situation:

1. The more day to day provision of readings entered via blogging will continue to be posted at the Zmag site as that is where more frequent posting will benefit with regard to exposure from the information organization of my Zspace page and linked blogging afforded by that activist community site. The less frequent posting to the Blogger site will consist only of the more personal opinion pieces and the most significant articles, and not so much the daily news on conflict situations I am covering. These are the two blog sites:

http://www.zmag.org/zspace/stefandav

http://stefandav.blogspot.com/

2. Annotated bookmarks of all my on-going research continues to be collected and organized at the social bookmarking site provided for public access at Delicious:

http://delicious.com/stefandav

It is pretty obvious… but you can get the main topic areas of my research by applying the tags as follows:

Nepal Maoist Revolution: http://delicious.com/stefandav/nepal

Crisis in Haiti: http://delicious.com/stefandav/haiti

Political philosophy of Peter Hallward: http://delicious.com/stefandav/hallward

Political Philosophy of Alain Badiou: http://delicious.com/stefandav/badiou

Political Philosophy of Savoj Zizek: http://delicious.com/stefandav/zizek

3. The specific study for me at this time is focused on gaining knowledge and understanding in some specific ways:

a. Study of the political theory thesis of Peter Hallward’s current project as introduced in his article :

The Will of The People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism

b. Emphasis on research regarding on-going developments and the historical context in Haiti by real-time collection of news development from aggregators to my Delicious bookmarking annotations – to include key writings published in recent years on the net.

c. Reading and related research keyed to the political arguments and perspectives provided in the detailed history, interviews and analysis by Peter Hallward in his book “Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment”

d. Direct involvement with the Haitian Diaspora in Brooklyn. This is emerging by establishing a relationship to the organization Haitian Liberte and the activist and filmmaker Tim Ives. This is the immediate physical space of my situation, so I hope the involvement can be fruitful.. ultimately if I am to explore direct action in Haiti (or based nearby in the Dominican Republic), I need to making the rather daunting commitment to start some study of the Kreyol language.

4. I am writing this in anticipation of a series of blog entries germane to the writing about and providing linkages to important texts on the Haitian crisis. The following is an introductory outline to existing and planned entries:

US-Haiti: Noam Chomsky March 9, 2004

International Crisis Group - Haiti 2009: Stability at Risk

Kim Ives: Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

Haitian Government Raises Minimum Wage to $5.50 per day

Haiti: Dialogues With Tim Ives (1) - Activist Author and Filmmaker

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Himalayan Consensus - Spiritual Revolution

2009-09-15T02:01:00.002+08:00

Himalayan Consensus

Written by Laurence Brahm - Published by laurencebrahm.com on 03/08/2009

On October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the United Stated Federal Reserve, was hauled before Congress to testify on causes underlying the largest financial crisis since the 1930s Great Depression. “I made the mistake in presuming that the self interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,” explained the ex-central banker adding he had “found a flaw” in his underlying economic assumptions. “The whole intellectual edifice,” he admitted, “collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Since Wall Street’s crash in September 2008, igniting a global great depression, “Washington Consensus” models of economic development are discredited. Developing nations seek new alternatives to the Washington Consensus. Nowhere is this feeling stronger than Asia, which had been chastised and lectured by Washington following its own regional financial crisis in 1997.

The Himalayan Consensus is a response to our current global crisis. Finding acceptance from Dhaka to Islamabad, from Kathmandu to Lhasa, it is now being discussed in Beijing.

The premise of Washington’s neo-liberal capitalist and neo-conservative political models is Adam Smith’s underlying theory -- greed alone motivates mankind, all markets will find equilibrium if left to choices of greed’s “invisible hand”. Himalaya Consensus rejects this notion. As Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus summarizes, “With all of our economic theories we forget the environment, forget people, forget culture, and destroy anything to make money. This is the inherent fault in economic theory which creates an artificial human being who knows how to make money because maximizing profit is the sole basis of business. But human beings are bigger than just money.” Himalayan Consensus is not just another voice of the developing world calling to restructure our global financial system. Rather it calls for reengineering the very values underlying assumptions driving that system.

Himalayan Consensus prioritizes environmental protection as the single most urgent task. It promotes multi-ethnic diversity best fostered and preserved through cultural sustainable development economic programs or businesses – not just aid – to address poverty and income gap inequality. It rejects any economic theories or models premised on ideology.

Himalayan Consensus draws upon Asian values of compassion, alms giving, community cohesion and networking. It seeks a middle way between extremes, rejecting both economic and political fundamentalism. Regardless of economic tools -- socialist or capitalist -- the Himalayan Consensus calls for mixing methodologies disregarding labels. It advocates grassroots realistic programs acceptable to indigenous communities fighting cyclical poverty. Politically, the Consensus draws upon indigenous forms of community expression and participation to create effective mechanisms of representative government relative to each society and culture.

Nepal’s Prime Minister Prachanda stated, “This Himalayan Consensus is special given the unique physical and spiritual dimension of this region, and the political and economic institutions developing here should encompass these ideas.” Bhutan’s Prime Minister Lyonpo Jigmi Y. Thinley echoed, “In fact, it is already happening. Yes, the compulsion is powerful in this region.”

Himalayan Consensus embraces three pillars:

First, throw out economic theory and models. Each country’s experiments and experiences differ based on local conditions. They should be shared without dogma. Sri Lanka’s president Mahinda Rajapaksa has explained, “How people choose to live is something they have to decide for themselves. It shouldn’t be decided by politicians, the World Bank or the IMF.”

For instance, China’s economic experience overturned classic assumptions about “shock therapy”. Ignoring IMF and World Bank proselytizing China adopted gradualist reform. However, China’s GNP growth emphasis is diametrically opposite neighboring Bhutan’s measurement of gross national happiness GNH. Both may be suited to the unique circumstances prevailing in each country. No one model fits all. End the blind application of Washington Consensus economic-module fundamentalism. It often bears no relation to local realities. Quantity accumulation through blind brand-consumption does not mean quality of life. Small can be beautiful. Grassroots work can change lives without baggage of excessive top down cookie cutter formulas. Rajapaksa advocates, “There are simply different international approaches. The people need to retain their values. Without their values, development is useless.”

Second, ethnicity is good. The more diverse our global ethnicity, the better it is for our human species. Why should everyone dive into a single melting pot? Of course, everyone thinking alike makes it easier for multinational corporations to globalize marketing. But is this good for the survival and evolution of our species? At the same time sustainable economic foundations are essential to each culture’s survival and evolution. Idealism must be tempered by pragmatism to succeed. Establishing functioning, sustainable businesses can help cultures evolve while preserving their individual identity. Ian Baker, National Geographic explorer and the author on Himalayan subjects advocates, “Engaged social interaction without violence is a Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu and also Islamic vision. The Himalayan Consensus approach should mean positive social action. Don’t spend time looking for a perfect world. That’s just escaping. Go create it!”

The Himalayan Consensus draws its value paradigm from the indigenous ethical values of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, all of which have similar aspirations for equality among humanity, closing the gaps between rich and poor. Himalayan Consensus universal rights include: credit, medical treatment, environment preservation, and finding peaceful solutions to global conflicts.

Reza Aslan, leading American Islamic scholar has commented, “A Himalayan Consensus can draw positive commonalities among different cultures. It was not some Hindu in the Himalayas who came up with the clash of civilizations. It was a Westerner who created the civilizations to highlight the advantages of one over the other. This is not scholarship.”

The third pillar is that every country has the right to develop its own political system, independent of any other country, incorporating the nation’s own unique ethnic, religious and social groups as it sees fit. The role of governments should be to alleviate poverty, narrow income gaps that create social strife, protect the environment for next generation’s survival, provide health care and education, offer hope for a better future. What form or political model government takes is less important than what it accomplishes. Photocopying theoretical models, applying them to cultures and ethnic groups where they won’t work is counterproductive. The attitude in Washington about so-called liberal free market theory and color-coded party democracy is no different in its fundamentalism then the Soviet International once was, insisting on its centrally planned top-down model. So both approaches are equally wrong in imposing what they believe on other people, where conditions and experiences are irrelevant.

Instead, indigenous models of participatory government should be created based on each country’s local cultural, tribal, historic, political and economic traditions. Such ideas may be anathema to previous administrations in Washington. But Himalayan Consensus advocates believe each culture and ethnic group knows what is best for itself. People must determine their own future. Providing tools that re-empower people contribute to development. However, forcing a particular model of government on nations having no relevant historic, social or cultural commonality with the country transferring its system, only leads to ineffective government, political instability and social–humanitarian disasters.

“It all comes down to politics,” Ian Baker explained. “Buddha walked out of politics and renounced it to meditate under a tree. Now it is time for Buddha to walk back into politics, because all the trees are being cut down.”

Laurence Brahm is a global activist, international mediator, political columnist and author. He is the leading advocate of a fresh development paradigm - The Himalayan Consensus - an innovative approach to development.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

2-Line Struggle At Paris Height: Report from Key Meeting of Nepal’s Revolutionary Leaders

2009-09-14T22:03:00.003+08:00

Posted by Mike E at Kasama on September 12, 2009

The following piece appeared on the re-opened Red Star website - beginning with quotes from the Red Star article then the article itself:

“The central committee meeting was held in such a challenging situation in which the adoption of a correct ideological and political line would lead the Nepalese people to a victorious conclusion of new democratic revolution while an incorrect one would either entrap the whole party into reformism or defeat it for a long way ahead in the face of tightening encirclement of the enemy nationally and internationally. This situation had unsurprisingly made the entire central committee members serious in their responsibility… there was in this central committee meeting a vigorous ideological and political struggle against various wrong ideological trends, principally the right opportunism, which is the main danger in the contemporary communist movement.“

“….the tactic of democratic republic that was adopted from Chunwang meeting had already completed with the promulgation of federal democratic republic from the Constituent Assembly. When the tactical political objective had been achieved then the tactical unity expressed in the form of the 12-point understanding between seven parliamentarian parties and ours had also become obsolete. In spite of this, for a long one year and more our party remained hesitant to address it correctly but remained in the main groping in the dark with no comprehensive ideological and political line and correct tactical slogan to go forward to establishing people’s democratic republic under the leadership of the proletariat. Unless this situation was dealt with in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist way the danger of democratic republic, the tactic adopted from the Chunwang Meeting, eating up the strategy of new democratic revolution was looming on the horizon. It was the main ideological question where the two-line struggle was focused on.”

The UCPN(M)’s Paris Height Meeting, a victory of the proletariat

by Basanta, central committee member, Unified Communist Party Nepal (Maoist)

The Central Committee Meeting held at Paris Height, Kathmandu, of our party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), has been concluded recently.

This meeting was organised when the Nepalese revolution was at a turning point. Therefore, the people of the whole world had kept their ears close to the outcome of this meeting. The imperialists, expansionists and all sorts of reactions the world over wanted our party, as a whole, to take up a reformist course and, if that did not take place, wanted it to undergo a split, at the least. Big media houses spent a lot of money to make their design happen. On the contrary, the international working class and the entire oppressed masses all over the world wanted our party to develop a correct ideological and political line and at the same time remain united stronger than before to fight imperialism and their lackeys. It was of course a big challenge before the central committee meeting, at Paris Height, of our party.

As had the international working class yearned for, it was not at all an easy task for this meeting to simultaneously build up a correct ideological and political line and maintain the party unity intact. It was of course an arduous task given the obvious differences in their way of thinking among the central committee members, in general, and the top leaders, in particular. Unlike before, most of the central committee members, including the top rank leaders, were skeptical of whether or not the party can build up a revolutionary line and the party remains united. Consequently, all of the central committee members in this meeting were down-weighed with two heavy responsibilities of firstly, building a correct line and secondly, developing party unity stronger than before.

The two-line struggle that surfaced at the Paris Height, first in the political bureau meeting and later in the central committee meeting as the continuity of the former, was in essence centred on how to comprehend the democratic republic in place and what steps to take up in order to realize the minimum strategic goal of new democratic revolution from the present stage of strategic offensive in Nepal. The central committee meeting was held in such a challenging situation in which the adoption of a correct ideological and political line would lead the Nepalese people to a victorious conclusion of new democratic revolution while an incorrect one would either entrap the whole party into reformism or defeat it for a long way ahead in the face of tightening encirclement of the enemy nationally and internationally. This situation had unsurprisingly made the entire central committee members serious in their responsibility.

However, it is not one’s seriousness and honesty that is decisive in formulating a revolutionary line. But it is his or her way of thinking that makes one able in applying dialectical materialism when analyzing the concrete condition and thereby developing a line to act upon it politically. Therefore, there was in this central committee meeting a vigorous ideological and political struggle against various wrong ideological trends, principally the right opportunism, which is the main danger in the contemporary communist movement.

The line struggle we engaged in is the obvious outcome of the present objective situation.

The tactic of democratic republic that the Central Committee Meeting in Chunwang, October 2005, had adopted was successfully over following the election of Constituent Assembly and proclamation of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal in June 29, 2007. No later than the republic was declared it was necessary on the part of our party to develop a next political tactic and sequence of class struggles to achieve it.

Although we adopted a new tactic, People’s Federal Democratic National Republic, in the Kharipati gathering, November 2008, and figured out the programmes of struggles, even then, apart from a number of pro-people programmes on the part of the government, the party could not in the main attain target in class struggles worked out from the meeting rather it engaged in day to day affairs for a long period until Paris Height meeting was held in July 2009.

In this situation, it was obvious to surface these questions sharply in the meeting because they were related with party’s overall ideological and political line.

Strategy and tactic are two basic aspects of a revolutionary line. Strategy is determined to resolve basic contradictions of the given society where as tactic is adopted to resolve the principal contradiction at a particular juncture. In short, sum of all tactics taken up as to resolve all of the fundamental contradictions makes a strategy. In this sense, strategy and tactic make a dialectical relation as do the whole and part of an entity. There must in no way be erected a Chinese wall in between these two. And, failure to grasp it and apply the interrelation between these two correctly has at times led to unjustified and avoidable splits within the revolutionary camp and sometimes to an unprincipled compromise among the classes which differ in their class interest.

As had been said earlier the tactic of democratic republic that was adopted from Chunwang meeting had already completed with the promulgation of federal democratic republic from the Constituent Assembly. When the tactical political objective had been achieved then the tactical unity expressed in the form of the 12-point understanding between seven parliamentarian parties and ours had also become obsolete. In spite of this, for a long one year and more our party remained hesitant to address it correctly but remained in the main groping in the dark with no comprehensive ideological and political line and correct tactical slogan to go forward to establishing people’s democratic republic under the leadership of the proletariat. Unless this situation was dealt with in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist way the danger of democratic republic, the tactic adopted from the Chunwang Meeting, eating up the strategy of new democratic revolution was looming on the horizon. It was the main ideological question where the two-line struggle was focused on.

Like every entity, our party is also a unity and struggle of opposites in which unity is conditional, time-bound and relative while the struggle is absolute. None can escape from struggle; neither can there be any monolithic unity in a party. What happens is that people change their ideas in the course of struggle and thereby undergo relative transformation. Every line struggle strengthens unity to a higher level only when there is transformation. However, what we have achieved through this struggle is relative transformation and relative unity not the transformation and unity for ever. Had not we undergone transformation from our previous ideological positions no such unity was possible.

The thoroughgoing and sharp debate followed by relative transformation and unity not only made the central committee meeting of our party finally reach to a correct line but also made the party centralised and united strongly than before. The ideological unity we achieved in this way was the reason behind our success to unanimously develop an overall ideological and political line that ensures the way to go forward to accomplishing new democratic revolution and plan of action to agree with it.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Nepal: Interview with Comrade Binod

2009-09-05T20:47:00.005+08:00

Nepal: Interview with Comrade Binod
Posted by Member-WPRM (Britain)

Note: In the current situation, in which international support for the Nepalese revolution has waned considerably since 2006, members of WPRM (Britain and Ireland) are in Nepal to talk with leaders and masses to try to better understand the contradictions in Nepalese society and how the UCPN(M) is providing leadership in making revolution. We believe constructive criticism should be made on the platform of internationalist support, especially given the ongoing threat from US imperialist and Indian expansionist intervention. Here is the first of various interviews and articles we hope to publish.

WPRM: Can you introduce yourself please?

Com. Binod: My name is Comrade Binod. I am a Central Committee member and secretary of the state council for Mahakali state, which comprises seven districts in the far west of Nepal.

WPRM: Can you tell us about the recent Central Committee meeting and its implications for the coming weeks and months?

Com. Binod: In the life of the party, this Central Committee meeting has been unusual from the point of view of ideology and debate. We have received an opportunity, and we are proud that this meeting has been very unusual because it has taken place amid the deep curiosity of the proletariat in Nepal as well as the world over. This curiosity is positive. At the same time, the imperialists and reactionaries also have an expectation. Amid this we have carried out a great meeting, and made decisions which have made us proud to talk about this meeting.

WPRM: And what are these decisions?

Com. Binod: At this moment when there is no experience of revolution in the 21st century, when there is no advanced proletarian revolutionary movement in the world, when this country is encircled and governed by Indian expansionism, at this moment against imperialism and expansionism, we have come to the decision that we have to accomplish insurrection. This is the important outcome of this meeting.

WPRM: So insurrection can be carried out in this situation?

Com. Binod: Certainly there is a negative situation; an unfavourable situation for revolutionaries. But there is no other mightier force than the people, and the Nepalese people are so mighty. Because of this, these people can bring us success. We have the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) and we have a good and clear organisational setup, we have a team of leaders who want to fight, we have a class, a nation and a region which has been heavily suppressed. We have the commitment to win victory, the commitment to synthesise our understanding to a new height. Certainly there are serious obstacles put in front of the Nepali people by the Americans, but we have commitment, courage and the confidence to overcome those obstacles. What we see now within the UML, a revisionist party, is that their cadres have lost confidence with their leaders and their line. At the same time within Nepali Congress, a reactionary party, many cadres have also lost confidence with their leaders and their line. The monarchists have already lost their leadership and also the Terai nationalist forces have seen their leadership divided.

We have a glorious history. You are British, and we have a glorious history of Ghorkali forces that defeated the British Army in many places. As descendants of that, our people are equipped with the weapons of MLM and the blood that is flowing in Nepal is now working for the purpose of socialism and communism. When we initiated the People’s War we were only 70 or 75 people. Even at that time we had the courage and confidence that we could conquer the world, that the revolutionary forces, the proletariat, could conquer the world. We had some fear about whether our party was going to be destroyed, or whether, like UML, it would become a revisionist party, whether it would vacillate on the revolutionary path. But through the process of great debate we have come to a higher level of understanding and we see that the victory of the proletariat is inevitable. We have a deep feeling that today no-one can make this party a reactionary or vacillating party. We are not only capable and experienced in leading People’s War but also in leading line struggle and taking the party to a higher level of debate. That has been proved in this meeting.

WPRM: How does the UCPN(M) feel about the current UML led coalition government?
Com. Binod: Our senior leader Baburam Bhattarai said that the Nepali people have given the responsibility of being a driver to the Maoists, as a conductor to the Nepali Congress and as a caretaker to the UML. But now the caretaker has taken the place of the driver and the driver is in place of the caretaker. In Nepalese tradition there is a fable about Dakchyaprajapati, who has the body of a human being and the head of a goat, which is set in a wrong direction, pointing backwards. This government is like that. Objectively we understand this government like that, but politically this government is designed by Nepali Congress. In the objective reality of Nepal, this government has been constructed in order to destroy the Nepali revolution, the UCPN(M) and the aspirations of the Nepali people. But this government is like a scarecrow. In the beginning the birds think this might be a man. Then when the bird realises this is not a man then it sits on the head of the scarecrow. At the moment this government is like a scarecrow. The Nepali people understand that it is set up by Indian expansionism and they are not afraid of this. So it is not so important to talk about this government, but as far as MK Nepal (the PM) is concerned, he has time and again over the last few years prepared his trousers and his daura-suruwal (a type of Nepali dress). He has been prepared many times but had never before had this opportunity. Now he has got his opportunity. But this time there is a big possibility that his chair will fall down before his clothes get dirty.

WPRM: Now Prachanda is talking about a new government being formed, how will this come about?

Com. Binod: This new government will assure civilian supremacy and national sovereignty, giving immediate relief to the people and with the purpose of insurrection. We have carried out many preparations in order to convince the international community that it is necessary to have power, in order to convince Nepalese society this government will be formed. Certainly, this government will be formed to organise insurrection, having convinced the international community that we want a new society, and to convince the revolutionary forces that we want to make revolution, to convince the people that we are going towards a new society, to convince anti-imperialist and anti-expansionist forces that we are taking this society forwards.

WPRM: How exactly will this new government come into being?

Com. Binod: The main basis is the Nepalese people. It will come about through the struggle of the Nepalese people, through strong intervention against the parliament and the organisation of a United Front amongst the nationalist and democratic forces within parliament and involving all sections of people and civil society. We understand that one section of UML is not happy with this government. The main section of the leadership is also not happy with this government. The Madhesi party has split and the Madhesi people are also not happy with this government. Even the honest people within Nepali Congress believe that without the Maoists the new constitution cannot be written. The people who are in favour of civilian supremacy and national sovereignty are also not happy with this government. The majority within this parliament agrees on the question that the step of the president (to overrule then-PM Prachanda’s decision to sack General Katuwal) is unconstitutional and unjust. These parliamentary forces are afraid even to debate this issue, this motion on the step of the president. Therefore this government is defunct because the practice has been shown that the parties are split and the parliamentary members are protesting. This kind of government cannot be accepted for a long time. It is defunct and is losing morality, confidence and honesty. It is set up against the people and so cannot sustain itself for long time.

WPRM: The deadline for writing the constitution is in nine months, is it possible to write it in time and what will happen if it is not?

Com. Binod: The constitution would certainly have been written if there was no struggle between opposite classes. But this struggle is happening as a political struggle. The other classes would like to write a constitution according to their class interests, we would like to write a constitution according to our class interests. The possibility of the constitution being written is low. At that time there is the possibility that a new class situation might emerge. We are taking the issue very seriously in order to meet the challenges that might come up in those conditions. In this situation we are trying to organise the masses for rebellion, through insurrection of the masses. The reactionaries didn’t want Constituent Assembly elections, but on the backs of the masses they were obliged to hold them. They didn’t want a republic, but on the back of the people the republic was established. Those elements who once put a bounty on our heads and propagated that we are terrorists have now been forced to recognise us as a political party because of the force of the people, as has the US imperialist force who also called us terrorists.

No such event has before taken place in history, where ‘terrorists’ have been recognised like this. These kind of unimaginable things have happened on the back of the force of the masses. We believe that on the back of the force of the masses, the constitution can also be written, a constitution favourable to the masses, but the possibility of that kind of constitution being written is very low at the moment.

WPRM: Many Maoists around the world are concerned that the party has given up the armed struggle, the PLA are in cantonments and the party now has the plan to merge the two armies together, the PLA and the Nepali Army (NA). What is the role of the PLA now in the struggle for revolution in Nepal?

Com. Binod: The PLA is under the control of UNMIN and a special team, the Army Integration Committee. But practically the PLA is under the control of the Maoist party. Even though the weapons are in containers, the key of those containers is in our hands. We talked to the lower members of the NA and we found that the behaviour within their army is like from the 12th or 14th centuries, feudal behaviour is being carried out. The leadership of the NA is from a very backward class, from feudal leadership. If we do things carefully then there is a big possibility that the bitterness between officers and soldiers could be maximised. Obviously as long as the NA is around, insurrection or victory cannot be achieved. Hence, the question of integration is not that the PLA is being diluted into the NA. The NA should be diluted into the PLA. The meaning of the policy of army integration is not in the dissolution of the PLA but in the dissolution of the NA, to transform the NA and turn it into a PLA. That is why Nepali Congress and UML are always afraid of army integration.

WPRM: Mao said that after 1949 the dangers of sugar-coated bullets are more dangerous than the real bullets from the war before. How does the UCPN(M) understand this?
Com. Binod: Certainly this situation is grave, but it is not out of our hands and the situation can be made positive. Why has the situation developed in the world where millions of people worked to establish a socialist state and then again the same people came to power and later removed that state away. Why is that? Why do the same people who were once deeply respected reach the point of denouncing the state? There are still certain citizens who fought for Marxism who are now really afraid of Marxism. While we were talking to youth from Eastern Europe, youth working for human rights organisations, I talked to them and asked why there is no attraction towards Marxism among the masses of Eastern European countries.

Why do British people, where Marx said the first revolution would take place, still support the rejected parliamentary system? Why was the Chinese revolution demolished very easily after the death of Mao Zedong? We have to answer these crucial questions standing on the unprecedented history of the 21st century. We feel we can meet the many challenges put forward in the present world. We will continue developing our understanding, our theory, having in the present given answer to these questions; these crucial questions. Based on dialectical materialism and based on democratic centralism, based on safeguarding participation in state power and control over state power, we can accomplish and meet the challenges of state power and control. Communists believe that the stability of capitalism is in motion. We believe that those who are most scientific are Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. But to some they look dogmatic and unscientific. Those who are most reactionary are capitalist-imperialists, which to them looks more dynamic and more forward-moving. The crucial question is why it looks like that. We have to answer this question.

WPRM: The UCPN(M) has developed a theory of elections taking place after New Democratic Revolution and during the stage of socialism. Can you give us your thoughts about this?

Com. Binod: Based on the experiences of Soviet Russia and China, we have understood that the economic and social rights of the masses are not only important, but the political rights of the masses, the personal liberty of the individual, are also very important. With the participation of the masses in state power, state power can go autocratic; state power can become another type. Certainly the dictatorship of the proletariat has to be established and systematised. While we are systematising the dictatorship of the proletariat we should not be cut off from the relationship with the masses. So the dictatorship of the proletariat should be approved directly by the masses.

This does not include pro-feudal, pro-imperialist, pro-expansionist forces, or comprador bureaucrats. It does not include anti-feudal ideologies. Not from those kinds of people, but from people that are really oppressed, those who, if they lose state power, will lose everything. We understand that socialism is an exercise of political ability of the individual to safeguard the dictatorship of the proletariat. That kind of society is, we believe, socialist society. Leninist socialism as defined in the period of Stalin contained something wrong somewhere, so we believe and we hope that we can correct this practice. The control, the observation and the intervention of the masses against the state, has to be guaranteed. In one certain sphere, our correct leadership, our correct party line, cannot mean a direct corridor to revolution. The whole thing has to be tested time and again. Then the instrument of the state is the people, and the people must have the right to test it. That is our definition of socialism as we understand it.
Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Peter Hallward: The Will of The People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism

2009-09-04T01:11:00.002+08:00

By: Peter Hallward - Journal of Radical Philosophy

By ‘will of the people’ I mean a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective selfdetermination. Like any kind of will, its exercise is voluntary and autonomous, a matter of practical freedom; like any form of collective action, it involves assembly and organization. Recent examples of the sort of popular will that I have in mind include the determination, assembled by South Africa’s United Democratic Front, to overthrow an apartheid based on culture and race, or the mobilization of Haiti’s Lavalas to confront an apartheid based on privilege and class. Conditioned by the specific strategic constraints that structure a particular situation, such mobilizations test the truth expressed in the old cliché, ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. Or, to adapt Antonio Machado’s less prosaic phrase, taken up as a motto by Paulo Freire, they assume that ‘there is no way, we make the way by walking it.’[1]

To say that we make the way by walking it is to resist the power of the historical, cultural or socioeconomic terrain to determine our way. It is to insist that in an emancipatory political sequence what is ‘determinant in the first instance’ is the will of the people to prescribe, through the terrain that confronts them, the course of their own history. It is to privilege, over the complexity of the terrain and the forms of knowledge and authority that govern behaviour ‘adapted’ to it, the purposeful will of the people to take and retain their place as the ‘authors and actors of their own drama’.[2]

To say that we make our way by walking it is not to pretend, however, that we invent the ground we traverse. It is not to suppose that a will creates itself and the conditions of its exercise abruptly or ex nihilo. It is not to assume that the ‘real movement which abolishes the existing state of things’ proceeds through empty or indeterminate space. It is not to disregard the obstacles or opportunities that characterize a particular terrain, or to deny their ability to influence the forging of a way. Instead it is to remember, after Sartre, that obstacles appear as such in the light of a project to climb past them. It is to remember, after Marx, that we make our own history, without choosing the conditions of its making. It is to conceive of terrain and way through a dialectic which, connecting both objective and subjective forms of determination, is oriented by the primacy of the latter.

Affirmation of such relational primacy informs what might be called a ‘dialectical voluntarism’. A dialectical voluntarist assumes that collective self-determination – more than an assessment of what seems feasible or appropriate – is the animating principle of political action. Dialectical voluntarists have confidence in the will of the people to the degree that they think each term through the other: ‘will’ in terms of assembly, deliberation and determination, and ‘people’ in terms of an exercise of collective volition.

I

The arrival of the will of the people as an actor on the political stage over the course of the eighteenth century was itself a revolutionary development, and it was experienced as such by the people themselves. To assert the rational and collective will of the people as the source of political authority and power was to reject alternative conceptions of politics premissed on either the mutual exclusion of society and will (a politics determined by natural, historical or economic necessity), or the primacy of another sort of will (the will of God, of God’s representative on earth, or of his semi-secular equivalent: the will of an elite entitled to govern on account of their accumulated privileges and qualifications).

If the French and Haitian revolutions of the late eighteenth century remain two of the most decisive political events of modern times it’s not because they affirmed the liberal freedoms that are so easily (because unevenly) commemorated today. What was and remains revolutionary about France 1789–94 and Haiti 1791–1803 is the direct mobilization of the people to claim these universal rights and freedoms, in direct confrontation with the most powerful vested interests of the day.[3] The taking of the Bastille, the march upon Versailles, the invasion of the Tuileries, the September Massacres, the expulsion of the Girondins, the innumerable confrontations with ‘enemies of the people’ up and down the country: these are the deliberate interventions that defined both the course of the French Revolution, and the immense, unending counter-revolution that it provoked. The Haitian revolutionaries went one step further and forced, for the first time, immediate and unconditional application of the principle that inspired the whole of the radical enlightenment: affirmation of the natural, inalienable rights of all human beings.[4] The campaign to re-pacify the people has been running, in different ways in different places, ever since.

The events of 1789–94, and the popular mobilization that enabled them, continue to frame our most basic political choice – between empowerment or disempowerment of the will of the people. In Robespierre’s France ‘there are only two parties: the people and its enemies’, and ‘whoever is not for the people is against the people.’ Despite the well-known limits of his own populism, Thomas Jefferson found a similar distinction at work in every political configuration: there are ‘those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes’, and there are ‘those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them’ and consider them the ‘safest depository of their own rights’.[5] In spite of all that has changed over the past two hundred years, the alternative remains much the same: either an insistence on the primacy of popular self-determination, or a presumption that the people are too crude, barbaric or childlike to be capable of exercising a rational and deliberate will.

Different versions of this choice have come to the fore every time there is an opportunity to confront the system of domination that structures a specific situation. The will, as Badiou notes, is an essentially ‘combative’ process.[6] Haiti, Bolivia, Palestine and Ecuador are some of the places where in recent years the people have managed, in the face of considerable opposition, to formulate and to some extent impose their will to transform the situation that oppresses them. Responses to such imposition have tended to follow the Thermidorian model. The mix of old and new counter-revolutionary strategies for criminalizing, dividing, and then dissolving the will of the people – for restoring the people to their ‘normal’ condition as a dispersed and passive flock – is likely to define the terrain of emancipatory struggle for the foreseeable future.

II

In a European context, philosophical expression of a confidence in the will of the people dates back to Rousseau, and develops in different directions via Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx.[7] Over the course of this trajectory the category of the people expands from the anachronistic idealization of a small homogeneous community towards an anticipation of humanity as a whole. The more it approaches a global universality the more difficult it becomes, of course, to conceive of the people in terms of a naively immediate or self-actualizing conception of will. Kant’s abstract universalization makes too sharp a distinction between determination of the will and its realization; Hegel goes too far in the other direction.

I will assume here that the most fruitful way to begin thinking a dialectical voluntarism that might eventually draw on aspects of both Kant and Hegel is to start with a return to Rousseau and his Jacobin followers, notably Robespierre and Saint-Just, supplemented by reference to more recent interventions that might be described in roughly neo-Jacobin terms. Rousseau’s conception of a general will remains the single most important contribution to the logic at work in a dialectical voluntarism. Unlike Rousseau or Hegel, however, my concern here is not with a people conceived as a socially or ethically integrated unit, one that finds its natural horizon in the nation-state, so much as with the people who participate in the active willing of a general will as such. Such a will is at work in the mobilization of any emancipatory collective force – a national liberation struggle, a movement for social justice, an empowering political or economic association, and so on. ‘The people’ at issue here are simply those who, in any given situation, formulate, assert and sustain a fully common (and thus fully inclusive and egalitarian) interest, over and above any divisive or exclusive interest.

The gulf that separates Marxist from Jacobin conceptions of political action is obvious enough, and in the first instance a dialectical voluntarism has more to learn from the latter than the former. Nevertheless, what is most fundamental in Marx is not the ‘inevitable’ or involuntary process whereby capitalism might seem to dig its own grave, but rather the way in which it prepares the ground upon which the determined diggers might appear. ‘The emancipation of the working classes’, stipulates the wellknown opening sentence of the rules Marx drafted for the First International, ‘must be conquered by the working classes themselves’.[8] Even Marx’s most non-voluntarist work is best described as an effort to show ‘how the will to change capitalism can develop into successful transformative (revolutionary) activity’, or as an effort ‘not only to make History but to get a grip on it, practically and theoretically’.[9] (A similar argument, as Adrian Johnston, Tracy McNulty and several others point out, might be made in relation to Freud and Lacan.[10]) The concentration of capital and the intensification of exploitation and misery which accompanies it lead not to the automatic collapse of capitalism but to a growth in the size, frequency and intensity of ‘the revolt of the working-class’. It is this class which, as anticipated by the Paris Communards, will carry out the deliberate work of ‘expropriating the expropriators’.[11] Once victorious, this same class will preside over the establishment of a mode of production marked above all by the predominance of autonomy, mastery and freedom. The newly ‘associated producers [will] regulate their interchange with nature rationally and bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power.’ They will thereby enable affirmation of human creativity and ‘energy [as] an end in itself’.[12] Understood as the real movement which abolishes the existing state of things, communism, we might say, forces the conversion of work into will.

The optimism that characterizes such an approach is still emphatic in Gramsci (who seeks ‘to put the “will”, which in the last analysis equals practical or political activity, at the base of philosophy’[13]) and in the early writings of Lukács (for whom ‘decision’, ‘subjective will’ and ‘free action’ have strategic precedence over the apparent ‘facts’ of a situation [14]). Comparable priorities also orient the political writings of a few more recent philosophers, like Sartre, Beauvoir and Badiou. Obvious differences aside, what these thinkers have in common is an emphasis on the practical primacy of self-determination and self-emancipation. However constrained your situation you are always free, as Sartre liked to say, ‘to make something of what is made of you’.[15]

Overall, however, it is difficult to think of a canonical notion more roundly condemned, in recent ‘Western’ philosophy, than the notion of will, to say nothing of that general will so widely condemned as a precursor of tyranny and totalitarian terror. In philosophical circles voluntarism has become little more than a term of abuse, and an impressively versatile one at that: depending on the context, it can evoke idealism, obscurantism, vitalism, infantile leftism, fascism, petty-bourgeois narcissism, neocon aggression, folk-psychological delusion … Of all the faculties or capacities of that human subject who was displaced from the centre of post-Sartrean concerns, none was more firmly proscribed than its conscious volition. Structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, by and large, relegated volition and intention to the domain of deluded, imaginary or humanist-ideological miscognition. Rather than explore the ways in which political determination might depend on a collective subject’s self-determination, recent philosophy and cultural theory have tended to privilege various forms of either indetermination (the interstitial, the hybrid, the ambivalent, the simulated, the undecidable, the chaotic…) or hyper-determination (‘infinite’ ethical obligation, divine transcendence, unconscious drive, traumatic repression, machinic automation…). The allegedly obsolete notion of a pueblo unido has been displaced by a more differentiated and more deferential plurality of actors – flexible identities, negotiable histories, improvised organizations, dispersed networks, ‘vital’ multitudes, polyvalent assemblages, and so on. Even the most cursory overview of recent European philosophy is enough to evoke its general tendency to distrust, suspend or overcome the will – a tendency anticipated, in an extreme form, by Schopenhauer. Consider a few names from a list that could be easily expanded. Nietzsche’s whole project presumes that ‘there is no such thing as will’ in the usual (voluntary, deliberate, purposeful…) sense of the word.[16] Heidegger, over the course of his own lectures on Nietzsche, comes to condemn the will as a force of subjective domination and nihilist closure, before urging his readers ‘willingly to renounce willing’.[17] Arendt finds, in the affirmation of a popular political will (‘the most dangerous of modern concepts and misconceptions’), the temptation that turns modern revolutionaries into tyrants.[18] For Adorno, rational will is an aspect of that Enlightenment pursuit of mastery and control which has left the earth ‘radiant with triumphant calamity’. Althusser devalues the will as an aspect of ideology, in favour of the scientific analysis of historical processes that proceed without a subject. Negri and Virno associate a will of the people with authoritarian state power. After Nietzsche, Deleuze privileges transformative sequences that require the suspension, shattering or paralysis of voluntary action. After Heidegger, Derrida associates the will with selfpresence and self-coincidence, a forever futile effort to appropriate the inappropriable (the unpresentable, the equivocal, the undecidable, the differential, the deferred, the discordant, the transcendent, the other). After these and others, Agamben summarizes much recent European thinking on political will when he effectively equates it with fascism pure and simple. [

Even those thinkers who, against the grain of the times, have insisted on the primacy of selfdetermination and self-emancipation have tended to do so in ways that devalue political will. Take Foucault, Sartre and Badiou. Much of Foucault’s work might be read as an extended analysis, after Canguilhem, of the ways in which people are ‘de-voluntarized’ by the ‘permanent coercions’ at work in disciplinary power, coercions designed to establish ‘not the general will but automatic docility’.[19] Foucault never compromised on his affirmation of ‘voluntary insubordination’ in the face of newly stifling forms of government and power, and in crucial lectures from the early 1970s he demonstrated how the development of modern psychiatric and carceral power, in the immediate wake of the French Revolution, was designed first and foremost to ‘over-power’ and break the will of people who had the folly literally to ‘take themselves for a king’;[20] nevertheless, in his published work Foucault tends to see the will as complicit in forms of self-supervision, self-regulation and self-subjection. Sartre probably did more than any other philosopher of his generation to emphasize the ways in which an emancipatory project or group depends upon the determination of a ‘concrete will’, but his philosophy offers a problematic basis for any sort of voluntarism. He accepts as ‘irreducible’ the ‘intention’ and goals which orient an individual’s fundamental project, but makes a sharp distinction between such intention and merely ‘voluntary deliberation’ or motivation: since for Sartre the latter is always secondary and ‘deceptive’, the result is to render the primary intention opaque and beyond ‘interpretation’.[21] Sartre’s later work subsequently fails to conceive of a collective will in other than exceptionalist and ephemeral terms. Badiou’s powerful revival of a militant theory of the subject is more easily reconciled with a voluntarist agenda (or at least with what Badiou calls a volonté impure[22]), but suffers from some similar limitations. It’s no accident that, like Agamben and Žižek, when Badiou looks to the Christian tradition for a point of anticipation he turns not to Matthew (with his prescriptions of how to act in the world: spurn the rich, affirm the poor, ‘sell all thou hast’…) but to Paul (with his contempt for the weakness of human will and his valorization of the abrupt and infinite transcendence of grace).

