Nepali Maoism and Prophet the “Outcast” Leon Trotsky

This article was written by a Trotskyist from Nepal, about an article a Maoist from Nepal wrote, admitting Maoism is a dead end, and that Maoist cadres in Nepal are interested in the revolutionary ideas of Trotskyism. This post I admit to my readers isn't for everyone. Just like on rightist blogs, some discussions are more for their own group. I disagree with the comrade's conclusion about Maoists and Trotskyists uniting. I believe unity is based totally on common principles.



70 Years after the brutal murder of Bolshevik Revolutionary Leader Comrade Leon Trotsky by Koba’s criminal regime (Joseph Stalin), Nepal’s Maoists for the first time have accepted that, in the current context of the globalised capitalism, the revolutionary ideas of Leon Trotsky are “more relevant” than those of his killers (Koba Stalin).

In a recent Maoist Publication “Rato Jhilko” (The Red Spark), Maoist ideologue, Baburam Bhattarai writes: “Today, the globalization of imperialist capitalism has increased many fold as compared to the period of October Revolution. The development of information technology has converted the world into a global village. However, due to unequal and extreme development inherent in capitalist imperialism has created inequality between different nations. In this context, there is still (some) possibility of revolution in a single country similar to the October revolution; however, in order to sustain the revolution, we definitely need a global or at least a regional wave of revolution in a couple of countries. In this context, Marxist revolutionaries should recognize the fact that in the current context, Trotskyism has become more relevant than Stalinism to advance the cause of the proletariat”. (The Red Spark, July 2009, Issue, -1, Page-10, our translation from Nepali language).

So far, Maoists were trying to hide the truth about the life and contribution of comrade Leon Trotsky from their own cadres. But after our intervention on this issue through the internet, it seems that, Nepali Maoists could not hide the truth about comrade Trotsky any more. As the 14 year old Maoist campaign in Nepal based on Stalinism and Maoism is heading to a dead end, and as the party cadres are demanding explanation from the Leaders, the latter have been forced to speak the truth about Bolshevik Revolution in general and about comrade Leon Trotsky in particular.

This recognition is also an indication of the fact that, Maoists are trying to draw a balance sheet of their decades long campaign, and have come to face the truth about the fallacy of Stalinism and Maoism.

We appreciate this positive first step of Nepali Maoists to embrace the truth, and urge them to educate their cadres about the life and work of comrade Leon Trotsky and his teaching on “permanent revolution”.

We also urge the Maoist leadership to take immediate steps to bring the Maoists and Trotskyists from different nations together in order to establish a global nucleus of revolutionary forces to fight imperialism more effectively.

RENEGADE EYE

Open Thread

I want to do more Food and Blogging posts, but I'm running low on recipes. If you send me a recipe by emaailing me at my profile email address, I'll print the recipe, and plug your blog. I eventually post every recipe, even if it takes two years as Mehmet Çagatay found out. I prefer recipes with simple ingredients, low cost, themed etc.

Taking Woodstock **1/2

A well acted, directed, and photographed trite movie. The times and the subject deserve more than a coming of age story. Liev Schreiber as a drag queen was the best part.

I finished reading Moby Dick. It took me forever to read through the dense middle. If only the plot was the book, it would be a thin well written book. If you read Moby Dick, what do you have to say about it?

One of my favorite UK blogs is Dave's Part. I'm not sure why he calls himself an ex-Trotskyist. I find his posts really well thought out and readable.

The East Dakota take on the recent Afghan elections is insightful.

American Left History deserves more readers. It has very well written posts on American history and culture, from a Trotskyist view. Markin loves history and good music, and it shows on his blog.

This is an open thread. Take advantage of it.
RENEGADE EYE

The Stalin-Hitler Pact

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the infamous The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This article is a good analysis from a Marxist viewpoint, about the several wars together called World War II,.

Written by Ben Peck
Monday, 24 August 2009



In the early hours of August 24 seventy years ago Germany and Soviet Russia signed a "non-aggression pact", which divided the states of Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", effectively slicing Poland into two halves. Ben Peck looks back at what happened and explains why such an incredible event could take place – and the price that was paid

Be sure to read the rest of the article HERE

RENEGADE EYE

The Curious Case of Dana Ali

I was asked by the blog The Third Estate to cross-post this article. I think this is of interest to my readers.

This post was written by Salman Shaheen on August 21, 2009

Dana Ali, faces deportation after an alleged Home Office blunder fails to recognise his marriage to a British citizen.



Dana Ali was born in 1975. He grew up in Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq that the world first heard about on March 16th 1988 when 5,000 people were massacred by Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons. “Many of my family died in that attack,” Dana tells me. His story is the story of the Kurds, a stateless people facing the brutal repression of a tyrannical regime. It is little wonder, then, that Dana became a vocal critic of Saddam’s government. “When I grew up, I began supporting the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq,” he says. Dana would distribute leaflets and newspapers for the party. That was how he came to the attention of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, an Islamist group that held power in the region. “They saw us as a threat to them,” Dana says. “They arrested me and I was threatened by them. I had to leave in the end. If I had stayed there, they would have killed me.”

Fearing for his life, Dana fled to the UK in July 2000. After being granted a work permit, he found a job at Buxted Chicken Factory in Suffolk. It was there that he met his wife, Taina Mason. “I was Dana’s boss,” Taina tells me. “We hit it off so well. We went out together for about eight months, then we were talking romantically and discussed getting married. So we eloped.” Dana moved to Lowestoft to live with Taina and they married in 2003. The year that Britain and America invaded Iraq, Saddam’s regime was toppled and the Islamists in the Kurdish north were crushed. “I didn’t support the invasion,” Dana says. “I was glad that they got rid of Saddam, but so many civilians were killed.”

Even in the darkest days of the occupation, with hundreds dying every day and the country on the brink of a civil war between Shi’ahs and Sunnis, Kurdish Iraq was held as a success story. That elusive island of calm in a sea of chaos. Dana, however, has no desire to return. “I don’t know if I will be safe,” he says. “There are still kidnappings in northern Iraq, the media here don’t cover that really, but if you look at the Kurdish newspapers you can see it, and I don’t know if the people who made me leave are still about.” Dana’s wife tells me he has no family left there. “His family are here, there’s no reason for him to go back. He’s worried he might be arrested or shot.” Hoping to settle in the UK to start a family with his new wife, Dana applied for a marriage visa and it should have been a happily ever after.

“We heard nothing back from the Home Office,” Taina says. She tells me that despite sending their passports and marriage certificate, the Home Office curiously failed to recognise their marriage. Taina believes that her husband had been confused with another person called Dana Ali. “We kept getting police phone calls and credit card companies saying you’ve taken out loans. They were looking for someone in Yorkshire. And we said that’s not him. He’s not allowed a credit card, he’s not allowed loans, he’s never been to Yorkshire.” Mistaking him for the other Dana Ali, the police turned up at 3.30 in the morning one day last year and arrested him. “They had a picture of this guy and they realised they’d mixed the papers up.”



The situation was soon resolved, but Taina believes that the mix up of the papers is the reason her marriage was never recognised and Dana was denied a visa. “At first they approved my application,” Dana says. “Then they said my leave to remain paper was a mistake because my file had mixed me up with someone else.” A UK Border Agency spokesperson denied the allegation that the papers had been muddled up, but declined to comment as to whether a marriage visa application had been received. “We would not remove anyone from the UK while there are outstanding applications or representations on their case,” the spokesperson said.

“They told me to go home and wait 3-6 months,” Dana says. “I waited and nothing happened. My solicitor phoned them and sent letters to them. After a couple of years, they just refused me.” As a result, Dana was forced to leave his job at the chicken factory. He has been out of work since 2004, unable to claim benefits and unable to help his wife with the mortgage, living in the country pending immigration investigation. “They told us, when they want him, they’ll come and get him,” Taina says. “He was getting so down; he just wanted to get out of the house. So a couple of nights a week he would help out his friend at the kebab shop and have coffee with him. He wasn’t working there and he wasn’t getting paid, and the manager told the Home Office that, but the authorities said that he was working and they issued him with a form telling him he had to sign in at the police station every month.”

Told that if he was caught helping out his friend again, he would be arrested and the owner of the kebab shop fined £5,000, Dana has been reporting to Lowestoft police station once a month since March. One day, however, he didn’t come home. When he turned up at the police station on July 31st, they took him into custody without warning. “I asked them why and they told me they had papers to remove me from the United Kingdom,” Dana says. “I haven’t been home since that day.” Dana has barely seen his wife since they took him to Oakington, the Cambridgeshire immigrant detention centre exposed by a 2005 BBC documentary for the violence and racist abuse carried out by some of its staff. “You think you’re not going to do anything ‘cos a white person tells you what to do. Well I’m afraid you’re wrong,” employee James Martin was filmed saying to a detainee. “My great-grandfather shot your great-grandfather and nicked his fucking country off you for 200 years,” he says before tipping the immigrant out of bed. In December last year, inspectors investigating Oakington declared it had “lost direction” and inmates felt unsafe.



“I think it’s like Auschwitz,” Taina tells me. Whilst it is probably a little unfair to compare Oakington Immigration Reception Centre to the Nazi concentration camp in which over a million people were killed, hearing Dana describe the razor wire, the guards, the dogs and the cramped conditions, it is easy to understand why he and his wife are frightened. “He’s had to see a doctor and a psychiatrist since he’s been there,” Taina says. “On one of his arms, he started scratching his skin to bits. He doesn’t realise he’s doing it, he’s so stressed. They’ve put him on anti-depressants, which took over a week for him to get. Even the doctor said she’s disgusted at how he’s being treated.”

