Friday, February 4, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Jhala Nath Khanal new Prime Minister of Nepal
Khanal got elected as the PM Thursday evening defeating his rivals Nepali Congress leader Ram Chandra Paudel and Madhesi Janadhikar Forum – Loktantrik chairman Bijaya Kumar Gachchhadar at the election held at the parliament Thursday evening.
Khanal got elected as the 34th Prime Minister of Nepal through a parliament voting as the largest party in the parliament, the Unified CPN (Maoist) withdrew in his support.
UCPN (Maoist), which had fielded its chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal aka Prachanda for the post of the Prime Minister, decided through an emergency standing committee meeting to withdraw Dahal’s candidacy and support Khanal.
Speaking at the Legislature Parliament, Maoist chairman Dahal said, his party was sacrificing once again for the sake of the nation and people by supporting Khanal to end the status quo.
We have decided to sacrifice once again to show that we Nepalis can decide nfor ourselves, said Dahal.
With Khanal’s election to the top executive post, a six-month long status quo has ended. The nation was running under a caretaker government for the last six months after erstwhile Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal resigned in June last year.
Khanal was born in Ilam on March 2, 1950. He has been involved in politics for over three decades. He was elected the UML chairman by the eighth general convention of the party on February 16, 2009. Khanal got elected as lawmaker from Ilam constituency 1 in the CA elections in 2008.
Khanal had also filed nomination for the post of Prime Minister in the previous election process which prolonged for six months without any results. He had withdrawn his candidacy as he could not get assurance of two-thirds lawmakers in the parliament as per the mandate of his party’s Central Committee. nepalnews.com
However, the foreign powers, especially, the Indian ruling class was in the serious efforts to prolong process and defeat the Maoists and the patriotic forces .
Some of the experts of the Research Analysis Wing (RAW) were taking shelter in some big hotels of Kathmandu to foil the Prime Ministerial Election according to Krishnasenonline..
Chairman Mao Zedong on Palestine and Africa
Democracy and Class Struggle says the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are not just part of an Arab Revolution but are essential part of the Afrikan Revolution.
The impact of current events in North Afrika are multi faceted and multi - dimensional and will help shape both Afrikan and Arab social and national Liberation in the 21st Century.
Here are the views of Mao Zedong on the question of Palestine and the Afrikan Revolution
Question: What is your view on the Palestinian Arabs being deprived of their land?
Question: What is your view of the struggle of the US Negroes?
Mao: The Negro people are a national minority within the US, but they are also a quite numerous nationality of 20 million people and their struggle of opposing' oppression and discrimination is developing. The day will surely come when we will win victory and the US proletariat will surely awaken. That is to say, the great majority of white proletarians and progressives will unite together with the Negro people and win victory.
For the US is divided into classes. Chiang Kai-shek (then still alive) and us are also in different classes - they don't like us. However, we are all of the same yellow race, of the same Chinese nation, speaking the same Chinese language. Some say, then, that we are Chinese nationalists and, that being so, we should unite with Chiang Kai-shek!
People here today are of different nationalities, but on the question of opposing imperialism and particularly US imperialism we all stand together, whether acquainted with each other or not. I haven't seen you before today and many haven't seen me. China has 700 million people - I haven't seen all of them. Neither have you people from France seen all of your tens of millions of people - it's not possible.
Question: In my country we are in struggle with imperialism and are grateful for China's support. Could you say something of the African situation as, for instance, in Congo (Leopoldville)?
Mao: In Africa today there is a vigorous struggle against imperialism. The revisionists are not happy about this. 'The imperialists are even less happy. The Congo should belong to the people of the Congo, to the people of Lumumba. Lumumba was killed physically, but his ideas do not die. We support the struggle of the Congolese people not surreptitiously but openly. We openly support their struggle against those who oppose them Our heart is always with the oppressed peoples; we are leaning to one side. Some think that we are not being impartial and ask us to look with equal favour on both sides. They say we should lean equally toward the imperialists and their lackeys and towards the people. We will not do so. We lean only to one side. If they say; you are partial; yes, we are partial, just as with the Palestinian Arabs and the 10th Conference, we are partial to one side.
Why Mubarak is Out by Paul Amar
Democracy and Class Struggle publishes this not because we agree with all the content , we specifically do not agree with the articles assessment of El Baradei who we see has representing one of the wings of Imperialism. However the article provides essential insight into social forces in Egypt and should be studied.