Pending a more robust philosophical defence, contemporary critical theorists tend to dismiss the notion of will as a matter of delusion or deviation. But since it amounts to little more than a perverse appropriation of more fundamental forms of revolutionary determination, there is no reason to accept fascist exaltation of an ‘awakening’ or ‘triumph of the will’ as the last word on the subject. The true innovators in the modern development of a voluntarist philosophy are Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and the general principles of such a philosophy are most easily recognized in the praxis of people like Robespierre, John Brown, Fanon, Che Guevara… It is to such people that we need to turn in order to remember or reconceive the true meaning of popular political will.

III

On this basis we might enumerate, along broadly neo- Jacobin lines, some of the characteristic features of a will of the people:

1. The will of the people commands, by definition, voluntary and autonomous action. Unlike involuntary or reflex-like responses, if it exists then will initiates action through free, rational deliberation. As Rousseau puts it, the fundamental ‘principle of any action lies in the will of a free being; there is no higher or deeper source …. Without will there is no freedom, no selfdetermination, no “moral causality”.’[23] Robespierre soon drew the most basic political implication when he realized that when people will or ‘want to be free they will be’. Sieyès anticipated the point, on the eve of 1789: ‘every man has an inherent right to deliberate and will for himself’, and ‘either one wills freely or one is forced to will, there cannot be any middle position’. Outside voluntary self-legislation ‘there cannot be anything other than the empire of the strong over the weak and its odious consequences.’[24] An intentional freedom is not reducible to the mere faculty of free choice or liberum arbitrium.[25] If we are to speak of the ‘will of the people’ we cannot restrict it (as Machiavelli and his successors do) to the passive expression of approval or consent.[26] It is the process of actively willing or choosing that renders a particular course of action preferable to another. ‘Always engaged’, argues Sartre, freedom never ‘pre-exists its choice: we shall never apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making.’[27] Augustine and then Duns Scotus already understood that ‘our will would not be will unless it were in our power.’[28] Descartes likewise recognized that ‘voluntary and free are the same thing’, and finds in the ‘indivisible’ and immeasurable freedom of the will our most fundamental resemblance to divinity.[29] Kant (followed by Fichte) then radicalizes this voluntarist approach when he defines the activity of willing as ‘causality through reason’ or ‘causality through freedom’.[30] Will achieves the practical liberation of reason from the constraints of experience and objective knowledge. As Kant understood more clearly than anyone before him, mere familiarity with what is or has been the case, when it comes to ethics and politics, is ‘the mother of illusion’.[31] It is the active willing which determines what is possible and what is right, and makes it so. As the French Revolution will confirm, it is as willing or practical beings that ‘people have the quality or power of being the cause and … author of their own improvement’.[32]

From a voluntarist perspective, the prescription of ends and principles precedes the calculation, according to the established criteria that serve to evaluate action within a situation, of what is possible, feasible, or legitimate. To affirm the primacy of a prescriptive will is to insist that in politics all external (natural, sociological, historical, unconscious, technical…) forms of determination, however significant, are nonetheless secondary, as are all forms of regulation and representation. ‘To will’, as Badiou puts it, is ‘to force a point of impossibility, so as to make it possible.’[33] The guiding strategic maxim here, adopted in situations ranging from Lenin’s Russia in 1917 to Aristide’s Haiti in 1990, was most succinctly stated by Napoleon: on s’engage puis on voit. Those sceptical of political will, by contrast, assume that apparently voluntary commitments mask a more profound ignorance or devaluation of appetite (Hobbes), causality (Spinoza), context (Montesquieu), habit (Hume), tradition (Burke), history (Tocqueville), power (Nietzsche), the unconscious (Freud), convention (Wittgenstein), writing (Derrida), desire (Deleuze), drive (Žižek)…

2. The will of the people involves collective action and direct participation. A democratic political will depends on the power and practice of inclusive assembly, the power to sustain a common commitment. As many of his readers have pointed out, what distinguishes Rousseau from other thinkers who (like Plato or Montesquieu) likewise privilege the general over the particular is his insistence that only active willing can enable an inclusive association, an association with an actively ‘common interest’.[34] What ‘generalises the public will is not the quantity of voters but the common interest which unites them’,[35] and what sustains this interest is the common will to identify and accomplish it. The assertion of a general will, needless to say, is a matter of collective volition at every stage of its development. The inaugural ‘association is the most voluntary act in the world’, and to remain an active participant of the association ‘is to will what is in the common or general interest’. In so far (and only in so far) as they pursue this interest, each person ‘puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme control of the general will’.[36] Rousseau’s analogy is familiar: ‘As nature gives each man an absolute power over his limbs, the social pact gives the body politic an absolute power over all of its members; and it is this same power which, when directed by the general will, bears the name of sovereignty.’ Defined in this way, ‘the general will is always on the side most favourable to the public interest, that is to say, the most equitable, so that it is necessary merely to be just to be assured of following the general will.’[37]

As a matter of course, such a will can only remain sovereign in so far as its willing remains general, rather than particular. The general interest will prevail only if the will to pursue it is stronger than the distraction of particular interests; reflection on how best to strengthen it, how best to ‘carry the self into the common unity’, is Rousseau’s most obsessive concern. The legislator who aspires to assist the ‘founding of a people … must, in a word, take away man’s own forces in order to give him new ones which are alien to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others’.[38]

To say that a general will is ‘strong’ doesn’t mean that it stifles dissent or imposes uniformity. It means that in the process of negotiating differences between particular wills, the willing of the general interest eventually finds a way to prevail. There is an inclusive general will in so far as those who initially oppose it correct their mistake and realize that ‘if my private opinion had prevailed I would have done something other than what I had willed’ – that is, something inconsistent with my ongoing participation in the general will.[39] So long as it lasts, participation in a general will, be it that of a national movement, a political organization, a social or economic association, a trade union, and so on, always involves a resolve to abide by its eventual judgement, not as an immediate arbiter of right and wrong but as the process of collectively deliberating and willing what is right. Participation in a general will involves acceptance of the risk of finding yourself being, at any given moment, ‘wrong with the people rather than right without them.’[40] By the same token, it’s precisely in so far as it remains actively capable of seeking and willing the collective right that we can agree with Rousseau and Sieyès when they insist that, in the long run, a general will can neither err nor betray. The ‘sovereign, by the mere fact that it exists, is always what it ought to be’.[41] The most pressing question, as the Jacobins would discover in 1792–94, is less that of a general will’s legitimacy than that of its continued existence. Without ‘unity of will’, Sieyès understood, a nation cannot exist as an ‘acting whole’; ‘however a nation may will, it is enough for it to will, [and] for its will to be made known for all positive law to fall silent in its presence, because it is the source and supreme master of all positive law.’[42] After Robespierre, Saint-Just summarizes the whole Jacobin political project when he rejects ‘purely speculative’ or ‘intellectual’ conceptions of justice, as if ‘laws were the expression of taste rather than of the general will’. The only legitimate definition of the general will is ‘the material will of the people, its simultaneous will; its goal is to consecrate the active and not the passive interest of the greatest number of people.’[43]

Mobilization of the general will of the people must not be confused, then, with a merely putschist vanguardism. An abrupt appropriation of the instruments of government by a few ‘alchemists of revolution’ is no substitute for the deployment of popular power.[44] In spite of obvious strategic differences, Lenin is no more tempted than Luxemburg to substitute a Blanquist conspiracy for ‘the people’s struggle for power’, via mobilization of the ‘vast masses of the proletariat’.[45] It’s not a matter of imposing an external will or awareness upon an inert people, but of people working to clarify, concentrate and organize their own will. Fanon makes much the same point, when he equates a national liberation movement with the inclusive and deliberate work of ‘the whole of the people’.[46] Such work serves to distinguish political will from any merely passive opinion or preference, however preponderant. The actively general will distinguishes itself from the mere ‘will of all’ (which is ‘nothing but a sum of particular wills’) on account of its mediation through the collective mobilization of the people.[47] The people who sustain the ‘will of the people’ are not defined by a particular social status or place, but by their active identification of and with the emergent general interest. Sovereignty is an attribute of such action. Conceived in these terms as a general willing, the power of the people transcends the powers of privilege or government, and entitles the people to overpower the powers that oppose or neglect them. If such powers resist, the Jacobins argue, the only solution is to ‘arm the people’, in whatever way is required to overcome this resistance.

3. The will of the people is thus a matter of material power and active empowerment, before it is a matter of representation, authority or legitimacy. What divides society is its response to popular self-empowerment. Jefferson goes so far as to privilege insurgency even when it might seem misguided or deluded: ‘the people cannot be all, and always, well-informed’, he concedes with reference to Shays’ Rebellion, but they are entitled if not obliged to ‘preserve the spirit of resistance’ in the face of all obstacles.[48] This is as much a Marxist as it is a Jacobin insight. Any social ‘transformation can only come about as the product of the – free – action of the proletariat’, notes Lukács, and ‘only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat possesses this ability to transform things.’ Such a praxis-oriented philosophy did not die out after the political setbacks of the 1920s. Sartre took up the same theme in the early 1950s (before Badiou in the 1970s): as far as politics is concerned a ‘class is never separable from the concrete will which animates it nor from the ends it pursues. The proletariat forms itself by its day-to-day action. It exists only by action. It is action. If it ceases to act, it decomposes.’[49]

Of all the concerns that link Rousseau and Marx, few run as deep as the critique of conventional parli23 amentary representation. Since ‘a will cannot be represented’, so then ‘sovereignty, being nothing more than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated [and] can only be represented by itself; power can indeed be transferred but not will.’ The people can (and must) delegate ‘agents’ to execute their will, but they cannot delegate their willing as such.[50] Marx follows Rousseau, against Hobbes, when he criticizes modern bourgeois politics as essentially representative – that is, as an expropriation of popular power by the state.[51] The bourgeois ‘state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings’. Popular emancipation will require the interruption of such a state, and its replacement, through ‘the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class’, of a political form capable of overseeing ‘the economic emancipation of labour’.[52] In the wake of Marx’s critique of the Commune, Lenin’s State and Revolution takes this argument to its logical conclusion.

Will commands the initiation of action, not representation. An exercise in political will involves taking power, not receiving it, on the assumption that (as a matter of ‘reason’ or ‘natural right’) the people are always already entitled to take it. ‘The oppressed cannot enter the struggle as objects’, Freire notes, ‘in order later to become human beings.’[53] It makes no sense, as John Brown argued during his trial in 1859, to treat the imperatives of justice merely as recommendations that must bide their time: ‘I am yet too young’, Brown said on the eve of his execution, ‘to understand that God is any respecter of persons.’[54] A similar impatience informs the strategic voluntarism of Che Guevara, who knew that it is pointless to wait ‘with folded arms’ for objective conditions to mature. Whoever waits for ‘power to fall into the people’s hands like a ripe fruit’ will never stop waiting.[55] As one of today’s more eloquent proponents of a ‘living communism’ suggests, an inclusive popular politics must start with an unconditional assertion of the ‘humanity of every human being’. Our politics, says S’bu Zikode, chairperson of the Durban shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, is rooted in the ‘places that we have taken’ and kept: We will no longer quietly wait for our humanity to be finally recognized one day. We have already taken our place on the land in the cities and we have held that ground. We have also decided to take our place in all [political] discussions and to take it right now. We take our place humbly, but firmly. We do not allow the state to keep us quiet in the name of a future revolution that does not come. We do not allow the NGOs to keep us quiet in the name of a future socialism that they can’t build. We take our place as people who count the same as everyone else.[56]

Those who lack confidence in the people, by contrast, recommend the virtues of patience. Such lack of confidence takes the general form of an insistence on socially mediated time, the time of ongoing ‘development’. The people are in too much of a rush; it is too soon for them to prescribe demands of their own.[57] It is always too early, from this perspective, for equality and participation. Only when they ‘grow up’ or ‘progress’ might today’s people become worthy of the rights that a prudent society withholds. Between confidence in the people and confidence in historical progress, as Rousseau anticipated, there is a stark choice.

4. Like any form of free or voluntary action, the will of the people is grounded in the practical sufficiency of its exercise. Will is no more a ‘substance’ or object of knowledge than the cogito variously reworked and affirmed by Kant, Fichte and Sartre. A ‘fundamental freedom’ or ‘practical exercise of reason’ proves itself through what it does and makes, rather than through what it is, has or knows. Freedom demonstrates and justifies itself through willing and acting, or else not at all.58 We are free, writes Beauvoir, but freedom ‘is only by making itself be’. We are free in so far as ‘we will ourselves free’,[59] and we will ourselves free by crossing the threshold that separates passivity and ‘minority’ from volition and activity. We will ourselves free across the distance that our freedom puts between itself and a previous unfreedom. We are free as self-freeing.

In order to rouse themselves from the nightmare of history, the people thus need to anticipate the power of their will. The people are condemned, Robespierre accepts, to ‘raise the temple of liberty with hands still scarred by the chains of despotism’. A will, individual or collective, cannot begin in full possession of its purpose or power; it precisely wills rather than receives its clarification.[60] A voluntarist prescription must anticipate effects which enable their cause. Rousseau recognizes this necessity: ‘In order for a nascent people to appreciate sound political maxims and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause …; before the creation of the laws, people would have to be what they should become by means of those same laws.’61 The pressure of events would push Robespierre and Saint-Just to similar conclusions. Marx gave much the same problem its most productive formulation when he framed it in terms of the process that might educate the educators.[62]

The process of transition from submission to participation, notes Michael Hardt with reference to both Lenin and Jefferson, always involves a ‘self-training in the capacities of self-rule.… People only learn democracy by doing it.’ Much of Jacques Rancière’s work is organized around a parallel question: given the social differentiation of rulers and ruled, or teachers and taught, how can initially passive, subordinate or ‘brutalized’ people come to emancipate themselves in an anticipation of equality, an assertion whose verification will retrospectively invalidate any basis for the initial differentiation of functions or intelligences?63 By contrast the already-educated tend to worry that, if left unchecked, popular self-education will lead only to the forever-imminent tyranny of the majority. ‘Since the beginning of society’, notes Draper, ‘there has been no end of theories “proving” that tyranny is inevitable and that freedom-in-democracy is impossible; there is no more convenient ideology for a ruling class and its intellectual flunkies’, and ‘the only way of proving them false is in the struggle itself’.[64]

5. If it is to persist, a political association must be disciplined and ‘indivisible’ as a matter of course.[65] Internal difference and debate within an organized association is one thing, factional divisions or schisms are another. Popular freedom persists as long as the people assert it. ‘In order that the social pact may not be an empty formula,’ as Rousseau’s notorious argument runs, ‘it tacitly includes the commitment, which alone can give force to the others, that anyone who refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the entire body; this means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.’ Preservation of public freedom, in Robespierre’s arresting phrase, requires acknowledgement of the ‘despotism of truth’. Collective freedom will endure, in short, only so long as the people can defend themselves against division and deception. ‘The general will is always in the right and always tends toward the public utility, but it does not follow that the decisions of the people are always equally correct.… The people is never corrupted but it is often deceived, and it is only then that it appears to will what is bad.’[66] ‘Virtue’ is the name that Rousseau and the Jacobins gave to the practices required to defend a general will against deception and division. To practise virtue is to privilege collective over particular interests, and to ensure that society is governed ‘solely on the basis of the common interest.… Each person is virtuous when his private will conforms totally to the general will.’ If then ‘we wish the general will to be accomplished’ we need simply to ‘make all the private wills agree with it, or in other words …: make virtue reign.’[67]

The French revolutionaries took Rousseau’s advice to heart. If Robespierre prevailed over the course of 1793 it’s because he understood most clearly why (as he put it in a private notebook) ‘we need a single will, ONE will [une volonté UNE]’. If this will is to be republican rather than royalist then ‘we need republican Ministers, republican newspapers, republican deputies, a republican constitution.’ And since domestic resistance to such republicanization of the public space ‘comes from the bourgeois’ so then ‘TO DEFEAT THE BOURGEOIS we must RALLY THE PEOPLE.’[68] Across the distance that links and separates Marx from Robespierre we move from popular insurgency to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. But what does recourse to such dictatorship imply, other than ‘the truism that a cohesive popular will would be overwhelming in a truly democratic state’?[69] The basic strategic principle was once again anticipated at the limits of Jacobin practice. The ‘first and crucial step’ towards a more equal distribution of resources and opportunities, Babeuf knew, was ‘the achievement of a truly effective democracy through which the people’s will could be expressed.’ Having witnessed the fate of Robespierre and Saint-Just, however, in the autumn of 1794 Babeuf takes the initial steps down a path that Communist militants would explore for the next century and a half. Since ‘the undifferentiated mass of the people’ could not be relied upon on its own to sustain the revolution in the face of their enemies, so then the partisans who seek to continue the revolution must first consolidate, through the mediation of popular societies and associations, more disciplined and coherent forms of political organization.[70]

6. The practical exercise of will only proceeds, as a matter of course, in the face of resistance. To will is always to continue to will, in the face of difficulty or constraint. To continue or not to continue – this is the essential choice at stake in any militant ethics.[71] Either you will and do something, or you do not. Even as it discovers the variety of ways of doing or not-doing, these are the alternatives a political will must confront: yes or no, for or against, continue or stop, where ‘to stop before the end is to perish’.[72] A (temporary) survivor of Thermidor, Babeuf knew all too well that ‘the organization of real equality will not at first please everyone.’ In so far as ‘the aim of the Revolution is to destroy inequality and re-establish the common welfare’, so then ‘the Revolution is not finished’ so long as the rich dominate the poor.[73] Then as now, the revolution divides those who seek to terminate it from those who resolve to continue it.

As usual, Sieyès anticipates the essential logic of the antagonism that would inform the Jacobin political sequence: ‘a privileged class is harmful … simply because it exists.’[74] And, as usual, Robespierre ups the ante: since the rich and the tyrants who protect them are by nature ‘the lash of the people’, so then the people who dare to overthrow tyranny ‘have only one way to escape the vengeance of kings: victory. Vanquish them or perish; these are your only choices.’ In the speeches that decided the fate of his own king, Saint-Just relied on the same logic. The king qua king is an ‘enemy stranger in our midst’, who ‘must reign or die’; if the ‘king is innocent the people are guilty’.[75] If for the Jacobins of 1793 ‘terror’ comes to figure as the complement to ‘virtue’, it is above all as a consequence of their determination to overcome the resistance of kings and the rich. ‘One leads the people by reason’, as Robespierre explained in February 1794, and the enemies of the people by terror…. If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe, and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.[76] The reasons why the Jacobin terror continues to terrify our political establishment, in a way that the far more bloody repression of the 1871 Commune does not, has nothing to do with the actual amount of violence involved. From the perspective of what is already established, notes Saint-Just, ‘that which produces the general good is always terrible’. Terror in the Jacobin (as opposed to Thermidorian) sense is the deployment of whatever force is required to overcome those particular interests that seek to undermine or disempower the collective interest. The Jacobin terror was more defensive than aggressive, more a matter of restraining than of unleashing popular violence. ‘Let us be terrible’, Danton said, ‘so that the people need not be.’[77] The need for more limited but no less resilient forms of self-defence has been experienced more recently, in different ways but with similar outcomes, by political militants in the shanty towns of Port-au-Prince and Johannesburg, in the villages of the Altiplano, and in the refugee camps of Gaza and Lebanon.

7. By the same token, the practical exercise of will distinguishes itself from mere wish or fantasy through its capacity to initiate a process of genuine ‘realization’. [78] ‘The will always wills to do something’, notes Arendt, and ‘thus holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on “doing nothing.”’[79] As the polysemy of its English usage suggests, a will orients itself in line with the future it pursues. Even Kant could see that in so far as we will its achievement, the ‘mere yet practical idea’ of a moral world ‘really can and should have its influence on the sensible world, in order to make it agree as far as possible with this idea’.[80] Kant’s Jacobin contemporaries anticipated, in their own practice, the implication that post-Kantian philosophy would soon develop in theory. Only suitable republican institutions and educational practices, wrote Saint-Just, can serve to ‘guarantee public liberty’ and enhance public virtue. ‘We have turned into imposing realities’, Robespierre proudly declared, ‘the laws of eternal justice that were contemptuously called the dreams of humanitarians. Morality was once confined to the books of philosophers; we have put it into the government of nations.’[81]

Political will persists, then, to the degree that it perseveres in its material realization or actualization. After Fichte, Hegel complements the voluntarist trajectory initiated by Rousseau and Kant, and opens the door to Marx, when he identifies a free collective will – a will that wills and realizes its own emancipation – as the animating principle of a concrete political association. Thus conceived, the will is nothing other than ‘thinking translating itself into existence…. The activity of the will consists in cancelling and over coming [aufzuheben] the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity and in translating its ends from their subjective determination into an objective one.’[82] After Hegel, Marx will expand the material dimension of such concrete determination, without ever abandoning the idea that what is ultimately determinant is not given economic or historical constraints but free human action – the ability of ‘each single individual’ to prescribe their own ends and make their own history.[83] Along the same lines, after Lenin and Gramsci, the partisans of ‘dual power’ seek to build, step by step, the grassroots institutions of ‘a social framework responsive to the actual will of the people’.[84]

8. Realization of the will of (the) people is oriented towards the universalization of its consequences. As Beauvoir understood better than Sartre, I can only will my own freedom by willing the freedom of all; the only subject that can sustain the work of unending self-emancipation is the people as such, humanity as a whole. Kant, Hegel and Marx take some of the steps required to move from Rousseau’s parochial conception of a people to its universal affirmation, but the outcome was again anticipated by Jacobin practice: ‘the country of a free people is open to all the people on earth’, and the only ‘legitimate sovereign of the earth is the human race.… The interest, the will of the people, is that of humanity.’[85]

9. The will of the people, however, is not an absolute. The process of ‘thinking translating itself into existence’ cannot be understood in a literally Fichtean or Hegelian sense. To absolutize the will is also to ‘de-voluntarize’ it. Self-determination operates within the constraints of its situation, and the freeing that is a free will is a relative and relational process.[86] To move in this context from thought to existence is simply to determine, step by step, the consequences of a popular will. Participation in the process which empowers a collective capacity is a practical and political rather than an ontological process. It prescribes what people may choose to do, not what they are.

10. A final consequence follows from this insistence on the primacy of political will: voluntary servitude, from this perspective, is more damaging than external domination. If the will is ‘determinant in the first instance’ then the most far-reaching forms of oppression involve the collusion of the oppressed. This is the point anticipated by Etienne La Boétie, and then radicalized in different ways by DuBois, Fanon and Aristide (and also Foucault, Deleuze and Žižek): in the end it is the people who empower their oppressors, who can harm them ‘only to the extent to which they are willing to put up with them’.p[87] It wouldn’t be hard to write a history of the twentieth century, of course, in such a way as to illustrate the apparent futility of political will. The failure of German communism in the 1920s, the failure of ‘Soviet man’ in the 1930s, the failure of anti-colonial liberation movements in the 1950s and 1960s, the failure of Maoism, the failure of 1968, the failure of anti-war and anti-globalization protests – all these seeming failures might seem to demonstrate one and the same basic point: the diffuse, systemic and hence insurmountable nature of contemporary capitalism, and of the forms of state and disciplinary power which accompany it.

Such a distorted history, in my opinion, would amount to little more than a rationalization of the defeats suffered in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the late 1940s Beauvoir already bemoaned our tendency to ‘think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it.’[88] By the late 1970s such complaint, revalorized as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. This consensus has now been dominant, in both politics and philosophy, for more than thirty disastrous years. It’s time to leave it behind.

Notes

This article is a preliminary overview of an ongoing project. Fragments of the material presented here were first discussed in lectures at the universities of York (October 2006), Nottingham (February 2007), Cornell (April 2007), California at Irvine (November 2007), Kent (March 2008) and London (March 2009). I am grateful, for detailed comments on a rough draft, to Bruno Bosteels, Alberto Toscano, Adrian Johnston, Peter Kapos, Christian Kerslake, Nathan Brown, Tracy McNulty, Frank Ruda, Alex Williams and Richard Pithouse.

1. Antonio Machado, ‘Proverbios y Cantares – XXIX’, 1912, in Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. Betty Jean Craige, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1978.

2. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1966, p. 109; cf. Peter Hallward, ‘What’s the Point: First Notes Towards a Philosophy of Determination’, in Rachel Moffat and Eugene de Klerk, eds, Material Worlds, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 148–58.

3. See in particular Sophie Wahnich, La Liberté ou la mort: Essai sur la terreur et le terrorisme, La Fabrique, Paris, 2003; Wahnich, La Longue Patience du peuple: 1792, la naissance de la République, Payot, Paris, 2008; Florence Gauthier, ‘The French Revolution: Revolution and the Rights of Man and the Citizen’, in 27 Michael Haynes and Jim Wolfreys, eds, History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, Verso, London, 2007. As for the American revolution, Robespierre was quick to see that it was ‘founded on the aristocracy of riches’ (Maximilien Robespierre, OEuvres complètes, ed. Eugène Déprez et al., Société des Études Robespierristes, Paris, 1910–1967, V, p. 17).

4. Cf. Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 2008; Peter Hallward, ‘Haitian Inspiration: Notes on the Bicentenary of Independence’, Radical Philosophy 123, January 2004, pp. 2–7.

5. Robespierre, OEuvres, IX, pp. 487–8; Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henry Lee 1824, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert Bergh, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, Washington DC, 1903–04, XVI, p. 73; Jefferson, letter to John Taylor 1816, ibid., XV, p. 23.

6. ‘There can be no pacified conception of the voluntary act’ (Badiou, ‘La Volonté: Cours d’agrégation’, 17 October 2002, notes taken by François Nicolas, www. entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/02–03.2.htm; I’m grateful to Adrian Johnston for drawing my attention to these lecture notes). 7. More substantial studies which cover some of this ground include Patrick Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1982; Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1986; Andrew Levine, The General Will, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993; John H. Smith, Dialectics of the Will, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2000. 8. Marx, ‘Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International Workingmen’s Association’ (1867), in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975–2005, XX, p. 441; cf. Hal Draper, ‘The Two Souls of Socialism’, 1966, §1, www.marxists.org/ archive/draper/1966/twosouls/index.htm; Draper, ‘The Principle of Self-Emancipation in Marx and Engels’, 1971, www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1971/xx/emancipation. html. 9. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho, Marx’s Capital, Pluto, London, pp. 11–12; Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes, Vintage, New York, 1968, p. 89. 10. Adrian Johnston, Tracy McNulty, Alenka Zupančič, Ken Reinhard, letters to the author, 2007–09; Slavoj Žižek, ‘To Begin from the Beginning Over and Over Again’, paper delivered at ‘The Idea of Communism’ conference, Birkbeck, University of London, 15 March 2009; cf. Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2008, p. 102. 11. Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin, London, 1976, p. 929; cf. Karl Marx, Civil War in France, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1977, pp. 75–6. 12. Marx, Capital Volume III, ch. 48, www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1894–c3/ch48.htm; cf. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin, London, 1973, pp. 611, 705–6. 13. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Study of Philosophy’, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971, p. 345; cf. Gramsci, ‘The Modern Prince’, in Selections from Prison Notebooks, pp. 125–33, 171–2. 14. Georg Lukács, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’, Political Writings 1919–1929, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. Michael McColgan, NLB, London, 1972, pp. 26–7; cf. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Merlin Press, London, 1971, pp. 23, 145, 181. 15. Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 91; Sartre, ‘Itinerary of a Thought’, New Left Review 58, November 1969, p. 45. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, New York, 1968, §488, cf. §666; cf. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals I §13, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, Modern Library, New York, 2000, p. 481; Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, London, 1968, p. 53. 17. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, Harper & Row, New York, 1969, p. 59; cf. John Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, New York, Fordham University Press, 1986, p. 177; Bret Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit, Northwestern University Press, Chicago, 2007. 18. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 225; cf. pp. 156–157, 291 n24. 19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, Pantheon Books, New York, 1977, p. 169. 20. Michel Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, Semiotext(e), New York, 1997, p. 32; Foucault, Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power, trans. Graham Burchell, Palgrave, New York, 2006, pp. 11, 27–8, 339; cf. Foucault, Abnormal, trans. Graham Burchell, New York, Picador, 2003, pp. 120, 157–8; Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, Essential Works III: Power, ed. James D. Faubion, New York, New Press, 2000, p. 25. 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), trans. Hazel Barnes, Routledge Classics, London, 2003, pp. 585–6; pp. 472, 479. 22. Alain Badiou, ‘La Volonté’, 13 March 2003. 23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l’éducation, Institute for Learning Technologies online edition, http:// projects.ilt.columbia.edu/pedagogies/rousseau/contents2. html, §1008; Rousseau, Première version du Contrat social, in Political Writings, ed. Charles Vaughan, Wiley, New York, 1962, I, p. 499. 24. Robespierre, OEuvres, IX, p. 310; Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Views of the Executive Means Available to the Representatives of France in 1789 [1789], in Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Sonenscher, Hackett, Indianapolis, 2003, p. 10. 25. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Willing, in The Life of the Mind, Harcourt, New York, 1978, II, pp. 6–7. 26. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Penguin, London, 1983, 2:24, 3:5; cf. 1:16, 1:32; Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull, Penguin, London, 2004, ch. 9. 27. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 501. 28. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1993, pp. 76–7; cf. Duns Scotus, ‘The Existence of God’, in Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan Wolter, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1987, 54–6. 29. René Descartes, Letter to Père Mesland, 9 February 1645, in John Cottingham et al., eds, Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, III, 246; Descartes, Meditations IV, ibid., II, 39–40; Sixth Set of Replies, ibid., II, 291; Principles of Philosophy, ibid., I, §35, §37. 28 30. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in his Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary Mc- Gregor, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (references to Kant use the standard German pagination), pp. 4:461, 4:446; cf. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, p. 5:15; Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, p. 6:392. In his 1930 lectures on Kant’s practical philosophy, Heidegger emphasizes this point – ‘to give this priority in everything, to will the ought of pure willing’ (Heidegger, Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Ted Sadler, Continuum, London, 2002, p. 201). 31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. A318–9/B375. 32. Immanuel Kant, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’, in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970, p. 181; cf. Kant, ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, in Practical Philosophy, p. 8:351. 33. Alan Badiou, ‘La Volonté’, bilan de septembre 2003. 34. Cf. Patrick Riley, ‘Rousseau’s General Will’, in Riley, ed., Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 124, 127; Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969, p. 184. 35. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Première Version, in Political Writings, ed. Vaughan, I, p. 472. 36. Rousseau, Social Contract 4:2, 1:6. In Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, which in many ways might be read as an extended consideration of the process whereby a general will takes shape and dissolves, this moment of association is confirmed by a collective ‘pledge’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, Verso, London, 2004, p. 417). 37. Rousseau, Social Contract 2:4; Rousseau, ‘Discourse on Political Economy’, in Rousseau’s Political Writings, p. 66. 38. Rousseau, Émile, §24; Social Contract 2:7; cf. Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, pp. 182–97, 257. 39. Rousseau, Social Contract 4:2; cf. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Views of the Executive Means Available to the Representatives of France in 1789, in Sieyès, Political Writings, p. 11; Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, OEuvres complètes, ed. Anne Kupiec and Miguel Abensour, Gallimard, Paris, 2004, p. 482. 40. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, cited in J.P. Slavin, ‘Haiti: The Elite’s Revenge’, NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 25, no. 3, December 1991, p. 6. 41. Rousseau, ‘Discourse on Political Economy’, p. 66; Social Contract 2:3; Rousseau, Social Contract 1:7, translation modified. 42. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? [1789], in Sieyès, Political Writings, pp. 134, 136–8. As Thomas Paine would argue, against Burke, ‘the right of a Parliament is only a right in trust, a right by delegation, and that but from a very small part of the Nation, … but the right of the Nation is an original right …, and everything must conform to its general will’ (Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, in Paine, Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 131). 43. Saint-Just, OEuvres complètes, p. 547. 44. See Marx and Engels, ‘Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu’ (1850), online at www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1850/03/chenu.htm; Marx, ‘Meeting of the Central Authority, September 15, 1850’, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, X, pp. 625–9; Engels, ‘Introduction,’ in Marx, Civil War in France, p. 14. 45. Lenin, ‘The Conference Summed Up’ (7 May 1906), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/may/07. htm; cf. Draper, ‘The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party”’, 1990, www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/ myth/myth.htm. 46. ‘Experience proves,’ adds Fanon, ‘that the important thing is not that three hundred people form a plan and decide upon carrying it out, but that the whole people plan and decide even if takes them twice or three times as long’ (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1968, pp. 155–6; cf. pp. 198, 204–5; cf. Jane Anna Gordon, ‘Of Legitimation and the General Will: Creolizing Rousseau through Frantz Fanon’, The C.L.R. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, vol. 14, no. 1, forthcoming). 47. Rousseau, Social Contract 2:3. Here is the crux of the difference, often noted, between Rousseau’s volonté général and Montesquieu’s esprit général. Occasions for the self-determination of the former arise when the collapse or exhaustion of existing social relations give the people an opportunity to assert a new and deliberate beginning. The latter, by contrast, emerges through the combination of the ‘many things that govern people: climate, religion, the laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores, and manners’ (Charles Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler et al., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, 19:4). Since a general spirit is largely the product of its environment and the ‘organically’ established order of things, Montesquieu’s philosophy recommends, in anticipation of Burke and de Maistre, that ‘we should accommodate ourselves to this life and not try to force it into patterns of our own devising’ (Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1:2; Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution, Duckworth, London, 1983, p. 9). 48. Jefferson, letter to William Smith, 13 November 1787, in Michael Hardt, ed., Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, Verso, London, 2007, p. 35. 49. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 205; Jean- Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace, trans. Martha Fletcher, Braziller, New York, 1968, p. 89. 50. Rousseau, Social Contract 2.1; cf. 3:15. 51. ‘The State does not presuppose the “people” of which it would be the product or the serving delegate, on the contrary it is the state which institutes the represented as political subject, through the permanent dispossession of its capacity to act politically in the first person’ (André Tosel, Études sur Marx, et Engels, Kimé, Paris, 1996, p. 71). Hence the limitation of Laclau’s recent reconceptualization of populism. Since Laclau conceives of the ‘construction of a people’ not in terms of power, unity and will but in terms of heterogeneity, difference and language, he conceives of any popular ‘articulation of a chain of equivalences’ first and foremost in terms of representation. For Laclau, arguing against Rousseau, ‘the main difficulty with classical theories of political representation is that most of them conceived the will of the “people” as something that was constituted before representation’, rather than through it (Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, London, 2005, pp. 163–4). 52. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1978, p. 59; 29 Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 74. 53. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Ramos, Penguin, London, 1996, p. 50. 54. Cited in Arthur Jordan, ‘John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry’, International Socialist Review, vol 21, no. 1, 1960, www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol 21/no01/jordan.htm. ‘The general will, to be truly so, must be general in its object as well as in its essence; it must come from all to be applied to all’ (Rousseau, Social Contract 2:4). 55. Che Guevara, ‘The Marxist-Leninist Party’, in Che: Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara, ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdes, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1969, pp. 104–6. 56. S’bu Zikode, ‘The Burning Issue of Land and Housing’, 28 August 2008, www.diakonia.org.za/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=129&Itemid =54. 57. A version of this assumption informs Simon Critchley’s recent work. Since we cannot prescribe our own ends, in order to overcome our ‘motivational deficit’ we must accept a ‘heteronomous’ motivation imposed from the other or the outside, an other that is infinitely ‘higher’, i.e. holier, than us. Responsibility to such a transcendent or infinite demand exceeds all merely autonomous freedom (Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, Verso, London, 2007, pp. 56–7). The tactical corollary of such piety is a deflating, ‘self-undermining’ frivolity: the sacred majesty of the other demands of the self ‘not Promethean authenticity but laughable inauthenticity’ (pp. 124, 82). 58. How far we are actually or ‘objectively’ free, Kant insists, ‘is a merely speculative question, which we can leave aside so long as we are considering what ought or ought not to be done’ (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A801–4/B829–32; cf. Groundwork, 447–50). Rousseau again anticipates the point: ‘I will to act, and I act …. The will is known to me by its acts, not by its nature’ (Émile, §983). 59. Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, Citadel Press, New York, 1976, pp. 24–5, 130–31. 60. Robespierre, quoted in David Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre, Free Press, New York, 1985, p. 231. Psychoanalysis allows us to recognize, Badiou notes, that the will ‘isn’t necessarily transparent to itself’ (Badiou, ‘La Volonté’, 13 March 2003). 61. Rousseau, Social Contract 2:7. 62. Robespierre, OEuvres, V, pp. 19–20; Marx, Theses on Feuerbach §3, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1845/theses/index.htm. 63. Hardt, ‘Introduction’, in Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, xix–xx; cf. Hallward, ‘Rancière and the Subversion of Mastery’, Paragraph, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, pp. 26–45. 64. Draper, ‘Two Souls’, §10. 65. ‘For the same reason that sovereignty is inalienable, it is indivisible, for the will is general, or it is not’ (Rousseau, Social Contract 2:2; cf. Robespierre, OEuvres, VII, p. 268). 66. Rousseau, Social Contract 1:7; Robespierre, OEuvres, IX, 83–84; Rousseau, Social Contract 2.3. 67. Rousseau, Social Contract 2.1; ‘Discourse on Political Economy’, pp. 69, 67, translation modified. 68. Robespierre, notes written in early June 1793, in J.M. Thompson, Robespierre, Blackwell, Oxford, 1935, II, pp. 33–4. 69. Thomas Sowell, ‘Karl Marx and the Freedom of the Individual’, Ethics, vol. 73, no. 2, 1963, p. 119; cf. Draper, The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1987, ch. 1. 70. R.B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1978, p. 104, pp. 167–9. 71. Cf. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, pp. 27–8; Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward, Verso, London, 2001, pp. 52, 91. 72. Robespierre, OEuvres, X, p. 572. 73. Babeuf, Manifesto of the Equals, 1796, www.marxists. org/history/france/revolution/conspiracy-equals/1796/ manifesto.htm; ‘Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf’, 1796, article 10, www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/ conspiracy-equals/1797/placard.htm; ‘Babeuf’s Defense’, February-May 1797, www.historyguide.org/ intellect/defense.html. 74. Sieyès, What is the Third Estate?, in Sieyès, Political Writings, p. 157; cf. Fanon, Wretched, p. 200. 75. Robespierre, OEuvres, VI, p. 625; V, p. 61; Saint-Just, OEuvres, pp. 479, 512. 76. Robespierre, OEuvres, X, pp. 356–7. 77. Saint-Just, ‘Institutions républicaines’ (1794), in OEuvres, p. 1141; cf. Saint-Just, OEuvres, 659–60; Danton, 10 March 1793, cited in Wahnich, Liberté ou la mort, p. 62. In his notorious ‘Adam and Eve letter’, Jefferson defended the initial phase of the Jacobin terror for the same reason. ‘The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest [ … , and] rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated’ (Jefferson, letter to William Short, 3 January 1793, in Hardt, ed., Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, pp. 46–7). 78. Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 505; Gramsci, ‘The Modern Prince’, in Selections from Prison Notebooks, p. 175 n75. 79. Arendt, Willing, p. 37. 80. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. A808/B836; cf. Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–1801, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, pp. 279–80. 81. Saint-Just, ‘Institutions républicaines’, in OEuvres, pp. 1088–89, 1135; Robespierre, OEuvres, X, p. 229. 82. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, §4A, §28, translation modified. 83. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 1A, www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/germanideology/ ch01a.htm#a3; cf. Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 739. 84. Brian A. Dominick, ‘An Introduction to Dual Power Strategy’, 1998, http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/ 2002/09/2403.shtml; cf. Alberto Toscano, ‘Dual Power Revisited’, Soft Targets, vol. 2, no. 1, 2007, www.softtargetsjournal. com/v21/alberto_toscano.php. 85. Saint-Just, OEuvres, p. 551; Robespierre, OEuvres, IX, p. 469; VII, p. 268. 86. Badiou, ‘La Volonté’, 13 March 2003. 87. Étienne La Boétie, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz, Columbia University Press, New York, 1942, www.constitution.org/la_boetie/serv_vol. htm, translation modified. 88. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 139.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Hallward Reviews Alex Dupuy's "The Prophet and Power.."