“I’m being treated like a criminal,” Dana says. In the past, the British government treated the country’s poor as though they were criminals. Now that status is accorded to its immigrants. Dana has lost a lot of weight since his detention. Hearing about his experiences, it is not hard to imagine Oakington as some kind of Dickensian workhouse. “When we go for dinner, if you ask for one more piece of bread, they won’t give it to you. When I’ve complained, I’ve been told, I’m illegal in this country, I shouldn’t be here, why am I asking questions? This camp, the way they treat you, it’s somewhere else, it’s not England.”

His wife, Taina, is in quite a unique situation for a woman in Suffolk, a county seemingly immune to demographic changes, to mass immigration and to ethnic diversity. In fighting Dana’s corner through the years of alleged blunders and stalling from the Home Office, she has written to local MP Bob Blizzard, to Tony Blair, to George Galloway, and she has approached the national papers, but none of them took up her case. Married to an Iraqi immigrant, part of the problem she faces comes from the right-wing tabloids and the relentless stream of anti-immigrant propaganda they publish. “The government pays attention to the Mail,” writes Nick Davies in his book, Flat Earth News, describing the paper’s tendency to omit all the benefits of immigration in its reporting, quoting highly selective and distortionary figures to sell its own reactionary, and often false, line. “I’ve become immune to it, really,” Taina tells me. “Dana is such a loving person. Before this happened, he was the soul of the party, he’s such a brilliant host. When people start saying the immigrants come over here and get this and that, I think, well my husband’s not like that.”

Dana desperately wants to return to his wife. “There are many people here in the same situation,” he says. “They’ve been here for a long time, and they’re married, and they just want to work and get on with their lives and their families. Some of them have kids as well.” He tells me he’s hoping to start a family with Taina. “I want to have children. We haven’t been able to because I have a sperm problem and need to have IVF treatment. But that costs a lot. If I were allowed to work, I could afford it. I would like to have one baby or two.”

Having once again submitted his documentation to the Home Office, Dana is awaiting their response. Taina says that if they do not recognise their marriage and his eligibility to remain in the country, she will take the case to the High Court. “I spoke to my solicitor last night and he said if we go to the High Court it will probably cost £5,000 to get him free,” she says. “Where is the justice in this world if you have to pay for someone’s freedom?”

Dana’s life story, from his fight against Islamists in Halabja to his fight to remain in Britain, is testament to the fact that the price of freedom can be very high indeed.

Dana’s niece, Claire, has set up a Facebook group in support of their campaign

The Third Estate
RENEGADE EYE

Food and Blogging: The Turkish Edition

I asked several bloggers, to send me recipes; preferably easy to prepare, common ingredients, ethnic etc. In addition if I print the recipe, I'll plug your blog. Send recipes to me at the email address at my profile. I was going to print them all in one post, but I acquired too many. Political agreement doesn't matter. Atleast every month I'll continue this series. Leave comments about food, the blog, restaraunts etc. Everyone who sent recipes, will eventually have them published. I'm going in random order

Today we visit Turkish cuisine and blogging. One blogger lives in Turkey, moved to the US, and one who presents Kurdish/Turkish food.

Turkish Marxist/Laconian Mehmet Çagatay. He says about Batrik, I had spent my childhood in Mersin, a southern city of Turkey. There was a sort of salad (Batirik) that is uniqely belong to the region. That was my favorite food in these times

Batrik

For 7 People:

1.5 cups of fine bulgur wheat
1 cup of warm water
1 Tbs sesame seeds
3Tbs tahini
1/2 cup olive oil
1 big onion, grated
1/2 Tbs salt
2 tsp cumin
1 Tbs pepper paste (could be found in Middle East stores)
1/2 bunch of mint and parsley
4 mid size tomatoes, peeled and chopped finely
4 scallions
3 anaheim peppers
2 pickling cucumber
2 leaves of lettuce
6 – 7 cups of cold water
Lemon juice, or pomegranate juice to taste

How to make it:

Put the bulgur in a deep dish and pour warm water over it. Let it soak
In a nonstick pan, fry sesame seeds finely and add tahini. When the mix becomes too thick, take it off the heat and add to the bulgur
While making sure all the ingredients are mixed well, add the grated onion, pepper paste, cumin, olive oil, salt and start kneading it. If necessary, add little amounts of water to help mixing
Add the peeled, chopped tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce leaves and mix again
Add the cold water, to get a very think cold soup consistency
Add lemon or pomegranate juice to taste

Now to America via Turkey comes from one of my favorite bloggers recipes. Nevin presents carrot rolls (havuc kafte). She says, Here is a recipe that my kids grew up with. I have been very conscious about their eating habits ever since they were babies. I have always prepared "real" food and never taken them to fast food restaurants. I have a lot of great recipe's for kids especially.... :) (if you wish any more, I got tons up my sleeve)

This dish originated in the Ottoman Palace kitchens.. It is very typical of Istanbulian style of cooking. Not hot or overly spicy. Healthy and great for kids....

Havuc Kofte (Carrot rolls)

Serves 4 people:

- What do you need?

10 medium sized carrots, peeled and sliced
2 slices bread or bread crumbs
6 dried apricots, finely sliced
3-4 spring onions, finely sliced
2 tablespoons of pine nuts
2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed (this is totally up to the cook, depending on how much you like garlic)
1 egg
finely chopped parsley and dill
salt and pepper
Few tablespoons of thick creamy yogurt
Flour

- How to prepare it?

Steam the carrots until soft. Drain well and put them in a large bowl. Mash with a fork...
Then add the bread crumbs dried apricots, spring onions, pine nuts, garlic, salt, pepper, 1 egg, parsley and dill.

Tip: If there is unnecessary liquid in the mixture, add more breadcrumbs.

Mix everything together. The mixture should be moist and sticky.
Make small size oblong shapes.

On a separate flat surface, place some all purpose flour and dip the carrot rolls in it. (This may seem difficult as the mixture is so sticky, but once dipped in flour the "Kofte" are easy to handle) After dipping each carrot rolls in the flour, put them a side.

- Cooking?

Heat a thin layer of oil in a large frying pan and place the kofte in it. Roll them over to brown on all sides.
After cooking all sides, place them on a paper towel to get rid of unwanted oil.

Transfer to a serving dish and put a large spoon of creamy yogurt on top.

And now I return to Kurdish Turkish cuisine. Rastî presents Cacik--Cold Yogurt and Cucumber Soup. ,i>This soup is eaten all over Turkey, including the Kurdish Region. It's included with meals or is used as part of a meze selection, and it's wonderfully cooling on hot summer days.

Cacik--Cold Yogurt and Cucumber Soup

1/2 lb. cucumbers--preferably "Persian" cucumbers (available at Asian markets)
2 cups whole milk, whole fat yogurt--don't even think of using that nasty low-fat/no-fat kind
2 tsp white vinegar
1 tsp olive oil
2 tsp fresh mint, finely chopped or 1 tsp dried
1/2 tsp fresh dill, finely chopped or 1/4 tsp dried
1 tsp salt or to taste
ice cubes

If you use regular cucumbers, peel and seed them, then coarsely grate. "Persian" cucumbers only need to be grated. In a large bowl, whisk the yogurt until smooth. Mix in the grated cucumber, vinegar, olive oil, mint, dill, and salt. If the yogurt seems thick, add a bit of water to thin it. Put the cacik in the refrigerator for a couple of hours until it is very cold. Serve in individual bowls, adding ice cubes for extra chill.

Alternately, mash one garlic clove and stir it in with the other ingredients. Leave the clove in the cacik while it chills, but remove it before serving. It will add just a hint of garlic flavor to the cacik.

Blogs Listed:
Mehmet Çagatay
The Nevin Politology
Rastî



RENEGADE EYE

Has Obama Sold Out Already?

Louis Proyect here compares present day Democrats, to the old Whig Party: In 1820 a dispute arose over the extension of slavery into Missouri, which was not then yet a state. Henry Clay worked out a compromise in Congress that made Maine free and Missouri slave. This maintained the balance in the Senate, which had included 11 free and 11 slave states. Except for Missouri, it would ban slavery north of Arkansas. The Missouri Compromise sounds exactly like the kind of legislation that the Democrats would come up with nowadays, especially in light of Mukasey’s approval and the continued funding of the war in Iraq. That describes the Democrats on healthcare.

Obama had no mandate to take Universal Health Care (UHC) off the table. Now it looks like even the "ublic option is history. Even if the public option was passed, it only allocated a fixed number of clients.

This time the pendulum will not swing right. The right has no program for the economic or healthcare crisis. No ideas period. It's time for the union movement to break from its main enemy, the Democratic Party.

RENEGADE EYE

District 9 ****

This is the scifi picture, you've been waiting for. It's the Schindler's List of the genre.

The movie starts documentary style. The aliens have landed of all places, in Johannesburg. Their craft sputtered around for years, and stopped. The inhabitants are malnourished. They came leaderless, and without intentions of war or new technology. The creatures were stranded, without fuel for their craft.

They were housed in a closed shanty town establishment called District 9. It was overcrowded and militarized, turned into a slum. Mass protests hit South Africa, because the creatures who are contemptuosly called "prawns," are accused of taking up social service benefits, that belong to humans. There are signs everywhere, humans only. They have an insatiable appetite for cat food. Nigerians start a cat food scam.



A private company called MNU (Multi-National United) is contracted to relocate the aliens from District 9 to a new camp outside the city limits. Of course, MNU is secretly interested in figuring out a way to use the sophisticated alien weaponry, which apparently can only be activated using alien DNA.

Sharlto Copley plays Wikus van der Merwe, an MNU operative, assigned to lead the eviction of the prawns. He is a back slapper type, who during an eviction, accidently spills a cylinder of alien material on his skin, causing his slow transformation to a prawn. His value is he has both human and alien DNA, and could be exploited by MNU, for their goal of the weaponry. Sharlto is a young DeNiro quality actor.