![[Image from Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ttZtXUlQNQED6mq8gdqCQ3MzcOfssd_nJbsN4iVzVoiFCy7gskc9EiRwlqsXWIr5COgjFg-9yYGGslcPITlJU8u8zVb6DKTt0gPAPDIIGKyTfUWWPvQvyBv7dF=s0-d "[Image from Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo]")
[Image from Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo]
11
[Image from Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo]The “March of Millions” in Cairo marks the spectacular emergence of a new political society in Egypt. This uprising brings together a new coalition of forces, uniting reconfigured elements of the security state with prominent business people, internationalist leaders, and relatively new (or newly reconfigured ) mass movements of youth, labor, women’s and religious groups. President Hosni Mubarak lost his political power on Friday, 28 January. On that night the Egyptian military let Mubarak’s ruling party headquarters burn down and ordered the police brigades attacking protesters to return to their barracks. When the evening call to prayer rang out and no one heeded Mubarak’s curfew order, it was clear that the old president been reduced to a phantom authority. In order to understand where Egypt is going, and what shape democracy might take there, we need to set the extraordinarily successful popular mobilizations into their military, economic and social context. What other forces were behind this sudden fall of Mubarak from power? And how will this transitional military-centered government get along with this millions-strong protest movement?
Many international media commentators – and some academic and political analysts – are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events. This confusion is driven by the binary “good guys versus bad guys” lenses most use to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate. There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage: (1) People versus Dictatorship: This perspective leads to liberal naïveté and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising. (2) Seculars versus Islamists: This model leads to a 1980s-style call for “stability” and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist “Arab street.” Or, (3) Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth: This lens imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures.
To map out a more comprehensive view, it may be helpful to identify the moving parts within the military and police institutions of the security state and how clashes within and between these coercive institutions relate to shifting class hierarchies and capital formations. I will also weigh these factors in relation to the breadth of new non-religious social movements and the internationalist or humanitarian identity of certain figures emerging at the center of the new opposition coalition.
Western commentators, whether liberal, left or conservative, tend to see all forces of coercion in non-democratic states as the hammers of “dictatorship” or as expressions of the will of an authoritarian leader. But each police, military and security institution has its own history, culture, class-allegiances, and, often its own autonomous sources of revenue and support as well. It would take many books to lay this all out in detail; but let me make a brief attempt here. In Egypt the police forces (al-shurta) are run by the Interior Ministry which was very close to Mubarak and the Presidency and had become politically co-dependent on him. But police stations gained relative autonomy during the past decades. In certain police stations this autonomy took the form of the adoption of a militant ideology or moral mission; or some Vice Police stations have taken up drug running; or some ran protection rackets that squeezed local small businesses. The political dependability of the police, from a bottom-up perspective, is not high. Police grew to be quite self-interested and entrepreneurial on a station-by-station level. In the 1980s, the police faced the growth of “gangs,” referred to in Egyptian Arabic asbaltagiya. These street organizations had asserted self-rule over Cairo’s many informal settlements and slums. Foreigners and the Egyptian bourgeoisie assumed the baltagiya to be Islamists but they were mostly utterly unideological. In the early 1990s the Interior Ministry decided “if you can’t beat them, hire them.” So the Interior Ministry and the Central Security Services started outsourcing coercion to these baltagiya, paying them well and training them to use sexualized brutality (from groping to rape) in order to punish and deter female protesters and male detainees, alike. During this period the Interior Ministry also turned the State Security Investigations (SSI) (mabahith amn al-dawla) into a monstrous threat, detaining and torturing masses of domestic political dissidents.
Autonomous from the Interior Ministry we have the Central Security Services (Amn al-Markazi). These are the black uniformed, helmeted men that the media refer to as “the police.” Central Security was supposed to act as the private army of Mubarak. These are not revolutionary guards or morality brigades like the basiji who repressed the Green Movement protesters in Iran. By contrast, the Amn al-Markazi are low paid and non-ideological. Moreover, at crucial times, these Central Security brigades have risen up en masse against Mubarak, himself, to demand better wages and working conditions. Perhaps if it weren’t for the sinister assistance of the brutal baltagiya, they would not be a very intimidating force. The look of unenthusiastic resignation in the eyes of Amn al-Markazi soldiers as they were kissed and lovingly disarmed by protesters has become one of the most iconic images, so far, of this revolution. The dispelling of Mubarak’s authority could be marked to precisely that moment when protesters kissed the cheeks of Markazi officers who promptly vanished into puffs of tear gas, never to return.