2009-09-02T21:01:00.000+08:00

By: Peter Hallward - Haiti Liberte

Peter Hallward's A review of Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community and Haiti. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. ISBN 0-7425-3831-1, 238 + xi pages.

The basic argument of Alex Dupuy’s new book is that between 1990 and 2006, Haiti’s “tumultuous transition to democracy” was “temporarily derailed by both Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his enemies” (203). In particular, Dupuy sets out to show that “when he left [Haiti] in February 2004, Aristide had become a discredited, corrupted and increasingly authoritarian president who had betrayed the trust and aspirations of the poor majority” (2).

Alex Dupuy is an experienced and highly regarded scholar who has already written two other substantial books on modern Haitian politics. He has a sophisticated grasp of the workings of the “new world order”, of transnational capitalism and of contemporary forms of political and economic domination. Readers familiar with the recent work of analysts like David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein or William Robinson will find themselves right at home. His latest book is sure to appeal to people who are instinctively critical both of US imperialism and of the apparent degeneration of Aristide and the Lavalas movement that he led. It is reasonable to assume that The Prophet and Power will soon become a standard point of reference for anyone who wants to understand what happened to Haiti in the two confusing decades that followed the expulsion of the US-backed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. It is already beginning to enjoy a warm reception as a “challenging and enlightening book”, one that presents a “fair and persuasive” argument that is “rooted carefully in factual data, analyzing the global situation with insight and logical rigor.”2 Such an argument clearly deserves to be considered in detail and at length.

Dupuy provides a fairly full account of Aristide’s two terms in office (February 1991 - September 1991; February 2001 - February 2004). Both terms were interrupted by violent military coups. Dupuy argues that in each case, responsibility for the coup lay both with Aristide himself and with his opponents among the Haitian economic elite, backed by the Haitian army (or its paramilitary replacement) and its international patrons. Long before his political career was brought to an end in February 2004, Dupuy insists that it had become “clear that Aristide, as well as his Fanmi Lavalas party in power, relied on intimidation, violence, and corruption to maintain themselves in power, had become discredited, no longer represented the interests of the majority of Haitians who brought them to power, and were a major obstacle to the democratization of Haiti. But if Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas subverted democracy, so too did the organized opposition, the Haitian bourgeoisie, and their foreign allies” (168).

Most readers familiar with recent Haitian history are likely to agree with at least the second aspect of Dupuy’s analysis. Dupuy provides a useful introductory overview of the ways in which neo-liberal globalisation has led to increasingly desperate levels of exploitation and impoverishment. He demonstrates how this global economic order is tightly interconnected with US imperial power. He understands the difference between core and peripheral states within the contemporary world-system. He shows how the US and its allies in the Haitian elite were determined at all costs to prevent Aristide from pursuing meaningful social and economic reforms. He shows how the “democratic opposition” that the US and pro-US members of Haiti’s little elite rigged up to oppose Aristide’s second administration amounted to nothing more than a front for the most reactionary forces in Haitian society. He shows how Aristide’s early efforts to rid Haiti of the murderous legacy of the Duvalier dictators (1957-1986) and their brutal “Tonton Macoute” militia were thwarted by a mixture of military and paramilitary reaction. He explains how Aristide’s early ambition to lead Haiti towards a “maximalist” (redistributive, socially transformative) version of democracy was constrained by pressure from the international community and its financial institutions to legislate for what became a merely “minimalist” or formal (market-driven, politically conservative) version of democracy (18-21). In all these respects Dupuy provides a valuable and clear-sighted analysis of this most turbulent period in Haitian history.

What may be more controversial is Dupuy’s insistence that the primary responsibility for the end of democratic rule in 2004 nevertheless lies with President Aristide and members of his Fanmi Lavalas party. Like a good many other analysts who considered themselves sympathetic to the embryonic phase of the Lavalas project, Dupuy claims that whereas Aristide’s first administration was marked by a mix of authoritarian and democratic tendencies, his second administration was simply authoritarian through and through. “Aristide’s second term of office”, he writes, was “disastrous on all fronts ― political, economic, and social” (168). By 2001, “Aristide’s objective was to consolidate his and his party’s power and preserve the prebendary and clientelistic characteristics of the state he had vowed to dismantle in 1991. To maintain power, Aristide relied on armed gangs, the police, and authoritarian practices to suppress his opponents, all the while cultivating a self-serving image as defender of the poor. That strategy did not work, though, as his government became increasingly discredited and his popularity waned [...]. Consequently, unlike in 1991, the majority of the population did not rally to save Aristide from being forced out in 2004 or clamor for his return afterward” (xv). By 2004, “betrayed by a false prophet”, one of world’s most remarkable and inspiring political mobilisations had been definitively crushed.

Now readers familiar with anti-Aristide propaganda will know that as far as the prevailing norms of the genre are concerned, this is very mild stuff. Alex Dupuy’s incisive and sharply written book is certainly more balanced and more accurate than say Michael Deibert’s recent account of these same years, in his Notes from the Last Testament (2005). Dupuy’s argument draws on a very wide consensus, a consensus endorsed for some time now by a whole slew of other experienced observers, including Jane Regan, Charles Arthur, Jean-Michel Caroit, and Laënnec Hurbon, among many others. Dupuy’s restatement of the prevailing case against Aristide deserves to be considered very seriously.

So let’s consider it.

Dupuy mounts three main accusations against the twice-deposed president. First, he claims that Aristide contributed to the first coup, in 1991, by failing to do enough to placate his enemies within the Haitian economic and political elite. Second, he claims that by the time Aristide was re-elected in 2000 (if not by the time he returned to Haiti in 1994) he had abandoned his original principles and had become just another “all-too-ordinary and traditional president, who like all the others who came before him, was using state power for his and his allies’ personal gains” (170). Third, as his corrupt administration began to encounter understandably agitated forms of political opposition, Dupuy claims that Aristide decided to arm gangs of his most impoverished and desperate supporters (the infamous “chimès”) to intimidate his opponents. This strategy, Dupuy concludes, “would prove to be the Achilles’ heel of Aristide’s second term. In effect, I will argue, by relying on armed gangs rather than mobilizing his popular base as a counterforce to the opposition, as he tended to do in his first term, Aristide would marginalize the latter. Henceforth, Lavalas would become equated with the chimès, and the entire popular movement associated with Lavalas [...] would become discredited, demobilized, and demoralized” (143-144).

I’ll go through these three accusations in turn, paying particular attention to the first and the third.

I

The first accusation is the most familiar, since it is an echo of longstanding elite anxieties about Aristide that date back to the explosive entry, in the late 1980s, of this “cross between Ayatollah and Fidel” onto the political stage.3 The “greatest mistake” of Aristide’s first administration, Dupuy says, was his belief that “with the masses behind him, he was invincible and that he could rule without respecting the law and without winning over the bourgeoisie, the parliament, or the army” (130). Although Dupuy can see that this most fearless scourge of macoutisme stood little chance of gaining the support of the Duvalierists and their Macoutes, still “he could have done much more to reassure the bourgeoisie and win it over to his side” (132). Instead, by failing to reward his bourgeois allies within the political class, and by making a couple of apparently inflammatory speeches, he drove Haiti’s economic masters back into a lethal alliance with the army and the Macoutes.

There are two separate issues to assess here, one political, one strategic. The political question concerns the relation between Aristide’s actual electoral base and the little clutch of professional politicians who briefly allied themselves to that base during the election campaign of 1990. As far as Dupuy is concerned, “the most important virtue of the broad and decentralized democratic movement” that started up in the late 1980s was precisely its lack of centralized organization, a virtue which “meant that no single political organization or individual would emerge as its identifiable leaders” (59). Free from the oppressive influence of a united and identifiable leadership, these golden years of Haitian civil society were instead populated by small (and surely unidentifiable) “social-democratic” groupings like Victor Benoît’s KONAKOM and Evans Paul’s KID, groupings that aimed to “created a popular, progressive, and democratic government as an alternative to the discredited dictatorial system” (59). So when in the autumn of 1990 a more dominant and more identifiable individual backed up by a more effective popular organisation did indeed begin to engage more directly with this dictatorial system, it’s not surprising that for Dupuy this development already represented a serious setback for Haitian democracy.

Officially, in the 1990 election campaign, Aristide replaced Victor Benoît as the candidate of another loose coalition of KONAKOM- and KID-affiliated social-democrats who briefly duplicated themselves to create a parallel grouplet called the Front National pour le Changement et la Démocratie (FNCD). Dupuy suggests that the “worst” and most “dangerous” consequence of 1990 was that “once Aristide’s Opération Lavalas emerged as the dominant political force and the other popular organisations and left-of-center coalitions, especially the FNCD, accepted Aristide as their leader, they in effect surrendered their autonomy and their ability to criticize Aristide, to serve as checks and balances to his powers, and to articulate independent agendas” (95). Aristide himself, by contrast, appears to have wasted little time in implementing his own all-too-independent agenda. After winning the election with a landslide 67% of the vote, rather than choose leading members of this FNCD coalition as ministers in his cabinet, a president that Dupuy presents as worryingly “theocratic” and “messianic” preferred to work with a mixture of competent administrators and veterans of the powerful popular movement he had helped to inspire over the preceding couple of years. Rather than appoint a worthy democrat like Victor Benoît, Aristide named as his prime minister a mere agronomist and social activist, René Préval. “Ironically”, says Dupuy, the result of such choices was the enmity of the “FNCD, the very coalition that made Aristide’s candidacy and his election possible” (125).

Some readers, mindful of the electrifying impact of Aristide’s last-minute decision to stand as a candidate in that election, might question whether it really was the hapless and unpopular FNCD politicians that made his victory possible. Granted, they provided the banner under which Aristide could legally run. But no one can deny that just four months after Aristide had appointed him, the FNCD opposition had managed to grind Préval’s energetic, practical and wide-ranging legislative programme to a halt. Had the army not intervened in its own fashion in September 1991, notes Dupuy, “there is little doubt that the four major political blocs in the Chamber of Deputies, including the FNCD, would have voted in favor of a censure motion” (127). Readers will have to judge for themselves the degree to which such behavior corroborates Dupuy’s own diagnosis of the most “dangerous” development of 1990 ― the fact that the FNCD and their fellow social-democrats had apparently “surrendered their autonomy and their ability to criticize Aristide.” Readers familiar with the subsequent political evolution of people like Evans Paul and Victor Benoît ― a shift that saw these erstwhile social-democrats ally themselves with unreconstructed Duvalierists like ex-general Prosper Avril and ex-colonel Himmler Rébu, backed up by plenty of financial and logistical support from the most reactionary and most powerful figures of the second Bush administration (Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, Stanley Lucas...) ― may also hesitate a little before opting to characterize it in terms of a servile deference to Aristide.

Be that as it may, Dupuy’s main point at this stage of his book is that “Aristide’s option for the masses, his distrust of the bourgeoisie and of the US, and theirs of him made it impossible for him to substitute the prince’s clothing for the prophet’s. It reinforced his inclination to ‘go it alone’ and shun any attempt to form a broad consensus government” (107). Since Dupuy is sharply critical of this failure to change clothes and to embrace consensus, the thrust of this line of reasoning seems clear enough. Aristide shouldn’t have opted for the isolation of the masses. He should have trusted the bourgeoisie, and he should have trusted the US. Then maybe everything would have worked out fine. Aristide could have morphed into a proper democrat like KONAKOM’s Victor Benoît, and the whole disastrous experiment in “anarcho populism” could have been avoided. Instead, Aristide stubbornly refused to “woo the bourgeoisie” and declined to form “a broad coalition government that included representatives” from among his “opponents in the National Assembly” (119). Instead of embracing proper parliamentary democracy, Aristide “disdained all established political parties, sought to bypass the National Assembly and the judiciary, and even encouraged his popular supporters to harass and intimidate parliamentarians and the justices who opposed him” (133).

Of course Alex Dupuy is a sophisticated analyst and a trenchant critic of the oppressive machinery of our new world order. More simple-minded sceptics may wonder, nevertheless, whether his repeated preference for a “broad-based” as opposed to a “mass-based” government is altogether compatible with his apparent enthusiasm for democracy. They may not grasp how a decision to pursue policies emphatically endorsed by the great majority of the population and authorized by several repeated and overwhelming election victories is best interpreted as a rejection of “consensus.” They may wonder whether Aristide was really mistaken in his distrust of the bourgeoisie and the US, when a fair amount of Dupuy’s own book is devoted to a damning and perfectly accurate demonstration of their determination to frustrate, depose and then discredit him by all available means. They may find it strange to see that Aristide’s reluctance to adopt disdainful enemies as ministers in his own government provides Dupuy with further proof of his authoritarian tendencies ― no doubt bona fide democrats like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have been criticized, but perhaps rarely, for their failure to include parliamentary opponents in their own cabinets. Still more intransigent sceptics may even find it strange that whereas the whole thrust of Dupuy’s book targets the deeply, institutionally entrenched corruption of the political class and the profoundly “predatory” or “prebendary” orientation of the status quo, he nevertheless condemns out of hand, and as a matter of dignified principle, Aristide’s rather cautious attempt to submit this status quo to the one and only source of non-predatory pressure available: the force of direct popular mobilization.

As far as anyone interested with actually-existing Haitian democracy is concerned, such musings are somewhat beside the point. Over the last dozen years or so, Haitian voters can have left even the most sophisticated analysts in little doubt as to their own opinion of parties like KONAKOM, KID and the many KID-like clones that emerged (with generous US and EU support) to divide and rule the Haitian political scene in the 1990s. In 1995, for instance, Evans Paul ran as a candidate for mayor of Port-au-Prince against a close ally of Aristide, the activist and singer Manno Charlemagne: despite (or because of) years of US encouragement, Paul only managed to scrape 14% of the vote. Later in 1995, KONAKOM’s own Victor Benoît finally got his chance to run in his own presidential election, against Aristide’s old prime minister René Préval: the first of the FNCD posse to break free of Aristide’s ‘authoritarian’ grip back in the autumn of 1990, Benoît earned the support of an impressive 2% of the electorate, against Préval’s 88%. Five years later, all of the myriad social-democratic parties that had embraced an unconditional revulsion for Aristide as their political raison d’être were wiped off the electoral map in a crushing and definitive defeat. In the legislative elections of May 2000, the largest and most significant of these parties, Gérard Pierre-Charles’ OPL, managed to win just one seat in the 83-member Chamber of Deputies. Like most other members of his profession and class, Dupuy is no doubt entitled to regret the fact that so unconventional a political organisation as Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas happened to win 72 of these seats ― but perhaps he is not entitled to regret it in the name of ‘democracy’ per se.

Whether Alex Dupuy likes it or not, the plain fact of the matter is that Benoit’s 2% is just about par for the course for Haiti’s leading social democrats. Although they were wise enough not to challenge Aristide directly for the presidency in 2000, in the 2006 presidential elections Evans Paul polled 2.5% of the vote, and Serge Gilles, the long-time darling of French social democracy, 2.6%. As we shall see in a moment, however, mere numbers have never made much of an impression on Alex Dupuy.

What now about the strategic side of this first question? Here Dupuy knows that he is on slightly firmer ground, and we need to ponder his argument more carefully. He observes that in 1991 Aristide’s government sought to pursue ‘an economic program that depended for its success on the cooperation with the bourgeoisie’, but he notes that by occasionally raising the prospect of vigilante violence against the enemies of democracy, Aristide made such cooperation a virtual impossibility (129). Dupuy has in mind two notorious speeches given on 4 August and 27 September, speeches in which Aristide refused to rule out recourse to defensive violence as a last-ditch strategy whereby the people might protect the government they had elected against extra-legal pressure from the army, the Macoutes and the ruling class. Although hardly typical of Aristide’s main priorities during these years ― his relentless emphasis on the non-violent struggle for social justice, conceived in the terms developed by liberation theology and its ‘preferential option for the poor’ ― Dupuy is surely right to say that these pointed appeals to popular vigilance provided the enemies of Lavalas with an inexhaustible supply of damaging propaganda. In the 4 August speech in particular Aristide openly considered the pros and cons of recourse to ‘Père Lebrun’, a phrase that was guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of the Haitian elite and their proxies in the armed forces.

Père Lebrun is a notorious euphemism, based on the name of a local tire-dealer, for the use of burning tires; it became part of Haiti’s popular political vocabulary during the uprooting or déchoukaj of the Macoutes that began when a growing popular movement against Haiti’s old dictatorship finally forced Jean-Claude Duvalier from power in February 1986. If you ask a sample of Haitian people what the metaphor Père Lebrun meant in 1990/91, they will readily admit that its range of meanings included ‘necklacing Macoutes’. For Alex Dupuy, as for the Americas Watch and NCHR analysts he relies on, Père Lebrun simply means recourse to ‘murder’, ‘necklacing’ or ‘deadly force’4; in the early 1990s CIA analyst Brian Latell and US politicians like Jesse Helms and Bob Dole would likewise jump to the same politically convenient conclusion. This interpretation is not so much incorrect as crucially incomplete. In his speech, Aristide himself doesn’t refer to necklacing, of course, though he certainly refers to burning tires, and to matches and gasoline. Haitians more sympathetic to Aristide than Dupuy insist, as veteran journalist Kim Ives explains, that when Aristide spoke of petit Père Lebrun in the summer of 1991 he was using ‘code, or shorthand, for “popular power”, “street power” or “popular vigilance.”’5 Such power certainly included, in extremis, recourse to necklacing, but it was not reducible to it.

Semantic niceties aside, necklacing is a gruesome crime by any standard. If condemnation of such a vigilante practice is to carry any genuine force, however, it must take into account all the reasons that lie behind its use. By the summer of 1991 Aristide’s reformist government had indeed antagonised virtually every sector of the Haitian establishment. The 4 August speech was delivered in the wake of noisy popular demonstrations that had threatened to boil over and interrupt the trial of an exceptionally prominent and aggressive Macoute ― Roger Lafontant. In late July, Lafontant and a group of his associates were put on trial for trying to stage a pre-emptive coup d’état in January 1991, a few weeks before Aristide’s inauguration; after some uncertainty they were hastily sentenced to life in prison, under the watchful eye of a pro-Aristide crowd. Aristide needed to maintain this popular mobilisation against the sworn enemies of his government, while finding ways to discipline and channel a thirst for retaliation that might otherwise spiral out of control. On 4 August, then, speaking to an exuberant gathering of high-school students, Aristide commended them for grasping the difference between situations in which recourse to vigilante violence was always illegitimate (i.e. any situation in which the constitution and the rule of law is respected) and circumstances in which such violence might become legitimate (i.e. situations in which enemies of the constitution sought to subvert it by force, deception or corruption). It’s quite true that in this speech, Aristide advised his listeners not to forget about Père Lebrun, and to remember ‘when to use it, and where to use it’ ― always with the proviso that ‘you may never use it again in a state where law prevails.’6

In August 1991, the continuation of such a state was anything but certain. The judges in the Lafontant trial had been under significant pressure from the Duvalierists and the army to let Lafontant and his accomplices off the hook. Aristide’s erstwhile ‘allies’ in the legislature, meanwhile, were openly seeking to get rid of his prime minister. For the thousands of impoverished people who came out into the streets to demonstrate against these and related developments the real meaning of Père Lebrun was very simple: given their lack of weapons, resources, or international friends, it meant resistance by all means necessary to prevent a further coup d’état and further aggression from the Macoutes.

So long as we don’t pause to ponder why people in Haiti’s poorer neighbourhoods might occasionally have had recourse such tactics, nothing could be simpler than a principled condemnation of so patently barbaric a figure as Père Lebrun. If in 1991 many of Aristide’s more militant supporters didn’t see it that way, it’s because they knew from bitter experience that neither the police nor the army nor the legal system nor the ‘international community’ were likely to offer them any sort of alternative. It’s because they had learned, over many years, that people incapable of defending themselves against the Macoutes and their mercenary informants were likely to pay a very high price for such docility; during the long anti-apartheid struggle that animated places like Soweto during these same years, the followers of Aristide’s fellow ‘populist-terrorist’ Nelson Mandela also learned a very similar lesson. Dupuy himself estimates the number of people killed by François Duvalier and his Macoutes at around 50,000. In the years that followed the expulsion of François’ son Jean-Claude in February 1986 and Aristide’s election in December 1990, many hundreds of pro-democracy activists were killed by the military regimes that took over where the Duvaliers left off. By mid 1987 well-known Macoutes were once again operating with their usual impunity, and were given a free hand to carry out gruesome massacres like the one that crushed a protest movement of small farmers in Jean-Rabel in July (around 300 dead) or that ended a grotesque first attempt at elections in November (around 150 dead). Almost as soon as Jean-Claude Duvalier was ousted, highly politicised neighbourhoods like Cité Soleil and Bel-Air began to suffer violent military or paramilitary incursions on a regular basis. Aristide himself narrowly survived several assassination attempts during these same years, and there can be little doubt that it was only the very rare but very public reprisal killings carried out by some of his supporters that discouraged further attacks. The most high profile incident came in response to the murderous Macoute assault on Aristide’s crowded church on 11 September 1988. After torching the building, killing at least a dozen parishioners and wounding many more, Gwo Schiller and some of the other perpetrators were foolish enough to boast about their heroics on national television, warning that ‘wherever Aristide appears, there we will kill.’ Four or five of these people were themselves tracked down and killed soon afterwards.7

In 1990/91, to insist like Alex Dupuy (or the US human rights groups that he cites) on a blanket condemnation of Père Lebrun in 1990/1991 would have been tantamount, in practice, to an insistence on mass submission to the Macoutes. To demand such principled condemnation is to underestimate the extreme but routine violence that structures Haitian society itself, and it is to downplay the impact of many decades of systematic political violence, the violence upon which the preservation of Haiti’s exceptionally unequal distribution of wealth and power still depends. Without the prospect of anti-Macoute violence Aristide would never have survived the 1980s. Without massive popular mobilisation he would never have been elected. Without the determined and militant popular uprising that overwhelmed Lafontant’s premature putsch in January 1991 he would never have been able to take office: scores of unarmed Lavalassians were killed when many thousands of them confronted Lafontant’s soldiers, and some of these soldiers were in turn besieged and ‘déchouked’ when their ammunition ran out. Once he then became president and immediately set about loosening the army’s grip on the country, Aristide’s supporters understood perfectly well what would happen if that army ever managed to regain the initiative. Sure enough, around 4000 of them would die during the army’s first coup, and several thousand more were killed during the second. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that more than a few of these people were prepared to protect their government with whatever makeshift tools came to hand.

This then is the context in which we need to listen to Aristide’s controversial references to Père Lebrun. By July 1991 it was obvious that a further coup attempt was already imminent, and that the army’s officers were preparing rank and file soldiers for a direct assault on neighbourhoods most closely identified with the government. Back in January, during Lafontant’s brief uprising, the most powerful and most brutal unit of the army (the presidential guard based in the Dessalines Barracks of the National Palace) had remained ominously neutral and refused to intervene; by July it was clear that this apparent neutrality had once again lapsed back into an active hostility. Haiti’s richest families, meanwhile, had already raised millions of dollars to pay for an old-fashioned return to the status quo (and when the time came, ordinary soldiers would receive up to $5000 each in exchange for their willingness to shoot into the crowds8). From now on the government’s very existence was at stake. If not Père Lebrun, if not some form of intimidating popular pressure, who or what might keep the army at bay once it had decided to suspend the rule of law and remove the people’s government by force?

When Aristide eventually made his most frequently deplored speech ― his 27 September 1991 call to give the Macoutes, the pro-army bourgeoisie and other enemies of democracy ‘what they deserve’9 ― the government was already under open military attack. Again the context is not irrelevant. His back to the wall, Aristide improvised this speech after returning from a triumphant visit to the UN in New York. The army had planned to assassinate him on arrival, but the president’s convoy narrowly survived several military ambushes on the way back from the airport, thanks to another massive popular mobilisation in Cité Soleil and around the National Palace. Since the international community had already made it clear that it would not intervene (and since well-placed members of Aristide’s security team already knew what to expect from the army’s old ally and patron the United States), the future of Aristide’s government and the survival of its most active supporters was now utterly dependent on the persistence of this mobilisation. As Kim Ives explains, in these circumstances Aristide’s speech was an attempt to

warn the bourgeoisie and Macoutes that the masses will ‘give them what they deserve’ if they try to carry out a coup. He used his trademark multi-meaning, riddle-strewn Bible-like language, leaving his true meaning open to just about any interpretation. But I don't think that he was calling for lynchings ― necklacing ― at all. I think he was just saying: ‘Don't mess with the people or you will reap a whirlwind.’ His message to the people that day was not go out and necklace your opponents, it was simply remain vigilant and don't hesitate to defend yourself against attack.10

As it turned out, in order to begin to overcome such vigilance, during the night of 30 September the army would have to kill anywhere between 300 and 1000 people.11

Rather than surrender to such an army, in August and September 1991 Aristide did indeed choose to ‘fight bullets with words.’12 No doubt some of the people behind these bullets were worried by his choice of words. As a leading member of Aristide’s 1991 security team points out, however, ‘it’s utterly hypocritical to condemn Aristide’s inflammatory words unless you first condemn the weapons that provoked them.’13 In a spectacular inversion of the historical record, leading figures in the US government and senate soon began to argue that it was Aristide’s words rather than the army’s weapons that were mainly to blame for the violence that overwhelmed Haiti in late September 1991.

Although Alex Dupuy strikes a more balanced note than Jesse Helms and other US critics of Haiti’s elected ‘psychopath’, nevertheless his book does little to set the record straight. Everyone can see why the little group of people who had hitherto oppressed the majority of Haiti’s population with impunity saw Aristide as a profoundly threatening figure, but why anyone else should think of him that way is less clear. Dupuy pays little attention to the most important point in this whole discussion: given the context and long history of systematic oppression that structures Haitian society, what is most extraordinary about the events of 1991 is surely the lack of popular violence that accompanied the beginning of this risky ‘transition to democracy’. The American activist Douglas Perlitz has been working with street kids in Cap Haïtien for more than a decade, and makes sense of the situation of 1991 with a helpful analogy:

The way I see it, it’s as if the poor had been suffocated for decades, in fact for centuries; the rich, and their army, were like a hand keeping their heads under water, and they couldn’t breathe. Aristide was the person who removed that hand. But when the people could finally lift their heads from out of the water they didn’t just gasp for breath, they also tried to lash out at the hand that had oppressed them for so long. Some popular violence in the wake of Aristide’s election victory in 1990 was inevitable; Gandhi himself would have been powerless to stop it. What’s remarkable is that things never got out of hand. Under the circumstances the level of discipline in the popular movement was very impressive.14

Despite endless provocations, once the immediate threat from Lafontant had been deflected there were just two or three occasions during the whole of Aristide’s first administration in which outraged crowds attacked and killed notorious enemies of their government. Not a single incidence of popular violence can fairly be blamed on the government itself. It would be difficult indeed to find a more dramatic instance of an abrupt reduction in human rights abuses than the one that began in Haiti with the elections of December 1990. As for Aristide himself, to devote obsessive attention to the isolated occasions in which he risked the language of open class conflict is to distort beyond recognition the general emphasis of his contribution to Haitian politics. He devoted much if not most (if not too much!) of his political life to the affirmation of non-violence and social reconciliation. The overwhelming emphasis of the many speeches he gave in 1991 was on the need to pursue social justice through respect for the constitution and cooperation with the security forces. Again and again he reminded his supporters of the need to work in harmony with the army and the police, in a country that had no experience of democracy or the rule of law.15 By the same token, when the US eventually allowed him to return to power in 1994, Aristide somehow managed to defuse a widespread and understandable desire for revenge against this same army, even though the US troops who escorted him home had already ruled out any legal prosecution of its crimes (and had already begun to take covert steps to secure its future political influence). In reality it was Bush and Clinton who calmly and deliberately sanctioned recourse to violence in Haiti during these years, not Aristide.

The truth is that as far as advocates of popular violence go, Aristide doesn’t cut a very impressive figure. Perhaps that’s because, leaving aside the ethical issues that may have appealed to a Catholic priest who had already committed his life to serving the poorest of the poor, Aristide always ‘recognise[d] that institutionalised violence is stronger than any we could unleash. We are not armed. And I do not believe that we will ever have the means to compete with the enemy on that key terrain. But they cannot count on me to condemn acts of despair or of legitimate defence by the victims of aggression.’16

Whether or not some amount of defensive popular violence might have been justifiable in the context of 1991, Dupuy argues that Aristide’s decision to compensate for his lack of support within the established political class by ‘building his own counterforce with the masses who supported him’ (127) was a fatal strategic mistake. Dupuy’s own account of the situation in 1991, however, renders this conclusion at least a little debatable. He knows that the elite ‘feared the empowerment of the social classes whose abject exploitation and suppression the dictatorships had guaranteed’. He knows that the tiny group of ‘rich Haitians and their foreign allies will do everything they can to prevent any significant tampering with the status quo.’ He knows that in 1991 this elite was especially hostile to reforms introduced by Aristide to ‘target the loopholes and other prerogatives it had enjoyed under the old regimes’ (121, 201). How exactly, then, were Aristide and Préval supposed to persuade them to go along with these reforms, if not through some sort of popular pressure? When and where, in fact, has a ruling class ever made significant concessions to the people they rule without the direct or indirect prospect of mass protest? Occasional victories won by exploited groups in the US itself are no exception to this rule, as anyone who has read Piven and Cloward’s book on Poor People’s Movements (1978) may recall.

Such then is the first strand of Dupuy’s argument. In a nutshell, Aristide stands accused of ‘encouraging the bourgeoisie to side with the army and the Macoute camp against him’ (133). With remarkable sang-froid, Dupuy opts to say rather less about the failings of these pro-army bourgeois themselves. He says little or nothing about their financial support for the coup, and little or nothing about their actual collusion with the military. He says little or nothing about the brutal assault on Aristide’s supporters in places like Cité Soleil and Raboteau, and little or nothing about what powerful bourgeois families like the Mevs, the Bigios, the Boulos, the Apaids, the Nadals and a few others got up to between 1991 and 1994. This is presumably because, as far as Dupuy is concerned, it’s already quite clear where the main responsibility lies. Although Dupuy realises that the bourgeoisie opposed Aristide’s reforms and hated everything that he stood for, he nevertheless prefers to emphasise the fact that ‘Aristide’s confrontational and sometimes threatening behaviour “added fuel to the fire” of class conflicts exacerbated by his election to the presidency’ (133). Through a whole series of ‘populist’ symbols and gestures, all through 1991 ‘Aristide signalled that he was shunning the bourgeoisie to form a new pact of domination with the masses, on whom he relied to defend him against his enemies’ (106).

Just how exactly the bourgeoisie was ‘dominated’ by this new configuration is something that Dupuy doesn’t bother to explain, but luckily for the dominees the pact of domination between Aristide and the masses doesn’t seem to have lasted for a very long time. Rightly or wrongly, in 2001-2004 a more experienced Aristide would go to considerable lengths to reassure the Haitian bourgeoisie, and he took some controversial steps to win over at least a small portion of the already-dominant class. This doesn’t impress Dupuy either, however, for by the time he gets to 2001 he has shifted the focus of his critique. Aristide’s mistake in 2001 was no longer his hostility to the bourgeoisie but his betrayal of his popular roots. In order to consolidate his new ‘class interest’, the Aristide of 2001 had come to accept ‘the same clientelistic and prebendary practices as his predecessors and to conform to the interests of the dominant classes, the foreign investors and the core powers and their financial institutions’ (20). But just as he was wrong to snub the bourgeoisie in 1991, it seems he was still more wrong to court them in 2001. Distracted by his newfound thirst for absolute power, the re-elected president was apparently oblivious to the fact that ‘the Haitian private-sector bourgeoisie, which despised Aristide and was angry at the Clinton administration for having returned him to Haiti in 1994, was not in the least interested in his conciliatory tone, instead throwing its support behind the Convergence Démocratique [a small US- and French-backed parliamentary coalition established in May 2000] in its effort to topple Aristide’ (143).

II

Dupuy’s analysis of Aristide’s apparent slide towards despotism, in the fifth chapter of his book, gets off to an improbable start when he acknowledges on its first page that in May 2000, ‘as expected ― because of the party’s popularity ― candidates for Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party swept the elections, thereby granting the FL overwhelming control of government at the national and local levels’ (135). This isn’t quite how previous dictators like Duvalier, Namphy, Avril or Cédras came to power, and it isn’t quite how Latortue’s dictatorship got started either. As anyone can see, however, ‘overwhelming control’ already looks and sounds a lot like old-fashioned dictatorship. Rather than waste time reflecting on the reasons for Aristide’s apparent popularity, therefore, Dupuy moves straight on to the much more important fact that ‘many of his former allies, especially the cadres of OPL, now saw him as a dangerous demagogue with dictatorial ambitions’ (136). Dupuy then spends most of what remains of his book trying to show how this disinterested perception turned out to be correct.

Although undeniably ‘popular’ ― unequivocal endorsement by around 75% of the electorate can’t be completely ignored by even the most scrupulous of democrats ― Dupuy claims that by creating the Fanmi Lavalas (FL) organisation ‘Aristide broke away from the broad coalition’ that had won the 1995 elections (136). Worse, ‘by 1996-97 it had become evident that Aristide’s FL was unquestionably the dominant political force in Haiti. If unchecked, Lavalas could build a formidable political machine and clientelistic network that would ensure its continued electoral dominance and control of the government’ (137). Haitian democracy was now clearly hanging by a thread. Unfortunately, no suitably resolute force emerge to ‘check’ Lavalas before it was too late. Unchecked, FL went on to wage an enthusiastic and well-organised electoral campaign, and duly won its overwhelming mandate in May 2000. Dupuy notes in dismay that ‘since his rise to power in 1991 Aristide had effectively shut out the coalition of parties ― the FNCD ― that had backed him in 1990. These parties were again marginalised when his Lavalas Political Platform [PPL] swept the parliamentary elections of 1995. And the OPL, which was then the dominant bloc within the PPL thanks to its association with Aristide [...], was now destined for the same fate with the break-up of the PPL and the formation of Aristide’s FL party’ (137-138). For reasons that remain opaque yet presumably incompatible with the international norms of parliamentary democracy, rather than reward ‘those sectors of the political middle class that had supported him [in 1990] with a share in the spoils of power, Aristide [in 2001] sought to monopolize state power for his benefit and those who formed the cadres of FL’ (138).

Less clairvoyant analysts than Dupuy might have paused, at this point, to consider whether the fact that Aristide, Préval and their associates invariably trounced their social-democratic rivals in repeated electoral contests might perhaps reflect some sort of extra-parliamentary political reality. They might have pondered whether ten years of active hostility should have been forgotten in favour of a few weeks of opportunistic and long-forgotten ‘alliance’. They might even have wondered whether Aristide still simply enjoyed the support of the great majority of the population. Dupuy can see through appearances that might lead other analysts astray, however, and he knows that in 2001, unlike 1991, Aristide did not actually have a ‘strong popular mandate and a mobilised population behind him [...]. If for a brief moment in 1991 the balance of forces was in favor of Aristide, conditions were very different during his second term (2001-2004).’ In 2001, unlike 1991, ‘Aristide came to power with his legitimacy and that of his party in control of parliament challenged’ (97― and technically this is quite right, in 2001 Aristide’s legitimacy was indeed ‘challenged’: it was challenged by a tiny and permanently unelectable ‘democratic opposition’ that owed its very existence to investments from USAID, the EU and the IRI). Despite this apparent lack of democratic legitimacy, Dupuy makes the startling claim that in 2001 ‘the goal of Aristide and the FL was to maintain power at all cost until the end of Aristide’s second and final term as president’ (145).

This is a serious charge. It may even be true. Maybe, once he was re-elected in November 2000 with some 90% of the vote, Aristide really did mean to serve out the whole of his second term in office. Maybe he hadn’t yet forgotten the thousands of people who died when his first term was interrupted. Maybe, confronted once again with an opposition that sought openly to overthrow him and to resurrect the army that was responsible for killing those people, Aristide decided to resist them. Readers less well versed than Alex Dupuy in the specific nuance of Haitian politics may even be forgiven for suspecting that governments led by people like Bush or Chirac, if confronted by similar threats to their survival, might also have toyed with the temptation to confront them. Who knows. What’s clear is that ‘the goal of Lavalas was to lay the groundwork for its continued dominance through the ballot box after Aristide’ (145). And that, needless to say, obviously couldn’t be in the best interests of Haitian democracy.