Director/writer Neil Blomkamp grew up in South Africa. The story is based on District Six, Cape Town is the name of a former inner-city residential area in Cape Town, South Africa. It is best known for the forced removal of over 60,000 of its inhabitants during the 1970s by the apartheid regime — a historical basis for the MNU's eviction and relocation of the "prawns".

RENEGADE EYE

Thoughts On the Town Hall Disruptions

By Louis Proyect
August 09, 2009

On August sixth, a Marxmail subscriber posed the question of “proletarian defense guards for Democrats, specifically Democratic congress members attempting to hold town hall meeting.” He, as the rest of us, must have realized how anachronistic such a term was but added:

It sounds weird, true, but I was contacted today as part of a mobilization to confront the hysterical collection of Ron Paulites, birthers, and other associated storm troopers who will be attempting to shut down a discussion of health care tonight by our aging congressman. In other parts of the country liberal representatives have had to flee of be escorted out by the police. The UAW is also supposed to lend some rank and file militants to this so we shall see how things turn out.

Does a proletarian defense guard for an aging Democratic hack make any sense to anyone here? It is true that the local right wing is particularly virulent and I noticed several “Death to communists” at the “tea party” tax protest. It brought to mind the fact that all the Obama signs/ stickers I saw on campus were defaced with a Soviet flag stickers. Given how incensed these people are one wonders what they would do if a real socialist were in any elected office.

I am not going to agonize now over the popular front overtones about all this but I really hate these creeps and I can be as loud as these assholes any day of the week. The larger question remains is that what is the correct path in this era of political polarization and the increasing virulence of the neo-Nazi faction of the Republican Party. I would appreciate other comrades’ experience and thoughts on this issue.

A Huffington Post article fleshed out the Marxmail subscriber’s report on trade union involvement, as well as the frenzy that this had driven the rightwing into:

Union officials continued to receive a barrage of threats on Friday evening and into Saturday punctuated by warnings that if organizers were sent to counter-demonstrate at health care town halls they would be met with violence.

An official with the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor organizations, passed on what he described as a “pretty direct threat” to those union hands who were showing up to balance out anti-Obama demonstrations being waged at local Democratic forums.

“I will be going to a local town hall this weekend, all you union members BEWARE!” an emailer wrote at 9:40 Saturday morning. “We will be waiting for you. better make sure you have arrangements with your local ER. today is the day when the goon meets the gun. see you there.”

The rightwing has been posting Youtube clips about these confrontations. The one below shows the trade union defense guard clearing them out of a town hall meeting organized by Kathy Castor, a Democratic Congresswoman from Florida. It reminded me of some of the assignments I had defending meetings in the 1960s but I was about half the size of these guys.

So far most of the violence at these meetings has consisted of pushing and shoving from the rightwingers, but we cannot rule out an escalation at some point especially in light of the recent murder of an abortion provider in Kansas. For the last several months, talk radio, Fox TV, Lou Dobbs on CNN, the “birthers”, and the far right wing of the Republican Party in Washington has worked itself into a lather around a number of seemingly unrelated issues: whether Obama was born in the US or not; the supposed possibility that health care reform will lead to old people being thrown to the wolves; and a general sense of economic vulnerability.



When the evening newscast the other night was showing footage of the chaos at another one of these town meetings, I told my wife that it reflected the basic difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats do everything they can to demobilize their base, who are seen as inconvenient and extraneous to their main way of getting things done, namely through closed door meetings with corporate executives and nonprofit honchos over how to screw the American people while giving the opposite impression. Meanwhile, the Republicans are much more reliant on an activist base because their social support is much narrower. As a party that rules directly and openly in the interests of the moneyed elite, it requires all sorts of grass roots organization to push its filthy agenda forward.

But in practice, this means that the grass roots is almost always reliant on seed money from deep-pocketed foundations and corporate benefactors. Conservatives for Patients’ Rights takes credit for interventions at these town meetings. A character named Rick Scott, who is a millionaire investor and formerly head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company, leads CPR. A fraud investigation in the 1990s resulted in the Columbia/HCA pleading guilty to charges that it overbilled state and federal health plans. It ended up paying a record $1.7 billion in fines. According to Politico, CPR has raised $20 million to fight health care reform. You can bet that this is more than enough to pay for transporting mobs from one town hall meeting to another, including the one that just got the heave-ho from trade unionists in Florida.

It is impossible to predict what the next four years have in store but you cannot rule out such confrontations being repeated with some regularity given the sharpening of class tensions in the U.S. over what looks like a protracted L shaped recession. Even though the Dow-Jones index is heading toward the 10,000 level, the job and housing situation remain bleak.

Obama will do everything in his power to convince those who voted for him to remain patient while he carries out what amounts to a third Bush term, but there will be more and more defensive measures by the poor and the working class in defense of its own class interests. One can be reasonably assured that the level of discontent in the US will rise despite the African-American President’s clear gift for demagogy and deception.

And as the workers and the poor begin to fight for their rights, the retrograde social forces churned up from a capitalism in decay will become more and more violent and inclined to direct action. While this does not pose any immediate threat of fascism, largely a function of the unlikelihood of a revolutionary socialist movement gaining the necessary numbers and influence any time soon, there will be a need to study the 1930s just as the Marxism list subscriber alluded to when he referred to proletarian defense guards—the sort of thing that hasn’t been seen since then.

For one of the best introductions to the period, I can recommend Leon Trotsky’s Whither France, a sharp polemic against a Popular Front Government that like Obama’s tried to keep its social base demobilized while the fascists were taking over the streets. Trotsky wrote:

It is not the spirit of combination among parliamentarians and journalists, but the legitimate and creative hatred of the oppressed for the oppressors which is today the single most progressive factor in history. It is necessary to turn to the masses, toward their deepest layers. It is necessary to appeal to their passions and to their reason. It is necessary to reject the false “prudence” which is a synonym for cowardice and which, at great historical turning points, amounts to treason. The united front must take for its motto the formula of Danton: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.” To understand the situation fully and to draw from it all the practical conclusions, boldly and without fear and to the end, is to assure the victory of socialism.

I imagine that everybody will have no trouble understanding Danton’s French, but it turns out that he was saying: “Audacity, again audacity, and always audacity.” Given our weakened state, most leftists have difficulty thinking in terms of audaciousness. But if the period we are entering is marked by open conflict between workers and their class enemies, we have to dust off our weapons and march off to the class war once again.

RENEGADE EYE

Nathalie Cardone - Che Guevara

RENEGADE EYE

The Anti- Jokes of Neil Hamburger

Food

Why are M&M's full of chocolate?
Because it would be illegal to fill them full of shit.

Why did ET the Extra Terrestrial love Reese's pizzas so much?
Well because they have the same flavour that cum does on his own planet.

How do you keep your pet dog from licking his balls?
Coat them in Domino's pizza sauce.

Why did God create Domino's Pizza?
To punish humanity for their complacency at letting the Holocaust happen.

Why do Pringles employees get laid so often?
Because they can.

Why does Arby's put so much mayonnaise on their sandwiches?
It makes it easier to flush them down the toilet.

How do you keep flies from landing on your Big Mac?
Unwrap it.

Why did Ronald McDonald have sex with his sister?
His judgment was impaired from all those years of eating junk food.

Why does KFC come in a bucket?
So you have something to throw up into afterwards.

Why did the Sanders girls, Colonel Sanders' daughters, absolutely refuse to eat KFC's extra crispy fried chicken?
Well because it brought back too many bad memories of their late father's foreskin.

Why did Colonel Sanders keep his eleven herbs and spices a secret?
Because he was ashamed of them.

And why, why did, on his deathbed, why did Colonel Sanders on his deathbed reveal the secret of his eleven herbs and spices to Academy Award-nominated actress Sally Fields?
Well, because he was desperate for a handjob... Would that have been funnier if we had a black gospel choir behind me?

Celebrity

Why didn't Santa Claus give anything for Christmas to Osama Bin Laden last year?
Because he blew up the World Trade Center. No Sony Playstation 2 for you, Osama.

What do Osama Bin Laden and Chevy Chase have in common?
Neither one has released a new film in the last year.

What did the godfather of soul, the godfather of soul Gerald Ford have in common with disgraced vocalist James Brown and activist Saddam Hussein?
Well, all three men were very well hung.

Why did Angelina Jolie, sexual actress Angeline Jolie, and sensual actor Brad Pitt, choose to have their baby in a primitive medical facility in Namibia, a third-world hellhole?
Well, simply to have a scapegoat when the baby was born retarded... Did you get that on film asshole, huh? Sick creeps.

Why did Vice-President Dick Cheney shoot Texas attorney Harry Whittington.
Well, it was in retaliation for the Biggie Smalls murder... Hey they loved that joke in Dubai, I'm telling you.

Why did Julia Roberts rub shit on her vagina?
Because she was horny. Hey, don't blame me. I stole that joke from Kris Kristofferson.

What did Santa Claus give Paris Hilton for Christmas?
Well, he raped her.

Why did Robert Redford stick his cock in a jar of Paul Newman's spaghetti sauce?
Lots of spaghetti sauce fans in the crowd tonight. Good to see. Sauce enthusiast. For those... to repeat... for those whose ears are encrusted with venereal disease: Why did Paul Newman, no Robert Redford right, stick his cock in a jar of Paul Newman's spaghetti sauce?
Well, the two men have been friends for over 40 years, do you think he's gonna stick his cock in a competitor's product?

Why did God send Terri Schiavo to hell?
For the sin of sloth.

Why did God create herpes?
So Robin Williams could give something to his female fans that they couldn't just turn around and sell on eBay.

Did you guys hear the one about the paparazzi with the heart of gold?
He stole it from Princess Diana as she lay dying in her car.

