Revolution at the Roof of the World: New Freedom Road Pamphlet on Nepal

Freedom Road Socialist Organization has released a new pamphlet on Nepal. There is a screen viewable and printable pdf and a pamplet layout pdf. The pamphlet contains articles and analysis on the revolution in Nepal. Here is the introduction from the pamphlet:

The people of Nepal have stood up.

The people of Nepal have swept the despised monarchy into the dustbin of history and are proceeding with their revolution. A decade long people’s war led to fair elections and the construction of a Constituent Assembly. Now led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), Nepal stands on the verge of becoming the first new socialist country of the 21st Century. Nepal, sandwiched between China and India, is one of the poorest countries in the world, but is now on the road to building a new society in which the working people have power.

The core of the CPN (Maoist) strategy was people’s war in the countryside. Beginning in 1996, they progressively grew stronger as they engaged police outposts with hunting rifles. Later they challenged the Royal Nepal Army (RNA) with the full force of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This was accompanied by preparing students and workers in the cities for general strikes and insurrection.

The war ended in 2006 when a peace deal was signed to form an interim government. This government elected a body to draft a new constitution, abolish the monarchy, and establish Nepal as a republic. The Maoists swept the elections to the Constituent Assembly, winning the most seats, but not quite a majority.

The major question since the election of the Constituent Assembly revolved around the control of the military. The CPN (Maoist), based on Mao Zedong’s statement that "without a people’s army the people have nothing," demanded the merger of the PLA and the Nepal Army. The Nepali Congress Party (NCP), the major bourgeois party in the Assembly, worked diligently to stop revolutionary changes. For instance, the Congress Party demanded the Maoists dissolve the people’s power structures in the countryside and disband the PLA. The Maoists have stood firm and after considerable struggle, the Congress Party Prime Minister Koirala stepped down.

Through all of this, the hand of U.S. imperialism has been present. The CPN (Maoist) is designated a terrorist organization by the White House. Furthermore, the U.S. trained and equipped the RNA since the people’s war began. The U.S. wants nothing more than to build and maintain an empire all over the world, and sees Nepal as a part of that. But like others all over the world, the people of Nepal have a thirst for independence and liberation.

The CPN (Maoist) bases its practice on the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. They have applied Marxism to conditions in Nepal and call this "Prachanda Path" after the founder of their party. They work to fight against slave-like labor conditions in the countryside and fight diligently for the rights of oppressed nationalities in Nepal. Additionally, they are making considerable strides towards women’s liberation and the emancipation of the dalits (‘untouchables’). Bringing these oppressed groups into the political life of the country is instrumental to the continuing successes of the revolution.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, in our meetings with representatives of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), expressed solidarity with the Nepali people in their continuing struggle against feudalism and imperialism. We are proud to release this pamphlet, highlighting some of our analysis of the revolution in Nepal.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization

More pamphlets from Freedom Road can be found here: http://www.frso.org/about/literature.htm

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Harry Haywood: "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question"

Harry Haywood wrote the pamphlet, "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question" in 1957 to fight back against the revisionist assault on the CPUSA. It deals mainly with attacks on Harry Haywood's revolutionary line which come from James Allen, Eugene Dennis, and James Jackson. It was intended for a discussion at a meeting, following the 16th National Convention, which was to adopt on position on the African American national question. That meeting was never held, the paper in question was suppressed, and Harry Haywood, who first developed the theory that African American constituted an oppressed nation while working in the Comintern, was expelled, along with many other revolutionaries. This left the CPUSA as the hopelessly reformist organization that it is today.

This pamphlet was republished by Liberator Press in 1975, the publishing house of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), which was one of the important parties and organizations that made up the New Communist Movement. Harry Haywood, after his expulsion form the CPUSA, went on to be a leader of the Mao Zedong-oriented CPML. His main theoretical work on the African American national question, Negro Liberation, is available online as a PDF file, and can be found relatively cheaply used. His autobiography, Black Bolshevik, is also obtainable. This pamphlet is difficult to find these days, but since its contents are significant in their application of Marxism-Leninism to the revolutionary movement in the United States I wanted to post a few short excerpts here in the hopes that interested persons would try to find the pamphlet and learn more about Harry Haywood and the revolutionary line he has come to represent.

Here are some selections from the pamphlet.