Whatever else Dupuy means by ‘democracy’, by this stage in his book it’s clear that it has little to do with such crass things as popular vote or support.

Dupuy makes little or no reference to what Aristide’s second administration actually set out to accomplish, in spite of a crippling US-imposed embargo on foreign aid that cut its budget roughly in half. He makes no reference at all to its various social programmes, its investment in new schools and hospitals, in a major literacy programme, in a new medical school, in new joint ventures with Cuba, and so on. But he does at least list a few of the tyrannical steps that the newly autocratic president agreed to take, within a couple of months of his taking office in February 2001. These steps ‘included the resignation of seven FL senators whose elections had been contested [on trivial technical grounds by members of the US-backed politicians who were defeated by FL] in the May 2000 elections; reducing the terms of the senators elected in May 2000 and the terms of the entire Chamber of Deputies by two years; holding elections for those senators elected in May 2000 and for the entire Chamber of Deputies in November 2002; reconstituting the CEP in line with OAS recommendations’ (150). Dupuy could have added: including several high-profile opponents of FL in his cabinet; reluctantly accepting several unpopular macro-economic policies imposed by Haiti’s international donors and lenders; agreeing to his arch-enemies’ framework for futile and interminable ‘negotiations’ with those same unpopular political leaders he had just obliterated at the polls. No doubt readers familiar with the conventional patterns of tyranny will have little trouble placing such concessions in the continuum of Duvalier-Namphy-Cédras-Latortue. Along the same lines, Dupuy is even prepared to acknowledge certain differences ‘between Aristide and the dictators who came and went before him’: since he had only relatively limited means of repression at his disposal and was confronted by the implacable opposition of the US and its allies, it seems that ‘Aristide could not transform himself into an outright dictator even if he wanted to’ (146).

All the same, Dupuy does his best to suggest that he made a pretty good go of it.

III

Having thus proved to his own satisfaction that in 2001 Fanmi Lavalas sought to monopolise the spoils for political power for itself and itself alone, Dupuy now moves on to make the third and most damaging of his three main criticisms of Aristide. It emerges predictably enough from the ex-messiah’s dictatorial turn. Since he was clearly incapable of acquiring anything that Dupuy can recognise as a legitimate democratic mandate, there was only one other way Aristide could achieve his main objective ― the consolidation of his grip on power ‘at all cost’. As resistance to the incipient dictatorship began to increase, the tyrant ‘politicized the police and called on his armed gangs of supporters known as chimès [chimera] (who took their name from mythical fire-breathing monsters) to intimidate his opponents’ (98).

Mythology and etymology aside ― anyone familiar with the people derided as ‘chimès’ know that ‘they themselves hated that word’17 ― this is another serious charge, and it is reasonable to expect an expert prosecution to back it up with a carefully documented case.

Dupuy describes these ‘chimès’ as a ‘relatively small force of not more than a few thousand’ people. He acknowledges that they were perhaps neither as well-armed nor as well-organised as Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes (146), but the whole thrust of his main argument ― that Aristide became just another dictatorial president in a long line of other similarly dictatorial Haitian presidents ― rests squarely on the presumption that a comparison between Aristide’s ‘chimès’ and Duvalier’s Macoutes is at least in some sense helpful and illuminating. Dupuy isn’t the first person to have made such an argument; analysts as shrewd as Roger Noriega, Lyonel Trouillot, Laënnec Hurbon, Raoul Peck, Jean-Michel Caroit and Michael Deibert have all given it a try as well.

Before knuckling down to the business at hand, Dupuy pauses to consider an important matter of principle. He admits that there is some ‘controversy’ about the emergence and role of these so-called ‘chimès’. The controversy seems to be about ‘whether Aristide personally created and directed them or simply left that task to others. In my view, however, it is immaterial whether or not Aristide had a direct role in creating and directing the chimès’ (144). This isn’t to say that Dupuy is reluctant to accuse Aristide of doing precisely these things. On the contrary: Dupuy says, for instance, that since he was ‘unwilling to rely on the rule of law or even to mobilise his popular supporters to counter the threats of his opponents peacefully, Aristide chose instead to use the chimès to do that job’ (155). Dupuy says that ‘Aristide “chimerized” Lavalas and betrayed his mass base’ (157). He says that ‘Aristide engaged in egregious human rights violations against his opponents and critics’, that ‘Aristide relied on the chimès to intimidate the opposition’, that ‘Aristide sought to suppress his opponents’ by force, and that ‘Aristide used the chimès as a force de frappe against his opponents’ (144-146, 165). What Dupuy means by the word ‘immaterial’, presumably, is that when he repeatedly accuses Aristide of creating and directing these chimerical ‘chimès’, it is immaterial whether or not such accusations are in fact correct.

It is also immaterial, presumably, that if Aristide really ‘sought to suppress his opponents’, then this all-too-ordinary autocrat once again appears to have done a quite extraordinarily bad job. Insufficiently suppressed readers might remember that in 2001 Aristide’s opponents mounted their campaign to oust him in conditions that bore no resemblance whatsoever to those suffered by the subjects of ‘previous dictators’. They might remember that all through Aristide’s last months in office US-sponsored anti-government radio stations were free to broadcast their venomous propaganda around the clock, that internationally sponsored anti-government rallies continued for week after week, and that from the very month of his second inauguration the same soldiers who backed the bloody coup in 1991 were permitted to hold public rallies, loudly calling for a repeat of their previous exploits (and were vigorously encouraged, from the get-go, by nothing less than an entire ‘parallel government’ mounted by respectable ex-FNCD social-democratic members of the US- and French-backed Convergence Démocratique).

All the same, more forgetful readers may need a little reassurance at this point. ‘To be sure’, Dupuy tells us, ‘everyone knew the chimès were working for Aristide and others, including the opposition, but such links had to be proved’ (156). Indeed they did. Readers looking for such proof, however, may be disappointed to learn that they won’t find much of it in Dupuy’s book. Who needs proof, after all, when everyone already knew what was really going on?

The fact that everyone already knows these things this saves Dupuy a certain amount of time and effort. It saves him the bother of having to explain, in even the most schematic detail, who these ‘chimès’ were, or what they did, or who paid them, or how they were armed and organised. It saves him the bother ― so far as I can tell ― of having to speak with or cite or perhaps even read about a single representative of these ‘chimès’ or their baz associates in the many dozens of organisations populaires that supported Aristide to the end. It saves him the trouble of asking why some members of those impoverished neighbourhoods that bore the brunt of military repression in 1986-90 and again in 1991-94 might have taken some steps to avoid the repetition of a similar catastrophe in 2004.

Although this isn’t the place for a detailed analysis of the question, people more acquainted with Dupuy’s ‘chimères’ than Dupuy himself paint a rather less sensational picture of the people who apparently terrorised the political opposition to Aristide. Veteran reporter Guy Delva is one of the most neutral and balanced of Haitian journalists, and he knows of no deliberate campaign of violence and of no coordinated effort to arm the ‘chimères’. ‘There’s no evidence of it. Of course it’s possible that in 2004 some weapons were handed out to groups loyal to the regime: there was an armed insurgency going on, after all, and it’s possible that the government wanted to strengthen itself against the rebels. But the government had very few weapons, in fact, and the supply of police munitions was very low.’ As for the ‘gangs’ themselves, continues Delva, ‘I know this is hard for people outside Haiti to understand but in Cité Soleil the people with the weapons are not seen as criminals or bandits, but as people who are protecting the population. They see that when MINUSTAH or the Haitian police come they kill people, and the gangs do what they can to defend them. I can confirm that when you speak to them most people in Cité Soleil say they saw Dred Wilme as a leader, as someone who defended their community, they didn’t just see him as a bandit.’18 Aidworker Eléonore Senlis directed the largest international NGO in Cité Soleil from the spring of 2003 through to July 2004; she won the confidence of several leaders of the armed groups (Dred, Labanye, Amaral, Tupac, Billy...) and quickly became well-informed about what was going on in the Cité. Although it’s true that once the anti-government demonstrations started in November 2003 some group leaders in the Cité received occasional calls from Aristide’s departmental police chief Hermione Léonard and his interior minister Jocelerme ‘Miss’ Privert encouraging them to stage counter-demonstrations, Senlis says that the main purpose for government communications was to try to keep the peace among rival gangs in the most desperately impoverished parts of the city. From time to time Hermione Léonard would arrange ‘a meeting with the various group leaders, a sort of peace would last for a while, and then sooner or a later new groups would push their way onto the scene, begin to interfere with another group’s activities, the leaders would start fighting amongst themselves, and the process had to start all over again.’ As for claims that the government set out to arm such groups in order intimidate its opponents, Senlis is probably as well-placed as any outsider to judge the point, and she knows of only a single clear-cut case:

After the trouble started in early February 2004, some of the group leaders, along with some of their men, were sent up to Gonaïves, and there they were given weapons by the government, to confront the insurgency; the rest of the time it wasn’t at all clear that the government was deliberately trying to arm groups from Cité Soleil. They generally seemed to steal their guns from the police or security guards or from other residents. The bigger guns were always bought, often from the DR, with money stolen from shops or occasionally donated by various interested parties as “contributions to the security of Cité Soleil”. But as far as I know there was never any large-scale distribution of weapons from the government to their supporters. As for the actual number of guns around, at least until mid 2004 there weren’t very many of them. As of February 2004, there were three well-armed groups, led by Dred, Labanye, and Amaral, and each of these three leaders had several automatic weapons at his disposal, around half a dozen high calibre pistols and several dozen .38 revolvers, most of which were loaned out to their followers. I think I saw most of them, and I’d guess that there was a grand total of perhaps 250 guns in the hands of groups from Cité Soleil during the turmoil of February 2004, and considerably less before then.19

In the context of a country blessed with an estimated 210,000 firearms ― at least 170,000 of which remain securely in the hands of its ruling families and businesses20 ― it’s possible that this ‘chimère’ arsenal of 250 handguns never posed a very worrying threat.

Although genuine proof may be immaterial, Dupuy does of course trot out a certain number of facts to back his accusation up. In a paragraph devoted to showing how ‘Aristide and other Lavalas officials were using the chimès as a force de frappe against his opponents’ (144) he mentions, for instance, the murder of the iconic radio journalist Jean Dominique ― discreetly passing over the fact that there appears to be no proof whatsoever that any ‘chimès’ were involved in the assassination of Aristide’s old friend and Haiti’s most famously pro-Lavalas and anti-establishment journalist. He also mentions, as evidence of ‘chimè’ violence, the facts that in 1999 ‘five people were killed in fights among criminal gangs’; that in April 2000 a group of FL militants set fire to the office of Evans Paul’s KID (obliging the not-yet-re-elected tyrant to pay KID a sizeable sum in compensation); that when ‘the Provisional Electoral Council was pressured [by the US and its newly created ‘Convergence Démocratique’] to annul the results of the first-round parliamentary elections [of May 2000], hundreds of pro-FL supporters erected barricades, burned tires, and effectively shut down Port-au-Prince in an attempt to intimidate the Council. In all these incidents the police failed to stop, investigate or to arrest and punish their perpetrators’ (144). I assume that people who lived through earlier periods of dictatorship in Haiti can immediately see how, by early 2001, Aristide had indeed become just like Duvalier or Cédras.

Dupuy is also prepared to explain how things arrived at this dreadful impasse. Drawing on a single article by Le Monde reporter Jean-Michel Caroit (dated 5 November 2003), Dupuy explains that ‘the creation of armed groups that would become the chimès goes back to 1995 after Aristide had abolished the Haitian Army and a new Haitian National Police was created with help and training from the US, France, and Canada.21 Aristide understood the need to control that force and placed trusted allies in its command. It was then that the link between Aristide and the chimès was formed. The director of the police, along with the minister of interior and the chief of presidential security, served as the liaison with the gangs, who received cash and weapons for their operations’ (144). If someone as even-handed and reliable as Le Monde’s Jean-Michel Caroit says so then it must be true. Never mind the incidental fact that, perhaps stung by Aristide’s deeply threatening demand that France repay the enormous sum of money it had extorted from its former slave colony back in the nineteenth century, Le Monde’s reporting in 2003/2004 was so outrageously biased as to make even the New York Times’ anti-Lavalas propaganda seem like a model of impartiality. Never mind the fact that in 1995 Aristide disbanded the army in the face of powerful US resistance, or that CIA interference in the subsequent recruitment and orientation of the new police force was so flagrant and counter-productive that even the person appointed by the US Department of Justice to oversee the police training programme resigned in disgust. Never mind the fact that leading segments of this police force remained openly hostile to the elected government, and that in October 2000, after years of violent destabilisation, a close-knit group of rightwing and pro-US officers (including Guy Philippe, Jackie Nau, Gilbert Dragon, all of whom during the first coup had received special US-sponsored training in the US-client state of Ecuador) were implicated in a further coup plot and were escorted to the safety of another suitably policed US-client state, Haiti’s hostile neighbour the Dominican Republic. Never mind the fact that for the next several years, beginning in the summer of 2001, with the active support of Convergence luminaries like ex-democrat Serge Gilles and ex-colonel Himmler Rébu, this same Guy Philippe and his colleagues, bolstered by dozens of other US-trained ex-military or ex-paramilitary assets like Jodel Chamblain, were to wage an unrelenting guerrilla war against Aristide’s government, all with the clear collusion of powerful elements within the police and the presidential guard.

Never mind all that: excessive concern with such matters might well lead us towards what Dupuy derides as dictatorship, rather than democracy. Leaving aside the question as to whether or not Aristide had much actual control over the police, Dupuy is quite right to say that when it became clear, in the late 1990s, that membership in Fanmi Lavalas was a virtual guarantee of access to political power, so then many unscrupulous opportunists did indeed flock to join the new organisation. As may sometimes happen in some other profoundly impoverished countries, in Haiti overwhelming and inescapable levels of destitution can indeed encourage a certain amount of corruption and opportunism. The shocking truth, then, is that a small number of Aristide’s associates and some leading members of Fanmi Lavalas did indeed become corrupt. A few high profile police officers made money smuggling drugs to a growing market in the US, and some Lavalas legislators found ways to profit from their position. Readers acquainted with the longue durée of Haitian history can judge the relative severity of such corruption for themselves, and decide whether Aristide, Cédras, and Duvalier père, mère et fils are best described as variants of one and the same essential pattern.

It’s one thing, however, to condemn the corruption of a few powerful figures in the Aristide-era security apparatus like Fourel Celestin and Hermione Léonard, it’s another to present the whole period between 2001-2004 as a disastrous deviation towards violent dictatorship. The image of a tyrannical Aristide presiding over a murderous police state could hardly be further from the truth. If anything, Aristide’s real problem was precisely the opposite. Even before his re-election, Haiti’s poorly equipped and poorly paid security forces had been thoroughly infiltrated (and embargoed) by his enemies, and it was all too obvious that the presidential guard in particular was no more reliable than its predecessor had been in 1991. It was perfectly clear that powerful ex-military figures like Dany Toussaint and Joseph Médard, people who had profited from their association with Aristide in the early 1990s, were by 2000/2001 actively working against him.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand what happened next. The ‘laboratory’ that still wields significant behind-the-scenes power in Haiti knows very well that if you want to demonise a popular president then the easiest way to get to him is through his close associates. If these associates cooperate with the demonisation campaign they will be rewarded; the less uncooperative ones may have to be punished. So long as Dany Toussaint pretended to be loyal to Aristide, for instance, the US and the elite denounced him as a thug and a drug-dealer; as soon as he changed camps the talk of drugs and murder came to an abrupt stop, and in 2006 they allowed him to stand for president alongside other law-abiding democrats like Guy Philippe and Franck Romain. An old associate of Dany Toussaint, ex-presidential guard commander Youri Latortue is another veteran police officer whose human rights record is as questionable as that of any of his colleagues; after Aristide’s ‘flight’ from Haiti in 2004, however, the US invited him to oversee the security arrangements for the ‘democratic and constitutional’ government it imposed on Haiti as a replacement for the Lavalas dictatorship. A leading figure in the presidential guard, Wilson Casséus, played a significant role in undermining the police response to the insurgency, and was promoted to commander as soon as the person he supposed to protect had been expelled from the country. Less enthusiastically cooperative folks like Oriel Jean and Jean Nesly Lucien, on the other hand, had to be packed off to jail in Miami.

Critics of Aristide are no doubt entitled to say that he was too slow to act against the scandalous emergence of opportunists in his entourage. They are entitled to regret some of the people he chose as members of his inner circle after 2001, or to puzzle over his reluctance to take more assertive action to deal with the state of emergency that confronted his government in February 2004. They may know that when US intelligence and the DEA began to accuse a few of his high-level police officers of drug smuggling and corruption Aristide was initially reluctant to believe them. They may know that he thought ― with good reason ― that this was yet another attempt to isolate him by driving a wedge between the government and its few allies in the security forces. Unlike the US itself, notes Ben Dupuy, ‘Aristide had no secret police, no parallel force with which he could “police the police”; given their history and the material conditions in which they work it has so far been and will for the time being remain virtually impossible for any Haitian government, on its own, to root out corruption in its security forces.’22 But just like Aristide’s enemies in the US, Alex Dupuy blames him for this structural impossibility all the same. He blames him for failing to accomplish an impossible task.

More importantly, Alex Dupuy blames Aristide for the fact that ‘the human rights situation deteriorated significantly between 2001 and 2004. Local FL officials and members of the police persecuted, arbitrarily arrested, and physically abused members of the opposition or sometimes their family members. Supporters of Aristide and the police disrupted peaceful demonstrations by opponents of the government and ransacked or burned the offices and private residences of opposition leaders. And sometimes members or supporters of the opposition were killed’ (161-162). Although Dupuy doesn’t bore his readers with much detailed evidence to flesh out this description of 2001-2004, he does mention at least four specific episodes, in addition to the murder of Jean Dominique, that appear to back up his case. (As for Dominique’s murder, this is a crime that Aristide’s enemies used to attribute with great enthusiasm to Dany Toussaint, up until the moment when he publicly joined the anti-Aristide camp ― at which point, of course, he was instantly dropped from the list of leading suspects. Other analysts, though, continue to point the finger at powerful interests that Dominique threatened rather more consistently and passionately than he ever did Toussaint, including interests linked to the bitterly anti-Lavalas Boulos family).

Since much of Dupuy’s argument might seem to ride on these examples it may be worth looking at them very briefly here.

First of all, as an illustration of the growing violence ‘among pro-Lavalas grassroots organisations’, Dupuy refers to a pitched battle in the Fort Mercredi district of Port-au-Prince in June 2001, when ‘members of rival gangs in neighbouring slums near PAP engaged in a dispute over land, which left 17 people dead, nineteen others injured, and more than 135 houses looted or burned. No one was arrested. Instead, Aristide held a meeting with the residents of the two slums in the National Palace to urge them to resolve their conflicts’ (162). The implication, presumably, is that because some of the people involved in this battle were indeed ‘pro-Lavalas’, so then the government (for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious) may have incited them to declare war on their neighbours. Perhaps the fact that Aristide then tried to calm things down by speaking with all the groups involved, rather than by shooting at them, is further proof of his complicity in such violence. Even so, more naïve readers may suspect that since violent turf-wars between criminal gangs and drug-dealers don’t seem to be confined solely to pro-Lavalas neighbourhoods in Haiti’s capital city, so then in the absence of any evidence to the contrary it could just be that Aristide and his government had nothing to do with it.

Second, Dupuy cites the inflammatory murder in September 2003 of Gonaïves ‘chimè’ supremo Amiot Métayer, and pins it (as did ex-FRAPH commanders and various other equally disinterested parties) on Aristide’s government (166). Rather than back up this highly implausible claim with any investigation of his own, Dupuy puts the names of Jean-Michel Caroit and Jane Regan in brackets, and lets the accusation stand as self-evident. (Similarly notorious incidents in the anti-Aristide dossier are dealt with in much the same way ― the ugly clash between students and FL supporters on 5 December 2003, for instance, is described simply as ‘a pro-government attack against university students’ [167]). Again, more hesitant readers might be more inclined to set Jane Regan’s tendentious argument alongside those made by people like Ben Dupuy or Frantz Gabriel, who claim to have good reason to believe that Métayer was killed by anti-Lavalas members of the security forces, on the orders of the ‘laboratory’. It may be that no-one really knows how exactly Métayer died; inconveniently, the last person seen with Métayer on the night of his murder, Odonel Paul, also disappeared soon after his death. It’s possible that the new French and US ambassadors who arrived in Haiti around the time of this murder did not shed many tears for Amiot Métayer. Who knows. What we do know is that the people who immediately profited from this murder certainly weren’t fans of President Aristide, and the gang which started to cause havoc in Gonaïves immediately after Métayer’s death can only be described as a collection of disaffected ex-pro-Aristide ‘chimès’ if you ignore the little fact that they were led and directed by a well-funded and well-connected group of ex-military and ex-FRAPH thugs. (After this useful group had accomplished its historical mission, a few months after Métayer’s death, one of its leaders admitted, among other things, that in the autumn of 2003 it had received some $20,000 worth of ammunition courtesy of Jean-Renel Latortue, future director of Cap Haïtien’s port authority, brother of the exemplary ex-policeman Youri Latortue and nephew of the soon-to-be-US-appointed interim prime minister Gérard Latortue).

Third, in a paragraph describing the growth of opposition to the government in late 2003, Dupuy notes that ‘the violence between supporters and opponents of the government resulted in the deaths of nearly fifty people and injury to many more between December 2003 and February 2004’ (168). Surely this must be all the evidence of tyranny that any reasonable person might want. Surely this proves that Aristide’s supporters were now hard at work killing members of the opposition. Perhaps. Dupuy doesn’t provide a source for this number, however, and I would genuinely like to know how many of these fifty people were killed by rampaging ‘chimès’. As far as I’m aware, a grand total of two opponents of the government were killed during the long and heated weeks of US-orchestrated demonstrations that began in Port-au-Prince in early December 2003; one of these two people, a student, died when he was accidentally hit in the back by a police teargas canister. Several government supporters also died in clashes between pro and anti-government protestors. I’m not sure that, faced with a similar threat to their existence, Duvalier’s Macoutes would have been overly impressed by the performance of their Lavalassian counterparts. Given the fact that during these months Haiti was indeed embroiled in a low-level civil war these numbers may be an underestimate, of course, but then it’s hard to know what or who Dupuy is referring to. Perhaps he has in mind reports published in papers like the New York Times and Washington Post in late January and early February 2004 which claimed, sure enough, that fifty people had died in political clashes over the previous few months.23 The problem with this particular figure, though, is that as far as I can tell it refers primarily (if not overwhelmingly) to victims of anti-government violence. Although these papers didn’t themselves dwell on the distasteful task of identifying victims and perpetrators, it seems to refer primarily to the growing number of people killed during ex-military anti-government attacks carried out in places like Belladère, Pernal and a few other defenceless villages scattered across Haiti’s Central Plateau.

Dupuy provides a fourth indication of Aristide’s authoritarian turn. As insurgents led by Guy Philippe and Jodel Chamblain were busily terrorising large parts of the country into submission, ‘in the days preceding his departure [the night of 28-29 February 2004], Aristide unleashed the chimès who went on a rampage, thereby reinforcing his enemies’ claims that the country would be plunged into a bloodbath unless Aristide was removed’ (172). Dupuy has already informed us that proof of this sort of assertion is immaterial. Therefore he can afford to ignore the fact that though there was indeed some spontaneous looting and violence in the last couple of days of his presidency, even newspapers that were eagerly complicit in the campaign to get rid of Aristide were only able to attest to a couple of killings in Port-au-Prince in the (understandably?) tense atmosphere of 26-27 February. As far as I know, no-one actually investigated these murders, so responsibility for the deaths remains a matter of speculation. All this is immaterial, however, given the fact that dispassionate White House officials, on the eve of the operation that would lead to the abduction of Haiti’s elected president, spread rumours during these same days that ‘Aristide may have given the order to begin killing opponents and looting businesses.’24 Dupuy can also afford to gloss over the fact that in response to the growing fear and unrest, rather than ‘unleash the chimès’ Aristide did just the opposite, and broadcast the last of a long series of public appeals for calm and non-violence. As the Miami Herald observed at the time, what actually happened the day before he was kidnapped by US troops is that Aristide went on air to urge his supporters to abstain from ‘acts of looting and violence. And they promptly did.’25

As for the US and French-sponsored military insurgency that took off earlier that same month and that really did kill a considerable number of people, before leading to the creation of an illegal de facto administration that would kill thousands more, Dupuy dispatches it in four brisk sentences of his book as a rebellion that began when a ‘gang of chimès [...] once allied with Aristide turned against him’ (172).

Again, Dupuy has a principled explanation for his priorities here. The fact that Aristide’s government can only be held (indirectly) responsible for a very small number of political killings26 is itself immaterial, since what is at stake is obviously too important to be associated with numbers. As any genuine democrat knows, what is really at stake in such discussions is nothing less than the immeasurable sanctity of human life. It doesn’t matter, then, that a comparison of the numbers killed ‘by’ Aristide on the one hand and by Duvalier, Cédras or Latortue on the other might to an outside observer look like an obscene joke. Numbers can have nothing to do with principles. This is why Dupuy disagrees with the human rights lawyer and pro-democracy activist Brian Concannon when Concannon argues that ‘because more people were killed under Latortue than under Aristide, the former should have been condemned even more [than the latter].’ Dupuy is too cunning to fall for such clumsy reasoning. Dupuy knows that ‘both deserved to be condemned and be held responsible for the human rights violations that occurred under their governments, regardless of how many people were killed’ (183).

Dupuy doesn’t spell out just how far he might be prepared to push this line of reasoning but, to his credit, his analysis of the post-2004 period is indeed consistent with this indifference to number. Dupuy pays no heed, therefore, to the irrelevant fact that according to the best available estimates the unelected democrat Latortue may be responsible for at least 100 times more political killings than the elected tyrant he usurped. Instead he condemns Latortue almost as vigorously as he does Aristide, noting that ‘just as Aristide had done, Latortue opted to use the police, gangs, former soldiers and paramilitaries, as well as the judicial system, to achieve its [sic] political ends’ (189). Since numbers and details remain beside the point, Dupuy doesn’t need to demonstrate just how ‘Aristide’s use of former soldiers and paramilitaries’ might be compared to that of Gérard and Youri Latortue. More’s the pity. I imagine that a good many of these ex-soldiers would be genuinely curious to know how they were used by Aristide.

Given the constraints of time and space, of course, any published account is bound to suffer from a little selective bias. It is nevertheless regrettable, however, that in a book-length study of Aristide’s demise Dupuy couldn’t find room to mention an incidental detail like his provocative though perfectly reasonable demand for immediate reimbursement of the old French debt (equivalent to $21 billion US) ― a demand that just may have had something to do with that country’s energetic contribution to the bicentennial coup of 2004, and that may even have grabbed the attention of several other ex-colonial states. It’s too bad, when Dupuy suggests that by 2004 ‘only a foreign military intervention could prevent the country from descending into a full-fledged civil war’ (171), that he has so little time to consider how such intervention might already have become an integral component of this very war. It’s a shame that, after noting that it was such foreign intervention which early in the morning of 29 February 2004 allowed ‘Aristide to flee Haiti for the Central African Republic aboard an aircraft chartered by the US and escorted by US military personnel and his own personal security’ (171), Dupuy cannot afford to linger for a little longer over the circumstances of this ‘flight’. It’s a pity that he has no time to explain why exactly Aristide might have chosen a distant and heavily policed client state of France as his preferred place of refuge, rather than an openly supportive (and slightly more convenient) country like Jamaica, Venezuela, Cuba or the Bahamas. It’s a pity that he doesn’t explain why, if it was just a matter of protecting their employer, Aristide’s own reasonably experienced and well-connected team of Steele Foundation security guards didn’t just fly him off to safety on their own. No doubt such speculation is immaterial. Once a deceitful dictator starts to run amok, everyone already knows that proper democracies are sometimes obliged to step in and clean up the mess.

* * * * *

As a result of Aristide’s criminal ambition, Dupuy concludes, ‘Lavalas would become equated with the chimès’ (144). This is a finely constructed phrase. In actual fact it is Dupuy himself (along with a few other intellectuals, NGO consultants and unelectable social-democrats who appear to think like Dupuy) who has gone to some trouble to make this equation appear plausible. As for the millions of Haitian people who still support Aristide as a unifying symbol and potent spokesman of their own political struggle, it seems that they don’t buy it. Perhaps they know that, leaving aside the perfectly predictable corruption and opportunism of a few members of Fanmi Lavalas, this ‘equation’ is nothing more than a crude ideological ruse. Although they may be less expert in the ways of neo-liberal imperialism than Alex Dupuy, it seems that most of these people still stubbornly refuse to accept the demonisation of their movement.

Even an analyst as close to Dupuy as his old friend and colleague Robert Fatton ― the prominent political scientist who endorsed the back of Dupuy’s book ― acknowledges that while his level of support has of course declined during these last few years of relentless disinformation, ‘Aristide remains the most popular politician in Haiti today, and if he could stand for re-election tomorrow he would easily win.’27 Carol Joseph may not be the only minister in the current government who insists on this same point: like it or not, ‘it is undeniable that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is still the most popular man in Haiti, and if he could run for office again he would certainly be re-elected.’28

It seems that when it comes to political re-education, most Haitian people remain regrettably and mysteriously backward. They haven’t managed to keep up with the times. Their repeated failure to pass the real ‘test of democracy’ ― their unfathomable refusal to identify with the class interests of their oppressors ― continues to leave their would-be educators scratching their heads. No doubt a suitably trained sociologist will one day find a way to account for this popular stupidity, courtesy, perhaps, of the French CNRS. But it may be that Aristide’s unrepentant supporters already understand something that democratic intellectuals like Laënnec Hurbon or Alex Dupuy are usually reluctant to admit. They may know that when scholars attack Lavalas as authoritarian and undemocratic it seems that they tacitly assume a very old distinction, one dear to many professional political scientists. Aristide’s earliest critics were already very familiar with it, and one of them ― the Duvalierist prelate Monseigneur Dorélien ― was obliging enough to spell it out in terms that should make perfect sense to any reader who manages to get to the end of Dupuy’s book. Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the first coup, Dorélien was quick to remind his listeners that before you speak of the will of the majority you must ‘be careful, you must remember there are two kinds of majority: the qualitative majority [i.e. the intellectual and political elite] and the quantitative majority ― the ignorant rabble, the populace that acts blindly, not understanding what it is choosing.’29

Perhaps, one day, Dupuy may ask a few of these ignorant and immaterial members of the numerical majority about their choices, and about their incomprehensible understanding of democracy. Perhaps he may even listen to what they have to say.

1 This review was written in February 2007, and first published in Haiti Liberté in July 2007.

2 Bob Corbett, review of Alex Dupuy’s The Prophet and Power, January 2007, http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/dupuy-prophet.html.

3 Cited in Howard French, “Front-Running Priest A Shock to Haiti”, New York Times 13 December 1990.

4 Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power, 123-125; Americas Watch/NCHR, The Aristide Government’s Human Rights Record (1 November 1991, http://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/h/haiti/haiti91n.pdf), 6.

5 Letter from Kim Ives, 26 February 2007.

6 Aristide, speech to high school students on 4 August 1991, partially transcribed in Americas Watch/NCHR, The Aristide Government’s Human Rights Record, 26-28.

7 Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier [1989] (London: Vintage, 1994), 354, 362.

8 Howard French, ‘Haiti Police Seen as Gaining in Coup’, New York Times 13 October 1991.

9 In this his final effort to stare his old enemies down, Aristide warned the bourgeoisie that the time of reckoning was drawing near ― ‘you earned your money in thievery, under an evil regime, it is not really yours.’ He encouraged the poor, ‘whenever you are hungry, to turn your eyes in the direction of those people who aren’t hungry. Whenever you are out of work, turn your eyes in the direction of those who can put people to work. Ask them why not? What are you waiting for? Are you waiting for the sea to dry up?’ If you catch a thief, he told his listeners, or a Macoute, or a ‘false Lavalassian, don’t he-si-tate-to-give-him-what-he-deserves! [...]. Alone, we are weak. Together we are strong! Together, together, we are the flood! Do you feel proud? Do you feel proud!?’ (Aristide, ‘Speech of 27 September 1991’, Haiti Observateur, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/009.html; cf. Anne-Christine D’Adesky, ‘Père Lebrun in Context’, NACLA Report on the Americas (December 1991), 7-8.

10 Letter from Kim Ives, 19 February 2007.

11 Mark Danner explains that when it launched the coup the army first took control of the radio stations, thereby eliminating ‘Aristide’s most potent weapon ― his voice. Now squads of soldiers made their way into the bidonvilles, shooting anyone they saw, firing into the scrapwood hovels. When the people came out into the garishly lit streets, the soldiers shot them down [...]. The people, confused, frightened, and disorganized ― they had received no mot d’ordre from their leader ― stumbled into the streets and died. Automatic weapons, ruthlessly employed, had given the lie to Aristide’s “unarmed revolution”’ (Danner, ‘Fall of the Prophet’, New York Review of Books 2 December 1993; cf. Farmer, Uses of Haiti (Monroe ME: Common Courage Press, 2003), 154).

12 Aristide, interview with Joel Attinger and Michael Kramer, ‘It’s Not If I Go Back, but When’, Time Magazine 1 November 1993.

13 Telephone interview with Patrick Elie, 24 February 2007.

14 Interview with Douglas Perlitz, Cap Haïtien 12 January 2007.

15 Portions of such speeches are transcribed in the AW/NCHR report of November 1991, The Aristide Government’s Human Rights Record, 28-29.

16 Aristide, Dignity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 96; cf. Aristide, In the Parish of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 12-13; Aristide, Autobiography (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 133. In exactly the same way, Aristide refused to condemn the anti-Macoute violence of déchoukaj, in circumstances where it was ‘authorised’ (if not demanded) by the imperatives of self-defence (Aristide, Théologie et politique (Montréal: CIDIHCA, 1992), 94-95).

17 Letter from Eléonore Senlis, 19 March 2007.

18 Interviews with Guy Delva, Port-au-Prince 9 April 2006 and 25 April 2006.

19 Letter from Eléonore Senlis, 19 March 2007. ‘You have to be careful’, Senlis adds, ‘to try to distinguish gossip from truth in a place like Cité Soleil, in a world that is desperately poor, full of misery and uncertainty, shot through with jealous rivalries that make people’s imaginations run riot...’

20 Robert Muggah, Securing Haiti’s Transition, Small Arms Survey Occasional Paper no. 14 (October 2005, http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/files/sas/publications/o_papers_pdf/2005-op14-haiti-eng.pdf), 6-7.

21 Jean-Michel Caroit, ‘La Loi des milices en Haïti’, Le Monde 5 November 2003. In many ways the argument of Dupuy’s book reads like an expanded version of Caroit’s own articles from October 2003 through to January 2004; see in particular Caroit, ‘Aristide, du prophète au dictateur’, Le Monde 9 January 2004. For more on the media’s contribution to the coup of 2004 see my Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment (London: Verso, 2007), chapter four.

22 Telephone interview with Ben Dupuy, 16 February 2007.

23 Richard Lezin Jones, ‘Haiti's Neighbors Are Pressing Aristide for Reforms’, New York Times 29 January 2004; DeNeen L. Brown, ‘In Haiti, Two Sides and Bloodshed Between’, Washington Post 3 February 2004.

24 Nancy San Martin, ‘Rebels’ Aim: Choke, Take Port-au-Prince’, Miami Herald 28 February 2004.

25 Trenton Daniel, ‘Appeals for Calm Bring Respite; Mayhem in Haiti’s Capital Ends as the President Tells Backers to Stop Attacks’, Miami Herald 29 February 2004.

26 Independent analysts Ronald Saint Jean and Kim Ives estimate the total number of broadly ‘politically’ motivated killings for Aristide’s second administration at around 10; Amnesty International reports for the years 2001-2003 suggest a figure of around 30 or so, if you include extrajudicial executions attributed to the (often anti-government) police.

27 Telephone interview with Robert Fatton, 9 November 2006; cf. Fatton, ‘A War Waged on the Aristide Regime’, Socialist Worker 5 March 2004, http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-1/489/489_02_Fatton.shtml.

28 Interview with Carol Joseph, Cap Haïtien 14 January 2007.

29 Monseigneur Chanoine Albert Dorélien, cited in Katherine Kean’s 1994 film Rezistans.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Haiti: The Deluge (Lenin's Tomb)

2009-09-02T20:28:00.000+08:00

The Deluge posted by lenin

The global food riots and protests have hit hardest in Haiti. It is to be expected that Haiti, which has struggled for so long to escape the tyranny of external powers and is today struggling under a UN mandate in which civilians are regularly murdered, should suffer the worst of the food crisis - an acute crisis, moreover, obviously created by the markets and not simply by scarcity. (Incidentally, to the extent to which poor harvests were a factor, these cannot be extracted from the intensifying problem of 'climate change'.)

Amid the uninformative and frequently racist pieties of the media when it comes to Haiti, I have been struck by the lucidity and power of Peter Hallward's recent book, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. It stands out as the single most informative account of Haiti's politics so far produced, and it will surely become a classic and a key reference. If it is a counterblast to critiques of Aristide as a sell-out whose rule was becoming disastrous and autocratic, that counterblast is aimed at left-wing critiques as well as the conventional right-wing ones. I can think of Alex Dupuy's hostile book, The Prophet and Power, which - while it does not conceal what the Bush administration did to Haiti in 2004 - maintains that Aristide was a sell-out after 1994, having reverted to an authoritarian paradigm that he once condemned with the formation of Fanmi Lavalas as a split from the broader Organisation Politique Lavalas, and was arming Lavalas-supporting gangs to murder opponents. It's not just Dupuy - many former supporters believed that he had refashioned himself in the mould of the Ton Ton Macoutes. Hallward does a sterling job of defending Lavalas and Aristide, and describing the means by which Haitian popular democracy was repeatedly subverted by the United States. (In fact, Hallward's review of Dupuy's book can be read here).