The Armed Forces of the Arab Republic of Egypt are quite unrelated to the Markazi or police and see themselves as a distinct kind of state altogether. One could say that Egypt is still a “military dictatorship” (if one must use that term) since this is still the same regime that the Free Officers’ Revolution installed in the 1950s. But the military has been marginalized since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel and the United States. Since 1977, the military has not been allowed to fight anyone. Instead, the generals have been given huge aid payoffs by the US. They have been granted concessions to run shopping malls in Egypt, develop gated cities in the desert and beach resorts on the coasts. And they are encouraged to sit around in cheap social clubs.
These buy-offs have shaped them into an incredibly organized interest group of nationalist businessmen. They are attracted to foreign investment; but their loyalties are economically and symbolically embedded in national territory. As we can see when examining any other case in the region (Pakistan, Iraq, the Gulf), US military-aid money does not buy loyalty to America; it just buys resentment. In recent years, the Egyptian military has felt collectively a growing sense of national duty, and has developed a sense of embittered shame for what it considers its “neutered masculinity:” its sense that it was not standing up for the nation’s people. The nationalistic Armed Forces want to restore their honor and they are disgusted by police corruption and baltagiya brutality. And it seems that the military, now as “national capitalists,” have seen themselves as the blood rivals of the neoliberal “crony capitalists” associated with Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal who have privatized anything they can get their hands on and sold the country’s assets off to China, the US, and Persian Gulf capital.
Thus we can see why in the first stage of this revolution, on Friday 28 January, we saw a very quick “coup” of the military against the police and Central Security, and disappearance of Gamal Mubarak (the son) and of the detested Interior Minister Habib el-Adly. However the military is also split by some internal contradictions. Within the Armed Forces there are two elite sub-branches, the Presidential Guard and the Air Force. These remained closer to Mubarak while the broader military turned against him. This explains why you can had the contradictory display of the General Chief of the Armed Forces, Muhammad Tantawi, wading in among the protesters to show support on 30 January, while at the same time the chief of the Air Force was named Mubarak’s new Prime Minister and sent planes to strafe the same protesters. This also explains why the Presidential Guard protected the Radio/Television Building and fought against protesters on 28 January rather than siding with them.
The Vice President, Omar Soleiman, named on 29 January, was formerly the head of the Intelligence Services (al-mukhabarat). This is also a branch of the military (and not of the police). Intelligence is in charge of externally oriented secret operations, detentions and interrogations (and, thus, torture and renditions of non-Egyptians). Although since Soleiman’s mukhabarat did not detain and torture as many Egyptian dissidents in the domestic context, they are less hated than the mubahith. The Intelligence Services (mukhabarat) are in a particularly decisive position as a “swing vote.” As I understand it, the Intelligence Services loathed Gamal Mubarak and the “crony capitalist” faction, but are obsessed with stability and have long, intimate relationships with the CIA and the American military. The rise of the military, and within it, the Intelligence Services, explains why all of Gamal Mubarak’s business cronies were thrown out of the cabinet on Friday 28 January, and why Soleiman was made interim VP (and functions in fact as Acting President). This revolution or regime change would be complete at the moment when anti-Mubarak tendencies in the military consolidate their position and reassure the Intelligence Services and the Air Force that they can confidently open up to the new popular movements and those parties coalesced around opposition leader Elbaradei. This is what an optimistic reader might judge to be what Obama and Clinton describe as an “orderly transition.”
On Monday, 31 January, we saw Naguib Sawiris, perhaps Egypt’s richest businessman and the iconic leader of the developmentalist “nationalist capital” faction in Egypt, joining the protesters and demanding the exit of Mubarak. During the past decade, Sawiris and his allies had become threatened by Mubarak-and-son’s extreme neoliberalism and their favoring of Western, European and Chinese investors over national businessmen. Because their investments overlap with those of the military, these prominent Egyptian businessmen have interests literally embedded in the land, resources and development projects of the nation. They have become exasperated by the corruption of Mubarak’s inner circle.