'The key question involved in projecting a solution for the Negro question is the universal problem of reform or revolution. The reformist position on the Negro question claims that it is being solved on the basis of gradual, progressive gains within the framework of the existing monopoly dominated system. There are variations on this theme, ranging form the Southern "liberal" gradualists to the assimilationist line of the NAACP, the most recent variation of which is solution of the Negro question through "full integration into every aspect of American life."
'While we Communists fight for every possible democratic demand of the Negro people, and welcome all advances made, we have pointed out that the Negro question is at bottom the question of an oppressed nation in the South and a national minority in the North. Therefore, the Negro question can only be solved on the basis of a revolutionary change in the Deep South. This difference is fundamental.
'When our Party adopted the position that the Negro question is in essence the question of an oppressed nation, it made a great leap forward from the bourgeois liberal view, which regarded it solely as a question of race that had to be resolved through education and humanitarian uplift. Characteristically, this bourgeois liberal view placed the main onus of racial prejudice not on the ruling class oppressors but on ignorance of the white masses.
'The Party's position was also a sharp break with the Social-Democratic viewpoint, in which racist oppression was considered of no relevance in defining the position of the Negro people in the United States. According to this view, the plight of the Negro people was regarded as purely a question of class, the same as that of the working class in general. Thus, in the name of the general class struggle it denied the specific character of the Negro question, regarding the fight for special demands of the Negro people as divisive and tending to distract workers from the struggle for socialism.
'Both views are not only scientifically incorrect but conceal the profound revolutionary and anti-imperialist character of the struggle for Negro rights which could only be finally resolved through the land revolution and the right of self-determination in the Black Belt, the historic area of Negro majority, and through winning equal rights in the North.
'The formulation of the Negro question by the Party as in essence a question of an oppressed nation correctly related the struggle of the Negro people to the class struggle of the American working class against capitalism, imperialism, and for socialism.
'Our revolutionary position on the Negro question has been challenged only during the three periods of major crisis in the Communist Party, all three of which were caused by the deeply embedded right-revisionist liquidationist trend in our Party, which has its roots in the corruptive influence of the leading imperialist bourgeoisie, to which the U.S. working class is directly subjected. It also has its roots in the overwhelmingly predominant petty-bourgeois and highly skilled worker composition of our Party and its leadership, and the low level of theoretical development of both the leadership and the rank and file' (pp 1-2).

(...)

'The right-revisionists are hard put to explain the fact it was on the basis of our revolutionary position on the Negro question that we led these great mass struggles, and won the respect of the Negro masses as the most militant, consistent fighters for Negro rights: the accolade of "The Party of the Negro People." They try to explain this phenomenon in terms of "our militancy" or "the mass upsurge of the crisis years."
'What they refuse to see is that our militancy, our orientation in the South as the fountainhead of Negro oppression, and our ability to rally the white workers in defense of Negro rights was based upon our placing of the Negro question as a revolutionary question, vital to the interests of the entire working class.
'In sum, our militant and effective struggle flowed from our understanding that the Negro question was a question of national revolution in the Deep South. It was only on the basis of this line that we were able to lead the masses in struggle for Negro rights during the 1930's' (p 35).
(...)

'This is the programmatic significance of our position that the Negro question is a question of national revolution in the Deep South. The correctness of our approach to the Negro question was proved during the struggles of the 1930's.
'The line of the C.P. brought the issue of Negro equality out of the realm of bourgeois humanitarianism, where it had been the special property of the bourgeois philanthropists and professional uplifters who sought to strip the Negro struggle of its revolutionary implications and to make it a feeble adjunct of safe and sane reforms - all obtainable presumably within the existing imperialist-dominated system. It grounded the issue of Negro liberation firmly in the fight of the American people for full democracy and in the struggle of the working class people against capitalism' (p 36).

(...)

'We, Negro Communists, do not accept the status of "aliens" to which the [revisionist] Negro Resolution relegates us. We are an integral part of the Negro movement, embodying the great revolutionary traditions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, etc. We do not become "foreigners" when we become Communists.
'It is therefore, not only the right, but the duty of Negro Communists to project forms and methods of struggle consistent with the great revolutionary traditions of the Negro people. As true patriots, we call for a consistent fight against U.S. imperialism as the main enemy of the Negro people. We call for an alliance with the white working class based upon common revolutionary aims. We call for international solidarity with the heroic struggles for national liberation, peace and Socialism which embrace the vast majority of mankind' (p 38).

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Suggested Reading in Marxism

Here is some literature I would suggest people read, some of my favorites. Listed below is what is in the photo above. Some of this material is available online, and I'll provide a link where that is the case. I don't agree with every word of everything in these books, but I do agree with them overall. Finally, I should add that there are some things I would suggest which aren't included, merely because I structured this list around a picture of some books I actually physically posses. So some books are included as representative a larger body of work, such as that of the important U.S. Marxist-Leninist leader and theorist William Z. Foster, for example.