Hallward's argument, based on a surfeit of data, documents and interviews, is roughly as follows (it follows at some length too - you may as well forget this post and just buy the bloody book). Lavalas as it emerged in the 1980s was a movement of unprecedented moment, led by a man hated by the elite as a combination of Castro and Khomeini, the sophisticated liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Hallward makes clear the particular nature of Aristide's theology: "That Aristide prefers to assert this [egalitarian] principle in primarily theological terms is an indication of its unconditional quality, not of its dependence on any sort of supernatural domain. What he calls 'God' is simply a name for an uncompromising commitment to equality and justice. 'There is no force superior to humankind' and 'There is no Messiah other than the people'." It was a grave climacteric for an elite cultivated by the US during its occupation from 1915-1934 during which time it massacred the Cacos rebels, killing up to 30,000 people, and created a plantation state from corvée labour, defended by a violent government militia comparable to the Guardia Nacionale created in Nicaragua. The US has supported that elite to this date, whether its leading spokesman is Duvalier or Apaid. The threat of popular self-government that culminated in a landslide victory for Aristide in the 1990 elections could only be answered by a coup and a wave of CIA-backed death squad violence, which killed some 5,000 people.

Aristide responded to this terror by arguing that there could be no question of confronting this terror with an armed struggle. He set about negotiating a means back to power with the US, accepting some harsh terms and more or less being compelled to take up much of the agenda of his opponent who had lost the previous elections. Critics of Aristide say that he made too many compromises to return to power, and effectively become a wholly bought adjutant of American power. Hallward maintains that Aristide had little choice by 1994, given the balance of power in Haiti, but to cut a deal with the US and adopt a more conciliatory posture. Moreover, the fact that he was able to do so was nothing short of miraculous, given that the Ton Ton Macoutes who were ravaging the country even as the negotiations wore on, were a direct extension of American power in the country. In fact, as the violence of the FRAPH escalated, US negotiators were not shy about reminding Aristide that unless he was a lot more cooperative, those nasty people might end up becoming "the dominant force on the ground". (Aristide's own account of the negotiations can be read in his 1996 book Dignity). It was quite a remarkable turnabout to have Clinton announce in September 1994 - to great disquiet among neocons and nutters of the John McCain variety - that he was going to send in 20,000 marines to remove the "most brutal, most violent" regime in the hemisphere. The solidarity movements in the US undoubtedly had a great deal to do with this, but the main reason is that the Clinton administration now had come by a different means of getting what it wanted. For, what those marines actually did was not to disarm the army, but to ensure the protection of the FRAPH soldiers and extend courtesy to the murderers while key coup leaders were exiled to the US. Many former soldiers were integrated into the new national police force (PNH) which at any rate was an immediate target for assassinations, and that police force rapidly reverted to behaviour redolent of the old army. As the transition was effected, the US was able to exert overbearing control over the reconfiguration of the state, populating it with chosen advisors and consultants. This will be familiar to those who follow such institutions as the NED - the professionalisation of the civilian component of imperialism has been a critical component of American power since the 1980s. It has helped convert quite explicit dictation of the affairs of others into a neutral exercise, a simple fulfillment of a sort of corporate strategy. The best recent guide to this tendency, albeit one that places too much emphasis on former Shachtmanites, is Nicolas Guilhot's The Democracy Makers.

Most US marines remained in Haiti from 1994 to 1996, while a small number remained behind until 2000. America's multilayered presence intensified its grip over the country. But the US could not stop Aristide from doing the one thing that the people demanded above all, which was to disband the army. However, neoliberalism meant conserving the elite, and any attempt to dilute its power was resisted by the US, usually successfully. Lavalas won the 1995 parliamentary elections resoundingly, but the main organ in the Lavalas Front, the Organisation Politique Lavalas no longer supported Aristide. Led by the career politician Gerard Pierre-Charles, the OPL sought to adapt to the new power balance. One of its leading members in the new parliament was the US-imposed conservative Prime Minister Smarck Michel. At the same time, USAID and a Washington-funded body called the Programme Integre pour le Renforcement de la Democratie (PIRED) were organising for the contuination of the business elite's dominance, with the latter using its influence to win over labour and community groups. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) was contracted by USAID to organise 'civil society' groups - business leaders in the main - to maintain pressure on the government. Instead of allowing Aristide to continue as President, the OPL opted in 1996 to back his former Prime Minister René Préval, and - although they were swiftly disappointed by the latter's continued loyalty to Aristide's aideas - they did successfully under-sell a series of public utilities. The right-wing drift of OPL politics led to the formation by Aristide and his allies of Famni Lavalas (FL), a grassroots-based party designed to create a link between the Haiti's working population and their representatives. When several Aristide supporters won decisive victories in the 1997 legislative elections, the OPL refused to accept the results and its supporters resigned from the government, refused to accept any nominations from Préval for a Prime Minister and blocked legislation until their terms expired in January 1999. They then acted to delay elections until May 2000, which meant that Préval had to govern by decree for the next 18 months.

What happened next shocked the OPL (now renamed the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte in order to distance itself from the old Lavalas front from which it had emerged) and Haiti's business elites. Aristide won a decisive mandate with the backing of a disciplined political organisation that was far more cohesive than the loose coalition that had backed him in 1990. If Haiti used a first-past-the-post system like that in the UK or US, "Famni Lavalas would have won more than 95% of the seats in both houses of parliament". This, Hallward maintains, made the Lavalas movement more threatening than before. The opposition howled that it was a fix. Both the OPL and the new pro-army, pro-US coalition called Convergence Démocratique (CD) vowed not to accept the results. They were followed in their dismissal of the results by Western politicians and also by media sources such as Reuters and AP - the agenda-setting media, as Chomsky points out. The basis of this is a minor technical complaint by the OAS, which did not dispute the fairness of the vote or the legitimacy of the result. The OAS referred to a mistaken methology used by the independent electoral arbiter, the CEP, which had no Lavalas representatives on it. On this basis, the opposition and the United States undermined the legitimacy of a highly popular elected government and proceeded to sabotage it. The US imposed an embargo on all aid and blocked development loans, cutting the national budget in half and reducing the GDP by over a quarter in the period that followed. The Clinton administration instructed its ambassador to tell the new government that relations would not be normalised until the "problems" with the elections were resolved. The Bush administration continued these policies with even less subtlety, insistent that Aristide had no future. USAID and other organisations poured money into the coffers of his opponents, and IFES was put to work to mobilise various groups under the rubric of professional associations to act against the government.

This is where Hallward's documentation and reportage is essential. Myths abound about this period, with Aristide accused of orchestrating violence against opponents and ruling by decree. This despite the fact that having won so convincingly, he had invited the CD into the government and was met with intransigent hostility. The CD embodied leading US clients, and was quickly adopted for grooming by American PR experts (Hallward notes that James Foley, the US ambassador to Haiti from 2003, had cut his teeth grooming the KLA into a 'respectable' outfit in the late 1990s). IFES and the IRI embraced the Group of 184 (G184), which represented the most reactionary elements of the business sector under the sweatshop owner Andy Apaid junior. But it was not enough to destabilise the government in non-violent ways, so by late 2000, the opposition was trying to recruit some of the armed groups operating in the slums, some of which were simple criminal enterprise. They had no success in this venture until mid-2003. Former army personnel such as Guy Philippe, an admirer of Augusto Pinochet, were organised by the US under the rubric of the Fronte pour la Libération et la Reconstruction Nationale (FLRN). This was an organisation comparable to the Contras in Nicaragua. Other leaders included former FRAPH death squads fighters including Jodel Chamblain and Jean Tatoune. The FLRN organised from the Dominican Republic, and launched its first incursion into Haiti in July 2001, attacking the Haitian National Police Academy and various police stations. The government's subsequent arrests of suspected insurgents included some CD members, and was used as a pretext to call off negotiations between the CD and the government. Then, on 17 December 2001, 30 commandos took over the presidential palace with the help of the national police and announced that Aristide was no longer president. The subsequent popular uprising that thwarted the coup involved a few offices belonging to constituent parties of the CD being attacked. And so it went on, with repeated attacks and destabilisation, and all the while US policymakers and the IRI disavowed its connections to Guy Philippe and his merry band of putschists. (Philippe himself was unhelpful enough to warmly recall his 'good friend Stanley Lucas, scion of a wealthy Haitian family and the IRI programme director whose subsequent starring roles involved him in support for the Venezuelan opposition). The opposition itself abandoned its disavowal by 2004, warmly referring to the insurgent Macoutes as "heroes".

Despite all this pressure, the Préval-Aristide governments managed several remarkable accomplishments - reducing infant mortality from 125 to 110 per thousand live births; bringing illiteracy down from 65% to 45%; slowing the rate of new HIV infections. They did what they could to soften the blow of 'structural adjustment', by maintaining subsidies, implementing some land reforms, and promulgating certain social programmes. However, they were not in a position to implement socialist or even social democratic reforms, and most people suffered from the effects of neoliberalism. Realistically, what Lavalas could do was create a lively popular movement to try to pressure elites for change, to formulate popular demands and try to fulfil them. That movement consists of a national network of ti famnis, groups of neighbourhood militants. Because of its popularity, however, and also because of its relatively informal structure, it has been susceptible to infiltration by criminal or opportunistic elements. Leading Lavalas politicians often ended up showing more in common with the party's opponents than with its base, and did a great deal to enrich themselves and further their own careers. Corruption spread throughout segments of the Lavalas hierarchy, albeit on nothing like the scale of previous administrations, particularly that of Duvalier. Further, when the success of Lavalas showed the difficulty of organising outside it, so many opponents decided to oppose from within. Aristide had to work with hostile elements in the police, particularly the force attached to the presidential palace which - surprise - was composed of large numbers of former army members. Chavez can call upon the loyalty of army cadres in Venezuela; Aristide does not come from a military background and has no experience in fighting wars. He put up with demonstrations calling for a coup d'etat, allowed an unashamedly insurgent opposition to organise, and sought compromise everywhere: far from being a dictator, Aristide was in an extremely weak position. Yet, human rights organisations have tended to depict the Preval-Aristide years as continuous with previous and subsequent administrations in terms of human rights abuses. Hallward comments: "Here we reach the crowning achievement of the disinformation campaign ... Remember the basic numbers: perhaps 50,000 dead under the Duvaliers (1957-86), perhaps 700-1,000 dead under Namphy/Avril (1986-90), 4,000 dead under Cedras (1991-94) and then at least 3,000 killed under Latortue (2004-06). And under Aristide?" Between ten and thirty individuals killed by the PNH "whose political affiliation was often anti-government".

At any rate, given the manifest weakness of the government, and the growing problems faced by the country's poor, it should not have been difficult for the US to start paving the way for a coup and the subsequent UN protectorate. In fact, as Hallward points out, it took quite a long time and was much more difficult than the coup in 1991 - a testament to the resilience of the Lavalas movement. It required massive intervention, with 11,000 people in 1,000 organisations trained within Haiti by USAID. It required repeated incursions and a failed putsch. But perhaps most striking of all, it required elaborate attempts at winning over a diverse array of NGOs and unlikely groups like Batay Ouvriye (BO). Hallward documents who groups like Christian Aid performed a neo-colonial function, advocating CD's preferred version of events and a version of their preferred outcome (the elimination of Lavalas as the dominant force in Haitian politics). Hallward rightly points to the funding that BO received from the NED, as well, and the role it performed in polemicising against Aristide despite the fact that their own aims would be served worst by the overthrow of the government (although he uses the unfortunate term "neo-Trotskyite" to describe them). He suggests that they may have supported the coup, and that they were at least content to see Aristide go. Whatever the case, their sectarian analysis and actions did not see them attempt to hinder the coup in any way. The coup began with the siezure of Raboteau in September 2003, and the emergence of the Cannibal Army as an anti-government gang engaged in attacks on government forces the same year. In February 2004, the death squads and criminal gangs and ex-army men united for the insurgency and were shortly on the march to Port-au-Prince, perhaps even already there with several sympathisers in the presidential palace guards. The myths that were widely repeated in the media - that it was a democratic rebellion, a popular liberation struggle, or perhaps a combination of genuine revolt with initial criminal instigation, which at any rate had nothing to do with any outside powers - are meticulously taken to pieces in Damming the Flood. Essentially, it is clear that despite national and regional efforts at finding a negotiated settlement, and despite the fact that the evident difficulties being experienced by the insurgents, the opposition was determined this time to bring the government down. And it seems it was Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega who pulled the plug on final negotiations. The Chirac government was also anxious to get rid of Aristide and his demands for restitution for the systematic extortion of the Haitian treasury by the French state after L'Ouverture's revolution (for the amount the French deemed that they had lost as a result of the overthrow of slavery), and it restored France's longstanding relationship with Haitian elite figures such as G184 supporter Serge Gilles. Finally, Aristide was abducted on 29 September 2004. The US ambassador at the time, James Foley, claimed that it had been a rescue mission, that the US was deeply saddened by what was happening, and that to protect Aristide's endangered life they absconded with him to a safe place. It was claimed that he had resigned voluntary, with an air of passivity and acceptance. Some 36 hours after his 'resignation', as soon as he found a phone, he told every news outlet that would listen that he had been kidnapped by US forces. Hallward does not profess to be a detective, but he does an excellent job here of piecing together what happened and skewering the propaganda.

We know some of what happened next, of course: the revenge of Haiti's ruling class. The mass imprisonment and murder of prominent Aristide supporters. The restoration of convicted genocidaires. A government under a UN protectorate that carried out attacks on pro-Lavalas neighbourhoods (not to mention hospitals). Hallward documents in some detail the Latortue government's repression, as well as the massacres of the UN and anti-Lavalas gangs. However, he is fundamentally optimistic - as is Jean-Bertand Aristide in the closing interview. The coup was difficult to effect, and it could not withstand the popular counter-coup that resulted in another Preval administration. The government is still beholden to neoliberalism, the UN troops continue to commit atrocities, but Lavalas is still a powerful popular movement. Terror has not been able to destroy it in the way that the Sandinistas were destroyed, even if Haiti's position means it will take a global upturn for the left to help shake it free of domination for good. Over 200 years old now, Haiti's liberation struggle could hardly have asked for a better contemporary advocate than Peter Hallward.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Nepal: Maoists launch UNPM

2009-09-01T22:49:00.000+08:00

The UCPN-Maoist on Thursday made public the Declaration of United National People’s Movement (UNPM)—the newly formed party front to launch its fresh struggle programmes.

The four-point declaration has demanded that the decisions made by the parallel people’s power centers established during the people’s war—the decade-long civil bloody war—should be given legitimacy.

The UNPM was formed on August 3 under the leadership of Maoist Vice Chairman Baburam Bhattarai to lead the series of protests announced by the party earlier this month.

As per the declaration, the recently formed Revolutionary Joint Front will work for the power as demanded by the situation though it will be the medium of struggle.

The main opposition party, which dislodged from the government under its leadership after the president intervened into its attempt to sack the Chief of Army Staff (CoAS), has also demanded for the formation of a joint national government under its leadership by dissolving the current government at the earliest.

In the declaration made public through the personnel website of leader Baburam Bhattari, the chairman of UNPM, the Maoists have laid out various demands, among others, rubbish the President’s move over CoAS row and guarantee the civilian supremacy by keeping the Nepal Army completely under the government elected through people’s mandate.

Likewise, the Maoists have called for deploying both the armies—Nepal Army (NA) and Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—in the development works and public service until the completion of integration process. It has also urged the government to provide all kinds of services and perks to the PLA men on a par with the NA personnel.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Announcement Regarding My Blogs

2009-09-01T11:06:00.000+08:00

During the last few weeks several important developments regarding my use of my blogs and focus of coverage. These will help any readers follow these changes:

1. I returned from Nepal to Beijing and ended my business activity and apartment lease and for all practical purposes am no longer based in China after a period of 7 years there.

2. My primary base now is in New York City, but I plan to be in Brooklyn only for a period of 2-3 months each year. My plan is to continue travels to areas of revolutionary socialist development.

3. Nepal's Maoist revolution has been my primary story for coverage and I will continue to provide updates on developments and most important articles on the Maobadi. I will however be changing immediate focus to an investigation of the conflict in Haiti.

4. Having relocated to New York, the immediate plan is to begin excursions to the Dominican Republic to explore the living situation and begin personal coverage of Haiti (the other part of Hispaniola).

5. I am also interested in a visit to New Zealand to make some assessment of living possibilities there. This will be later. That being in the East I may take the opportunity to return to Nepal in that period depending on the state of developments there.

6. Regarding the Blogger website I will continue to post the most important entries based on the news and all the postings that are mainly my own writing. I am going to stop however the monthly posting of all news items on the situation in Nepal.

7. Regular coverage of the news events in Nepal will still be available at my Delicious bookmarking website. Major stories will still be posted at the Blogger website as well as my
Zmag website.

8. The Zmag website in addition to providing links to postings at the Blogger site will also continue to be the place where daily postings on all my topic areas will be situated.

9. Besides the focus on specific revolutionary and socialist struggles in various geographic areas I intend as well to continue to study the range of current Communist philosophers, particularly Alain Badiou and Savoj Zizek - and now in regard to my interest in Haiti, the philosopher and writer Peter Hallward.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Commentary: CPI (Maoist) Open Letter on Nepal Maoists

2009-07-07T02:59:00.005+08:00

Focus on my commentaries regarding article with comments linked below:

Stephen David Mauldin said
July 3, 2009 at 1:20 am

Quoting the article first:

Today any slight mistake on the part of the Maoists would result in grave disaster. The reactionaries in Nepal, with the active aid and assistance of US and India, are hatching conspiracies to unleash a blood-bath to wipe out the Maoist forces. The only way to resist these reactionary attempts is to rely on the revolutionary masses, organize them against the state and prepare them for street battles basing on the base areas in the vast countryside. At least now the leadership of the CPN(M) should realize the futility of the parliamentary path and resume the people's war to achieve complete victory by smashing the old state and reactionary forces, and establishing the people's democratic state.

The author(s) need to be informed that the threat of the NA is not significant. The PLA has instant access to weapons and during the recent years the All Nepal Federation of Unions has developed a very close affiliation to the Maoists and they have become a militant force. See my report on meetings with the Union and its leader Ganesh Regmi recently in Kathmandu covered in my blog entries here. The growth of the YCL has been phenomenal - it is only the restraint by the Maoist leadership that these forces have not already suppressed violently the NA. Ganesh Man Pun, formally commander of the PLA 4th Division also explained to me that there are significant internal rifts in the NA which is part of why there is no fear of any coup attempt - My blog entry on the discussion with YCL leaders is posted here

Best of all Azad, please read the recent analysis of Bhattarai by Rosa L. Blanc:

http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/bhattarais-new-type-of-state-and-the-maoist-re-envisioning-of-communism/

then:
Stephen David Mauldin said
July 6, 2009 at 3:21 pm

Dear Comrades,

I have simply reported what was said to me directly by Ganesh Regmi, Ganesh Man Pun and C.P. Gajurel

Short of claiming I have made it all up, any arguments of whether the combined militant capacity of the PLA ANTUF and YCL is a successful deterrent to the NA should be taken up with those parties.

The point made is that the NA is not the degree of threat pictured by the CPI writer if you listen to what the CYL and Union leadership are saying.

Some observation and logic also are important. Could the Maoists continue to dictate from the streets and from their seats in the CA unless they had a strong deterrent at hand? This is exactly why the UML government will not last and the UCPN(M) will return to the leadership of the government with civilian supremacy over the NA - which is a pretty easy prediction the CPI fails to make.

If we don't see the Maoists back in leadership of the government soon then I would guess that means I was in fact over optimistic - lets see.

My optimism extends to some faith the Maoist led coalition of parties representing oppressed classes will in time further weaken and dominate the NC oppressors and the oppressor factions in the UML and Terai parties; the integration process will occur, with some internal support of nationalist factions within the NA itself; and, the CA with vanguard leadership of the Maoists will complete the constitution for a New Nepal on schedule.

It is a matter of opinion, yes, atheistic faith as I see it - which is far different than a Pollyanna optimism as it awaits the confirmation of what was believed, the confirmation that it had been true. The future path beyond the establishment of the New Nepal state is really what is most problematic. Will the collaboration with nationalists (and their unfortunate patriotism), along with the primarily regional and ethnic group agendas hamper the withering away of that state? Will some, even within the Maoist camp fall to sugar bullets as development projects in cooperation with global capitalists ensue? Will "a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers" (Badiou) occur?

These are the questions that need our attention... but I see how some may not be able to address them if their own faith is in the military supremacy of the imperialists.

Note: These responses to the posted article and other commentaries refer to the entry at the South Asia Review:

CPI (Maoist) Internationalist statement on the recent turmoil in Nepal

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Rosa L. Blanc: Rebuttal of RCPUSA on Nepal Maoists

2009-07-03T07:40:00.003+08:00

Introduction

Baburam Bhattarai’s article entitled “The Question of Building a New Type of State” is at the center of many polemics today and has been the object of attack in the recent critique of the RCP to the Nepalese Maoist

to read Bhattarai article go to:
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2009/04/question-of-building-new-type-of-state.html

“Alarmed by the positions put forward in the ‘New State” article,” the following is how Revolutionary Communist Party,USA describes Bhattarai’s intervention:

1-”have loudly proclaimed loyalty to ‘democracy’—meaning Western-style bourgeois democracy,”
2-”expressed a negative verdict on the whole first wave of proletarian revolution,”
3-”advanced a series of arguments about democracy and dictatorship and how they related to the struggle in Nepal that,” the RCP argued, “would, if followed, lead to not establishing a proletarian dictatorship or to abandoning it if it were established.”
4-”basically placed the extension of formal democracy (including elections with competing political parties) at the heart of the socialist transition and as some kind of supposed “guarantee” for the prevention of capitalist restoration”
5-”proposed that upon reaching socialism the standing army could be dissolved and replaced by militias,”
6-”the model of the Paris Commune, with direct elections and recall of officials, was raised as a more positive model than the experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union and China.”
7-”argues that Nepal must first develop the productive forces before the revolution can advance further, and that only capitalism can achieve this… some compare him to China’s Deng Xiaoping.”
(From the RCP long essay in Revolution 160, March 29, 2009 entitled “On Developments in Nepal and the Stakes for the Communist Movement: Letters to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) from the  Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, 2005-2008 “)]

Given the distortions and misrepresentations of Bhattarai’s article in these current debates, I feel the need to summarize its main ideas so that people can judge for themselves. I want to contrast the way RCP summarizes this article with what the article really said.

I am not going to develop my own critique to this article here. Instead I hope to bring the basic elements and ideas of Bhattarai’s article back into the public discussion – many of which have been ignored and distorted by RCP. And I would like to help open a serious discussion on the main proposals by Bhattarai and Nepalese Maoist on the re-envisioning of communism in the 21st century.

Before I summarize Bhattarai’s article, I would like to say that many of the ideas in his article were first vetted during a group discussion at the National Convention of the United Revolutionary People’s Council (URPC) of Nepal held in September 2001. During this National Convention, Bhattarai presented a draft report of entitled “Common Minimum Policy and Programme of United Revolutionary People’s Council (URPC)” while Dev Gurung presented a draft of the URPC constitution.

The group discussion of Bhattarai’s draft report centered on:

“…how it was more difficult to fight against counter-revolution than making revolution. Referring to the loss of once well established socialist states in the world, particularly those in China and Russia, it was opined that the challenge today lies in creating a 21st century state which will not only consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat but at the same time it will have elements of pave way for the withering away of the state. Today, the starting point of any attempt to create a new state should begin with incorporating the spirit of the GPCR [Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution], at the same time one must go beyond it so as to pursue a continuous revolution. Discussion was also centered on the dialectical relation between the Party and the people’s government and correct method of ensuring continued proletarian leadership over the government. After intense discussion the draft report and the constitution were unanimously passed with some amendments” (”National Convention of the United Revolutionary People’s Council (URPC),” THE WORKER No. 7, January 2002: 9-10).

Moreover, in the Second National Conference of CPN (Maoist) of February 2001 the Nepali Maoist leader Prachanda presented a historic document approved by the conference entitled “The Great Leap Forward: An Inevitable Need of History” (The Worker, No. 7, January 2002: 26-63). This long document is an important summary of CPN-Maoist’s understanding and evaluation of the problems of the international communist movement in the 20th century and constitute an important antecedent to Bhattarai’s article on “The Question of Building a New Type of State.”

Anyone interested in understanding the Nepalese Maoist perspective, should take a close look at all of these documents.

I mention this because it is sometimes implied or openly stated that Bhattarai’s “New Type of State” is a deviation from the previous line of the UCPN(Maoist). In fact, these two antecedents were publicly known but ignored by the RCP. This way they could focus primarily on the 2004 article by Bhattarai and make claims about deviation. In fact, Bhattarai’s article is a continuation of UCPN-Maoist previous documents, resolutions and discussions.

Bhattarai’s article develops a discussion at two levels:

One level is the international historical experience of the communist movement in the 20th century and its lessons for re-envisioning communism in the 21st century.

The other level is the national context of Nepal.

What Bhattarai says about the lessons and re-envisioning of communism and his strategic proposal for a re-foundation of communist theory and practice is a powerful intervention into matters that are fundamental for communists. In the current debate, Bhattarai’s position is profoundly distorted by the RCP when they collapse what Bhattarai proposes for the strategic goals and re-envisioning of Communism in the 21st century into his tactical proposals made within the national context of Nepal. Although RCP insist that they are criticizing neither tactics nor negotiations (per se), what they really do is to criticize the specific short-term tactics while implying they are intrinsic to the CPN-Maoist’s strategic line.

In his article Bhattarai reveals that the need for a transitional state which is a step below the New Democratic/People’s Democratic state “has been provided in the ‘An Executive Summary of the Proposal Put Forward by CPN (Maoist) for the Negotiations’ [See, CPN (Maoist) 2004] proposed by the Party during the latest round of negotiations on April 27, 2003.” He continues,

“The Party believes that the concept of such a transitional state rising above the bourgeois parliamentarism but not yet reaching the level of New Democracy is appropriate both theoretically and practically in the concrete conditions of Nepal.”

I am not going to focus this article on the validity of this tactical move in the context of Nepal. This has been done in a more intelligent and informative way by Nepalese Maoist themselves (see for example the intervention by Nepalese Maoist leader C.P. Gajurel, known as Gaurav, at University of London on November 11, 2007:
http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/gaurav-the-revolution-in-nepal/

What I would like to focus in this articles is on Bhattarai’s critical evaluation of the experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the 20th century, its lessons and his re-envisioning of communism for the 21st century — in other words, how to make socialist revolution better next time. This is the aspect of Bhattarai’s contribution that gets absolutely distorted and ignored in RCP critique of Bhattarai’s article. Why? Is it because it proposes a different approach and conception from RCP’s chairman Bob Avakian’s so-called “New Synthesis”?

Basic Principles

Bhattarai’s essay starts by emphasizing that the question of state power is the central question of New Democratic revolution in Nepal in late 2004. Bhattarai explores two contradictions in developing his argument:

1) One is the contradiction between the international context and the national conditions for state power in Nepal; and

2) the other is the contradiction between universal communist principles and their application within the particularities of the struggle in Nepal.

These two contradictions (international vs. national and universal vs. particular) are interrelated and yet distinct. It would be a mistake to conflate or collapse one into the other.

Thus, in the relation between the universal and the particular, the international context is not equivalent to the universal principles and the national context is not equivalent to the particular application of those principles. Both the international and the national context form part of both the application of universal principles to a particular situation. The international and the national are the contexts that form the particular context where universal principles are applied.

The articulation of these two levels does not have easy solutions. If it is true that the universal principles provides general guiding lines, those principles cannot be mechanically applied, but need to take into account the very particular conditions (both international and national) of the country. The international context and the national context provides the concrete space for the application of universal principles in order to apply them to a particular situation.

Although formally speaking almost everybody in the international Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM) movement agrees with the formulation that universal principles has to be applied to particular conditions and that you cannot collapse one into the other in a mechanical way, there are disagreements in how to interpret this formulation.

For right wing revisionist, the particular is so particular that universal principles never apply to concrete situations justifying the elimination of principles in ways that foster class conciliation, reformism and, thus, give lip service to principles or make them irrelevant. Meanwhile for dogmato-revisionist trends, universal principles apply to all concrete situations without exception in a one-to-one direct correspondence between the abstract principles and the concrete situation. Principles apply without a nuanced understanding of concrete historical conditions. A dialectical understanding of this question is fundamental here. There is a fine line to transit between the dogmatic-revisionist danger of abstract affirmation of principles with no consideration of particularities and the revisionist danger of exaggerated affirmation of particularities throwing away principles.

Strategy and tactics are always informed by the principles that guide the immediate and ultimate goals of the revolution and the particularities of the local and international historical conditions and relations of forces within which a revolution is situated.

Bhattarai starts the essay making three statements. First, he affirms one universal principle :

“[T]he proletarian (i.e. New Democratic or Socialist) state power is of a ‘new type’ as compared to all the state powers of minority exploiter classes in history.”

This principle implies that the proletarian state cannot have the same form and content as the states of the exploiter classes before (including all exploiter classes in history).

This universal principle is followed by a second statement that is of a different order:

“[A]fter the downfall of all People’s Democratic or Socialist state powers including those in Russia, China and others in the past, the proletarian state powers arising in a new setting in the 21st century have to be of a further newer type.”

This statement implies an orientation within a new international historical particularity: The defeat of the People’s Democratic and Socialist states in China, Soviet Union and other places, the restoration of capitalism in the formerly socialist states of the 20th century, now requires a further development of the universal principle of a new type of state.

The third statement is about the particular national context of the struggle:

“In the concrete semi-feudal and semi-colonial national context of Nepal, where even the old bourgeois revolution and state has not been accomplished, the prospective proletarian state would naturally be, and have to be, of a ‘new’ type.”

These three statements are going to organize the rest of the article. The first part of the article is a discussion of the question of state power in the international communist movement. The following is a group of theoretical universal principles that Bhattarai raises about the MLM understanding of the state based on a historical materialist analysis as opposed to the three evils such of “anarchist, revisionist and dogmato-revisionist views, which may also be called petty-bourgeois, bourgeois and bureaucratic bourgeois views on the state.”

The state is:

- A dictatorship of one class over the others
- The centre of class struggle in every historical stage where every victorious class has further sharpened and strengthened this weapon of the state according to its class interest
- Although initially born as ’servant’ of the society, gradually separated itself from the society and took the form of ‘master’ of the society
- By the time the state reached the ‘highest’ and ‘ultimate’ stage of the bourgeois republic it became terrible parasitic machinery over the society armed with a huge bureaucracy and standing army
-Similar to the law of dialectics that requires everything that is born to meet with its death, the state is also inevitably destined to die someday
- The concept of building a new type of transitional state in lieu of the bourgeois state, whose essence would be the dictatorship of the proletariat.

After raising the above principles, Bhattarai defends the critique that Marx and Engels made of the anarchist concept of the state and he supports the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a new form of state for the long transitional period between capitalist and communist society. The need of the dictatorship of the proletariat arises from the need to exercise dictatorship over the capitalist class and the need to overcome the unsolved contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not only the state of a transition — but a transitional state as well.

Bhattarai emphasizes that,

“Engels had further expounded that after the displacement of the state of the minority exploiter classes by the social revolution of the conscious masses the majority exploited classes should establish a ‘transitional’ state to apply dictatorship over the defeated exploiter classes and to move towards a classless society, and such a state would be ‘no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’.”

The Paris commune was for Engels the example of such a state. It was created through a social revolution that defeated the bourgeois state. The new type of state established by the commune was characterized by the following:

a) Direct election by the workers’ universal suffrage of the commune’s officials
responsible and revocable at short terms with public service done at workmen’s wages,
b) directly defended by the armed masses after the dissolution of the standing army
c) and equipped with all the executive and legislature powers.

This new type of state known as the Paris Commune was upheld by Marx and Engels as the most shining example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Bhattarai goes on to say that Marx’s expression, that “this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to… a classless society” clearly asserts that the new type of state (in the form of dictatorship of the proletariat) is not a state “in the proper sense of the word” and is a means to do away with all the classes and state. Then he passes on to discuss the contributions of Lenin in the eve of the October Revolution:

1-Using Marx’s expression the proletariat must “smash” the ready-made machine and replace it by a new one that will merge the police, army and bureaucracy with the “entire armed people,”

2-the “entire armed people” composed of the exploited section of the population lead by the proletariat should take directly into their own hand the organs of state power in order that they themselves should constitute a new type of state,

3- this new type of state in the Russian context was identified as the Soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants.

Bhattarai cites Lenin’s:

“…I advocate not the usual parliamentary bourgeois state, but a state without a standing army, without a police opposed to the people, without an officialdom placed above the people.” (Lenin 1917c: 49)

After this clear Leninist orientation, Bhattarai denounces right wing revisionism:

“However, Kautsky and other Right revisionists of the Second International had sought to discard the very class concept of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat and to spread the illusion of bourgeois parliamentarism in the form of so-called “pure democracy” within the proletarian movement, against which Lenin had launched a severe polemics. In his famous work “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (1918), Lenin had amply clarified that in a class divided society ‘democracy’, too, would have a class character and bourgeois democracy and constituent assembly were mere concrete forms of bourgeois state.”

This long quote of Bhattarai’s article is crucial to keep in mind given the kind of accusations raised recently by the RCP.

Bhattarai positively mentions and upholds the Bolsheviks’ strategy after the October Revolution of dissolving the bourgeois representative organ, the Constituent Assembly, in order to replace it with a more democratic and revolutionary structure such as the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the Soviets:

“Thus, an extensive network of local to central Soviets of workers, peasants, soldiers and other revolutionary classes developed in the model of the Paris Commune was the practical expression of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and a new type of socialist state after the October revolution. When there arose a contradiction between the bourgeois representative organ, the constituent assembly, and the socialist representative organ, the Soviet, immediately after the revolution, the constituent assembly was dissolved as a historically retrograde organ, and the forward-looking Soviet democracy was institutionalized. Even when a vicious imperialist aggression and internal civic war ensued in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the congress and meetings of the elected Soviets were held in short and regular intervals and all-important decisions of the state were taken through the Soviets.”

According to Bhattarai, the civil war against the Soviet power had long lasting negative consequences for the proletariat Soviet state power. This is a crucial historical point in order to understand the spirit of the rest of Bhattarai’s article calling to further develop the concept of a new type of state under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is how Bhattarai is going to characterize the tragic consequences of the 1917-1921 civil war in Russia:

“However, when the civil war got stretched and a ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP) with features of state-capitalism was introduced to tide over the problems of the economic construction after the end of the civil war, there was gradual erosion in the dynamism and liveliness of the initial Soviet system. The higher-level executive committees started getting more active and powerful at the cost of the Soviet Congress and local organs. The organs of the state, Party and army (which was getting transformed into a standing army from the initial ‘Red Guards’) were getting intertwined inseparably. A bureaucratic apparatus in the old Czarist mould, cut-off from and placed over the people, started rising up gradually. Similar other bureaucratic deviations were cropping up menacingly in the new Soviet state system. As Lenin was a rare genius of revolutionary firmness and dynamism and a past master in applying revolutionary science in the concrete time and place, he made concerted efforts till the end to curb the rising bureaucratic tendencies in the Soviet state system and to ensure the initiative, supervision and participation of the revolutionary masses in the new state power through ‘Worker’s and Peasants Inspection’, ‘non-Party Worker’s and Peasant’s Conferences’, etc.”

Bhattarai goes on to cite Lenin’s deep concern with the rising problem of bureaucratization at the end of his life:

“Let us hope that our new Worker’s and Peasants’ Inspection will abandon what the French call pruderies, which we may call ridiculous primness, or ridiculous swank, and which plays entirely into the hands of our Soviet and Party bureaucracy. Let it be said in parentheses that we have bureaucrats in our Party offices as well as in Soviet offices.” (Lenin 1923:419)

This wishful thinking of Lenin, according to Bhattarai, is not going to be fulfilled. He states that Stalin’s mechanical thinking basically strengthened the bureaucratic tendencies. This is what Bhattarai says:

“After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin made efforts to continue and develop the Soviet state in a socialist direction. However, firstly due to a type of economic deterministic thinking that envisaged the development of the productive forces per se would lead the society towards communism, a one-sided stress was laid on economic development through central planning. Secondly, in the particularity of heightened contradictions with imperialism in and around the World War II, the ‘external’ cause was accorded primacy and the policy of applying force of state power to settle internal contradictions within the state and the Party was followed. Consequently, by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 the Soviet state was caught in a vicious bureaucratic quagmire, and with Khrushchev’s advent it assumed an open bureaucratic capitalist and totalitarian character, which was ultimately transformed into naked capitalism in 1989.”

Bhattarai states that out of a serious study of this tragic experience, the communist leader Mao Zedong in the 1950s and 60s derived the grave lessons and “developed the theory of the continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR).” Bhattarai emphasizes that:

“…after the [Chinese] revolution when there was the danger of the people’s democratic dictatorship (till 1956) and the dictatorship of the proletariat (1956 onwards) undergoing bureaucratization and degenerating into bourgeois dictatorship, Mao searched for new methods to ensure supervision and participation of the masses in the state and to correctly handle contradictions prevalent in society… The method of ensuring maximum and continuous participation of the masses in the state through the practice of ‘great democracy’ under the leadership of the proletariat, is the question of utmost importance in checking bureaucratic deviations and building a new type of state, which is reflected in Mao’s assertion: ‘We must have this much confidence. We are not even afraid of imperialism, so why should we be afraid of great democracy? Why should we be afraid of students taking to the streets? Yet among our Party members there are some who are afraid of great democracy, and this is not good. Those bureaucrats who are afraid of great democracy must study Marxism hard and mend their ways.’” (Mao 1977:347)

Despite RCP accusations, Bhattarai upholds Mao’s contributions during the 10 years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) such as when he said:

“…widespread slogans of ‘It is right to rebel,’ ‘Bombard the bourgeois headquarter’ etc; revolutionary committees made up of non-Party masses to conduct state functions in the model of Paris Commune; formation Red Guards in millions through the arming of the masses; inclusion of the rights of workers to strike in the state constitution; etc.”