Paralleling the return of organized national(ist) capital associated with the military and ranged against the police (a process that also occurred during the struggle with British colonialism in the 1930s-50s) there has been a return of very powerful and vastly organized labor movements, principally among youth. 2009 and 2010 were marked by mass national strikes, nation-wide sit-ins, and visible labor protests often in the same locations that spawned this 2011 uprising. And the rural areas have been rising up against the government’s efforts to evict small farmers from their lands, opposing the regime’s attempts to re-create the vast landowner fiefdoms that defined the countryside during the Ottoman and British Colonial periods. In 2008 we saw the 100,000 strong April 6 Youth Movement emerge, leading a national general strike. And in 2008 and just in December 2010 we saw the first independent public sector unions emerge. Then just on 30 January 2011 clusters of unions from most major industrial towns gathered to form an Independent Trade Union Federation. These movements are organized by new leftist political parties that have no relation to the Muslim Brotherhood, nor are they connected to the past generation of Nasserism. They do not identify against Islam, of course, and do not make an issue of policing the secular-religious divide. Their interest in protecting national manufacturing and agricultural smallholdings, and in demanding public investment in national economic development dovetails with some of the interests of the new nationalist capital alliance.
Thus behind the scenes of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Facebook-driven protest waves, there are huge structural and economic forces and institutional realignments at work. Egypt’s population is officially recorded at 81 million; but in reality goes well beyond 100 million since some parents do not register all their children to shield them from serving in the Amn Al-Markazi or army. With the burgeoning youth population now becoming well organized, these social and internet-coordinated movements are becoming very important. They can be grouped into three trends. One group of new movements are organized by and around international norms and organizations, and so may tend toward a secular, globalizing set of perspectives and discourses. A second group is organized through the very active and assertive legal culture and independent judicial institutions in Egypt. This strong legal culture is certainly not a “Western human rights” import. Lawyers, judges and millions of litigants – men and women, working-class, farmers, and elite – have kept alive the judicial system and have a long unbroken history of resisting authoritarianism and staking rights claims of all sorts. A third group of new social movements represents the intersection of internationalist NGOs, judicial-rights groups and the new leftist, feminist, rural and worker social movements. The latter group critiques the universalism of UN and NGO secular discourses, and draws upon the power of Egypt’s legal and labor activism, but also has its own innovative strategies and solutions – many of which have been on prominent display on the streets this week.
One final element to examine here is the critical, and often overlooked role that Egypt has played in United Nations and humanitarian organizations, and how this history is coming back to enliven domestic politics and offer legitimacy and leadership at this time. Muhammad ElBaradei, the former director of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency has emerged as the consensus choice of the United Democratic Front in Egypt, which is asking him to serve as interim president, and to preside over a national process of consensus building and constitution drafting. In the 2000s, ElBaradei bravely led the IAEA and was credited with confirming that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapons program. He won the Nobel Prize for upholding international law against a new wave of wars of aggression and for essentially stopping the momentum for war against Iran. He is no radical and not Egypt’s Gandhi; but he is no pushover or puppet of the US, either. For much of the week, standing at his side at the protests has been Egyptian actor Khaled Abou Naga who has appeared in several Egyptian and US films and who serves as Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. This may be much more a UN-humanitarian led revolution than a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. This is a very twenty-first century regime change – utterly local and international simultaneously.
It is a good time to remind ourselves that the first-ever United Nations military-humanitarian peacekeeping intervention, the UN Emergency Force, was created with the joint support of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower (both military men, of course) in 1960 to keep the peace in Gaza and to stop the former colonial powers and Israel from invading Egypt in order to retake the Suez Canal and resubordinate Egypt. Then in the 1990s, Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali served as the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Boutros-Ghali articulated new UN doctrines of state-building and militarized humanitarian intervention. But he got fired for making the mistake of insisting that international human rights and humanitarian law needed to be applied neutrally and universally, rather than only at the convenience of the Security Council powers. Yet Egypt’s relationship to the UN continues. Notably, ‘Aida Seif Ad-Dawla, one of the most articulate, brave and creative leaders of the new generation of Egyptian social movements and feminist NGOs, is a candidate for the high office of UN Rapporteur on Torture. Egyptians have a long history for investing in and supporting international law, humanitarian norms and human rights. Egyptian internationalism insists on the equal application of human rights principles and humanitarian laws of war even in the face of superpower pressure. In this context, ElBaradei’s emergence as a leader makes perfect sense. Although this internationalist dimension of Egypt’s “local” uprising is utterly ignored by most self-conscious liberal commentators who assume that international means “the West” and that Egypt’s protesters are driven by the politics of the belly rather than matters of principle.