Marx & Engels, "The Communist Manifesto"

V. I. Lenin, "What is to be Done?", "Left-Wing Communism", and "Marx-Engels-Marxism"

J. V. Stalin, "Problems of Leninism"

Mao Zedong, "Selected Works" and "Quotations from Chairman Mao"

Harry Haywood, "Negro Liberation", "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question", and "Black Bolshevik"

William Z. Foster, "American Trade Unionism"

Revolutionary Union, "Build the Anti-Imperialist Student Movement"

Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, "Build the Black Liberation Movement"

Proletarian Unity League, "2, 3, Many Parties of a New Type?"

League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), "Founding Statement"

Freedom Road Socialist Organization, "Unity Statement", "Unity Statement on the National Question", "Some Points on the Mass Line", and "Summing up the Communist Movement"

Workers Party of Belgium, "Another View of Stalin"

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP), "Historical Outline"

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, "A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine"

Communist Party of the Philippines, "Philippine Society and Revolution"

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New pamphlet from Freedom Road: "Summing up the History of the Communist Movement - From Marx to 1999"

Though the text of the document has been on the Freedom Road Socialist Organization website for a long time, FRSO has just released the 1999 Declaration of the International Communist Seminar as a new pamphlet: 1999 Declaration of the International Communist Seminar: Summing up the History of the Communist Movement - From Marx to 1999.

FRSO is one of many Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations from around the world who participate in the International Communist Seminar and who signed onto this important document. As such, it represents Freedom Road's understanding of some of the key questions of Marxism.

This document represents a superb attempt at summing up the experiences of building socialism in the 20th century. It looks at the contributions of V. I. Lenin, J. V. Stalin, and Mao Zedong in particular and, examining the rise of revisionism and the struggle against it, draws out some principal theses of Marxism-Leninism.

I'd like to encourage everyone to read it. Marxists should print out the pamphlet and distribute it. It is an excellent piece for introducing people to Marxist theory and practice and provides a good basis for deeper discussion of some of the more complex questions of the experiences of socialist revolution in the last 100 years.

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Freedom Road on the Mass Line

"The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history." - Mao Zedong

One of the main things that attracted me to Marxism-Leninism and the thought of Mao Zedong when I was becoming an activist and getting involved in popular struggles, particularly in the antiwar movement, was the revolutionary theory and practice of the mass line.

I was drawn to this method of organizing and leadership because it answers in a practical and straightforward way many questions that people have to deal with if they want to fight for fundamental change in society. When I was first beginning to organize and work is large mass meetings in the anti-war movement I felt the need for a revolutionary theory that could measure up to the test of practice. And the mass line measures up.

I first encountered the mass line in Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. Later I read other articles by Mao Zedong on the subject, such as Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership and his January 30, 1962 talk on democratic centralism. I also studied articles by other communists like Liu Shaoqi's Concerning the Mass Line of our Party and the short collection of Lenin's writings, Party Work in the Masses.

That being said, I just wanted to draw people's attention to this newly released pamphlet by the U.S. Marxist-Leninist group, Freedom Road Socialist Organization on the subject, Some Points on the Mass Line. It is a study of the mass line that was developed by FRSO which explains many of the key points of communist organizing, theory and practice, philosophy and revolution, in a very clear way. If an activist/organizer wants to know what Marxism has to offer in practical terms, in terms of getting stuff done, talk to them about the mass line and show them this pamphlet. It is about how to organize for revolution and change the world.

Well, though it is being published officially by Freedom Road now, in February 2008, it is really sort of a re-release, because as a study it has been floating around for a while now. So at the very beginning of Some Points on the Mass Line it says, "This study was prepared by a leading member of FRSO in the late 1980s. Since then this study has been used extensively inside and outside our organization and it has been reprinted in a number of different political settings. The application of the mass line is basic to how we do our work in trade unions, in the movements of oppressed nationalities, in anti-war and other progressive struggles. It informs our work on building a new communist party." So the real target audience of Some Points on the Mass Line is clearly Marxist-Leninists, though I think advanced activists and organizers who aren't necessarily Marxists or communists could get a a lot out of studying it as well. When combined with a strong, Marxist-Leninist class analysis, a clear view of the national question in the U.S., and important texts like the Main Political Report and other documents from FRSO's 5th Congress (2007) we see that this document on mass line organizing is well contextualized within the rest of what Freedom Road has to offer.