Despite the acknowledgement of the contributions of Mao, “the incidence of counterrevolution from within the existing state and restoration of bourgeois dictatorship in China after Mao’s death” raises our responsibilities today for the further development and formation of a new type of state. For Bhattarai this means that “we should move further ahead after drawing positive and negative lessons of practices of dictatorship of the proletariat from the Paris Commune through the Russian Soviet to the Chinese GPCR.” This is a call for a thorough scientific study of these three experiences. For Bhattarai this is a priority of the communist movement today. Its importance is summarized in the following statement:

“It is obvious that as long as the era of imperialism prevails and there is the compulsion of building socialism within a single country, nobody can and should objectively deny the possibility of counter-revolution after a revolution. Even then, if we can’t provided scientific and logical answer to the subjective factors behind the relatively easy and more or less ‘peaceful’ occurrence of counter-revolution and restoration of bourgeois dictatorship in nearly half of the world that had dozens of socialist and people’s democratic state systems in the twentieth century, we won’t be able to win the confidence of the masses to accomplish revolution and defend and develop the same up to communism. In this sense it is imperative to firmly grasp that the question of building a new type of state in the twenty-first century means the building of the state that would prevent counter-revolution after revolution and would lead to communism through a continuous revolution; or it is a state that would bring about its own end as a state… On Lenin’s death and during the period of Third International and Stalin, though there was mechanistic stress on the ‘necessity’ of dictatorship of the proletariat from a dogmato-revisionist angle, the question of continuous revolution and withering away of the state was put in the back burner and consequently the dictatorship of the proletariat itself got distorted and ultimately degenerated into bureaucratic bourgeois dictatorship or totalitarianism. It was only during the period of Mao that both the revisionist and dogmato-revisionist tendencies were attacked and a balanced stress was placed on both the questions of dictatorship of the proletariat and of ‘continuous revolution’ and withering away of the state. As Mao’s efforts during the short period were grossly inadequate and incomplete, the revolutionaries of the present age should dare go beyond all the past experiences and build a new type of state power while firmly grasping the question of dictatorship of the proletariat and continuous revolution. “

This paragraph not only sums up the main content of the Nepalese Maoist insistence on bringing forward a new vision for 21st century communist revolutions, but it formulates the challenges of our times after the defeat of all existing dictatorships of the proletariat in the 20th century by counter-revolutionary capitalist forces inside the communist party and the state in socialist societies.

There is no way communist forces are going to win back masses of people world-wide to the communist project without a scientific study of the experiences of the 20th century and further development of the new type of state, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat, in a more democratic proletarian direction.

Given that this text was written before there was any public talk about a “new synthesis” in the RCP or anywhere else, it is the first major statement by a leader of a MLM party to attempt at doing precisely that: the road towards a new synthesis. We have to see this article by Bhattarai as a major contribution and invitation to envision a new communist project for the 21st century in order to do it better next time.

Re-envisioning Communism in the 21st Century

In the rest of the article, Bhattarai continues to develop his proposal towards a new synthesis by continuing to raise the important questions involved on building a new type of state based on the 20th century experience that led to the revisionist coup in Russia and China. The following are the points he raises:

A. The Question of Smashing the Old State

One of the principles of MLM is what Bhattarai sums as:

“One basic precondition for building a new type of state is the complete smashing of the old state. The more completely and deeply the old state is smashed, the better would be the probability of building a more stable and complete new state. This is the objective law verified by historical experience and facts.”

He mentions this universal principle to argue about the impossibility of building a new type of state through general reforms and to defend the scientific socialist constant insistent of Marx, Engels and Lenin on the question of “smashing the old state.” The greater the intensity of the destruction of the old state, the greater the stability of the construction of the new type of state.

B. The Question of Class Dictatorship and Proletarian Leadership

Here Bhattarai states that the most important question of the new type of state is its class dictatorship and it proletarian leadership. He criticizes the “revisionists” who discarded the notion of dictatorship of the proletariat.

Since every state has a class character there is no such thing as a the ‘free people’s state’ defended by the anarchist nor a ’state of the whole people’ as defended by the revisionist. However, Bhattarai mentions here Marx and Engels statements on exceptional situations also stated by Lenin in State and Revolution:

“As an exception in special situations of two struggling classes being in the position of a stalemate, Marx and Engels have talked of the state temporarily assuming a non-class and neutral status and have put forward the examples of the initial stages of the rules of Napoleon Bonaparte (1798-1815) and Louis Bonaparte (1848-1871) in France. (See, Marx 1871 and Engels 1884). However, there should not be any iota of doubt among the revolutionaries that these exceptional conditions are temporary and that the historical rule is for the state to ultimately assume the form of dictatorship of one or the other class. Hence, while building a new state the revolutionaries should first of all determine with utmost gravity and clarity which class dictatorship it is and against which class this dictatorship is applied. In a semi-feudal and semi-colonial multi-class society like ours, it should be firmly grasped that at the initial stage the new state would be a joint democratic dictatorship of all anti-feudal and anti-imperialist classes, or all the progressive classes from the proletariat through the peasantry to the national bourgeoisie except the feudal and comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisie. After the completion of the bourgeoisie democratic revolution and transition to socialism the state’s character would be the dictatorship of the proletariat and all types of dictatorship would whither away only in communism.”

This is a nuanced and subtle position.

Bhattarai is not arguing that there can be no exceptions to the universal principle that all states response to the interest to a dominant class that exercises a dictatorship over the opposite classes. Following Marx and Engels, he acknowledges moments when the class character of the state is temporarily assuming a contested status.

However, this is only temporarily at moments when two struggling classes are in a position of stalemate. The historical rule is the opposite. Every state has a class character and exercises the dictatorship of one class over others. Here the dialectic between dictatorship and democracy under the dictatorship of the proletariat is discussed by Bhattarai citing Mao:

“Dictatorship does not apply within the ranks of the people. The people cannot exercise dictatorship over themselves, nor must one section of the people oppress another. Law-breakers among the people will be punished according to law, but this is different in principle from the exercise of dictatorship to suppress enemies of the people. What applies among the people is democratic centralism.” (Mao 1957:387)

The dictatorship of the proletariat should follow the principle of exercising dictatorship against the reactionary classes and “democratic centralism” among the non-antagonistic classes. This principle is applied in different forms depending if it entails the struggle of New Democracy or if it is a Socialist Revolution. The reactionary classes and non-antagonistic classes are defined differently according to the character of the revolution. With the advance of information technology and its increased role as propaganda war, Bhattarai insists that under the new type of state more attention should be pay to the use of cultural and ideological weapons to maintain its dictatorship.

He cites Gramsci about the importance reactionary classes give to ruling by consent of the people through cultural and ideological means apart from the use of military force. The following is a long quote from Bhattarai’s article that merits to be read and discussed by the international communist movement because of its implications for the re-envisioning a new course for socialism in the 21st century:

“Whereas the bourgeoisie has been very craftily practicing its dictatorship under a parliamentary ‘democratic’ cover and in the name of the ‘whole people’, there has been a long debate in the international communist movement about the form of proletarian dictatorship and the practical method of assuming proletarian leadership over the state. In view of the serious setbacks received by the models of proletarian dictatorship practiced in Russia, China and elsewhere in the twentieth century, the present day revolutionaries should draw appropriate lessons from these experiences and dare experiment and develop new models. After the experiences of the Paris Commune and the Russian Soviets a general understanding was developed that the proletariat should exercise its leadership through the Communist Party organized as its vanguard and the dictatorship should be applied through the Soviets or People’s Councils modeled after the Paris Commune. Giving a concrete expression to this, Lenin in 1920 had said:
‘…the dictatorship is exercised by the proletariat organized in the Soviets; the proletariat is guided by the Communist Party…..’ (Marx-Engels-Lenin 1984:473)

Similarly, Mao had formulated the method of people’s democratic dictatorship a nd proletarian leadership this way:

‘…People’s democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the proletariat (through the Communist Party) and based on workers and peasants unity.’ (Mao 1948)
After the October Revolution Lenin had time and again stressed that dictatorship of the proletariat should be applied through the Soviets. However, his expression while addressing the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921 that ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat would not work except through the Communist Party’ was later taken mechanistically rather than in a general sense. As a result grave errors were committed everywhere to virtually erase all differences between a Communist Party and a socialist state. The present day revolutionaries should definitely dare correct them. In the light of the bitter experiences of gradual erosion of the distinction between the Party and representative institutions, the gradual conversion of the Communist Party itself into a bureaucratic bourgeois Party and the Party’s claim of the leadership of the state as a monopoly, we should develop a correct and new method to apply class dictatorship and to exercise proletarian leadership over the state. We should firmly grasp that the dictatorship is not that of a Party or a person but that of the class, and the proletarian leadership is not to be claimed as a monopoly but is to be won over through revolutionary practice and to be applied democratically. We must end at the earliest such paradoxical situation that the bourgeois dictatorship with a reactionary essence has been able to mislead the masses by presenting itself in an attractive form but the people’s democratic or proletarian dictatorship with a revolutionary content has had an ugly external form and been discarded by the masses. For this, first of all, it should be established in practice that the Communist Party does not receive the leadership right as a ‘monopoly’ but gets it because of its proletarian revolutionary character, and an institutional mechanism should be ensured for the class and the masses to reject and abandon a Party that has lost its proletarian character. Similarly, it should be firmly grasped and implemented in practice that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the dictatorship of the Party or its higher leadership but a class dictatorship applied through the elected representative organs (i.e. the Soviets or the People’s Council) of the masses. Even though the ‘content’ of the dictatorship is principal, the dialectical principle that if the ‘form’ is not correct it will ultimately hamper upon the ‘content’ should be correctly grasped and implemented. The future of building a new type of state principally rests on this cardinal question.”

This long paragraph is one of the most important contributions of Bhattarai’s article:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat is not that of a Party or a person but that of the class.”

He criticizes the way Lenin’s point about “the dictatorship of the proletariat would not work except through the Communist Party” was later mechanically applied and dogmatically understood after his death.

The consequences were grave errors that virtually erased all differences between a Communist Party and a socialist state. Moreover, the distinction between the party leadership and the proletarian state was not only fuzzy but erased in favor of the dictatorship of the party. With the weakening of the Soviet structure after the Russian Civil War (1917-1923), the party replaced the Soviets (workers councils) as the center of decision-making.

After the civil war, the Soviets as the commune-like structure of decision-making for the dictatorship of the proletariat was never reinstalled and instead the system of Soviets basically became a transmission belt for the decisions made by the party and, mainly, the party’s leadership. The party instrumentalized and replaced the Soviets by monopolizing state power. This created the bureaucratic separation between officials and the masses as well as between the army and the people during the Stalinist era that contributed to the degeneration of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the party, and helped lay the basis for the restoration of capitalism, i.e. the dictatorship of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

The latter contradicted Marx’s, Engels’ and Lenin’s idea to create a new type of state that would break with the historical separation between the army and the people, officials and the masses that characterizes all exploiters’ state in the past. Lenin’s concept of a “state without a standing army, without a police opposed to the people, without an officialdom placed above the people” was betrayed.

The inability of the Bolsheviks to reinstall the autonomy of power of the Soviets as the new type of state created the seed for the degeneration of the Communist party into a new bureaucratic state bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the state capitalist.

There are several historical studies of this period that are worth to examine and that coincides with Bhattarai’s verdict about the increased separation of the officials and the party from the masses. One of them is the four volume work by Charles Bettelheim on Class Struggle in the Soviet Union. The first volume covered the 1917-1924 period while the third volume covers the 1924-1930 period. The third and fourth volume are less known and less read. They cover the period of 1930 to 1940 and argue that the restoration of capitalism was not a post-1956 problem, but right in the 1930s. This, however, is not Bhattarai’s thesis.

Instead, Bhattarai talks about Stalin’s mechanical thinking contributing to the decisive restoration of capitalism later in the mid-1950s under the leadership of Nikita Kruschov. But the degeneration that he talks about in terms of the separation of the state from the masses is well documented in the work of Charles Bettleheim and E. H. Carr.

Bhattarai insist that in light of this restoration of bureaucratic state capitalism, we should develop new methods for class dictatorship and proletarian leadership over the state. These new methods should begin from two assumptions not to be reproduced again in the 21st century:

1) that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not that of a Party or a person but that of the class.

2) the proletarian leadership is not to be claimed as a monopoly but is to be won over through revolutionary practice and to be applied democratically

To claim that proletarian leadership is not the exercise of a political monopoly but is to be won over democratically and through revolutionary struggle does not mean that the proletarian state itself is up for election.

It means that the leadership has to be exercised in a way that decisions are not imposed due a state monopoly in decisions of the party — to the exclusion of the workers (and the people more generally). Decisions are debated and won in ideological struggle. One of the main mechanisms of revisionist “bourgeoisification” of the party was the fact that it was never challenged because of its monopoly in decision-making. This lead to the practice of preaching ideas to people about decisions already made rather than creating open public ideological debates and revolutionary struggles in a more lively, dynamic and extensive society to win people over to ideas to be democratically decided.

Bhattarai calls for an end to the paradoxical situation where a reactionary class dictatorship such as the capitalist state can deceive the masses by presenting itself in a democratic form, while a proletarian dictatorship with a revolutionary content has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the masses by an ugly external form that led to a degeneration in the class content. The Cultural Revolution was precisely Mao’s response to this problem.

C. The Question of Democracy

Bhattarai starts this section by the following principle statement:

“The main essence of the new type of state is dictatorship over the reactionary classes and democracy for the majority of the progressive and patriotic masses. Hence there is a complex dialectical interrelation between applying dictatorship over one particular section of society and availing democracy to the other section. Only in the process of articulating this interrelation that it is possible to build a new type of state. If one attempts to divorce democracy and dictatorship from each other or to merge them both into one, then there occur serious problems and accidents. This has been proved by the bitter experiences of building new type of state in the past century. Democracy and dictatorship are two sides of the same coin. In a class divided society democracy for one class is dictatorship against another class and dictatorship over one class is a democracy for another class. Hence in the new proletarian state to apply dictatorship over the handful of exploiting classes is to provide democracy for the overwhelming masses, and to expand the scope of democracy for the masses is to tighten the noose of dictatorship over the reactionary classes. In this sense democracy is also a form of state and as soon as the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes unnecessary democracy, too, becomes unnecessary or withers away. Hence the revolutionaries should be freed of the hypocritical illusion of absolute democracy or ‘democracy for all’ as spread by the bourgeois.”

Here it becomes very clear that Bhattarai is calling to institutionally further develop the dialectical relation between democracy and dictatorship under the dictatorship of the proletariat in the 21st century and that he is not defending here the revisionist bourgeois notion of a “state for all people” or “democracy for all.”

He states that in the past socialist experience of the 20th century, the relation between the two aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been problematic in two ways:

a) by merging democracy with dictatorship- This is the dogmatic-revisionist deviation under Stalin where the collapse of democracy and dictatorship or the reduction of democracy to dictatorship resulted in the elimination of proletarian democracy and the development of the dictatorship aspects of proletarian dictatorship that led to bureaucratization and state capitalism.

b) by the divorce or separation of dictatorship and democracy- This is the right wing revisionist deviation where the idea of “democracy for all” is opposed in a dualistic way to the exercise of dictatorship leading to the revisionist conciliation with the bourgeoisie.

For Bhattarai, democracy and dictatorship are two sides of the same coin. They go together in dialectical and complex ways. You cannot merge nor separate them. The dictatorship towards one class is the democracy towards another class. If this is the case: Why in the experience of the 20th century more emphasis was put on the dictatorship aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat and no importance was put on the aspect of proletarian democracy?

According to Bhattarai, the exception to this was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (GPCR 1966-1976). So, he calls for taking the best of the GPCR experience and moving beyond in developing the democratic aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat to face a fundamental problem:

“An institutional mechanism should be ensured for the class and the masses to reject and abandon a Party that has lost its proletarian character.”

When the party goes wrong and there is no institutionalized proletarian democratic mechanism to confront it, then the masses are at vulnerable to the revisionist coup. Here is where Bhattarai’s proposal for a multi-party democracy under the dictatorship of the proletariat (not under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) emerge. Bhattarai explains this as follows:

“…as practiced during the GPCR, such methods like guaranteeing the freedom of expression, press, strike etc. for the masses, public criticism of and mass action against persons in high authority of Party and state, etc. should be institutionalized. Also, drawing correct lessons from the bitter experiences of failure of the masses to stage organized rebellion against counter-revolution in the past, we should ensure a system in the new context whereby political parties may be allowed to get organized keeping within definite progressive and revolutionary constitutional limits and they may be encouraged to function not only in a ‘cooperative’ manner but in a ‘competitive’ spirit vis-à-vis the formal Communist Party. There can be no objective and logical reason for the Communist Party claiming itself to be the representative of the majority proletarian and oppressed classes to hesitate to enter into political competition within a definite constitutional framework, once the economic monopoly of the feudal and bourgeois classes over land and capital and military monopoly over the mercenary professional army, which are the sources of their political hegemony, are thoroughly smashed. One should earnestly acknowledge that this is not an advocacy of bourgeois pluralism but is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist method to objectively solve contradictions among the people as long as the class division in society exists. Though it could not be practiced for various reasons in the past, the fact that Mao himself was contemplating in that direction can be deduced from his following statement: ‘Which is better, to have just party or several? As we see it now, it’s perhaps better to have several parties. This has been true in the past and may well be so for the future; it means long-term coexistence and mutual supervision.’ (Mao 1956: 296). Whatever it may be, we should be prudent and daring enough to develop proletarian democracy or people’s democracy as per the new needs of the twenty-first century. This is the rationale of the new decision of our Party, under the leadership of Chairman Com. Prachanda, in relation to the development of democracy.”

This proposal is not saying that with a multi-party system the proletarian dictatorship is up for election. It is saying that political parties can be allowed to get organized only within “definite progressive” and “revolutionary constitutional limits.” If the class nature of the bourgeois state does not change with the change in administration every four years through bourgeois democratic elections, the character of the proletarian state need not be at stake with proletarian democratic elections with parties different from the communist party as long as they respect the constitutional and institutional limits of the proletarian state. Parties that run in the elections would have to respect these limits. If not, dictatorship will be exercise against them. This means that the top leadership of the state in crucial positions such as in the popular army or in other strategic state positions will have to continue in the hands of the Communist party leadership. However, they could also be up for election too as long as they are candidates from the Communist party and show a commitment to defend the proletarian state and improve the processes towards a classless society.

The importance of this proposal is that it offers a way of doing it better in the 21st century by providing an institutional framework that can allow the masses to organize political parties and organizations independently from the Communist Party to challenge it when it goes wrong. So, Bhattarai’s proposal to allow the masses to organize separate parties and organizations within certain constitutional and institutional limits under the dictatorship of the proletariat independently of the vanguard is not about formal democracy but about how to fight and challenge the vanguard so that is does not fossilize and become revisionist and bourgeoisified.

Bhattarai’s article is not questioning the need of a vanguard party but how to avoid the degeneration of the vanguard under the dictatorship of the proletariat and what can be institutionalized to struggle in case it goes wrong.

D. The Question of Armed Force

Bhattarai starts this section by repeating once again the cardinal principles of Marxist theory of the state but this time in relation to the question of the armed forces. In order to be able to operate against the interest of the exploited classes, the oppressors’ state structure need a standing army that is cut off from the masses and at the service of the dominant class. Smashing the old standing army of the state and arming the people to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat is the first step to eliminate the exploiters’ state structure and to form a new type of state. Then Bhattarai goes on to say:

“However, due to different factors as cited earlier, the Red Army in Russia could not fulfill the dream of the Bolsheviks that it ‘would in the near future provide the basis for replacing the regular army by the armed people’. On the contrary, in course of time the Red Army itself got converted into a large professional army and ultimately it became an instrument of counter-revolution. Similarly, the Chinese Red Army, steeled in the twenty-two years long vicious PW, too, gradually changed its color as a standing army after the revolution and ultimately served as a weapon of counter-revolution. On the basis of these bitter experiences and guided by the scientific ideology of Marxism –Leninism-Maoism on the question of army and state we should strive to build a new type of army as a defender of the proletarian state and medium of continuous revolution, which would be equipped with revolutionary ideology and politics, intimately linked with the general masses and capable of organizing rebellion of the armed masses against counter-revolution. In this context we should be serious to implement the following resolution recently adopted by the Central Committee of our Party:

‘….it should be guaranteed that the people’s army of the 21st century is not marked by modernization with special arms and training confined to a barrack after the capture of state power but remains a torch-bearer of revolution engaged in militarization of the masses and in the service of the masses. It is only by developing armed masses from both ideological and physical point of view that one can resist foreign intervention and counter-intervention; this fact must be made clear before the armed forces right from the beginning. The main thrust of work for the 21st century people’s army should be to complete the historical responsibility of developing conscious armed masses so that they may learn to use their right to rebel.’” [CPN (Maoist) 2004:147]

Here is an old idea taken from the dust of history and brought back to the present as a new re-envisioning of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the 21st century. Smashing the old state means at the same time building a new type of state that has a different structure than the old one. A fundamental question in this re-envisioning is the experience of 20th century socialism. What Bhattarai sums up here is how the people’s army in both Soviet Union and China transformed into standing armies that separated from the masses and formed a bourgeois state structure that played in the hands of the revisionist coup to reinstall capitalist state power under the leadership of the new bureaucratic state capitalist class inside the Communist Party.

It is this experience that is fundamental to keep in mind in order to understand Bhattarai’s proposal to organize the new type of state along the lines of the popular army. But what is interesting here is that Bhattarai’s call to move away in the socialism of the 21st century from the standing army model and embrace once again the old proposal of Marx, Engels and Lenin to build a new type of state based on the armed masses (not a professional army), is not his own individual idea but proposed by the CPN(Maoist) since 2001. The document he quotes is the report of the Second National Conference of the CPN (Maoist) held in February 2001.

E. The Question of United Front

In this section, Bhattarai makes a call for a correct united front policy of the proletariat with all exploited classes and oppressed groups. Those groups are, in Nepal, identified as peasants, oppressed nationalities, women, and the dalits in the Hindu caste system.

He makes very clear that the new state in a semi-colonial country has to be the joint dictatorship of several classes and oppressed groups led by the proletariat against imperialism and its local allies. Bhattarai states that “the question of united front is in essence the question of a correct practice of democracy and dictatorship.”

The antagonistic contradictions against the enemy cannot be handled with democratic means and the non-antagonistic contradictions among the people cannot be handled with dictatorial means. The essence of New Democracy is the dialectics between the joint dictatorship against the enemy and the joint democracy within the people. Moreover, against the long tradition of class reductionism in 20th century international communist movement, Bhattarai develops a more subtle and complex analysis of who are the allies of the proletariat and who is the main enemy.

Bhattarai adds the following sum-up from past experience:

“In this context, we should correctly grasp that one of the major reasons for the defeat of the historic Paris Commune was the inability of the Paris workers to materialize a timely united front with the rural peasants and one of the principal problems of socialist construction in Russia was the inability to correctly handle the contradictions among the rural peasants. Particularly in a semi-feudal context like ours, one of the principle basis of building a new type of state would be the correct united front policy with the various strata of the peasants. The revolutionaries should acknowledge this with deep seriousness… Similarly, another big problem encountered while building a proletarian state in the past was related to correctly handling the question of liberation of oppressed nationalities. In the light of all those historical experiences, we should firmly grasp that the best way to solve the national question is to implement the right to self-determination of oppressed nationalities under the leadership of the proletariat according to the concrete time, place and conditions. The new state should strive to correctly handle the national question in the spirit of the following analysis of Lenin:

‘In the same way as mankind can arrive at the abolition of classes only through a transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, it can arrive at the inevitable integration of nations only through a transition period of the complete emancipation of all oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede.’ (Lenin 1916:160)”

The question of the peasants and the oppressed nationalities were not handled correctly in the 20th century experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat such as the Paris commune and the Soviet experience. The question of women liberation and fight against patriarchy is another major task of the new state.

Bhattarai cites “Lenin’s exhortation that ‘the subject most starkly demarcating bourgeois democracy and socialism is the status of women in them’. Hence the specific task of a new proletarian state should be to guarantee special rights to women for a definite period and to ensure them equal rights and status as the men in all spheres.” And, given the specificities of South Asia, Bhattaria said that “the new state should scientifically solve the question of liberation of dalits, who are treated as untouchables according to the Hindu varna (caste) system, and other minority communities oppressed by the old state in different forms.”

It is in the concrete question of the United Front where the discussion about democracy and dictatorship outlined above acquires an important dimension in Bhattarai. He concludes the section with a non-formalistic and non-reductionist articulation of the dialectics between dictatorship and democracy:

“In sum, the real essence and challenge of the new state is to solve the non-antagonistic contradictions among all the oppressed classes, nationalities, regions and gender not through the method of ‘dictatorship’ but through that of ‘democratic centralism’ and to organize a joint dictatorship of all of them against the reactionary classes.”

F. The Question of Construction of Economic Base

This section calls for a dialectical relationship between economic base and the political superstructure of the society. After building a new type of proletarian state (people’s democractic or socialist state) it is imperative to build a corresponding economic base that is planned as opposed to anarchic.

Bhattarai continues:

“Thus the quintessential task of the new type of proletarian state is to end the anarchy of production inherent in the feudal, petty bourgeois, bureaucratic bourgeois, etc. economic systems and to construct large scale planned, balanced, organized and controlled socialist economic system… Moreover, without the development of labour productivity to definite higher levels, the material base for socialism and communism cannot be prepared. For, without sufficient production in society that enables distribution to all “according to necessity”, one cannot materially conceive of classless and stateless communism. Hence the new proletarian state should prepare the economic base for socialism and communism by increasing the capacity of labour through rapid expansion of education and culture and by increasing productivity through maximum utilization of science and technology and organization of large-scale production.”

Here Bhattarai is emphasizing the long term goal of communism. He is saying that without higher levels of productivity it would be materially impossible to achieve a classless and stateless communism. If he would have said just this, the accusation of reproducing the Stalinist fetishism with the forces of production, that was increased by all the revisionists like Kruschov and Deng Xiaoping, would apply to Bhattarai. However, this is what Bhattarai said right after the above outlined paragraph:

“However in the past, particularly in Russia during the period of Stalin, a mechanical and metaphysical conception that the development of productive forces by itself would usher in socialism and communism was prevalent and a wrong outlook prevailed that equated state ownership with ’socialism’. These, of course, were proved wrong by the later developments. The development of the productive forces and state ownership are necessary preconditions for socialism, but they themselves are not adequate and complete. More important than this are the socialist labour relations of production and socialist transformation of all the organs of the superstructure including the state and the development of socialist consciousness of the masses. Drawing lessons from these bitter experiences, Mao’s China, particularly during the GPCR, had developed a new system of socialist economic construction based on the principle of ‘grasp revolution, promote production’, which the present day revolutionaries should emulate and strive to develop further according to the changed circumstances. One should constantly keep in mind that the economic base for socialism and communism can be prepared only by resolving the long-standing contradictions between advanced productive forces and backward production relations, between physical labour and mental labour, between rural and urban areas, between agriculture and industry, between economic production and defense production, etc., through conscious and planned struggles.”

Contrary to RCP accusation, here Bhattarai is acknowledging the achievements of the Cultural Revolution. Developing the productive forces is necessary but not sufficient. By itself, the development of the productive forces is not adequate. Since it is wrong to equate state ownership with socialism, it is also wrong to equate development of the productive forces with advancement towards socialism and communism. Moreover, transformation of the superstructure including the state and the masses’ consciousness is a fundamental task to revolutionarize the society. He finished this section by constantly placing politics in command and arouse the initiative of the masses to lay the foundation of socialism and communism.

G. The Question of International Relations

Here diplomatic relations are subordinated to marching ahead and while resisting imperialism/ expansionism. To achieve this goal, strategically, it is necessary to to unite all the proletarian forces on the basis of proletarian internationalism. Tactically, he calls to take advantage of the inter-imperialist contradictions while maintaining diplomatic relations with all countries on the basis of peaceful coexistence. In the case of Nepal, in particular, he calls to maintain peaceful diplomatic relations with India and China on the basis of non-alignment while marching forward to establish the South Asia Soviet Federation which is a political framework once revolutions are finished in the whole of South Asia. This is how Bhattarai puts it:

“In the past century, even though the more than a dozen of the socialist or people’s democratic states in the world perished mainly due to their own internal causes, there can be no doubt that world imperialist sabotage and interventions played an important secondary role in their downfall. Hence it is imperative for the new type of proletarian state to be built now to follow a policy of marching ahead while resisting against imperialism/ expansionism/hegemonism from the very beginning. For this, it is necessary, on the one hand, to unite with all proletarian forces of the world on the basis of proletarian internationalism, strategically, and on the other, to maintain diplomatic relations with all the countries on the basis of the policy of peaceful coexistence with different state systems and to attempt to derive maximum advantage out of inter-imperialist contradictions, tactically. Within this general policy and in the specific geo-political context of Nepal, we should strive to maintain diplomatic relations with the two immediate big neighbors on the basis of non-alignment and mutual benefits and to march forward to establish South Asian Soviet Federation after completing revolution in whole of South Asia as envisioned by our Party’s Second National Conference held in 2001.”

H. The Question of Continuous Revolution and Withering Away of the State

In this section, Bhattarai further develops the question of what it mean to have a state that continuous revolution to wither away rather than to perpetuate itself. He states in the beginning of this section:

“The main reason why the proletarian state or the dictatorship of the proletariat was termed ‘no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’ by Marx and Engels is that it is not a medium of preserving or defending class contradiction as in traditional class society but is a medium of transition from class society to classless society and the object of withering away of itself in the process. Thus the main essence or particularity of the new type of state is, firstly, that it is the means of continuous revolution against the residual and newly emerging classes, and secondly, that it withers away in the process. This is not separate but a single interrelated process.”

Following Engels, Bhattarai states that the transition to communism is “a transformation from the means of ‘government of persons’ into means of ‘administration of things’.” The end of class contradictions implies the end of the political role of the state as a coercive force, “but the mechanism of voluntary organization to manage the essential goods and services in society remains intact.”

After stating these general principles of the transition to communism, Bhattarai proceed to evaluate the experience of 20th century socialism. He said:

“However, it is a bitter truth that in the past the proletarian state powers instead of serving the masses and acting as instruments of continuous revolution turned into masters of the people and instruments of counter-revolution, and rather than moving in the direction of withering away transformed into huge totalitarian bureaucracies and instruments of repression. The present day revolutionaries should draw appropriate lessons from this and should strive to lay proper foundation for the new type of state from the very beginning. In this context the first thing the new state power should acknowledge and practice from the very inception, as Lenin initially propounded and Mao subsequently raised to a new height, is the concept of GPCR or continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. As the defeated reactionary class can again raise its head in a new form and the material condition of the state power itself can give rise to a new bureaucratic capitalist class from within the revolutionary camp, we should institutionalize a mechanism of continuous struggle with the participation of the wider masses under the leadership of the proletariat in every sphere of the state and the superstructure. In other words, advancing from the GPCR in China we should look for new methods to exercise all round dictatorship over the old and the new reactionary classes and to continue this process till all classes are abolished in society.”

Here the question of “proletarian democracy” is not formalistic bourgeois ideology, but a fundamental question against the degeneration of sections of the Communist leadership into a new reactionary of class known as a bureaucratic bourgeois class. The conscious mass participation of people under the dictatorship of the proletariat is the only mechanism available to counteract a bureaucratic degeneration towards the restoration of capitalist power under the new form of state bureaucratic capitalism.

Bhattarai states:

“…to transfer the state power that had become master of the people in the past into servant of the people and to lead it towards ultimate withering away, methods of ensuring participation of the wider masses in the state or expanding greater democracy in society should be institutionalized. In this context it may be worthwhile to keep in mind the following statement of Lenin:

‘From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism-from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the ’state’ which consists of the armed workers, and which is ‘no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’, the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.’ (Lenin 1917d: 334-5)”

RCP accusation that Bhattarai’s article is about formalistic bourgeois democratic principles, is simply false and a very convenient distortion to make their case against the Nepalese Maoist. Moreover, given Lenin’s call for a “complete democracy” under the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the RCP accusation of Bhattarai as if upholding a formalistic bourgeois democratic conception, would have to be extended to Lenin himself. The call for more democracy is an instrument under the dictatorship o the proletariat to intervene politically without a “greater democracy” under the dictatorship of the proletariat it would simply be impossible for the active participation of the masses to continue the revolution towards a revolutionarization of the relations of production, the state power structures, the division between manual and intellectual labor, the culture and the ideas of the society beyond capitalism and, in the case of Nepal, beyond semi-feudal forms towards communism. So, democracy here is an instrument for continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is why Bhattarai concludes this section of the article with the following:

“Thus, continuous revolution against the residual ‘pugmarks of the old state’ and newly emerging classes and participation of the wider masses in such a continuous revolution is the method of withering away of the state initially hammered by Marx and Engels and later developed by Lenin and Mao. Withering away is, therefore, neither the abolition of the state immediately after the revolution as contended by the anarchists, nor is it first developing in a bureaucratic form like the old state of the bourgeoisie and then miraculously collapsing some day in the distant future as claimed by the revisionists, or more particularly by the dogmato-revisionists. Withering away means cessation of only the ‘political’ function of the state as an instrument of coercion, and it begins on the very day of consummation of the revolution but gets completed only with the total victory over the residual and newly emerging classes through continuous revolution and with the ultimate submersion of the state in the sea of the masses. The new proletarian (including the people’s democratic) state should correctly grasp and implement this, and only in that sense would this state be different or ‘new’ from the old one.”

This is a new type of state. RCP is caught in a model where the Party replaces the proletariat in the process of decision. The dictatorship of the party is not equivalent to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The return to the idea of a new type of state is a return to the spirit of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. What is needed according to Bhattarai is a state with structures that allow the masses to take control over their social existence in all of its dimensions in order to revolutionarize the political, economic, cultural processes towards communism. The vanguard cannot replace the class. It has to serve as a vehicle to guarantee an institutional structure of proletarian democracy and proletarian decision in all aspects of state affairs.

Even if the Party is composed of the most conscious and dedicated people committed to revolution, it cannot replace the proletariat in the name of “representing the interest of the proletariat.” The new type of state should allow the people to organize multiple parties and to have direct democracy in the decision making of the country.

As Bhattarai states in the conclusion of the article:

“Every state is in essence an instrument of dictatorship over certain classes and that of democracy for some others. In this sense dictatorship and democracy remain as two sides of the same coin in every state, and it is just ridiculous to talk of a state with either only dictatorship or only democracy. But it is a great paradox of history that whereas the proletarian state with an essence of dictatorship over the limited exploiting classes and that of democracy for a majority of exploited classes has been denounced as ‘dictatorial’, the bourgeois democracy with an essence of democracy for a handful of exploiting classes and that of dictatorship over the majority of working classes is hailed as an ideal model of universal and eternal democracy.”

It is this paradox that needs to be overcome by developing not only the dictatorship aspect but more importantly the democratic aspect of the proletarian state. Here is a list of the short comings of the proletarian state in the 20th century that Bhattarai listed in the conclusion and that is central to understand the proposals outlined above:

1-practical cessation of differences between the Party and the state
2-gradual inaction and demise of the people’s representative institutions
3-development and expansion of the standing army in place of arming the masses
4-virtual emasculation of the electoral system and freedom of speech and press
5-use of state force to solve contradictions within the Party and among the people
6-lack of people’s participation
7-supervision and intervention in the state affairs and development of totalitarian tendencies

The institutional structures of the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be the same everywhere. We need to avoid the abstract universalism where one model serves all. So, Bhattarai ends the article with an important statement made by Lenin:

“The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Lenin 1917d: 286)

In other words, the essence of the transitional revolutionary state to be built after smashing the old reactionary class state would be dictatorship of the proletariat or democratic dictatorship of the oppressed people. But the political forms of such transitional revolutionary dictatorship can be varied in keeping with different time and places, and we should exercise our revolutionary creativity in practicing and developing such forms.

Particularly in the light of the historical experiences of easy degeneration of the past proletarian states into bureaucratic capitalist states, we should strive to find newer forms of the ‘transitional’ state, which is said to be ‘no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’… The main thing is the correct proletarian outlook of the leadership and the question of ensuring continuous and active participation of the masses in the state affairs. This is the rationale behind our Party’s recent attempt to raise the question of democracy from a new perspective. The proletarian revolutionaries should firmly grasp that the question of democracy and new type of state are inseparably interlinked, and they should initiate the process of withering away of the state by submerging the state in the sea of the great democracy of the masses, as Lenin had said: ‘The more democratic the ’state’… the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.’

In this context, we should defeat the anarchist tendency that denies the very necessity of a transitional state, the Right revisionist tendency that gets swayed by the formal democracy of the bourgeoisie and abandons dictatorship of the proletariat, and the dogmato-revisionist tendency that vulgarizes the proletarian (or people’s democratic) dictatorship into a totalitarian bureaucratic capitalist dictatorship, and must-strive to establish the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought that leads to a classless and stateless communism through continuous revolution and withering away of the state by exercising great democracy under the dictatorship of the proletariat (or people’s democratic dictatorship). In this eventuality nobody can stop our great campaign to build a new type of proletarian state in the 21st century and march towards communism through continuous revolution and withering away of the state.”

Is the dictatorship of the proletariat up for election in Bhattarai’s proposal as is implied by the RCP? No. Is the vanguard in a position of not being able to decide on its own in order to act and lead in moments of military aggression, civil war or serious political crisis? No. What Bhattarai proposes is that the normal functioning of the dictatorship of the proletariat has to be through an open and broad proletarian democracy. But “democratic” here means within certain institutional and constitutional limits. This means that the multiple parties allowed to participate in elections under the dictatorship of the proletariat would have to respect the institutional and constitutional order of the new type of state. Without these constraints, it would not be a proletarian democracy but an anarchy.

All democracies are class democracies and have institutional and constitutional constraints, including bourgeois democracy. Proletarian democracy should not be an exception to this rule. The party for Bhattarai leads by constantly being challenged and challenging the status quo. Otherwise, if it has no challenges from below and from other political parties, it gets fossilized.

The concept of “greater democracy” and “multi-party democracy” proposed by Bhattarai is to enhance the mass intervention over the state affairs under the dictartorship of the proletariat in order to revolutionize the relations of production, the power structures and the old ideas towards a classless, exploitation-less and stateless social system.

This is Bhattarai’s spirit, despite all the distortions made by the RCP and others in the international communist movement. Avakian and his followers defend the one-party system institutionalized by Stalin in the 1930s and accepted as the model for the dictatorship of the proletariat in the 20th century. The only difference is that Avakian proposes a one-party state with more space for dissent, free speech and individual rights guaranteed by a constitution.

But the question that remains is how real proletarian democracy would be in the 21st century if dissent is left to an individual level and if the possibility to organize a political party independent from the Communist Party is forbidden. Is proletarian democracy able to flourish and revive under a Party-State system? That is why Avakian and his followers became obsessed with Bhatarai’s article. They attack anyone who dares to challenge their dogma and propose a “greater democracy” under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The problem that RCP has with Bhattarai’s article is that it challenges precisely this dogma of the 20th century international communist movement.