Why did the United States government hire a former hotdog vendor to pull the switch that executed Timothy McVeigh?
Well, they thought he might relish the job.

Did you read that Timothy McVeigh killed a million more people the night before he was executed, huh? Yeah. He ejaculated onto the floor of his cell... [When no one laughs:] Could this be a generation gap.

All right, for his final meal, why did Timothy McVeigh request a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a can of Pringles potato chips, a Nestle chocolate bar, and a Mountain Dew?
Because he had endorsement deals with all those companies... Sorry about that one.

Why did God create the Paris Hilton sex video tape?
Well, so that the mentally retarded would have something to masturbate to.

Hey is it just me, is it just me, or is George Bush the worst president in the history of the United States, huh. Am I right? Which makes it all the harder to understand why his son, George W, is the best president we've had in the United States.

[Alternative version: But these are difficult times, and it helps to have a sense of humour, doesn't it, ladies and gentlemen, with some of the things we've been going through in this country. I gotta tell you, I'm sure a few of you will agree, George Bush is the worst president this country has ever had, huh? Which is why it's so hard for me to understand why his son, George W Bush, has turned out to be the best president this country's ever had.]

But I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the people of Italy for their help with the war effort. As you may have read in the newspaper today, the Italians were involved, they sent over Pavarotti into Iraq to eat all the Iraqis' spaghetti in an attempt to demoralize them... [When people groan:] Hey, come on, I have cancer.

Well I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Phoenix Greyhound Park for hosting this annual event, because this is a great annual event, isn't it, ladies and gentlemen. It's just like Woodstock '99, but without all the rapes. And this is being filmed tonight for a DVD, although we will be editing that line from the broadcast. Been saddled with some substandard material here tonight, sorry about that.

Musicians

Hey what do you call it folks, friends, what do you call it when decrepit old dogs regurgitate garbage just before dying -- what's the medical term for that?
The Rolling Stones in concert.

Why did Metallica cut their hair?
Their hairdresser said it was the only way to get all that matted cum out of it.

Why did God give Smashmouth three top ten singles?
Well, it was a clerical error -- he meant to give them all AIDS.

Why did the farmer start a punk rock band?
Well because he was tired of Haulin' Oats.

Why did Sir Mick Jagger shove a carrot up his daughter's ass?
He mistook her for a fan.

What do you get when you cross Elton John with a sabretooth tiger?
I don't know, but you'd better keep it away from your ass.

But you know the thing with this war that really confused me was why the United Kingdom was involved at all. I don't think we needed those guys -- do you? I mean, their military is in terrible shape. Look who they've got. They've got Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, I mean these are hardly the knights of the round table... Okay. Well, moving right along.

Why did Jim Morrison, the dynamic lead singer of The Doors, die in a bathtub?
Well, he overexerted himself trying to clean the grime off of his balls.

Why did God give Motley Crue such abnormally large penises?
So that they'd be better equipped at dealing with the pain of life.

Why does Britney Spears sell so many millions of albums?
Because the public is horny and depressed.

How about Britney Spears' tits. Why didn't we just drop those on Iraq, huh. Talk about your biological warfare. I guess in her case it could more accurately be termed chemical warfare.

What do you call the creatures who are growing in the pile of potato chip wrappers and discarded g-strings behind Britney Spears' house?
Her children.

Why did Kevin Federline spray Britney Spears' caesarean section with Lysol disinfectant?
So it would be safe for fucking.

What do you call a senior citizen who can't refrain from exposing their genitalia in public?
Madonna.

Why did Madonna feed her infant baby Alpo dog food?
Well, she had no choice. That's just what came out of her breasts... These drug addicts like it, huh, why can't the rest of you.

Reach into my bag of tricks here, or more accurately my bag of shit. Why did Madonna wear a hat on the cover of her last two albums?
To try and cover up her bald spot.

What does British filmmaker Guy Richie have in common with Cheetos?
They both come in a plastic bag.

Times are tough for Michael Jackson. Over at Neverland, he recently had to shut down the juvenile VD clinic.

Why did Michael Jackson turn down $10,000,000 to advertise for McDonalds?
Because he doesn't find obese children at all sexually appealing.

Why did Michael Jackson dangle his infant son over the balcony of his hotel room?
He was punishing him for refusing to finish his plate of sperm.

Why did Michael Jackson put chocolate sauce on his hot dog?
So his children would eat it.

In keeping with the tradition he's had with his past albums of titling them after his various personality traits -- you know -- "bad", "dangerous", "off the wall" -- he's titling the first of these two new albums, to be released in July -- he's titling this first album "gay", and that'll be followed up in November with the second album, you know, "mentally ill".

What do you call five fingers that are grasping a small boy's penis?
The Jackson Five.

How many Red Hot Chilli Peppers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Well it depends on how recently they've shot up... [When no one laughs:] Well, we've got a few junkies here tonight, huh. Call the police, you people make me gag. Clean up your act, you're a disgrace to this clean city.

Did you guys hear, this was in the news, did you hear that Anthony Kiedis, the Grammy Award-winning composer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, finally joined the mile high club.
Yeah, he raped a woman in Denver.

Did you guys know that the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are the United States' foremost supporters of the mentally disabled.
That's right. For the past 20 years, without any public fanfare, at their own expense, they have been hiring these poor souls, the mentally disabled, hiring them to design their tattoos.

What is the only thing worse than a new album by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers?
9/11.

Why did the Red Hot Chilli Peppers cross the road?
Well because they were running away from the rehab clinic.

Why are the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' veins in danger of collapsing?
Well because the band has had so many hits.

What do the Red Hot Chilli Peppers have in common with George W Bush?
Well both of them like to shoot up everything in sight.

What's the difference between the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Harriet Taubman?
Well of course the great Harriet Taubman was a heroine to the slaves, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are slaves to the heroin.

Why did the Red Hot Chilli Peppers go under the bridge?
Because there was a plate of shit there they wanted to jack off into.

What do you get when you cross the Red Hot Chilli Peppers with an octopus?
[Something] with eight arms to shoot up into.

What did the Red Hot Chilli Peppers do when their management informed them that they were not all happy with the band's latest tracks?
Well, they went out and bought long suede shirts.

All right, here's a crowd pleaser. Why did Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper all retire from the music industry in 1959?
Well, because their vocal cords were all damaged in an accident.

How many Backstreet Boys does it take to screw in a light bulb?
They don't screw in light bulbs -- they're too busy screwing their audience.

Hey, here's one for you gang. What was Elvis Presley's worst ever release?
Well, the ejaculation containing Lisa Marie.

Why does Eric Clapton close his eyes during all of his guitar solos?
Well, because his audience is so ugly. That was in the news.

Why did Al-Qaeda burn in a public town square in Kabul, Afghanistan, over 10,000 copies of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album?
Well, because it's a horrible album.

What was the name of the historical event at which hundreds of thousands of children were brutalized by a fascist dictatorship and then left out in the sun to die?
The Vans Warped Tour.

Why did NASA send a titanium copy of the latest Linkin Park album to every planet in our solar system?
Well, to kill off any interest that the aliens may have had in invading earth.

Why did two teenage boys crawl down into the bottom of a portable chemical toilet, down into the holding tank, and wait there for 15 hours?
[Alternative version: why did two teenage boys spend 15 hours in a holding tank of the chemical toilet?]
Well, because they wanted to meet Aerosmith.

What is the difference between Courtney Love and a porcupine?
Well, if you get pricked with a porcupine's needle, you're not likely to get AIDS.

What do you get when you cross the latest album by Courtney Love with a boomerang?
A shitty album you can't get rid of.

More about Neil Hamburger here

RENEGADE EYE

Bella Ciao Iran (The Partisan Song)

About the song:
(From wikipedia) The song Bella Ciao was sung by the left anti-fascist resistance movement in Italy, a movement by anarchists, communists, socialists and other anti-fascist partisans. The author of the lyrics is unknown, and the music seems to come from an earlier folk song sung by riceweeders in the Po Valley. Another interpretation has been given following the discovery in 2006 by Fausto Giovannardi of the CD "Klezmer - Yiddish swing music" including the melody "Koilen" played in 1919 by Mishka Ziganoff.

The song has been recorded by various artists in many different languages including Italian, Russian, Bosnian, Kurdish, Croatian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, English, Spanish, Finnish, Kabyle, German, Turkish, Japanese, Tagalog, Breton and Chinese.

Singer of this version is Lidija Percan.

Lyrics
Una mattina mi son svegliato,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Una mattina mi son svegliato,
e ho trovato l'invasor.
O partigiano, portami via,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
O partigiano, portami via,
ché mi sento di morir.
E se io muoio da partigiano,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E se io muoio da partigiano,
tu mi devi seppellir.
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
sotto l'ombra di un bel fior.

ویدیویی برای جنبش سبز آزادی خواهی ایران


RENEGADE EYE

One Day In July: Remembering The 1934 Minneapolis Teamster Strike

THE 1934 MINNEAPOLIS TRUCKERS STRIKE On "Bloody Friday", July 20,1934,at 3rd and 6th, 67 striking truckdrivers and their supporters were shot by Minneapolis police, acting on orders from the Citizens Alliance, an anti-labor employers' group, which controlled city government. Seventy-five years later, WE REMEMBER THEIR SACRIFICE!

This weekend Minneapolis returned to an old tradition and celebrated the 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, that brought unionism to Minneapolis. The first day was a music festival in the streets where the fighting took place. Today was a picnic attended by relatives of strikers, and representatives of the UE who took part in the Republic Windows occupation in Chicago. No known 1934 strikers are living.

Teamsters got their name from starting out organizing drivers of teams of horses. There was less time between the 1934 stike and the Civil War, than the strike and today.