When you get right down to it, Some Points on the Mass Line is an organizing handbook, with 20 points dealing with various aspects of the mass line, and including study questions. Some Points on the Mass Line deals with questions ranging from the philosophical (Marxist theory of knowledge, relationship between theory and practice) to the political (democratic centralism and communist organization), to the very practical (methods of work and methods of leadership). It shows how the mass line allows organizers to deals with questions as seemingly simple as how to respond practically to apathy and cynicism. It discusses the importance of summing up experiences and the struggle for summation. It talks about how to do united front work. It even deals with questions regarding how to build a stable core of activists to mobilize masses of poeple. And, importantly, it links all of these points with deeper questions such as how to raise the level of people's consciousness.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that there is recommended reading at the end. The point is made that "although the term mass line was coined by the Communist Party of China, the basic method of reliance on, and the mobilization of, the masses of people has been utilized by all successful revolutionary parties." So along with the well known texts of Mao Zedong and Chinese communism, others like Lenin's On Confounding Politics with Pedagogics and Stalin's Armed Insurrection and our Tactics are listed there as well for people to do more research into the classics of Marxism-Leninism.

It is in the mass line that the dialectical relationship between theory and practice is the most clear. As a revolutionary method, the mass line has be proven by successful revolutionary movements all over the world. This pamphlet from Freedom Road shows, point by point, just how that works. I would highly suggest that people read it and apply it.

"The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge." - Mao Zedong

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Socialism or Barbarism? Review of "Another View of Stalin"

This book by Ludo Martens of the Worker's Party of Belgium, Another View of Stalin (EPO, Antwerp: 1994.), is pretty incredible. For us, working in the United States where anticommunism is so institutionalized, it is an important book. It is a weapon for communists to use in the ideological front.

For a long time I didn't understand Comrade Stalin. I came from a petit-bourgeois intellectual Marxism, distanced from practice and tied in rather closely to to the humanist/individualist ideologies of the U.S. I read Adorno, Jameson, and Critical Theory. As a young man, a teenager just coming to Marxism, I remember people would say, "but Socialism didn't work," and I would reply, with a fine mixture of youthful optimism and naivete, "but it was never really tried!" Any scientific socialist should be able to see such a statement for the utopianism that it is. Later my utopianism became more nuanced and sophisticated as I studied philosophy formally. It was only when I came to Mao Zedong's writings and the experience of the Chinese Revolution that I could begin to reappraise Stalin, the USSR, and the world communist movement as a whole. Whatever his errors may have been, Mao was a breath of fresh air, so clear and simple, yet sharp as a razor - so practical and useful! And yet Mao was a "Stalinist." So I had to ask, was Stalin a deviation from "true" Marxism and even from Leninism (and where did that leave Mao?), or was Stalin a genuine Marxist-Leninist? What did this say about socialism, what it is and what it isn't? What did this say about what socialism could be?

Through a more thorough study of Marxism and of history, I came to see that Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist and that the USSR, at least until the Krushchev years, provided a shining example of what Marxism was when applied. But why did it "fail" and where did that leave us? It was only much later that I came to understand the particulars of the sequence of events and what Mao Zedong calls the "two line struggle," whereby in the transitional society that socialism is (not what Marx calls a "mode of production" but something between the capitalist and communist modes) contradictions are intensified and class struggle along with it. Nothing is assured just because the proletariat has seized state power.

Fast forward a bit. I attended a recent conference where a lot of Trotskyite groups tabled. On the way to conference, in the van that we had rented for our mobilization, I was talking about Soviet history, about Stalin and his contributions to building socialism, and about the slow death of the Soviet system as the sickness of revisionism tore the USSR apart from Krushchov to through Gorbachav, to Yeltsin and the liquidation of the CPSU and the rise of the oligarchs. Having read Another View of Stalin, it was an easy thing to address such questions as, "What about Lenin's Will?", "What about the Purges and Show Trials?", "What about the Gulag? And the millions killed?" "The lack of democracy?" "The forced collectivization?" "What about Trotsky?" Martens goes into all of this. He addresses the usual criticisms of Stalin, going after their sources, showing how they don't hold up to any scientific analysis of history, situating them in their actual historical conditions, from which they are so easily and with such cleaverness removed. He exposes the agendas of Stalin's critics in the most thorough way. But people didn't understand why all these Trots were around. They were very confusing, and after all, they said all the same things about Stalin that their highschool teachers had been saying all along!