Avakian’s re-envisioning of communism should really be called “re-cycling of 20th century communism in the 21st century.” There is nothing new under Avakian’s so-called new synthesis. Instead, Bhattarai is making a proposal for a new and different model of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the 21st century based on the mistakes and problems of 20th century communist movement.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Indian Maoists Speak: On Intern’l Controversies Among Communists - Kasama

2009-06-29T23:11:00.003+08:00

This entry focuses on my comments on this letter from the Communist Party of India (Maoist) to the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) published here at the Kasama website. In addition to mine don't miss the very interesting comments of others regarding this letter. I am not myself going to replicate the entire document. First I will lift Kasama's Mike Ely's excerpts from the letter then follow with my own commentary.

Introduction by Mike Ely:

The following document is a major comment by the leading Politbureau of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) on controversies within the international Maoist movement. It was sent to the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) on May 20, 2009, and has now been made public.

As the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has maneuvered on the doorstep of seizing state power, there have emerged a series of open letters from other communist parties — engaging the approach taken by the Nepali Maoists, and struggling over major controversies facing communist revolution internationally.

Previously Kasama published an exchange of letters between the RCP,USA and the UCPN(M). Now we are sharing this document by the Indian Maoists.

For now, we are also making this letter available in pdf format. We will be posting a more readable PDF version, in pamphlet format, Monday evening.

* * * * * * *

“…in the name of struggle against dogmatism, there have been serious deviations in the International Communist Movement (ICM), often going into an even greater, or at least equally dangerous, abyss of right deviation and revisionism. In the name of creative application of Marxism, communist parties have fallen into the trap of right opportunism, bourgeois pluralist Euro-Communism, rabid anti-Stalinism, anarchist post-modernism and outright revisionism…

“‘Fight against dogmatism‘ has become a fashionable phrase among many Maoist revolutionaries. They talk of discarding ‘outdated’ principles of Lenin and Mao and to develop MLM in the ‘new conditions‘ that are said to have emerged in the world of the 21st century. Some of them describe their endeavour to ‘enrich and develop‘ MLM as a new path or thought, and though this is initially described as something confined to revolution in their concerned country, it inexorably assumes a ‘universal character’ or ‘universal significance‘ in no time. And in this exercise individual leaders are glorified and even deified to the extent that they appear infallible. Such glorification does not help in collective functioning of Party committees and the Party as a whole and questions on line are hardly ever raised as they stem from an infallible individual leader. In such a situation it is extremely difficult on the part of the CC, not to speak of the cadres, to fight against a serious deviation in the ideological-political line, or in the basic strategy and tactics even when it is quite clear that it goes against the interests of revolution. The ‘cult of the individual’ promoted in the name of path and thought provides a certain degree of immunity to the deviation in line if it emanates from that individual leader.”

* * * * * * *

Commentary by Stephen David Mauldin

The excerpts provided by Mike Ely above do not entirely pertain to the Maobadi in Nepal. The main thrust of the letter is in its admonition of the Maobadi claim to be functioning in a localized form of 21st Century Communism that is supposed to have universal application. This is a straw man argument in itself. Instead they are emphasizing the objective conditions in Nepal requiring a particular mode of tactics in practice: the universal message is that particular modes of practice for particular objective conditions are needed not that the modes of practice of Nepal should be applied universally. The theoretical debate over strategy is of a completely different register.

My commentary is far short of a comprehensive response to the letter. Rather I point to a key weakness in its summary paragraphs at the end - to include the following quote:

Now that the government headed by comrade Prachanda has collapsed after the withdrawal of support by the UML and others at the behest of the Indian ruling classes, American imperialists and the local reactionaries, the Party leadership should be better placed to understand how the reactionaries can manage the show from the sidelines or outside and obstruct even moves such as sacking of the Army chief by a Prime Minister.

A lot that needs to be discussed regarding this entire letter – not to dismiss that at all, but this conclusion at the end is suspect. It demonstrates a very elementary mistake about current Maobadi tactics that any consistent following of the recent history and understanding of the theoretical line of Mao’s democratic centralism should make clearly visible.

Surprisingly it follows the propaganda of the NC/UML assertion that the Maoist government collapsed. In fact the PM and the rest of the Maoists made a decision to resign because they are confident that in actually running of the government is relatively an unimportant and unproductive front in the process of seizing state power. This move was done at the behest of no one other than themselves once the UML and the Tarai Parties succumbed to an opportunistic line.

The fact is the government of the UML is unable to effectively function without the Maoists and the latter nonetheless maintain power in the largest number of Constituent Assembly seats and even more significantly in the streets. The characterization of the Maoists as being on the sidelines rather than still in the position of greatest actual power by virtue of the more important fronts (the CA and the streets)is very ironic. Its as though the CPI writer(s) themselves are glorifying the importance of multi-party parliamentarian government over the revolutionary tactics of the Maobadi.

Furthermore it is necessary to remember the Maobadi possess a militant advantage in the combined arms of the PLA, the Unions and the YCL. The Maoists are by no means a power that has been vanquished by the reactionaries simply by virtue of the reactionaries having stymied civilian government control of the military though collusion of a corrupt Supreme Court and the illegal acts of a President. Blockage of the functioning of the house will continue and the people in the streets will also force the eventual reversal of the president’s reinstatement of Katawal. The option remains to resume armed rebellion as the quickest route to seize state power – the decision has been to not exercise that route as yet.

The UML led government is not in fact a led government. It is a squabble over gaining political advantages – the NC over the UML, the Tarai parties over the UML and NC and within the internal divisions in these parties. We are seeing the reconfigurations of the reactionaries that will be at play if the UCPN (M) chooses to return to participation in the government and to its actual leadership. Revolution is indeed through the barrel of a gun, that is how the Maobadi got to where it is and the gun is still in their hands when and if they use the fronts of the CA and the streets to return to government – if they must these guns will be used.

One last very important point: much has been made of the Maoists participation in multi-party politics involving power-sharing with reactionary parties, but this is not what they want as a strategy while engaging in such as a tactic. Be clear that democratic centralism is about a coalition of parties serving the oppressed classes in eliminating the power of parties of the oppressor classes.

When we hear the international influences and the NC and opportunists reacting to the establishment of civilian supremacy by the Maoist led coalition of oppressed classes, it is always the cry of “they want a dictatorship!”. They are right, but not in the sense they wish us to believe. Such a coalition is a dictatorship, a dictatorship of the proletariat. Such a state is to then to wither away as the position of the reactionaries becomes meaningless, powerless.

Thus can state power be seized, gun in hand but with as little blood spilled as possible. There is a unified front among the Maoists with regard to the reactionaries while there continues theoretical debate about how much militant force is applied in practice. Its clear how much the CPI writers are calling for. These calls for immediate full scale violence are unwise considering the economic and social conditions of Nepal. These need to be addressed for some time while the people learn through practice what the communist hypothesis actually entails.

There are really very few true communists in Nepal. The Maoist leadership are communists, but the great bulk of the people behind them are simply oppressed classes having been screwed since time out of mind. They want a life which is tolerable and will fight for it if necessary having no real comprehension of what Mr. Mao had to say. In time through practice they can learn, but the important thing is to get them fed and educated and benefiting from a tolerable national infrastructure using tactics that keep this in mind.

Yes, tactics that involve engagement of capitalist modes of production and the global “capitalo-parliamentarian’ (Badiou) coordinates of power means playing a dangerous game. The well known capacity for the acquisition of power by reactionary forces in such a game are well known. However, to label the Maobadi as revisionist and opportunist and to therefore in effect serve the reactionaries both counters the novel unfolding of 21st century communism in Nepal and seems to imply they are so stupid they don’t understand the lessons of history. They understand quite well and they have not forgotten to arm the people.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Revolution in Nepal: Presentation to Union of Iranian Progressives

2009-06-27T00:23:00.041+08:00

I thought it telling somehow that my recent trip to Nepal, culminating in an interview with C.P. Gajurel (that receiving a wider audience mainly through its re-publication by the Kasama site and by the site Democracy and Class Struggle), resulted in interest and inquiry, not from American or British leftists, but from leftists in Turkey for example and particularly from Iranian progressives in the U.S. - by the time I arrived in San Francisco it had already been arranged that I would speak to the Union of Iranian Progressives in Los Angeles.

The presentation had been arranged prior to the astounding recent developments in Iran. Obviously the event was eclipsed by the more important need for an explosive emotional response from the members of the audience to the unfolding events. I did have an opportunity to get to my presentation (in a much truncated version) late in the evening's agenda and I did gain some recognition and appreciation of my main points in the context of the current revolt - especially from those present who experienced the revolutionary events in Iran in 1979.

Essentially my point was that the uprising and revolt in Iran today can be the seed of a revolution, or maybe the resurrection of the truly revolutionary cause of 1979, but it is not properly a revolution since this is not an armed rebellion. One cannot minimize the current revolt on the streets of Tehran , its important, but it is quite distinct from the very similar appearing struggle in the streets of Kathmandu. Among the questions afterward was the predictable one. The questioner pointed out that Gandhi made changes without a gun. Well, what to do but point out India today. More experienced listeners echoed the "hardliners" among the Maoists - questioning whether the Prachanda/Bhattarai line smacks of revisionism. Again, my response pointed to the fact that the real threat of armed rebellion was nonetheless the key leverage behind the tactics involved in engaging global capitalists and multi-party politics. This argument was the key message to the Iranian comrades about the Maobadi and what this portends for the long run of any true revolution in Iran.

I want to share some of the power point slides of the presentation and some notes for them. I have two reasons for this beyond simply information to all other readers of this entry. One is to give anyone who attended the presentation in LA a more fully developed concept of what I wanted to say. The other is in anticipating the content for those who have invited me to speak in Washington to the Iranian Leftists there - a presentation I am happy to say is being rescheduled for a couple of weeks later or longer, when as I will explain, it may be better for a situation residual to the ending of the active revolt at this time.

Let me say once more that the present revolt in Iran is an inspiring development for all who hope for world emancipation from elitist coordinates of power, religious or secular. However, the coordinates of power are not really in much danger of being undermined as long as there is no leadership or militant capacity of the people. As Savoj Zizek states in his new article replicated in this blog yesterday:

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others.

True, if an increment of emancipatory change occurs following a few weeks of bloodshed it would be a kind of result, maybe even justifying result, but it would not be a solution to the systemic problem of class society, of the existence of an oppressor class. That takes a Revolution, something never allowed by elite classes with a standing army to protect their hegemony over the rest. Let me turn to the presentation.

The opening slide 1 (click to enlarge - back arrow to return to text):

Nepal: An Anti-Feudal and Anti-Imperialist Peoples Revolution

1. An individual perspective: the popular revolt and leadership of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

2. A brief historical overview: orientation to recent developments and factors in the current situation

3. The important possibilities of people power : “the revolutionary front on the streets”

4. Opinion: theoretical basis of the novel manifestation of the communist hypothesis by the Maoist Party

Slides 2 and 3 Why I am speaking and quotes that are key to the narratives that follow:

1. Brief on background to presentation: Personal and professional history in conflict resolution including work and life in former Soviet Union, Central Asia and China then tours in Nepal. Writing on the Maobadi and on study of modern continental philosophers on communism - Savoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. Recent interviews with Maoist leaders being published on a number of websites.

2. The Zizek quote on Lenin:

"Lenin's obsessive tirades against formal freedom worth saving today; when he underlines that there is no pure democracy, that we should always ask whom a freedom under consideration serves, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true choice. Formal freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while actual freedom designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates"

Narrative: It is important to ask if the revolt in Iran must be carried forward to armed revolution if in fact there is to be actual freedom by destroying the elitist coordinates of power. By this definition we can grasp that nothing but dictatorship exists even in the case of multi-party parliamentarian government. Because the Maoists of Nepal have fought an armed revolution and have the capacity to resurrect it, the revolt on nepal has a potential far more potent than what is present in Iran today and this is an important message for the Iranian people.

3. The Badiou quote on the communist hypothesis:

"What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labor to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.“

Narrative: The quote defines an egalitarian maxim, probably only approached with radical transformation of human nature. He suggests emergence of the hypothesis in evolving manifestations throughout history and the future. He also emphasizes the necessity of novelty in the character of each successive manifestation and that the process requires a revolutionary faith. The presentation speaks to the great experiment of Nepal as novel 21st century communism and how it informs revolutionary possibilities in the objective conditions of Iran.

Slides 4-6 A brief History of Imperialist Intervention and Peoples Revolution

Narrative: The slides will provide a more detailed outline of the history while I simply outline the major aspects and the most recent developments since 1990 - it is key to understand that revolutions are characterized by the specific objective conditions at hand, this is true for Iran as it has been for Nepal:

1. Parliamentary government replacing a monarchy with a constitutional monarchy began as early as 1990 – it proved to be completely ineffective in ending semi-feudal conditions and simply magnified the role of oppressor classes.

2. So violent revolution ensued 1996 for 10 years – essentially reaching a military stalemate between the RA and the PLA

3. Indian hegemony behind the RA made a turn in facilitating Maoist entry into multi-party politics in hope of a leftist buffer & resolving armed conflict

Narrative: This was the situation in 2005-6 when I made my first tour of Nepal. Again, I am aiming to illustrate the objective conditions which are no doubt very different from those in Iran while the dialectic of theory and practice there holds key lessons for the future of other nations.

4. Indians lost a large degree of control when surprisingly the Maoists won a major share of the CA and began to lead the government

5. The reactionaries provided as much impediment to the Maoists as possible, culminating in blocking Maoist’s mandatory requirement for civilian control over the NA and PLA integration

Narrative: The Maoists attempt to establish civilian supremacy and the subsequent resignation from government took place during my recent tour April to June 2009. The absolute necessity of putting an end to the standing army of the reactionaries is a major axiom of seizing actual state power anywhere be it Nepal or Iran.

6. Maobadi decided to withdraw from the government front but still controls the political situation from the CA and the streets

7. The newly formed government is locked in internal power struggles, the functioning of the house is blocked by Maoist insistence on civilian control, the streets are becoming increasingly violent

Narrative: Let me begin to recap in more detail the nature of the current situation. The objective conditions of Nepal are unique to Nepal; however, if Iran is to approach a republic of the peoples through multi-party parliamentary government, the story in Nepal can be very instructive:

1. The Nepali Congress party as you see has been supported by the Indians since 1951. Today the NC holds only 114 of the 601 seats in the constituent assembly, but they still effectively represent the landowners and a semi-feudal society as well as the imperialistic Indian hegemony.

2. In 1990 when popular uprising against the monarchy resulted in establishment of a constitutional monarchy, the next decade of so-called “democracy” was dominated by the NC.

3. In the struggle for land reform and other countering of Indian hegemony the United Marxist Leninist party has played a role, but the UML despite its apparent communist orientation is not revolutionary is revisionist and has demonstrated repeated collaboration with the reactionaries.

4. The UML holds 109 seats in the CA and with backing by the NC now participating in government following the resignation of the Maoists, are attempting to lead the new government.

5. The UCPN (M) controls 234 seats of the CA and alone cannot control the government with a majority of 301, though larger than NC/UML at 221.

6. More significantly must garner a 2/3 vote to pass even a single provision of the new constitution. So the task is to get support from UML defectors or from the balance of 144 in the total 601.

Slide 7 Current Socio-Economic Status of Nepal – The Legacy of Dictatorship of the Reactionaries

Narrative: While you read about conditions in Nepal illustrating the effects of rule by the oppressor classes I will fill in some details about the very recent history leading to the Maoist government resignation:

1. It is very significant that the Maoist support is drawn from the oppressed classes as opposed to the oppressor classes who support the NC along with the collaborators within the UML.

2. Maoist support is not predominantly hard core communist – the people are not theoretically grounded, but they are learning though practice. The Maoists are pursuing a tactic of democratic centralism (much more on this later)

3. The Indian hegemony concerns not just Indian imperialism but also a cultural oppression in the form of the class divisions formed by the caste system, which at – these comprise again the polarity of NC and Maobadi supporters.

4. The imperialist and cultural class divisions at the same time involve the division of landholders and landless peasants an issue which is numerically greater in the Tarai regions of Nepal.

Slide 8 The Constituent Assembly Tasked With Creating New Nepal’s Constitution

Narrative: I have put up the numbers I briefly introduced a few minutes ago. Its a complex picture. Now you can look these over a bit while I give you a thorough analysis:

1. The key seats in this scenario are 81seats of that remaining 144. These 81 are formed by a coalition of parties representing the objectives of the ethnic and regional objectives of the Tarai region, the border regions with India, with its own mix of oppressed classes and caste divisions.

2. The Maoists led the government less than a year. They did manage to collect a good amount of funds for development projects but there were obvious difficulties in implementing programs because of the political conditions.

3. Nonetheless considerable planning and evolution of the political infrastructure for development occurred with the help of the Tarai factions and some among the UML despite on-going hindrances of the NC and other international influences.

4. The Maobadi have struck a balance between the vested interests of the Indians and the Chinese while also seeking relationship with socialist countries who can serve as models and economic support.

5. Of particular note is the vast hydropower resources of Nepal (ironic given most of the country is currently without power and even Kathmandu experiences power shut downs several hours a day). Significant assistance from Norway has been a specific accomplishment of the Maoists.

6. There is no doubt the Maoists have had a long term sometimes collaborative relationship with the Indians themselves, but the relationship developing with the Chinese has also opened an avenue for leverage to remove and replace long standing treaties over-balanced in Indian favor.

7. A very important factor during recent years and particularly during the months in government leadership is the Maobadi increasing their militant strength. Once they entered the cities, especially in Kathmandu, they quickly infiltrated all the unions and student bodies. They have grown the YCL a lot. It is an open secret that the union members as well as the YCL are now well armed and are a significant addition to the PLA as a threat of armed revolt.

Narrative: Given the Maoists have been able to make some progress in solidifying their power and moving towards development of Nepal’s infrastructure and hydropower potential, why you may ask have they resigned from government?

1. The fact is actual state power does not exist without civilian supremacy over the standing army. The integration of the Peoples Liberation Army sequestered in a number of cantonments with the former Royal Army, now the National Army has made no progress.

2. The NA is de facto the standing army in service not to Nepal but to the reactionary parties, the NC in particular and even the still active royalists. The PLA still exists with easy access to weapons and to some extent the people supporting the Maobadi are armed.

3. Also the judiciary, the Supreme Court, its members having gained office during the prior decade under the king and the political influence of the NC, has hardly been a supportive element to the Maoist agenda. Corruption in Nepal is blatantly systemic.

4. The sequence leading to the present impasse began with the Maoist led government moving to prevent the extended tenure of 8 NA generals, insisting they be retired. The decision was effectively blocked by a stay order from the Supreme Court.

5. The Maobadi then sought removal of the Chief of the NA alleging that he had defied civilian control and breached the terms of a 2006 peace deal. The government fired him, but immediately the ceremonial President of the republic reversed the government’s order on a very flimsy legal basis.

6. In seeking to force the President to reverse his order the Maoists were deserted by their coalition allies in government, the UML as well as the factions from the Tarai.

7. PM Prachanda promptly resigned himself and the UCPN (M) from government rather than accept a situation of dual power with the Army backed by reactionary parties. An Indian puppet state was just as quickly instituted through the NC support of a government formally led by the UML.

8. The resignation occurred in early May initiating all kinds of dispute over interpretations of the interim constitution and the blockage of action in the house by the Maoists insisting on a debate within the CA over the president’s reinstatement of the army chief. Mass protests are underway by the people in support of the Maoist demands.

Slides 9 through 11 The Primary Front: The People Take the Streets (Frequently as Whenever Necessary)

Narrative: I'll be showing some slides taken during my participation in some of the mass protests. It looks a lot like what is happening in Iran these recent days. There is a big difference though. You will not see heavy handed interference form the police or the army. The fact is the reactionaries are helpless to stop the people from shutting down the infrastructure and rightfully fear an armed uprising from the combined militant power of the PLA, Unions and YCL.

1. As we speak, the UML and the NC have haggling factions over key leadership positions. The UML is in clear danger of a split. The three factions comprising the critical block of CA votes from the Tarai are in deep conflict with the UML over power positions and likewise experiencing their own internal rifts.

2. The Maoists are being cajoled daily by the all parties trying to administer the state to return to participation in government, but the Maoists will not budge on the requirement of removal of Katawal and civilian supremacy in the integration process. The Constituent Assembly is at a standstill and the only place where any power is being exercised is in the streets.

Narrative: I want to share what it was like to see first hand the energy and dedication of the people in revolt. One sees the spirit of this revolt everywhere. Everyone is reading the news and discussing the situation and practically every day there are marches and demonstrations like the ones shown above. Most important however in contrast to the situation in Iran is the degree of organization behind these struggles in the streets of Nepal. I interviewed several leaders at different levels of responsibility during May. Discussion about these interviews will clarify what I mean by the organizational quality of the peoples revolt in Nepal.

Slide 12 Grassroots of the Peoples Movement - The Union Affiliation with the Maobadi

1. Of particular note and not well known outside of Nepal is the revolutionary power that has grown within the union movement. A very typical example is the All Nepal Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. This is where I started making interviews. The discussion of my interactions with this union are chronicled at my website here.

2. I met Pushpa Kunwar, a young Maoist organizer in 2006. He is the manager of the Vaishali Hotel and has worked there 13 years. He has also been an international martial arts competitor an a leading organizer of the union activity in his district and area.

3. Puspa related a history of the union going back several years. Before it was affiliated with the the National Congress Party. They never helped the rank and file, they were focused on collecting money from the hotel owners. When the Maoists came to the city they very quickly recruited Puspa and young men like him and the union has become strong.

4. The objective of the Maobadi was to help the members in practice to begin ending their exploitation. Of course some like Puspa were drawn to the theory and membership in the Party. Most who gain rank in the Union have a rank also in the Party.

5. Prakash Shrestha is a central Committee Member of the UCPN (M), a former PLA combatant. Before joining the PLA he worked as a wage slave for a 5 star in India. He took an active role in organizing the Hotel and Reastraunt Workers when the Maoists left the jungles for the city. I will share some of our discussions.

6. Prakash Shrestha eloquently defended the Maobadi in its conscious attempt to understand and avoid the mistakes of 20th century communist revolutions while recovering and reenacting the positive strategies of the Paris Commune, Lenin's Soviets and Mao's Cultural Revolution.

7. Prakash Shrestha responded regarding the RCPUSA attacks (to paraphrase): "We carefully read their ideas, about 23 pages of their ideas. We felt Comrade Bob is a very smart man and should understand our position, so we prepared a detailed response".

I said something like: "Yes, many of us have read that response and understood and support your answers and clarifications and attempt to have the RCP understand and agree with the Maobadi line - but it seems they continued to send more instructions to the Maobadi which were not answered."

PS: "We will complete our revolution and this will be evidence that Comrade Bob is wrong."

8. I brought up the fact that standing army, the NA cannot continue if there is to be peoples supremacy - the growing possibility of a showdown. I wondered if should the NA stage a military coup that this a serious threat to the revolution. Would it therefore be a mistake to continue to provoke the NA such as with the dismissal of the generals and the call for resignation of Katawal?

PS: We don't think the NA would dare to do this. They are well aware of the people's support for the Maobadi and such a move would lead to a mass insurrection.

SDM: But isn't it true that the NA is a more powerful force than the PLA? The people may protest but they are not an army - plus wouldn't widespread insurrection simply lead to chaos and the possibility of intervention from India?

Puspa: If the Indians intervened directly what do you think the Chinese would do?

PS: There are reasons to say the Indians would not directly intervene. For one thing they have a problem within their own Army because a good percentage are of Ghurka ethnicity and loyal to Nepal. Then not only the Chinese, but also what may happen with Northern India's Naxalite Maoists. It is not just the PLA that would fight. There is the numbers of the union cadre, the YCL and others who would fight.

SDM: I understand that the goal would be to arm the people, but what about now. Are you saying the people have weapons now? Is there some supply of weapons for the people already?

This is when I first learned that in fact the Maobadi have made weapons available to the unions and the YCL. Some have questioned my saying so in print - but I assure you it's an open secret in Nepal.

Slide 13 - All Nepal Federation of Unions

Narrative: The information about the organized unions being armed was verified again when I interviewed Ganesh Regmi, General Secretary of the Maoists' affiliated All Nepal Federation of Trade Unions. I visited the headquarters and saw there were over 30 such trade unions.

1. The very day of my visit he was quoted in the papers saying "Katawal represents the remnants of the former past, to wipe him out we are ready to capture the Army Headquarters even". My meeting was covered in my blog entries here.

2. I pursued the question of whether the Unions present a militant stance in their close affiliation with the Maobadi. I discussed with him it being axiomatic in revolutionary theory that the people need to be armed. We discussed that a UML leader, Oli, had claimed to have evidence the Maobadi have secured arms with intention of a new uprising to take state power. I asked him directly "Are the people in your unions ready to fight if necessary?". He answered simply.

GR: It is our opinion that the people are ready.

Narrative: Following interactions with the Maoist affiliated unions I made arrangements with their help to meet the leadership of the Communist Youth League, the YCL. This happened at the end of a major rally in protest of the Katawal re-reinstatement by the President and prior to PM Prachanda's resignation over the issue of civilian supremacy over the National Army. After hearing from the unionleaders their indication of capacity and desire to attack the National Army I was curious to know more about the position of the YCL in this regard.

Slide 14 People Power: The PLA Plus the Youth Communist League and Unions

Narrative: My blog entry on the discussion with YCL leaders is posted here. Comrade Pun told me his basic story over the course of our talk. His relationship to the YCL spans twenty years and before it was affiliated as an organ of the Maobadi. When the Peoples War broke out his "team" executed successful attacks on the district police, which is how they got weapons. In time Comrade Pun was captured however. He spent four years incarcerated, escaped, and went totally underground were he continued to gain greater responsibility fighting in the PLA. About three years ago the Party decided he would begin to lead the YCL. At the time he was Commander of the PLA 4th Division. At this point he is no longer officially part of the PLA, but of course he has close ties.

The most significant exchange was:

SDM: One main question for me is whether the masses involved are not only concerned with their regional, cultural or other unique requirements but also aware and committed to the communist hypothesis we have been discussing - that they fully understand it.

GMP: We can't copy what was done by others before, by Lenin or Mao, but we can learn from mistakes made then and in more recent revolutionary movements. Our YCL people understand and I would say 60% of the people creating the New Nepal government fully understand.

SDM: Lately there has been the obvious possibility of a military coup. One wonders about the capacity of the people to resist takeover by the reactionaries. The PLA will need the help of the armed masses, particularly the YCL and the Union members and others. But are they ready?

GMP: Because we have been in government and in the majority the situation has given us greater access to the internal conditions of the NA.

SDM: Yes, this has been characterized by the reactionaries as trying to destroy the morale of the NA with lies about the "soft coup" and other politicization of the issues.

GMP: There are actually two factions in the NA and two levels at which this split is evident (he drew a diagram in my notepad). We see there is already a morale problem in the rank and file of the NA because of the existing class divisions.

SDM: You mean there are a significant number of lower ranked soldiers who feel oppressed by the traditions of the officer corps?

GMP: Yes, that, but also more. Among the officers, led by some generals is a faction counter to the royalist mindset. Among the reactionaries are those who I would call "progressive". They are very nationalistic.

SDM: Do you mean to say you think there is an inclination in the NA to cooperate with the Maobadi led government, to be more in compliance?

GMP: We believe that a political solution is still possible because of this division within the NA itself.

Slide 15 The Demand for Civilian Supremacy in the Army Integration Process

Narrative: It remains to be seen if Com. Pun’s optimism regarding the internal weakness of the reactionaries within the ranks of the NA will preclude a military confrontation with the combined forces of the PLA, YCL and the Unions.

Clearly there is no possibility of a communist revolution or any revolution succeeding as long as there is a standing army in opposition, so the integration and rehabilitation process had to be brought to a critical state of political confrontation. Soon after the interview with Com. Pun I attended a press conference as seen in these photos. This is May 4, the day PM Prachanda resigned. I will now outline in more detail the process leading to the Maobadi leaving government:

1. The first major step taken by the Maobadi was to head a government directive to not extend the tenure of 8 NA generals, in effect requiring that they were now eligible to retire and must do so.

2. The reactionary counter move was based on the emphasis in the interim constitution on major decisions being reached by consensus if at all possible and by majority if not by consensus. On that basis the Supreme Court, made up of judges appointed in previous regimes, issued a stay order to further consider the matter.

3. The Maobadi argued this was absurd: there should never be a question of civilian control over the military because as proven by history this always opens the door to military coup.

4. The NC, having chosen not to participate in the Maoist led government remember, were not only backing publicly the SC, but actively proclaiming the Maoist removal of the Generals as an attempt to seize state power and establish a communist authoritarian dictatorship.

5. At the same time there was an influx of Indian emissaries on the scene to meet with reactionary party leaders and Army Chief Katawal was taking clearly political positions, even proposing his own version of constitutional structure.

6. Katawal’s politicization of the military had been a growing concern and the increased support he was now getting from the Indian establishment through the NC and other parties led the Maoist’s government to fire him.

7. Immediately, however, even though the interim constitution clearly places executive power in the PM and the cabinet the PM controls, the President, a largely subservient role in the interim government arrangement and a leader of the UML, stepped in and reversed the order to fire Katawal.

8. The Maoists declared the Presidents move illegal but the coalition members led by the UML and followed by the Tarai based parties took the opportunity to not follow suit.

9. Rather than accept a situation of dual power with the opposition essentially forgoing civilian supremacy over the NA, the PM resigned and the UCPN (M) pulled out of government

Slide 16 Opinion on the theoretical basis of the novel manifestation of the communist hypothesis envisioned by the Party

1. All of the Maoist leaders are well versed in Marxism Leninism and Maoism and they were all experienced combatants. Mohan Baidya was in the late 80s the leader of one of the main communist parties. Baidya and Gajurel ended up for long periods in Indian prisons. Prachanda led the 1996 armed revolution from the jungles beginning in 1996.

2. But it is Dr. Bhattarai who has provided the deepest most insightful analysis of the objective conditions of the revolutionary situation in Nepal and who has brilliantly elucidated the importance of the models provided by the Paris Commune, Lenin’s Soviets and by the lessons of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

3. The most significant thing about Bhattarai’s theoretical stance, in my opinion – as I will discuss in more detail later, is the emphasis on Mao’s concept of democratic centralism. I think this is the cornerstone of the Nepal Maoist position and much misunderstood by critics of the Maobadi engagement of multi-party politics.

4. The nature of the internal debates within the CPN (M) is well understood by the events last November when the Maoists had a major conference of the cadre (my coverage of the debates is here). Much has been made of there being a serious threat of Part schism over the Prachanda/Bhattarai line of engagement with imperialist powers. But nothing could be more wrong I think.

5. Prachanda in particular has employed a tactic of emphasizing the policy of democratic engagement with all the parties in a vision of parliamentary government solving the nation’s semi-feudal conditions and infrastructural problems – especially in efforts to engage Norway in developing the immense potentials for hydro-power production.

6. In his tenure as Finance minister Bhattarai developed a plan of economic development which is both highly detailed and technical while at the same time deemed by most of the world as highly idealistic in its vision of solving the economic disparities of oppressed masses. It will also involve Nepal in close relations to imperialistic and global capitalistic dangers.

Slide 17 The Interview with C. P. Gajurel

Narrative: Just before I left Nepal my friends in the Union secured an interview for me with C.P. Gajurel one of the Maoist leaders. Comrade Gajurel, like Comrade Baidya did not participate in the running of the government. His role has been in leading the Party's International Relations Department, which also publishes the Party's main periodical organ "The Worker". The full interview is available on my website here.

1. In 2003 Comrade Gajurel was arrested India. Nepali and foreign supporters, including several international communist parties launched a campaign to have him released. In April 2005 a team of European human rights activists was allowed to meet Gajurel in prison. His supporters feared that he would be extradited to Nepal and tortured by Nepali authorities. After the CPN (M) and the government of Nepal signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, India dropped charges against Gajurel, of "conspiracy against India". He was released in November 2006 and returned to Nepal

2. SDM: So is was true that from the time of negotiations through Prachanda’s recent resignation there was initially a drawing back from an aggressive revolutionary process as before and a new and different way of building the mass base. Would you say those tactics are over now? What are the new tactics, will we see a renewed aggressive revolutionary movement?

3. CPG: The Prime Minister’s resignation was not a big thing for us. Our movement has been working on three fronts and the participation in government was the least important. The experience of being in government was not a failure; it contributed to our revolutionary process in many ways. The issue we raised of civilian supremacy over the army has demonstrated to the people the truth of the situation, the other parties are against supremacy of the people. More important is the Constituent Assembly front where more focus can be on creation of the New Nepal constitution. Our tactics remain the same as to the remaining two fronts, the CA and the streets. We boycotted the selection of the new PM and abandoned the government front for better political benefits from action in the more important and effective fronts. We will use our greater numbers in the CA to create a constitution that will transform Nepal, creating a socialist economy meeting the needs of all the oppressed populations.

4. The question remains. Will the Nepali Maoists manifest a novel form of communism in their vision of a people’s republic? There is nothing about this vision that a priori precludes the possibility of revolution against the logic of class despite the obvious dangers. We are in a completely different historical period calling not for a victory of the hypothesis as it existed and ultimately succumbed in prior phases, but as it calls for practice in the context of conflict between old and new theory in the modern context – Badiou:

Slide 18 Badiou Quote:

"In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.“

1. It is certainly a good description of the world condition today with regard to hopes of an egalitarian society to say we are in a reactionary interlude. This interlude ha been manifest in Iran since 1979 in various phases just as it has been in Nepal since 1990. There is a big difference between the uprisings on the streets in Tehran and those in Kathmandu however.

2. The relatively rapid transitions in Nepal in the direction of ending oppressor classes have been a result of armed resurrection, plain and simple. Multi-party parliamentary participation by the Maoists instituted since 2006 still maintains a militant capacity. This is essentially why it is wrong to accuse the Maobadi of repeating the pattern of bourgeois democracy.

3. The coordinates of power in Iran can only provide the people with a formal choice between different oppressor class leaders. It was not that the election was stolen from anyone who was truly acceptable as a leader of a peoples democracy. The message of the Nepali Maoists is that a constituent assembly of multi-party interests representing oppressed classes may possibly create an interim state to wither away over a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers. That part of the story is not over yet.

4. The people of Iran can gain from the experience of the people of Nepal: from the universal novel theoretical understanding of revolution that has evolved there while in considering the singular local conditions of Iranian society when putting theory into practice. At the moment those conditions include a standing army in service to the reactionaries and little in the way of militant capacity in the hands of the people.

5. The Maoists in Nepal have chosen to stand-down from armed rebellion though clearly it is that capacity which allows them to continue to apply pressure in demonstrations in the street and in blocking the functioning of the constituent assembly. This is how we will soon see them back in government having obtained civilian supremacy over the reactionary army. While in Iran more deaths will occur among dwindling protests, many will remain in jail, many will begin to simply disappear and until such time as there grows actual revolution in Iran there will be no actual freedom.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Savoj Zizek: Will the Cat Above the Precipice Fall Down

2009-06-26T10:02:00.003+08:00

Slavoj Žižek contributed to Support for the Iranian People 2009

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

A Question Over Iran: Can the People Make History or Not?

2009-06-25T10:24:00.002+08:00

by Mike Ely at Kasama

There is a self-deceptive politics (among some leftists) that seeks to prettify all kinds of reactionary forces that (for one reason or another) are in opposition to U.S. imperialism — including Islamic reactionaries, Kim Jung Il, “hardline” revisionists of the Li Peng and Eric Honecker type and so on.

And in the process they have a real, almost startling, hostility toward sections of the people who rise up in important if still-inarticulate ways.

My sense is that such politics arise from a despair over actually developing our own revolutionary forces — and a resigned assumption that we have no other alternative but to fall behind any forces (ugly, oppressive, reactionary or not) who (one way or another) who seem to be on America’s shit list.

This is not a uni-polar world with only one defining contradiction. Yes, we understand (and must understand) that the U.S. acts as a central pillar of world capitalism… but it is hardly the only pillar or the only reactionary force.

As someone who remembers this Iranian regime murdering our comrades and drenching the people in blood, it is hard not have a far more nuanced sense of such events. I remember so vividly attended parties of celebration with our Iranian communist comrades, from the Iranian Student Association (ISA) at colleges in the U.S., as they went back to Iran (in 1979) to dive into the revolution — so full of hopes and energy.

And I know now, with real sadness that has never gone away, that many of them ended up in the prisons and torture cells of Khomenei, or wasted on the frontlines of the war with Iraq.

I suspect there is a whole generation of radical activists in the U.S. who don’t know how Iran’s Islamic Republic murdered and tortured communists and leftists in large numbers after the 1979 revolution — to consolidate a very conservative-reactionary god-state. And these victims including many who had based their politics (naively) on forming a “united front against imperialism” with those bloody mullahs-in-power.

The importance of revisiting such history is the importance of not repeating it — and not misunderstanding who the theocrats are, and what they are capable of. And at a moment when they are exposed, hated, de-legitimized, targetted among the people themselves, overwhelmingly because of their own crimes, it would be terrible politics to rally to the Islamic theocrats defense simply because they are also being targetted by the United States and Israel externally. In some ways, those external pressures are part of that “perfect storm” that may reawaken politics within Iran.

We have opposed (and must seek to oppose much more powerfully) the U.S. imperialist threats against Iran — and its whole long-term push to fully dominate the central oil fields of the Middle East. We know that the U.S. and Israel will pursue their geo-political strategies here. And we must understand and oppose those moves.

In many ways the only hope the U.S. has had for a “victory” in Iraq involved (somehow) causing a “regime change” in Iran. In the media, all the talk is about Israel’s fear of nuclear weapons, but there is another more-unspoken issue: the Iraq war has long ago morphed into a U.S.-Iranian power struggle over the control of Iraq (and of this region). And so for the U.S. there are very high stakes in the eruptions in Iran.

But our brains are capable of grasping more than one thread and dynamic at a time — it is not just possible (but inevitable) that great events draw into them the attentions of MANY and DIFFERENT players with many different interests. The U.S. hopes to have a pro-U.S. government emerge from all of this. We all know that. They are intevening in countless ways — seen and unseen. This is undoubtedly true.

But who says that a pro-U.S. outcome is the only possibility? Who says this means that the current government should be supported? Who decided that the people of Iran have no agency, no hopes, no possibility of upsetting that whole table of “choices”?

The world is full of very reactionary governments and forces who are in sharp hostility — but there is certainly no reason to believe that we (or the people generally) always just have to pick to side with one reactionary force over another. Sometimes the clash of oppressive forces create great openings through which radical, secular and even revolutionary forces can emerge, learn, organize and act.

The politics of “lesser evil” is often a politics of lowered sights — a politics so desparing of the possibility of revolution, that real, living, hairy, complex revolution possibilities don’t even enter the thinking. They are there, but you don’t even see them.