By Dave Riehle

Three successive strikes by Minneapolis truck drivers in 1934 resulted in the defeat of the Citizen's Alliance, the dominant employer organization that had broken nearly every major strike in that city since 1916. The strikes also established the industrial form of union organization through the medium of an American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft union and set the stage for the organization of over-the-road drivers throughout an 11-state area, transforming the Teamsters into a million-plus member union. The strikes were notable for their almost unequaled advance preparation, military tactics, and the degree to which they drew the active participation of union, non-union, and unemployed workers in Minneapolis alike into their struggle. Veteran union militants expelled from the American Communist Party in 1928 as Trotskyists led the strikes.

Carl Skoglund and V R. (Ray) Dunne, the central leaders, had also been expelled from the AFL Trades and Labor Assembly in Minneapolis in 1925 for their political views, along with 20 other Communists. In 1931 Skoglund obtained membership in Teamsters Local 574, a small general drivers. local. The president, William Brown, was supportive of their perspective for organizing drivers, helpers, and inside workers into an industrial union formation that could break the hold of the Citizen.s Alliance.



By late 1933, working in Minneapolis coal yards, they had consolidated a volunteer organizing committee, including Grant and Miles Dunne (V.R's brothers), Harry DeBoer, and Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs, DeBoer, and Shaun (Jack) Maloney became key leaders of the over-the-road drivers' organizing campaign from 1935 to 1940.

On 7 February 1934, a strike was called in the coal yards, shutting down sixty-five of sixty-seven yards in three hours. Under the leadership of DeBoer, an innovative strike tactic was introduced for the first time, cruising picket squads patrolling the streets by automobile. Cold winter demand for coal brought a quick end to the strike two days later, resulting in a limited victory for the union. Local 574's membership rose to three thousand by April, as the organization drive continued.

In preparation for a general drivers. strike, 574 got agreement for active support from Minneapolis unemployed organizations and the Farm Holiday Association, allied with the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. On 15 May, Local 574, now 6,000 members strong, voted to strike all trucking employers, demanding union recognition, the right to represent inside workers, and wage increases.

The union deployed cruising picket squads from strike headquarters, a big garage where they also installed a hospital and commissary. A strike committee of one hundred was elected, with broad representation from struck firms. A women's auxiliary was established at the suggestion of Carl Skoglund.

On Monday, 21 May, a major battle between strikers and police and special deputies took place in the central market area. At a crucial, point, 600 pickets, concealed the previous evening in nearby AFL headquarters, emerged and routed the police and deputies in hand-to-hand combat. Over thirty cops went to the hospital. No pickets were arrested.

On Tuesday, 22 May, the battle began again. About 20,000 strikers, sympathizers, and spectators assembled in the central market area, and a local radio station broadcast live from the site. Again, no trucks were moved.

Two special deputies were killed, including C. Arthur Lyman, a leader of the Citizen's Alliance. No pickets were arrested. On 25 May a settlement was reached that met the union's major objectives, including representation of inside workers.

In the following weeks, it became clear the employers were not carrying out the agreement. Over 700 cases of discrimination were recorded between May and July. Another strike was called on 16 July. The union's newspaper, The Organizer, became the first daily ever published by a striking union. Trucking was again effectively closed down until Friday, 20 July, when police opened fire on unarmed pickets, wounding 67, two of whom, John Belor and Henry Ness, died.

The Minneapolis Labor Review reported attendance of 100,000 at Ness's funeral on 24 July. A public commission, set up later by the governor, reported: "Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill. Physical safety of the police was at no time endangered. No weapons were in possession of the pickets." On 26 July, Farmer-Labor Governor Floyd B. Olson declared martial law and mobilized four thousand National Guardsmen, who began issuing operating permits to truck drivers.

On 1 August, National Guard troops seized strike headquarters and placed arrested union leaders in a stockade at the state fairgrounds in Saint Paul. The next day, the headquarters were restored to the union and the leaders released from the stockade, as the National Guard carried out a token raid on the Citizen's Alliance headquarters. The union appealed to the Central Labor Union for a general strike and the governor issued an ultimatum that he would stop all trucks by midnight, 5 August, if there was no settlement. Nevertheless, by 14 August there were thousands of trucks operating under military permits.

Although the strike was gravely weakened by martial law and economic pressure, union leaders made it clear that it would continue. On 21 August, a federal mediator got acceptance of a settlement pro-posal from A. W. Strong, head of the Citizen.s Alliance, incorporating the union.s major demands. The settlement was ratified and the back of employer resist-ance to unionization in Minneapolis was broken. In March 1935 International president Daniel Tobin expelled Local 574 from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). However, in August 1936 Tobin was forced to relent and recharter the local as 544. The leaders of 544 went on to develop the area and conference bargaining that exists today in the IBT. Local 544 remained under socialist leader-ship until 1941, when eighteen leaders of the union and the Socialist Workers Party were sentenced to federal prison, the first victims of the anti-radical Smith Act, a law eventually found by the United States Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
______________________________________


RENEGADE EYE

Afghanistan: Bloodshed Without End

Written by Ewan Gibbs
Thursday, 16 July 2009

The war in Afghanistan has re-emerged in the headlines as casualty rates for American and British forces have now reached their highest since the invasion of Afghanistan. Already more than one hundred American troops have been killed since the beginning of this year alone, whilst in Britain the news has been dominated by the deaths of eight soldiers who were killed in twenty four hours over the weekend,

Three of them were just eighteen. Although this has briefly seen a temporary rush of sympathy for the dead expressing itself in support for the army, in the long run this is only exposing Afghanistan as being an unwinnable venture which is seeing young working class people sacrificed in the interest of an insane neo-colonial war that is far from in their interests.


U.S. soldiers fire a 120mm mortar during a combat operation in the Da'udzay Valley in the Zabol province of Afghanistan Oct. 23, 2007. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Jim Downen)

It is clear that the total death toll since 2001 of Afghans simply unknown and most estimates do not even factor in the effects that living in a war zone may have on access to medical supplies and the effect of the stress and duress of the daily pounding of bombs on young children and pregnant women etc. Alongside this an untold amount of damage has been done to the already precarious infrastructure of the country. The hunt against opium has seen thousands of acres of farm land burnt as peasant farmers struggle to survive whilst the wider ‘battle for hearts and minds’ is getting nowhere fast.

Despite the loud claims that Afghanistan was entering the twenty first century through a “western style democracy” following the elections in 2004, it is clear that the American led vision of dominating Afghanistan from afar, via a loyal and stable government in Kabul, is little more than a pipe dream. The elections themselves are very precarious affairs. Outside of the capital and the immediate surrounding areas their legitimacy is severely in question due to the involvement of local warlords, to whom the American led coalition are all too happy to give a piece of the pie in return for their cooperation. Mean while areas of the west of the country such as the Helmand province that lie under Taliban domination are effectively excluded from the process what so ever.

As a result the man who is in theory president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai has been branded the world’s most expensive mayor. Entirely reliant on the support of coalition forces his government has been completely bound to the interests of imperialism. In spite of the image the western media has presented of Karzai heading a supposedly reforming liberal government he comes from the same background in the Islamist Mujahideen as the Taliban. His government includes many warlords and recently in has gone as far as to propose legislation that would not only legalize the rape of Shia Muslim women by their husbands and prevent them from leaving their houses, attending school or registering for a doctor without his support. (Amnesty international 14/7/09)

The real origins of this situation go back to the Saur Revolution of 1978 which saw the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan take power through support in the military. Whilst in name a socialist revolution, the coup in effect placed a layer of progressive military generals in charge of the country. Despite failing to establish genuine workers democracy and perusing an agenda centred on protecting and furthering the privileges of the generals, the regime established a planned economy that made huge strides in health care, education and the reform of Afghanistan’s infrastructure.

The American response to this was to support the opposition in the form of the Mujihadeen guerrilla fighters who were funneled huge sums of money through the Pakistani state, in particularly its intelligence forces, the ISI. Eventually these forces overwhelmed the PDPA regime which finally fell apart in 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union from which it drew material and political support. Basing themselves on a reactionary Islamist ideology the Mujihadeen was made up of a variety of disparate groups that based themselves on local strong men who often grew rich out of the trade in opium poppies. Eventually the hard-line Taliban faction took power in 1996, holding it until the US invasion in 2001.


U.S. and British soldiers during a combat patrol in the Sangin District area of Helmand Province. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Daniel Love)

Islamic fundamentalism, in both the case of Iran and Afghanistan, has proved to be a monster the US initially mobilised against social revolution but which eventually escaped its own control. From the fall of the PDPA regime in the early 1990s Afghanistan has been more of a land in between countries than a nation in itself as various factions headed by glorified gangsters have vied for control of the state. The Taliban regime fell from favour with the US as it grew too big for its own boots and various terrorist attacks, such as the attack on the US embassy in Kenya in 1998 and the attempt on the World Trade Centre in 1994, began to be traced back to training camps in Afghanistan.

The attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 proved to be the last straw and the perfect excuse for American forces to invade the country. Yesterday’s freedom fighter became today’s terrorist as the politicians sought to assert their domination over the country. Meanwhile the dollar signs showed in the eyes of the American and British energy companies, who sought to build their own pipeline to the Caspian Sea free from Russian influence. Evidently all were blind to the historical record of those invading Afghanistan! Seemingly the defeat of both the British army in the nineteenth century or the Soviet forces in the 1970s and 80s in Afghanistan did not cause them to think twice.

The invasion of Afghanistan has ended up in disaster. Whilst it is sickening but unsurprising to see opportunist politicians such as David Cameron cashing in on the needless deaths of young working class men who may well have had nowhere to turn but the army upon leaving school, the truth of the matter is no matter how many more helicopters are shipped over the situation will not change. As in Iraq and Vietnam imperialism has entered into a venture it cannot win and has attempted to subdue a people who will not be held down by military force. Sooner or later the Americans will be forced to come to a compromise with a section of the Taliban and, just as in Iraq, forced to march home with their tails between their legs - having only achieved a greater destabilisation of the region and a weakening of their allies and strengthening of their enemies.