And this brings us to the question of revisionism. Some don't see why this question of Stalin is so important for Marxist-Leninists today. Stalin is dead, after all, and this isn't Russia. In the last instance, it comes down to the very essense of Marxism, to historical materialism, to the scientific analysis of social, political and economic change. Had socialism "ever been tried" and did it work? If our answer is yes, then we must come up with a balance sheet of its successes and failures, we must go into the particulars, the local and geopolitical contradictions, the historical milieu. If no, we must discern how socialism in the USSR, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia or China differed from "true" socialism, and how is this "true" socialism to ever be achived given where are and what we know about class society, imperialism, uneven development and so on? The question of Stalin is central to this - the question of the architect of the first Socialist society and leader of the international communist movement for so many crucial decades. To defend Stalin one must have a firm grasp of history. To be a Trotskyite one must only say, "but think of what it would have been like if..." The concern is not with what happened. Trotskyite "theory" doesn't hold water. And we know, as Mao Zedong has said, the basis of Marxist epistemology, that is the basis of all scientific knowledge, is practice.

A lot of people I know who have read this book on Stalin by Comrade Martens have been stunned by the degree of the lies perpetuated to attack the architect of socialism. It is a common thread that links all of communisms enemies: Imperialists, Fascists, Trotskyites, Revisionists, etc. Comrades like it because it is a weapon. Anti-capitalist fellow-travellers like it because it reaffirms what they have always suspected - that the greatest enemies of capitalism and imperialism are the ones who are most villified by the petit-bourgeois lackeys of international monopoly capital. Today as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) stands on the verge of founding the world's next socialist state, we see it happening again with the new "biography" of Mao Zedong, which is nothing but propaganda dressed in the trappings of history.

One need not limit oneself to Krushchov's secret speech to the XXth Congress to find this problem. One can look in philosophy as well. The "Marxist" Humanists, celebrants of the velvet (counter-)revolution like Dunayevskaya (secretary of Trotsky and founder of News & Letters), Kolakowski ("Marxist" revisionist author of the most anti-Marxist philosophical text yet written, the three volume Main Currents of Marxism), and even Alain Badiou ("post-Maoist" methematician and philosopher who calls both the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Solidarity movement in Poland "obscure events" to study and upon which to refound the leftist project). And we can see where that leads. The humanists are liberals, as Louis Althusser has pointed out in his cleaver syllogism: "All humanists are liberals; Eric Fromm [famed "Marxist Humanist"] is a humanist; Fromm is a liberal." Kolakowski sings the praises of revisionism to no end, and Badiou's OP is at best infantile leftist and worst completely reformist. Where does this revisionism lead? In the Soviet Union and the Warsaw States it led to capitalist restoration in its most barbaric form. Humanism restored gangster-liberalism in the Soviet Bloc. It is easy when you start talking about "universal human rights" to forget that this means bourgeois right, and that in the end, "universal human rights", "Socialism with a human face" and what have you, is a defeat for the working class.

It is odd that when anyone wants to talk about the "true essense" of Marxism, or a "return to Lenin" it is that old renegade Kautsky, the social-democrat who wanted a reformed capitalism, that they dredge up in order to liquidate the CP and liberalize the state and economy. And nobody embodies Kautskyism like Tony Blaire's Labour Party as they unite with U.S. imperialism to rob the Middle East of all of its resources. Mao Zedong puts it very simply: never forget class struggle.

I am an activist, a militant involved in the daily struggles of the working and oppressed people. I argue for socialism, for Marxism-Leninism. To do this, this book by Comrade Martens is useful, especially with students and young people. So many people see these problems of exploitation, poverty, national oppression, sexism, and so on. They see that they are systemic, but so often it stops there. Because the radical alternative is "Stalinism" so many people settle for an ineffective social-democracy, a vain attempt to reform capitalism, or a cynical pessimism. But this book does well to demonstrate that, situated within its historical context, Communism is a good thing. And, as Lenin would have it, the dictatorship of the proletariat is "a million times more democratic" than anything else we have ever seen.

Stalin, architect of socialism, is a shining example to genuine Marxist-Leninists everywhere.

in unity and struggle,
Comrade Zero

(Another View of Stalin can be purchased from the Stalin Society. For a good discussion on revisionism in the USSR, perhaps one that is a bit more nuanced than Restoration of Capitalism in USSR by Martin Nicolaus that so many Maoists swear by, see Ludo Martens. USSR: The Velvet Counter Revolution. EPO, Brussles: 1991. For more on the role of Stalin, the anti-revisionist movement and a critical evaluation of the role of Mao and the CPC, see also Ludo Martens. "On Certain Aspects of the Struggle Against Revisionism". PTB, Brussles: March, 1995. [.doc])

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