In essense, this simplistic approach is an approach that pulls toward a cynical view of people, for their ability to learn and develop politics in complex situations, and which seems rooted in a rather strange attraction to any ugly force in the Third World that seems somehow “hard line.” What kind of a world will that create? What kind of evaluation is that of the forces (who are actually in the field)?

Some have argued that supporting the people in Iran’s streets lack a certain “class understanding.”

Presumably that is because the demonstration in Iran have drawn in urban middle class (but not so many of Iran’s working class and even less of the peasantry). But is that how we understand class? If “the workers” support a U.S. war, and “privileged college students” oppose it — should we be confused by that? Is that kind of crude reductionist “class analysis” we want to uphold?

If Iranian students and urban middle classes are the first to strike out against a brutal and theocratic regime, even if they bring their prejudices and illusions with them — is that so bad or unusual?

History is packed with examples to discuss. (Is the Chinese revolution imaginable without the heavily-urban heavily-educated intellectual movement the 1919 May Fourth Movement. Were the trade union aparatuses automatically right in the French may 1968 events?)

It is a good thing when college students take to the streets against a repressive government (with or without some workers). It is a good thing when secular, urban youth and women march against a theocratic regime that enforces medieval morality, and the veil, and much more (with or without some peasants). It is a good thing when people find their voice in a society that stifled them. And such openings are the path by which radical politics stirs even more widely — including precisely among the working people (who are sometimes slower to move).

A class analysis has many components: One is to approach the countless political questions of our world from the communist point of view of ending all oppression (a view that ultimately is in the interest of those most oppressed and stripped of property). It also looks at the actions of all class in terms of the revolutionary process.

And, finally, what is the “class understanding” in a view that seems to say we are limited to a choice between various capitalist and feudal forces. I.e. that the people of Iran are forced to pick between U.S. or their own ugly, hated ruling class. Is that a “class analysis”?

Someone said to me:

“People opposing these demonstrations have no sense of how revolutions unfold in real life.”

I think there is a lot to this. Often revolution emerges from cracks like this. And revolutionary forces (that will have a role in the future) reach new audiences and forces in events like this. And the forces who drag the people into political life — the Rafsanjanis and Moussavis of history — aren’t always the one who inherit the results.

Will forces within the Iranian establishment try to tame this movement with compromises? Yes. Will they order that demands remain within frameworks of the current system? Yes. Will they send marshals in green armbands into the mass marches to isolate and threaten the more radical, secular and revolutionary forces? Of course.

A great movement is not defined by those who “called it into being.” It is not limited by the forces who officially or temporarily claim to lead it. Its course is not set by those who try to control it. And in all of this, we look for, we popularize the most radical, secular, revolutionary and intransigent forces who ultimately represent the best interests of the people.

In many ways, the people churn up their own interests and programs in great upheavals. They congeal into organizations and trends that will influence a whole generation for decades. They will form the kinds of verdicts (in their own hearts and minds) that forge “a revolutionary people” — for greater challenges and even more sophisticated actions in the future.

We have given up on that future if we were to adopt a narrow, shortsighted politics of always picking between this or that bourgeois player on the scene.

Kasama has just posted this from Reza Fiyouzat:

“The Iranian people sensed a deep fracture within the ruling establishment – something that was clearly expressed in astonishing language and tone, in the televised-for-the-first time live debates between the candidates – and they have ceased their chance to use the divide between their rulers to their own advantage.

“The people may have taken to the streets under the excuse of the elections, and may have been encouraged by the rhetoric of the ‘reformist’ camp in favor of some breathing room in the suffocating political and cultural atmosphere imposed on them, but they have forced the debate further. They are openly, and in millions across the country, questioning the legitimacy of the establishment, represented at the moment by Ahmadinejad. The people, in short, have moved beyond Mousavi and the reformists, but are still willing to go along with the tactics formulated by reformist leaders; for the moment.”

This jibes with both my impression of these events, and my hopes for these events — though we will all learn over time the details of what is happening far below the visible screen. But I do know this: If you look at Iran, any future hope for radical change lie among the people in the streets, not in the bloody military and religious forces running the government.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

Revolution in Nepal: A Debate

2009-06-24T22:38:00.000+08:00

SUMMARY OF THE DISCUSSION HELD IN LONDON ON 09/05/09 ON THE POLITICAL LINE OF THE UNIFIED COMMUNIST PARTY OF NEPAL (MAOIST)

This post consists of the article replicated on the Kasama site by John Steele from its original location on Democracy and Class Struggle. I have pasted the content as well as John's commentary below - but first preceded by my own commentary on the article:

Commentary by Stephen David Mauldin

Just a few quick points – Good to see there was appropriate resistance to RCPUSA misunderstandings at this conference. A couple of glaring gaps : the thinking that participation in government was a main front is wrong and the militant capability of the YCL appears to be discounted along with no mention of that of the unions. In my recent interview with C P Gajurel he emphasized that withdrawal from government was withdrawal from the least significant of the three fronts.

The more important front is the use of the CA and far the most important is the front found on the streets. I also met with Ganesh Man Pun leader of the YCL and met with Ganesh Regmi who heads the All Nepal Federation of Unions. These two are somewhat frustrated that the UCPN (M) will not sanction their taking aggressive action against the NA. All the concern about the reactionaries now regaining control is unfounded. They government under UMLs government of NC directed Indian puppets cannot do anything without the Maobadi participation.

There is absolutely no fear of the NA and no government will be possible until they sack Katawal and PLA infiltration of the NA establishes civilian supremacy. The house and the normal functioning of all infrastructures can be shut down at will on the streets. The critical juncture is the CA where peaceful creation of the new constitution can continue albeit under pressure from the streets. The NC/UML government only exists by the whims of the Tarai faction support moving under the circumstances to consolidate their own new opportunity to gain power.

The revolution is very healthy and robust and so about the revolution occurring itself the RCP need not fret. However, as was pointed out by some in the article, to what extent this is a communist revolution is a real issue. The Maobadi leadership is well grounded in theory and working to reflect or engage theory with practice and practice with theory (as far as the state power issue is concerned through democratic centralism). Yet it is no doubt true that the great majority of Maoist supporters is simply oppressed classes sick of their condition and wave the hammer and sickle in ignorance of the communist hypothesis. The hope is that they are learning through practice and experience (the recent exposure of the real nature of the reactionaries in their SC manipulations, illegal presidential action, and moves against civilian supremacy have been very revealing to the populace – especially in their seeing the hand of India).

A return to open and swiftly successful violence is an option but one to be avoided if possible (it’s not a question of its potential). It is the Maobadi tactic to apply the pressure open on the streets to garner the 2/3 CA vote to create the constitution they want to see. Who in the meantime is trying to run the government is not that important. As for the government the thing that is important is that they be forced to give up their standing army in service to the reactionaries, to fire Katawal and give way to the integration in cooperation with the UCPN (M) and other anti-imperialist parties. Technocratic government functions can continue uncorrupted by feudalistic and imperialistic agendas.

Success via the use of the CA will create a New Nepal government of a specific nature. It is to be in effect a dictatorship of the proletariat. A democratic centralist government made up of a multi-party coalition excluding parties controlled by oppressor classes but including parties representing oppressed classes is the goal. The intent is to eliminate the reactionaries in a process which expressly leads to the withering away of that state. It is in that withering away that the greatest challenge will come. There are still relatively few who are actually communists.

The original article:

A presented the views of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA on the current political position of the UCPN(M). He said that fundamental political principles were at stake because the leadership of the UCPN(M) are taking steps to destroy the revolution in their country.

It is not simply a question of the correctness of the tactics being employed but a question of a change of strategy. Is the line of the party aimed at achieving a new democratic republic or a bourgeois democratic republic? During the People’s War a new revolutionary state emerged alongside the old reactionary state. Now the revolutionary state has been delegitimised and the reactionary state relegitimised.A said that some comrades who have concerns about the pronouncements and actions of the Maoist leaders are taking a wait and see attitude, of restraining from criticism and continuing to support the UCPN(M) leadership in the hope that errors will be rectified. He compared this to the stance of Maoists who after the reactionary coup in China in 1976 refrained from criticising the new leadership of the Communist Party of China although it was clear that they were deviating from the socialist road.

A particularly criticised the content of the article ‘The Question of Building a New Type of State’ by Baburam Bhattarai (The Worker, No. 9, Feb. 2004). He objected to what he said was Bhattarai’s suggestion that multi-party elections might be possible within a new state and that a phase of bourgeois democracy is required in Nepal. Bhattarai has overlooked the fact that the essence of the state is an army and bureaucracy. There seemed to be no awareness of or engagement with the important work of Bob Avakian (Chairman of the RCP, USA) on these key questions. Following on from the position put forward in this article in 2005 the Central Committee of the UCPN(M) adopted a plan for a “transitional state”. Since then there has been talk of a “joint dictatorship of the proletariat and bourgeoisie” which ignores the fact that the bourgeoisie will make no real concessions if they consider that their fundamental interests are threatened.

The Turkish comrades have with reference to their own party’s line in the past talked about how “tactics can eat up strategy”. This is what has happened in the Nepalese party with the tactic of standing in elections having become a strategic line. Instead of waging people’s war being the path to defeating the reactionary classes, winning seats in the Constituent Assembly and forming a government within the reactionary state became the main objective.

A said that Nepal does need a real new democratic revolution. It is necessary to outlaw imperialist and feudal property forms. Talk from some Maoist leaders about Nepal becoming “the Switzerland of Asia” is outright reactionary. What do they want: more capitalist development or socialism?

The leadership of the UCPN(M) are ignoring the dynamic role of theory, of the serious application of materialist dialectics, and have descended into ecclectics, trying to combine fundamentally incompatible elements into a coherent political line.

B criticised the claim by the UCPN(M) that multi-party competition in elections is possible within a new democratic republic or a socialist one without this leading to the full restoration of the rule of the reactionary classes. What is more, the UCPN(M) is putting forward the line of multi-party elections as not just appropriate for the specific conditions of Nepal but as one valid for the whole international revolutionary struggle. Multi-party competition is appropriate for the bourgeoisie which is divided into different factions but not for the proletariat which has developed its own organs for exercising state power such as the Soviets in Russia and the Revolutionary Committees in China. Multi-party elections under a revolutionary regime would provide an opportunity for the reactionary classes to regain power. The way in which proletarian power can be established and consolidated is by the members of this class actively exercising control at all levels of the different aspects of the state, economy and other aspects of society. The correct method for dealing with emergent bourgeois elements in the revolutionary party and state apparatus is by waging Cultural Revolution, not by holding periodic multi-party elections.

C reminded those present that Lenin had said that “the heart and soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of concrete conditions” but the critique of the line of the UCPN(M) by the RCP, USA made little reference to the particularity of the extremely complex nexus of antagonistic contradictions present in Nepalese society – class, caste, national/ethnic, religious, gender, etc.. Some comrades overlook the necessity for careful handling of these contradictions in order to maintain and strengthen unity among the supporters of the revolution. This means that the path towards the establishment of New Democracy will not be straightforward. The Nepalese comrades are well aware that they have not destroyed the old reactionary state. On his visit to Nepal last autumn Comrade Bosanta said to him that “Although we have formed a government, we do yet have state power.” He explained that the old Nepalese Army still existed and that the old administrative bureaucracy was still in place.

Some comrades, including the RCP,USA, seem to embrace a very simple model of revolution. The way they see it is that a revolutionary party starts waging a people’s war which eventually results in the complete military defeat and destruction of the reactionary armed forces and the whole state of which they are a part. Then a completely new state based on the revolutionary classes is established. The historical reality of actual revolutions, both bourgeois and proletarian, is much more complex. If we examine the course of the Russian and Chinese revolutions then we see a complex process with many twists and turns. The same is true of Nepal.

Both Comrade Gajurel, on his visits to London, and the Divisional Commander of the People’s Liberation Army 5th. Division talking to C in Nepal, have explained that careful consideration was given, on several occasions, to the PLA attempting a military assault in the Kathmandu Valley, supported by popular insurrection within Kathmandu, with the objective of seizing the capital city, the seat of the reactionary state apparatus. Both in terms of personnel and weaponry, the former Royal (now Nepal Army) is far superior to the PLA. While the PLA was able to win control of eighty per cent of the country’s area by waging guerrilla warfare against the police and army, the Party and PLA leaders did not consider that they could win in a conventional, set piece battle around Kathmandu. In making this judgment they were mindful of the experience of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. Thus it was decided that another, more indirect way would have to be found to deal with the army of the reactionary state.

Now the Maoist-led government has sacked the general commanding the Nepal Army who is refusing to go. This has provoked a political crisis with the government resigning. This development serves to make it clear to the masses that the old rulers will not go voluntarily. Also the other political parties are in chaos, both between and within themselves, so they are not likely to be able to form a viable government and this will further undermine their support.

C said that it certainly is correct for communists from different countries to criticise each other’s political actions but that in the case of the UCPN(M) our position should be first we support them and only secondarily do we criticise them. But the position of the RCP,USA is first we criticise them and only secondarily do we give some grudging support. This is incorrect.

D, (who spent a considerable period working for an NGO in Nepal), said that in his opinion a large section of the Nepalese people support the UCPN(M) even though he thought that there had been a certain amount of intimidation during the Constituent Assembly elections and subsequently some unnecessary violence between the Maoists and their political opponents. However, what the people were demanding in the mass protests of April 2006 was the end of King Gyanendra’s autocratic rule in place of the elected parliament. Most of the demonstrators had not been demanding a people’s republic leading to socialism and communism. Most of the supporters of the UCPN(M) were not very politically sophisticated and the Party would lose leadership of the masses if they try to move forward too rapidly. Also at that time many people had become weary of a continuing state of war and if the UCPN(M) had ignored these sentiments then they would have lost a lot of support.

E pointed out that the views of Nepalese comrades were not represented because no Nepalese were present. It may be necessary to criticize the political strategy of a fraternal party but for that we need an international centre where differing views can be debated. The RCP,USA is very dogmatic. There are no simple or readymade solutions to Nepal’s problems. It has taken eighty years for the Indian comrades to reject the appraisal that the Indian land system is a feudal one. The theoretical understanding by Marxists of democratic revolution is inadequate. Mao’s presentation of new democracy has not solved all of the problems. Most of the socialist societies in pre-semi-feudal countries have ended up in developing capitalism.

The international aspect of the struggle in Nepal is very important because the USA wants to control the whole of South Asia through India. As for the land question in Nepal, E is unsure if the land taken from the landlords is being returned to them or parallel administrations are being withdrawn

F said that it is not just tactical questions that are at stake but strategic ones as well. The Maoists in Nepal have become part of the bourgeois state and are not serving the cause of communism. It is not just comrades who have visited Nepal who have a right to speak. The achievements of the People’s War have been lost. Eighty per cent of the country is no longer under revolutionary rule and the Nepal Army come and go as they please. If she were to follow the logic of the Nepalese comrades then she should be supporting the bourgeoisie in her own country (Turkey). There must be a rupture with the logic of concentrating on making revolution in one’s own country. Making revolution is an international task.

G said that this issue is not just a debate between the RCP,USA and the UCPN(M). Nor is it one confined to comrades immediately involved in the struggle in Nepal as some comrades are suggesting. It is possible for comrades outside of Nepal to acquire objective knowledge of conditions inside Nepal and thus make an accurate assessment of the political situation there. Indeed, it is our duty as communists to do so and with we think the Nepalese comrades are making errors then we should say so. It is not true to say that the PLA could not defeat the Royal Army.

H said that the strategy of the UCPN(M) had been that of people’s war but now it has been reduced to being a tactic. They gave up the armed struggle because the enemy is bigger. If one takes up the position of saying that comrades in one country cannot criticise the actions of those in another then this is a nationalistic position and is incorrect. The parliamentary path that the UCPN(M) has taken is wrong.

I said that the UCPN(M) had adopted its present political line back at its National Congress in 2002. Since then the Turkish Maoists of the Maoist Communist Party of Turkey/North Kurdistan have been concerned about the tactics adopted by the Nepalese party and one and a half years ago issued a statement criticising these tactics. The new, incorrect political line of the UCPN(M) is being disguised as a change of tactics. (J emphasised that he was expressing a personal opinion rather than acting as a spokes person for his party.) A Khrushchev-type line of “peaceful coexistence” and “peaceful cooperation” is being applied in Nepal. Even so, it would still be possible for the Nepalese comrades to change this incorrect line.

A reiterated his earlier comments. Further, he pointed out that the UCPN(M) now say that the Nepal Army have two contradictory aspects, “pro-feudal” and “anti-imperialist”. This is clearly ridiculous.

B said that the UCPN(M) is negating the leading role of the communist party. Their lines on the question of democracy and the question of imperialism, especially as formulated by Bhattarai, are quite incorrect.

D reiterated his opinion that in 2006 the people were war weary and wanted to get rid of the king, not establish a socialist state. It would have been a grave mistake to continue with the military struggle at that time.

E said that revolutionary struggles in industrially backward countries such as Nepal cannot ultimately succeed without support from struggles by the working class in the imperialist countries. Therefore, it is essential that the RCP(USA) acts responsibly. He said that Comrade Gujurel had explained that on three separate occasions the Nepalese comrades had considered a military assault against the Royal Army forces in the Kathmandu Valley and each time had concluded that such an action would fail. We cannot decide from outside whether or not they were right not to proceed with such actions. K claimed that the political line of the UCPN(M) is essentially correct but that some of their tactics e.g. not involving the people during parliamentary negotiations is questionable and he had conveyed his worries to Cde Gajurel in this respect..

M said that if there is a military coup in Nepal then this could annihilate the revolutionary forces or they could prevail. We have no definite measure whereby we can decide if a party is revisionist or not but the RCP,USA method of debating questions of line is a correct approach. In 1945 in China there were negotiations between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang on forming a coalition government. Mao made concessions to Chiang Kai-shek. He agreed to reduce the size of the Chinese Red Army and this was not a bluff. However Chiang Kai-shek went back on the military offensive so the civil war resumed. However, if the coalition government had been formed there would not have been a revolution. In China after 1949 there existed a number of different political parties but they were cooperating with, not competing with, the Communist Party of China.

The important thing is according to which political line will the Nepalese revolution be realised. Also there is the real problem of Nepal’s geographical position between China and India.

Are we to be in solidarity with the Nepalese comrades or not? We should support them because matters have not yet reached the point where we should not.

B said that in terms of considering the issue of multi-party competition the Chinese model is not a good one to take. Multi-party elections within a revolutionary regime are essentially incorrect.

C took up the issue of who had a right to speak on the revolutionary struggle in Nepal. Some other speakers had claimed that some comrades are saying that if one is not in Nepal or has not visited there then one is not sufficiently formed to make an accurate analysis. H1 said that no one was making this claim. However the principle of “no investigation, no right to speak” should apply. M had claimed that 80% of Nepal was no longer under control of the revolutionary forces and that the Nepal Army came and went as they please. In fact the Village Development Committees (local government bodies) in the areas in question largely consist of Maoists. Both the Nepal Army and the PLA are confined to barracks and camps and cannot go outside as armed, military formations. Individual soldiers of both armies can move around on leave, for leisure, etc..

C took issue with the approach of the RCP,USA to the line of the UCPN(M). He said that the RCP,USA had played a very good international role back in the nineteen eighties when they took the lead in rallying Maoist parties and organisations around the world leading to the formation of RIM. However there was a negative side to a party based in the major imperialist country taking on this role. Culture runs deep and even among conscious communists some traits remain of the bourgeois culture in which they have been formed. In the case of the RCP,USA this comes through as a certain arrogance whereby they think that they are always right, especially with respect to assessing the political struggles of comrades in imperialistically-dominated countries. One example is that in the late nineteen eighties there was an issue of A World to Win devoted to describing and analysing the Naxalite uprising in India. After this issue came out the Indian comrades affiliated to RIM were outraged because they had not even been consulted on the writing of the articles, even though some of them were participants in this armed struggle. The same sort of know-all arrogance on the part of the RCP,USA is manifest in their approach to criticism of the UCPN(M).

Some comrades seem to think that a revolutionary communist party should keep itself completely apart from the institutions of a reactionary state. But the Bolsheviks participated in the Tsarist Duma and in 1936-7 the Communist Party of China formally subjugated itself to the Kuomintang Republic of China which just before had been trying to exterminate it. These were tactical moves that facilitated the implementation of the revolutionary strategies of these parties. Simply because the Nepalese Maoists have participate in the elections to the Constituent Assembly and formed a government does not necessarily mean that they have abandoned a revolutionary strategy.

C knows from what he saw and was told by the PLA during his visit last autumn and from recent, (rather ill-advised) communications from a current visitor that the PLA and the YCL are making preparations to fight again if it is necessary. H1 certainly has some reservations about some aspects of the policies of the UCPN(M). For example, Bhattarai’s plan to bring in foreign firms to carry out development projects such as building dams. Even so, now is not the time, at this crucial juncture, to publicly condemn the UCPN(M) as having abandoned the struggle for revolution. Firstly we should support our Nepalese comrades and only secondarily should we criticise them. The RCP,USA has taken the opposite position and thus the contradiction between it and the UCPN(M) has become antagonistic.

R said the UCPN(M) have dissolved the red political power that was established in Nepal. The Maoists in the Village Development Committees are applying the policies of the reactionary state. They are telling the people that real change can be brought about through the reactionary state and this is wrong.

John Steele's commentary:

The unfolding revolution in Nepal, led by the Maoists of the UCPN(M), posescpn-demonstration sharp questions for Maoists – and for revolutionaries generally in the world – in the following sense: Are revolutions made by following a recipe drawn up in advance? Have previous successful revolutions shown a path, and created a template, which must be followed if the revolution is not to be betrayed? Or does every new revolutionary process demand creative development and the rethinking of old lessons?

At Kasama we have made clear that we believe that revolutions are only made through seriously deep and creative interactions with the circumstances of particular places and times, and it is exactly this that we have seen in the practice of the Maoists of Nepal. And while we don’t know – can’t know – that their revolution will succeed, that all their tactics are free from error, or that this revolutionary process will forever remain truly revolutionary, we hail their breakthroughs in this world so sorely in need of revolutionary overturning, and we support their revolution.

These two opposing lines are sharply on display in the following report, along with some of the particularities of the revolution in Nepal. This is a report on discussion at a May 9 meeting in London, called by the RCPUSA, to discuss the political line of Nepal’s Maoist party.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0

New Left Review - Slavoj Zizek: How to Begin from the Beginning

2009-06-23T10:37:00.000+08:00

from New Left Review 57, May-June 2009

In his wonderful short text ‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically betraying the cause:

Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. [1]

In these circumstances, Lenin writes:

He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with an alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.

It would only be natural for a climber who found himself in such a position to have ‘moments of despondency’. In all probability these moments would be more numerous and harder to bear if he could hear the voices of those below, who ‘through a telescope and from a safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent’: ‘The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; they chuckle gleefully and shout: “He’ll fall in a minute! Serve him right, the lunatic!”.’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee, behaving ‘more like Judas Golovlyov’, the notoriously hypocritical landowner in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel, The Golovlyov Family:

They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did not we, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning (look, look, he has turned back! He is descending! A single step is taking him hours of preparation! And yet we were roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution!), if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!’

Happily, Lenin continues, our imaginary traveller cannot hear the voices of these people who are ‘true friends’ of the idea of ascent; if he did, ‘they would probably nauseate him’—‘And nausea, it is said, does not help one to keep a clear head and a firm step, particularly at high altitudes.’

Of course, a metaphor does not amount to proof: ‘every analogy is lame’. Lenin goes on to spell out the actual situation confronting the infant Soviet republic:

Russia’s proletariat rose to a gigantic height in its revolution, not only when it is compared with 1789 and 1793, but also when compared with 1871. We must take stock of what we have done and what we have not as dispassionately, as clearly and as concretely as possible. If we do that we shall be able to keep clear heads. We shall not suffer from nausea, illusions, or despondency.

After enumerating the achievements of the Soviet state by 1922, Lenin explains what has not been done:

But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy, and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism—that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal.

More than that, Lenin notes, ‘we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we have preserved its manoeuvring ability; we have kept clear heads and can soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap further forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished.’ And he concludes:

Those Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).

Fail Better

This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, foreshadowing the line from Worstward Ho: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ [2] His conclusion—to begin from the beginning—makes it clear that he is not talking about merely slowing down and fortifying what has already been achieved, but about descending back to the starting point: one should begin from the beginning, not from the place that one succeeded in reaching in the previous effort. In Kierkegaard’s terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual progress but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning, again and again.

Georg Lukács ended his pre-Marxist masterwork Theory of the Novel with the famous sentence: ‘The voyage is over, the travel begins.’ This is what happens at the moment of defeat: the voyage of a particular revolutionary experience is over, but the true travel, the work of beginning again, is just starting. This willingness to retreat, however, in no way implies a non-dogmatic opening towards others, an admission to political competitors, ‘We were wrong, you were right in your warnings, so let us now join forces’. On the contrary, Lenin insists that such moments are the times when utmost discipline is needed. Addressing the Bolsheviks’ Eleventh Party Congress a few months later, in April 1922, he argued:

When a whole army (I speak in the figurative sense) is in retreat, it cannot have the same morale as when it is advancing. At every step you find a certain mood of depression . . . That is where the serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different. During a victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed, everybody presses forward on his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more conscious and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat; under such circumstances a few panic-stricken voices are, at times, enough to cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.

The consequences of this stance were very clear for Lenin. In answer to ‘the sermons’ on the nep preached by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries—‘The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again’—he told the Eleventh Party Congress:

We say in reply: ‘Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white-guard elements.’ [3]

This ‘red terror’ should nonetheless be distinguished from Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’. In his memoirs, Sándor Márai provided a precise definition of the difference. [4] Even in the most violent phases of the Leninist dictatorship, when those who opposed the revolution were brutally deprived of their right to (public free) speech, they were not deprived of their right to silence: they were allowed to withdraw into inner exile. An episode from the autumn of 1922 when, on Lenin’s instigation, the Bolsheviks were organizing the infamous ‘Philosophers’ Steamer’, is indicative here. When he learned that an old Menshevik historian on the list of those intellectuals to be expelled had withdrawn into private life to await death due to heavy illness, Lenin not only took him off the list, but ordered that he be given additional food coupons. Once the enemy resigned from political struggle, Lenin’s animosity stopped.

For Stalinism, however, even such silence resonated too much. Not only were masses of people required to show their support by attending big public rallies, artists and scientists also had to compromise themselves by participating in active measures such as signing official proclamations, or paying lip-service to Stalin and the official Marxism. If, in the Leninist dictatorship, one could be shot for what one said, in Stalinism one could be shot for what one did not say. This was followed through to the very end: suicide itself, the ultimate desperate withdrawal into silence, was condemned by Stalin as the last and highest act of treason against the Party. This distinction between Leninism and Stalinism reflects their general attitude towards society: for the former, society is a field of merciless struggle for power, a struggle which is openly admitted; for the latter, the conflict is, sometimes almost imperceptibly, redefined as that of a healthy society against what is excluded from it—vermin, insects, traitors who are less than human.

A Soviet separation of powers?

Was the passage from Lenin to Stalin necessary? The Hegelian answer would evoke retroactive necessity: once this passage happened, once Stalin won, it was necessary. The task of a dialectical historian is to conceive it ‘in becoming’, bringing out all the contingency of a struggle that might have ended differently, as Moshe Lewin tried to do in Lenin’s Last Struggle. Lewin points, firstly, to Lenin’s insistence on full sovereignty for the national entities that composed the Soviet state—no wonder that, in a letter to the Politburo of 22 September 1922, Stalin openly accused Lenin of ‘national liberalism’. Secondly, he emphasizes Lenin’s stress on a modesty of goals: not socialism, but culture, universal literacy, efficiency, technocracy; cooperative societies, which would enable the peasants to become ‘cultured traders’ in the context of the nep. This was obviously a very different outlook from that of ‘socialism in one country’. The modesty is sometimes surprisingly open: Lenin mocks all attempts to ‘build socialism’; he plays repeatedly on the motif of party deficiencies, and insists on the improvizational nature of Soviet policy, to the extent of quoting Napoleon’s ‘On s’engage . . . et puis on voit’.

Lenin’s final struggle against the rule of state bureaucracy is well known; what is less known, as Lewin perspicuously notes, is that Lenin had been trying to square the circle of democracy and the dictatorship of the party-state with his proposal for a new ruling body, the Central Control Commission. While fully admitting the dictatorial nature of the Soviet regime, he tried to establish at its summit a balance between different elements, a ‘system of reciprocal control that could serve the same function—the comparison is no more than approximate—as the separation of powers in a democratic regime’. An enlarged Central Committee would lay down the broad lines of policy and supervise the whole Party apparatus. Within it, the Central Control Commission would:

act as a control of the Central Committee and of its various offshoots—the Political Bureau, the Secretariat, the Orgburo . . . Its independence would be assured by its direct link to the Party Congress, without the mediation of the Politburo and its administrative organs or of the Central Committee. [5]

Checks and balances, the division of powers, mutual control—this was Lenin’s desperate answer to the question: who controls the controllers? There is something dreamlike, properly phantasmatic, in this idea of a Central Control Commission: an independent, educational, controlling body with an ‘apolitical’ edge, consisting of the best teachers and technocrats, to keep in check the ‘politicized’ Central Committee and its organs—in short, neutral expertise keeping party executives in line. All this, however, hinges on the true independence of the Party Congress—de facto already undermined by the prohibition of factions, which allowed the top Party apparatus to control the Congress and dismiss its critics as factionalists. The naivety of Lenin’s trust in specialists is all the more striking if we bear in mind that it came from a leader who was otherwise fully aware of the all-pervasiveness of political struggle, which allows for no neutral position.

The direction in which the wind was already blowing is apparent in Stalin’s 1922 proposal to simply proclaim the government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as also the government of the republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia:

If this decision is confirmed by the Central Committee of the rcp, it will not be made public, but communicated to the Central Committees of the Republics for circulation among the Soviet organs, the Central Executive Committees or the Congresses of the Soviets of the said Republics before the convocation of the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, where it will be declared to be the wish of these Republics. [6]

The interaction of the higher authority with its base is thus not only abolished—so that the higher authority simply imposes its will—but, adding insult to injury, it is re-staged as its opposite: the cc decides what wish the base will put to the higher authority as its own.
Tact and terror

A further feature of Lenin’s final battles to which Lewin draws our attention is an unexpected focus on politeness and civility. Lenin had been deeply upset by two incidents: in a political debate, Moscow’s representative in Georgia, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had physically struck a member of the Georgian cc; and Stalin himself had verbally abused Krupskaya (having discovered that she had transmitted to Trotsky Lenin’s letter proposing a pact against Stalin). The latter incident prompted Lenin to write his famous appeal:

Stalin is too rude, and this defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and appoint in his place another man who in all respects differs from Comrade Stalin in his superiority, that is, more tolerant, more loyal, more courteous and more considerate of the comrades, less capricious. [7]

Lenin’s proposals for a Central Control Commission and his concern that civility be maintained in no way indicate a liberal softening. In a letter to Kamenev from this same period, he clearly states: ‘It is a great mistake to think that the nep put an end to terror; we shall again have recourse to terror and to economic terror.’ However, this terror, which would survive the planned reduction of the state apparatus and Cheka, would have been more a threat than an actuality: as Lewin recounts, Lenin sought a means ‘whereby all those who would now [under the nep] like to go beyond the limits assigned to businessmen by the state could be reminded “tactfully and politely” of the existence of this ultimate weapon.’ [8] Lenin was right here: dictatorship refers to the constitutive excess of (state) power, and at this level, there is no neutrality. The crucial question is whose excess? If it is not ours, it is theirs.

In dreaming, to use his own expression, about the ccc’s mode of work in his final 1923 text, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Lenin suggests that this body should resort to:

some semi-humorous trick, cunning device, piece of trickery or something of that sort. I know that in the staid and earnest states of Western Europe such an idea would horrify people and that not a single decent official would even entertain it. I hope, however, that we have not yet become as bureaucratic as all that and that in our midst the discussion of this idea will give rise to nothing more than amusement.

Indeed, why not combine pleasure with utility? Why not resort to some humorous or semi-humorous trick to expose something ridiculous, something harmful, something semi-ridiculous, semi-harmful, etc.? [9]

Is this not almost an obscene double of the ‘serious’ executive power concentrated in the cc and Politburo? Tricks, cunning of reason—a wonderful dream, but a utopia nonetheless. Lenin’s weakness, Lewin argues, was that he saw the problem of bureaucratization, but understated its weight and true dimension: ‘his social analysis was based on only three social classes—the workers, the peasants and the bourgeoisie—without taking any account of the state apparatus as a distinct social element in a country that had nationalized the main sectors of the economy.’ [10]

The Bolsheviks quickly became aware that their political power lacked a distinct social basis: most of the working class on whose behalf they exerted their rule had vanished in the Civil War, so they were in a way ruling in a void of social representation. However, in imagining themselves as a pure political power imposing its will on society, they overlooked how—since it de facto owned, or acted as caretaker for the absent owner of, the forces of production—the state bureaucracy ‘would become the true social basis of power’:

There is no such thing as ‘pure’ political power, devoid of any social foundation. A regime must find some other social basis than the apparatus of repression itself. The ‘void’ in which the Soviet regime had seemed to be suspended had soon been filled, even if the Bolsheviks had not seen it, or did not wish to see it. [11]

Arguably, this base would have blocked Lenin’s project of a ccc. It is true that, in both an anti-economistic and determinist way, Lenin insists on the autonomy of the political, but what he misses, in Badiou’s terms, is not how every political force represents some social force or class, but how this political force of representation is directly inscribed into the represented level itself, as a social force of its own. Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin thus has all the hallmarks of a proper tragedy: it was not a melodrama in which the good guy fights the bad guy, but a tragedy in which the hero becomes aware that he is fighting his own progeny, and that it is already too late to stop the fateful unfolding of his wrong decisions in the past.

A different path

So where are we today, after the désastre obscur of 1989? As in 1922, the voices from below ring with malicious joy all around us: ‘Serves you right, lunatics who wanted to enforce their totalitarian vision on society!’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee; they moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! How noble was your vision to create a just society! Our heart was beating with you, but reason told us that your plans would finish only in misery and new unfreedoms!’ While rejecting any compromise with these seductive voices, we definitely have to begin from the beginning—not to build further upon the foundations of the revolutionary epoch of the 20th century, which lasted from 1917 to 1989, or, more precisely, 1968—but to descend to the starting point and choose a different path.

But how? The defining problem of Western Marxism has been the lack of a revolutionary subject: how is it that the working class does not complete the passage from in-itself to for-itself and constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? This question provided the main raison d’être for Western Marxism’s reference to psychoanalysis, which was evoked to explain the unconscious libidinal mechanisms preventing the rise of class consciousness that are inscribed into the very being or social situation of the working class. In this way, the truth of the Marxist socio-economic analysis was saved: there was no reason to give ground to revisionist theories about the rise of the middle classes. For this same reason, Western Marxism has also engaged in a constant search for others who could play the role of the revolutionary agent, as the understudy replacing the indisposed working class: Third World peasants, students and intellectuals, the excluded. It is just possible that this desperate search for the revolutionary agent is the form of appearance of its very opposite: the fear of finding it, of seeing it where it already stirs. Waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity.

It is against this background that Alain Badiou has suggested we should reassert the communist hypothesis. He writes:

If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, nothing in historical and political becoming is of any interest to a philosopher.

However, Badiou continues:

to hold on to the Idea, the existence of the hypothesis, does not mean that its first form of presentation, focused on property and the state, must be maintained just as it is. In fact, what we are ascribed as a philosophical task, even a duty, is to help a new modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being. [12]

One should be careful not to read these lines in a Kantian way, conceiving of communism as a regulative Idea, and thereby resuscitating the spectre of ‘ethical socialism’, with equality as its a priori norm or axiom. Rather, one should maintain the precise reference to a set of social antagonisms which generates the need for communism; the good old Marxian notion of communism not as an ideal, but as a movement which reacts to actual contradictions. To treat communism as an eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal, that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence, of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own impossibility.

Though it is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, the majority today is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society; all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant and so on. The simple but pertinent question arises here: if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?

Class and commons

It is not enough to remain faithful to the communist hypothesis: one has to locate antagonisms within historical reality which make it a practical urgency. The only true question today is: does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? Four possible antagonisms present themselves: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums. We should note that there is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that separates the excluded from the included, and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call ‘commons’—the shared substance of our social being, whose privatization is a violent act which should be resisted by force, if necessary.

First, there are the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of cognitive capital: primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also shared infrastructure such as public transport, electricity, post, etc. If Bill Gates were allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have owned the software tissue of our basic network of communication. Second, there are the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation—from oil to forests and the natural habitat itself—and, third, the commons of internal nature, the biogenetic inheritance of humanity. What all of these struggles share is an awareness of the destructive potential—up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself—in allowing the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons a free run. It is this reference to ‘commons’ which allows the resuscitation of the notion of communism: it enables us to see their progressive enclosure as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance; a process that also points towards exploitation. The task today is to renew the political economy of exploitation—for instance, that of anonymous ‘knowledge workers’ by their companies.

It is, however, only the fourth antagonism, the reference to the excluded, that justifies the term communism. There is nothing more private than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the included and the excluded is the crucial one: without it, all the others lose their subversive edge. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight for the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confronting the antagonism between the included and the excluded. Even more, one can formulate some of these struggles in terms of the included threatened by the polluting excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only ‘private’ concerns in the Kantian sense. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favour among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell products with a progressive spin: coffee made with beans bought at ‘fair-trade’ prices, expensive hybrid vehicles, etc. In short, without the antagonism between the included and the excluded, we may find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian, fighting poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lack of a determinate place in the ‘private’ order of social hierarchy, stand directly for universality: they are what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘part of no part’ of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.

[1] V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, published posthumously in Pravda, 16 April 1924; Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow 1966, pp. 204–7.

[2] Samuel Beckett, ‘Worstward Ho’, Nohow On, London 1992, p. 101.

[3] Lenin, ‘Eleventh Congress of the rcp(b)’, Collected Works, vol. 33, pp. 281–3.

[4] Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary: 1944–1948, Budapest 1996.

[5] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle [1968], Ann Arbor, mi 2005. pp. 131–2.

[6] Quoted in Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Appendix 1, pp. 146–7.

[7] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84.

[8] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 133.

[9] Lenin, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 495.

[10] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 125.

[11] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 124.

[12] Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London and New York 2008, p. 115.

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

news books articles people topics culture politics philosophy activism badiou zizek

Subscribe to Stefandav: Atom 1.0 RSS 2.0