This will unfortunately not answer the problems of the Afghan masses. It is the duty of socialists in all countries with troops in Afghanistan to demand their immediate withdrawal and an end to the occupation and national oppression of the Afghan people. However this in itself will not be enough. As long as Afghanistan lies under the domination of the gangster warlords, imperialism will keep trying to gain access to the resources of Afghanistan and, if paid handsomely enough, these leaders will only happily oblige.

The recent activities of the Pakistani section of the International Marxist Tendency, The Struggle, during the fighting in the Swat Valley demonstrated the way forward. By opening relief camps and running Marxist education workshops whilst providing aid to the refugees and mobilising the efforts of the local people to do so, they proved that the masses can resist the forces of imperialism and its ill disciplined mercenaries. It is only by standing for their own interest and taking the resources and infrastructure of their country under their control and in their interests that the Afghan workers and the peasants behind them can find a meaningful solution; that is to say through the socialist revolution.

RENEGADE EYE

Carnival of Socialism # 40 Is Here

The Carnival of Socialism # 40 is here. At it's description profile it says, "The Carnival of Socialism attempts to bring a fortnightly round up of everything that's going on in the global socialist blogosphere." Hopfully this carnival, will introduce a few new blogs for your consideration, at other carnivals as well.



Kasama caught my interest with a post entitled Mao Zedong: Should Reactionaries Have Free Speech?.

American Left History should be a regular stop on your blog reading. This blog centers on American history and culture, from a socialist view. Markin's love of history and art shine through.

The Third Estate managed to interview political icon in the UK Tony Benn.

Left in East Dakota notes Obama's base being disillusioned with him.

Worker's Press criritiques Obama on healthcare.

River's Edge notes that the UK anti-terror units, only find rightist plots, "it is invariably more by luck than by design".

Vengeance and Fashion has an interesting post about a schoolteacher who was abused by his students and snapped. There are Facebook groups supporting both sides. It is unusual for socialists to write about such a subject so close to home.

The Trotsky Museum has a blog of its own.

Querida Celia Hart Is a Spanish blog that honors Celia Hart Santamaria, the Cuban revolutionary who died last year in an auto accident related to the Cuban Hurricane. Celia opened doors for socialist democracy in Cuba.

From Turkey Mehmet Çagatay writes about Michael Jackson.

The Red Mantis tackles Iranian unrest, and asks who leads and where is it going?



Histomat replies to a BBC documentary about Leon Trotsky, based on the book The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky. Histomat writes, "Just as Stalin smeared the Jewish Trotsky as an agent of Hitler, so Richard Overy describes Trotsky's supporters as a 'motley crew', while Trotsky himself suffered from a 'blindness to any sense of humanity' and apparently 'never had any scruples about killing those in the way of the Marxist utopia'. It is a pity that Overy has seemingly not made time to read Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours where he answered exactly Overy's critique about 'moral scruple' over seventy years ago:"

Socialism or Barbarism reviews the Irish economy, in a two part series.

Celticfire writes about a Portland transit riders union.

The Daily Maybe discovered the Trotskyist soft drink Red Kola.

Untouchable Earth writes from India about the will of the Iranian people. This blog is oriented to socialism, art and astronomy.

Madam Miaow gives us good analysis of the Uighur uprising in China. At my local coffeeshop Madam Miaow's blog is blocked by the computer's filtering software. What's wrong with Anna Mae Wong?

A Reader's Word from India, takes on the myth of micro finance.

The next Carnival will be August 02, 2009 at Red Wombat

Renegade Eye

Open Thread

What do you want to say?

RENEGADE EYE

An interview with an Iranian socialist: “Electoral Fraud” and the movement in Iran today

Written by Ted Sprague
Thursday, 09 July 2009


Millions of Iranians have come out on the streets demanding a change in regime. The movement that was first sparked off by “electoral fraud” has become a movement to demand complete democratic rights and against the dictatorship of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is an interview (conducted on July 2nd 2009) with Arash Azizi, an Iranian socialist, which was originally made to explain the situation in Iran to an Indonesian audience.

Ted Sprague: Can you explain to our readers about the electoral fraud in Iran and the movement that has emerged out of it?

Arash Azizi: Well, politics works in mysterious ways! If you want to take things at face value you have to believe millions of people have come onto the streets, in a direct clash with the deadly forces of an oppressive regime just because of some “electoral fraud” between candidates that didn’t really have a difference in platform! But that is not the case. You can’t analyze events without seeing them in the context and their background.

The truth is that people participated in the elections and massively voted for Mousavi for a reason which wasn’t his platform or anything like that. People had seen the obvious splits in the ruling clique of the Islamic Republic and they wanted to use these splits. They wanted to play off one wing of the regime against the other to get rid of them all eventually. The Mousavi wing advocated lifting somewhat the repressive measures of the regime to prevent or delay the people’s uprising against the whole regime. But the Khamenei and Ahmadinejad wing couldn’t really allow that. They knew that if they concede a little bit of freedom, people will want more and eventually would not stop short of overthrowing the whole regime. That’s why they staged a “coup”, a velvet coup d’etat, if you wish. They declared Ahmadinejad the winner with a ridiculously high margin of 16 million votes. But they hadn’t expected that the people would not just go home and accept that Khamenei can just do this with impunity. They came out massively and we witnessed the largest demonstrations of the past 30 years. This wasn’t and isn’t about Mousavi anymore. Even voting for Mousavi wasn’t about Mousavi! It is about a huge population that hates life in the Islamic Republic and is willing to fight it step by step. What we now have is no longer a movement against “electoral fraud”, but a massive revolutionary movement against the Islamic Republic in its entirety. This is also revealed in people’s slogans. They started with “Give me back my Vote” but then moved on to shouting: “Down with the Dictator!” and “Down with Khamenei!” and, although to a lesser extent, “We don’t want a theocracy!”

TS: It has been three weeks since the start of the protest; can you give an update as to how this movement has developed? And who is leading it?

AA: I think I hinted at this in my previous answer. The movement started spontaneously, which is normal, even though its scope was unprecedented and extraordinary. You suddenly had more than 5 million demonstrating all over Iran! Immediately after the election, the people’s demand was of course for the repealing of the vote and giving power to Mousavi and so they perceived him as their leader. They called on him (and Karoubi, another “Reformist” candidate) to “get back their votes”. But of course Mr. Mousavi and Karoubi are much more afraid of millions of people on the streets than they are of the Khamenei and Ahmadinejad gangs.

So they decided ‑ and did their best actually to achieve this ‑ to send the people home. In the first week we had a pattern of Mousavi calling for “no demonstrations” to “save people’s lives” but then the people showed up and he had to go there and speak. He was being psuhed by the events.

Giving a concise and concrete answer to your question is hard because this “movement” is not a homogenous one and changes every movement. What is definite is that it has shown great courage, which means it is ready to fight the Islamic Republic. What is also evident is that it lacks a leadership that could lead it to the results it desires. Mousavi and Karoubi are part and parcel of this regime and they would never willingly lead an opposition movement against the regime. The people’s aim is really an end to the Islamic Republic. But they lack an effective leadership to lead them to this.

TS: The Ahmadinejad government has claimed that this movement was organized by the imperialist powers (the CIA in particular) in order to topple the regime. Is this true?

AA: Well, anybody who has lived in Iran for a while knows that for them everything is organized by Israel and the CIA. Independent intellectuals, writers, poets, journalists, even youth who just want to have fun are usually attacked in this manner. This is because oppressive regimes never want to concede that people are actually against them!

Of course this is ridiculous. This is a genuine mass movement with millions on the streets.

TS: Quite a number of people in the left support Ahmadinejad, including Chavez. What do you have to say about this?

AA: First you have to differentiate Chavez from other “Leftists”. Chavez is a head of state and he has to carry out some formalities which are acceptable as long as it is about getting trade agreements and similar questions (which are vital for Venezuela). But he is making serious mistakes in his position toward Ahmadinejad. He does not understand that the real friends of the Venezuelan Revolution are the masses of the world, including Iran. His support for the hated Ahmadinejad has unfortunately led to a feeling of hatred on the part of many Iranians towards him and the Bolivarian Revolution. I was in a solidarity demonstration recently and I heard some people claiming that Venezuela is sending police forces to crush the protesters in Tehran! While this is probably just a rumour, it shows to what degree people have feelings against him that they are circulating these rumours.

He actually has some leverage with the Iranian government and should have at least voiced some concern. Even if he wants to only think about the immediate benefits at this stage, I should tell him that this government of the Islamic Republic will not be in a power for long! And he had better wait for the new government to have good relations with! I am confident that he will eventually change his position, especially as many parts of the Bolivarian movement are voicing their concern over this. I, for example, read a statement by the Venezuelan Marxists (Revolutionary Marxist Current, CMR) that disagreed with Chavez over this question.

As I said, while Chavez is a head of state that has taken a lot of progressive measures, but who is making some lamentable mistakes about Iran, other leftists are just showing how disconnected they are from reality.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read on wsws.org, the website of the “International Committee of the Fourth International”, that they are connecting the protests to foreign intervention. This website is actually quite popular among some Iranian leftists… or was popular I should say, as of now! I haven’t read anything from the International Socialist Tendency yet. But they have to do something about their support for the Islamic Republic over the years. Anybody on the left who has supported this regime even for a day will be seen as being so guilty when we succeed in getting rid of the Islamic Republic and establishing a workers’ state in our country. They then will have to come and kneel before the Iranian workers and socialists to be forgiven! We will forgive them then, but we will never forget how, when this regime was killing us in our thousands, they supported it.

TS: Mousavi has been portrayed as a reformist by the media, the face of democratic change in Iran. What is the feeling of ordinary Iranians towards him?

AA: Let me get this straight first: the “Reformists” are a wing of the Islamic Republic that has played a huge part in murdering tens of thousands and oppressing society. They are a fierce defender of the vicious Islamic regime and its founder, Khomeini. Actually their main platform has always been for a “Return to Khomeini”! This is the kind of reform they want! They remind me of a song by Phil Ochis, an American radical artist, who mockingly talks about how the Democrats and the Republicans in the US are really no different and they are all united against the people and the workers. It is the same with the “reformists” in Iran.

But how the average Iranian feels about Mousavi differs every week, if not every day. I think Iranians understand that he is part of the regime and that they don’t really want him but they are also very practical and say to themselves “he is much better than Ahmadinejad, so let’s get him for now”. He will be looked on as the leader for now, but people will soon realize he is not there to lead them to power and will pass beyond him.

TS: Now, many commentators have compared this movement to the one in 1979, the so-called Islamic Revolution, is this assessment correct?

AA: What is definitely incorrect is to call our Great Revolution of 1979 an “Islamic Revolution”. It was not. It was a popular revolution against the monarchy and for Freedom and Equality which was hijacked, with the help of the western governments, by the reactionary Khomeini and mullahs. You have to remember that Political Islam would have had no real chance to take power in Iran if it had not been for the aid of western governments. They found this dead corpse in the dustbin of history and brought it back to life because they realised its anti-left and oppressive potential. That needs a longer discussion…

As to the relation of the current movement to that revolution…well, if you ask me I’d like to say that I hope the current revolutionary movement will fulfil the goals that the 1979 revolution failed to achieve because of its defeat by counter-revolutionary mullahs. I also believe that the 1979 revolution, even though it was brutally defeated, provides important lessons to Iranian society and workers. Workers can remember how powerful they can be when they come onto the scene of history. The real commemoration of the memory of the 1979 revolution would be a revolutionary overthrowing of the counter-revolutionary Islamic regime which had hijacked that revolution and going toward the real goals, that are Freedom, Equality and the Well-being of the people, which by the way, are only possible under Socialism.

TS: How is this movement going to affect the political landscape in the Middle East?

AA: It has already affected the whole world, not only the Middle East. The people of the world have been inspired by the extraordinary courage that their Iranian brothers and sisters have shown. Once more they have come onto streets to fight a vicious regime. In a period of 30 years, this people have fought two of the most brutal dictatorships in human history. I think anybody who has fought even for one day against oppression and tyranny will be inspired by this people.

The conclusion of this movement has of course much more important implications in the region and internationally. The overthrowing of the Islamic Republic, in my idea, will lead to an end of Political Islam as an international movement because this movement will lose its main head. The resources for the Islamists in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria will dry up and this is only good news for the people of those countries! As I said, it will also prove to everybody that no regime is indestructible and one has to fight against dictatorships and once the collective power of the workers and people is on the scene, any regime will be brought down.

I, of course have much higher hopes for the new Iranian Revolution. I am hoping, and I will fight for, a socialist revolution that would establish a socialist republic in Iran and if that happens, if a country of 70 million people becomes socialist, an international battle will begin that will only end with the end of capitalism and will open up a new page in human history.

TS: What about the labour movement in Iran?

AA: the labour movement has its weaknesses and strengths. It lacks traditional mass organizations (like Trade Unions which are almost non-existent) but on the other hand it has great revolutionary traditions like the workers’ councils which were formed in the 1979 revolution. It also has a lot of potential militancy and has so far shown no illusions in any wing of the regime, which is extraordinary. But it is yet to decisively enter the struggle and when that happens, the fate of the Iranian revolution will be sealed.

TS: Where do you think this movement will lead? It has been 3 weeks of constant demos, how do you think it will end?

AA: I have never been a sole “predictor” of the event and I like to think myself as part of the movement that tries to move it to the left. This revolution will be stopped by a lot people at different “stations”, if you will. They will try to tell us when is the time for what, and that the time for what hasn’t come YET. The task is for a revolutionary leadership to emerge that would be accepted by the people and would lead their revolution all the way to victory, which means overthrowing the Islamic Republic and laying the foundations of a new society. My wish is for Iran to go socialist and I know this is not possible without a mass revolutionary party that would lead the workers and the people.

But apart from what I wish, one thing is for sure: Iran will never be the same again. The beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic has started and in the aftermath of the destruction of this regime, the people will have a real chance to found a humane society that would be a beacon of hope for the oppressed people all over the world.

RENEGADE EYE

Honduras: One week after the coup – mass mobilisation continues – Army prevents Zelaya’s come back

By Jorge Martín
Monday, 06 July 2009

All kinds of manoeuvres are taking place after the coup in Honduras. The coup organisers want to hold on, but pressure is being brought to bear for some kind of compromise solution, which however cannot satisfy the masses. The only real answer lies in the full mobilisation of the Honduran workers and peasants.

Hundreds of thousands had marched to the Toncontin airport and broken through police lines to make sure Zelaya's plane could land.On Sunday, July 5, a week after having been removed by a military coup, Honduran president Mel Zelaya boarded a Venezuelan plane in Washington with the aim of going back to his country. Hundreds of thousands had marched to the Toncontin airport and broken through police lines to make sure his plane could land. However, the army opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators, injuring scores and killing at least one. Zelaya’s plane was prevented from landing by the Army which positioned vehicles on the landing strip. The government of Micheletti ‑ imposed by a coup ‑ has closed down all of the country’s airports.

Men, women, children, workers, peasants, the poor, had gathered from early in the morning to march to the airport to receive their president. A report from Radio Globo put the figure at half a million, others put the number at 200,000 people. The live broadcast from Telesur showed a huge crowd of hundreds of thousands, far bigger than the 65,000 that had marched against the coup the day before in Tegucigalpa. Speaking from Honduras to In Defence of Marxism, Democratic Unity (UD) party MP Tomás Andino said: “This demonstration was unprecedented, probably the largest in the history of Honduras”. We have to take into account that the population of the country as a whole is only 7.5 million people. This demonstration was the biggest so far against the coup and dwarfed any of the demonstrations organised by the coup plotters during the week.

This massive movement of the people of Honduras has taken place despite the fact that the new regime has imposed a curfew (which has not been extended and is in place between 6pm and 6am every night), has arrested dozens of known trade union and popular movement activists and leaders, has killed a number of them (the correspondent from El Pais has reported that people have been taken to hospital by the police with bullet wounds every single night), has suspended constitutional guarantees (a de facto state of emergency situation) and put in place a media blockade (a number of radio and TV stations have been closed down). According to police officials 651 people were arrested on Saturday and Sunday alone. None of this has stopped the movement and the strikes which have paralysed mainly the education system and the telecommunications and electricity companies. Peasant and indigenous organisations are maintaining road blocks in many of the districts in the interior of the country.

The scope of the movement against the coup and growing the international pressure is already opening up rifts within the camp of the coup organisers. According to some reports, businessmen Ricardo Maduro, Rafael Ferrari and Carlos Flores Facussémet met with representatives of the coup organisers until early in the morning trying to get them to reach an agreement. But the coup plotters, led by Micheletti, are particularly obtuse representatives of the Honduran oligarchy, and having taken the step of organising the coup, are now in no mood to make any concessions. In a farcical press conference Micheletti alleged that Nicaraguan troops were massing at the border in preparation for an invasion of Honduras. When pressed by the journalists to give more details, he changed his tune and said that it was just a “psychological invasion”!

On Saturday, July 4, Micheletti’s junta also rebuffed OAS general secretary Insulza, who had gone to Honduras in a last minute attempt to reach a compromise. It is clear that this coup is highly embarrassing for the current US administration and that pressure is being put on the coup plotters to at least make some concessions which could allow for a negotiated settlement, probably including some guarantees on Zelaya’s part that he would not seek to call a referendum on a Constituent Assembly.

The role of the United States in the coup

There has been a lot of speculation about whether the Obama administration was involved in this coup or not. On this question, Andino was very clear: “We think it is impossible for the Honduran Army to have acted without at least tacit approval on the part of US intelligence”.

All the information that has come out over the last week confirms what we said just after the coup:

“It is clear and public knowledge that the US knew that a coup was being organised. They had had conversations with the leaders of Congress in which the coup had been discussed. The advice from the US had been against taking the step of arresting Zelaya. Probably the US administration, faced with the mass mobilisation on Friday and having learnt some lessons from Venezuela, was not very confident in taking what might be seen as an illegal step and were more in favour of continuing with the script of the “constitutional coup”, leaving the removal of Zelaya for another, more favourable, moment.” (Defeat the reactionary military coup in Honduras – Mass mobilisation in the streets and general strike!)



US ambassador Hugo Llorens had stated on a number of occasions that he was against the consultation being proposed by Zelaya on the possibility of a referendum on a constituent assembly, but he phrased his opposition in typical diplomatic language: “one cannot violate the Constitution in order to create a Constitution”, he said (La Prensa, June 4). This was precisely the argument used by the oligarchy to block Zelaya’s proposed consultation.

Llorens stressed that: “whatever is finally done, it should be done within the law, within the Constitution”. On June 17, he echoed the arguments of the Honduran capitalists: “The political situation in the country does not help to create an investment friendly climate. Uncertainty in a country does not help investment” (La Prensa). And he added that the dispute about the consultation should be resolved by Congress. What he was saying, loud and clear, was that the US were in favour of a “democratic constitutional coup”.

Right up to the eve of the coup, US ambassador Llorens was talking to the coup plotters. On June 21, there was a meeting in the US embassy with the presence of president Zelaya, as well as all the coup plotters: Congress president Micheletti, Liberal and National Party presidential candidates Santos and Lobo, and the head of the Armed Forces, Romeo Vásquez. According to the report in the Honduran La Prensa, Zelaya was told that “the best way out of the crisis” would be for him to “cancel the consultation and carry out an opinion poll instead”. (La Prensa, June 22). The very fact that the US ambassador is meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign country in this manner is a clear indication of the status of Honduras as a “banana republic” dominated by US imperialism. The message to Zelaya was clear: cancel the referendum or else.

It would be extremely naïve to think that Llorens did not know of the plans for a coup ‑ in fact this was being openly discussed in the Honduran media in the days leading up to it ‑ and even more naïve to think that he had not reported to Washington. Llorens is not a newcomer, he was nominated as US ambassador to Honduras by the Bush administration and had been Head of Andean Affairs at the National Security Council in 2002 and 2003. This position made him Bush’s main advisor on matters related to Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. He therefore was well aware of the failure of the 2002 coup in Venezuela.

The policy of the new Obama administration regarding Latin America has been one of hiding the stick and mainly waving the carrot. The aims are the same, but after the fiasco of Bush’s bullish policy in the region, Obama is keen to push back the revolutionary wave sweeping the continent by leaning on the “reasonable left” governments in the region. He cannot, therefore, afford the embarrassment of a military coup. Certainly the US administration wanted to remove Zelaya, who had become a thorn in their side, by joining ALBA, siding with Chavez, refusing for months to accept the new US ambassador, Llorens, as a gesture of solidarity with Bolivia (where the US were involved in another attempted coup in September last year) and by generally contributing to a sharpening of the class struggle (“polarisation”) in Honduras with his “irresponsible” statements about the rich and poor, and “freeing the country from imperialism”. They merely preferred to do so by constitutional means.

On June 25 the Honduran congress declared itself in “permanent session”. They were going to carry out the coup by declaring the disqualification of the president. The coup was averted at the last minute with the intervention of Llorens and even, according to some reports, of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself. But this only delayed the coup until Sunday 28, when the army took Zelaya in the middle of the night and put him on a plane to Costa Rica.

This was revealed in the lukewarm and belated statements of the Obama administration in the aftermath of the coup. The first official pronouncement of the White House was along the lines of an appeal to “all political and social players in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter”. That was an appeal for all players to respect democracy, when some of them had just carried out a coup! It was only after the strongly worded condemnation of the coup by the ALBA member countries, led by Venezuela, that the US was forced to utter the word “coup”, and threatened to curtail military aid to Honduras. However, ambassador Llorens was left in Honduras, in order to keep an open line “with all players”.

Even though Zelaya has been in Washington for a few days, neither Obama nor Clinton have thus far met with him, preferring to allow the OAS to deal with the matter. The Organisation of American States has been charged with trying to find a reasonable solution to this mess, one that would save face by bringing Zelaya back, but on the basis of neutralising him – and above all the masses who support him. After all, even if he came back, he does not have control of Congress, nor the Supreme Court, nor the Army, and there are elections scheduled in November in which he cannot legally participate. When Zelaya announced that he was going back to the country on Thursday, July 2nd, the OAS gave the regime a 72-hour ultimatum, thus delaying his return. Then Zelaya announced that he would go back on Saturday 4th, only for OAS general secretary Insulza to announce his own visit to Honduras on that day, delaying Zelaya by one more day.

But Insulza was met with derision on the part of the coup plotters who announced that, before anyone kicked the out, they would be leaving the OAS. There are certain elements in politics that are never completely under anyone's control. Here we saw the most obtuse representatives of the Honduran oligarchy biting the hand that was offering them a way out.

The Spanish El Pais, always reflecting faithfully the opinions of imperialism, put it quite bluntly last week: “It is urgent to find a way out within the agreed [OAS] deadline, in order to prevent Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, from filling the vacuum which might be left afterwards. If the OAS, with US support, does not reinstate Zelaya, the road would then be open for the insurrectionary solution that Chavez is suggesting. The US seems to be conscious of the fact that it is running more risks here than they could have ever imagined in a country like Honduras, and is attempting to be very careful in its moves, so that Zelaya can win but without a victory for what he represents. In other words, without a victory for Chavez and populism”. (El Pais, July 2nd, Ultimátum de la OEA a los golpistas)

El Pais, incidentally came out against the coup but supported the reasons for it, after having written a vitriolic denunciation of Zelaya the day before the coup, in an editorial which ridiculed Chavez’s warning that a coup was being prepared in Honduras. (Editorial: Crisis en Honduras, June 26th)



Negotiations and mass action

Nonetheless, in the next few days, more pressure will be exerted on the coup leaders to reach a settlement. This was confirmed today in an article in the Washington Post: “U.S. officials confirmed that Honduras's de facto government had sent a message to the OAS seeking to open negotiations, a move that one official described as positive. 'We think this could create the basis for continuing movement by the OAS on diplomatic initiatives,' one official said.”

Tomás Andino, the UD deputy, told us that Carlos Flores was in negotiations with Washington to find a negotiated way out of the current crisis. “They want to bring back Zelaya, but bound hand and foot”. He pointed out that the businessmen fear that if the current efforts do not force the coup plotters to step down they will be faced with an armed mass uprising of the people which would threaten the whole of the capitalist regime.

However, we must be clear on one point: no amount of diplomatic pressure can defeat the coup in Honduras unless the masses of workers and peasants fight for it on the streets as they have done in the last few days. It may even come to pass that Zelaya is returned to Honduras, only for Congress to start proceedings to remove him from the presidency before the end of his term in January.

Over the last week, the mass movement in Honduras has become broader, more confident and more radicalised. This is precisely what the coup plotters feared, and the reason why they organised the coup. The struggle of the hundreds of thousands of Honduran working people, who have come out on the streets over the last week braving repression, is not only for the reinstatement of the president, but also for the trial and punishment of the coup plotters. Even more than that, it is a fundamental struggle for jobs, bread, land, dignity, and national sovereignty. None of this will be achieved simply with the return of Zelaya alone. If a negotiated settlement is finally reached, this will not satisfy the demands of the masses for justice, and it will certainly not solve the economic and social problems that have pushed them to rally behind Zelaya.

Speaking to Tomas Aquino, from the Honduras Democratic United Party, he made it very clear that the Peoples’ Resistance Front Against the Coup rejects any kind of negotiation with the coup-plotters and stands for the unconditional reinstatement of the president. He added that the masses of the people have become radicalised through their own experience. “They no longer demand a referendum on the Constituent Assembly, they want a Constituent Assembly full stop, as they are not prepared to deal any more with the political institutions that organised the coup”.

The return of Zelaya, if it does finally take place in the next few days, will only be a real victory for the mass movement if it is achieved without concessions on his part. If so, it will strengthen the resolve of the workers and peasants, it will increase their confidence in their own strength.

This last week of struggle has been a very rich school of political education for the masses. Under the whip of repression their political understanding has developed by leaps and bounds. All that Zelaya wanted, apparently, was to carry out a consultation on the possibility of a referendum to decide on a Constituent Assembly! And just because of that, the oligarchy en bloc organised a military-civilian coup. As Andino explained to us, the coup has the support of all traditional political parties, the hierarchy of the Evangelical and Catholic churches, the monopoly mass media groups, the owners of industry, the landowners, the judiciary and the tops of the Army. The whole of the capitalist political establishment is against a minor democratic reform! Because they are terrified of the revolutionary implications of the direct participation of the masses of the workers and peasants in politics. The capitalist system cannot allow it. Andino added that, “what we see is the beginning of a revolution”, and he is correct.

The two main lessons to be learnt from these events are, on the one hand, that the oligarchy in these underdeveloped capitalist countries cannot allow even the most moderate progressive reforms if these are accompanied by a process of politicisation and mobilisation of the masses. They fear the revolutionary consequences of the active participation of the masses in politics. On the other hand it should by now be clear that it is utopian to expect that the institutions of the capitalist state (the judiciary, army hierarchy, mass media, police, etc.), will allow genuine revolutionary change to take place without them stepping in to defend the interests of their masters, the ruling class. This is a serious warning for the revolutionary movement in Bolivia, in neighbouring El Salvador, in Ecuador, etc.

The only way forward for the movement in Honduras is to continue the mobilisation against the coup. This must be organised and coordinated nationally through committees in every workplace, neighbourhood and village. An appeal must be made to the ranks of the Army, the ordinary soldiers who are also part of the people. Mass demonstrations must be protected by defence committees made up of the workers and peasants themselves. The army generals have already shown what they are capable of, the people cannot face them unprotected. Tomás Andino reported to us lots of different examples of fraternisation of police officers and soldiers with the protestors. These have not yet crystallised in any section of the army openly rebelling, but this could happen in the next few days.

Finally, the main weapon of working people against the oligarchy and the coup is the general strike. Without the permission of the working class not a wheel turns and not a light bulb shines in Honduras. Workers can bring the country to a halt and prevent the coup regime from functioning. Andino reported to In Defence of Marxism that about 60% of public sector workers had participated in the strike against the coup and that this week would see the spreading of the strike movement to the private sector. The call for strike action had been made by the three trade union confederations, all of them part of the Peoples Resistance Front.

Tomás Andino also made an appeal for action to the international working class. “There should be blockades against Honduran products on the part of dockers and transport workers. This can hit the capitalist class where it hurts”.

International solidarity on the part of working people and the labour movement internationally is also crucial. We stand firmly on the side of the Honduran people and against any attempts to water down their fundamental demands.

For the immediate return of Zelaya!

Trial and punishment for the coup plotters!

Full support for the struggle of the people of Honduras!









RENEGADE EYE