Mubarak is already out of power. The new cabinet is composed of chiefs of Intelligence, Air Force and the prison authority, as well as one International Labor Organization official. This group embodies a hard-core “stability coalition” that will work to bring together the interests of new military, national capital and labor, all the while reassuring the United States. Yes, this is a reshuffling of the cabinet, but one which reflects a very significant change in political direction. But none of it will count as a democratic transition until the vast new coalition of local social movements and internationalist Egyptians break into this circle and insist on setting the terms and agenda for transition.
I would bet that even the hard-line leaders of the new cabinet will be unable to resist plugging into the willpower of these popular uprisings, one-hundred million Egyptians strong.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Stance by Communist Parties, Groups and Organisations led by Marxism Leninism Maoism
January 31, 2011
Alongside with the popular masses who rebel in Tunisia, Egypt and in the other countries where they soon will begin the same great and heroic enterprise!
The international communist movement led by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
Greets with joy and favor the uprisings of the popular masses in Tunisia and Egypt that are overthrowing the regimes that oppress their country. They are anti-popular and tyrannical regimes, heirs of the old colonial system that has now worn neocolonial clothes. They are regimes slaves of U.S. imperialism, of the International Community that the U.S. government presides over, of the Zionist groups in Israel who are the colonial armed wing of the American imperialist bourgeoisie in Palestine and in the Middle East, of the world imperialist system.
Let their revolt be the dawn that heralds a new world!
The more the general crisis of the imperialist world system is getting worse, the more the corrupt and servile regimes slaves of the world imperialist system starve the masses, oppress the workers, in particular, they deny a decent future for young people and women, repress aspirations of so many people to a better world and the attempts to organize themselves to build it.
To overthrow these regimes is necessary to cope with the general, economic and environmental crisis produced by the world imperialist system and to progress. Without overthrowing those regimes, we cannot defend ourselves with some effectiveness and success against the plundering of the resources of our countries by multinational companies, by speculation even on foods, medicines, fuel and raw materials by the international market and its stock exchanges, by the exploitation of labor, by the usury of the financial market, of its institutions and its banks, by the political interference of the imperialist world system and of the imperialist powers that are at its head. No progress is possible.
We members of the International Communist Movement guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism call all progressive and communist organizations, parties and currents, all the democratic people, human rights advocates, and everyone who is in favor of justice, and freedom to fully support the revolt of the popular masses in Tunisia, Egypt and in the other countries suffering from similar conditions. The Arab and Muslim countries, from Iraq to Afghanistan, have already given and are still giving a great contribution to the liberation of peoples oppressed by U.S. imperialism and by its International Community, nailing down mounting numbers of imperialist troops.
We call for an emergency government with the participation and leadership of that most disadvantaged sections of society which is largest in number. We call for such government to organize the popular masses in order to be able to face militarily any armed attack by internal reactionary forces or by the imperialist powers, mainly US and Zionist imperialists.
We call the Communists around the world to support their struggle and their efforts to organize and give themselves a correct line.
In order to win and to advance it needs that in each country strong vanguard and mass organizations be formed among the masses, especially among workers, women and young people and that they establish strong bonds of brotherhood with each other at international level. As sooner in each country and on the international level this organizational web will be formed, the faster and larger the victory will be, the less painful and less disruptive the elimination of the old social systems will be, the more direct will be the start of the construction of a new world equal to the existing material and spiritual achievements of mankind.
The communist movement in this period has not yet fully recovered from the exhaustion of the first wave of proletarian revolution, from the decay of the first socialist countries until their disappearance and from the corruption and dissolution of many communist parties: the misfortunes it met in the second part of the last century. So today we Communists are not giving the liberation movement of oppressed peoples a contribution as great as that the communist movement gave in the first part of the last century.
Anyway, guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism the communist movement is reviving both in the imperialist countries and in the countries oppressed by the imperialist powers, in fraternal union with all those who struggle determined to build a better world, at the level of civilization, culture , knowledge and productive forces attained by human kind.
Communist parties will form stronger and stronger alongside with the exploited classes and oppressed peoples, to promote and guide their struggle, vanguard departments of their struggle. Already in several countries, primarily in Nepal where the new democratic revolution led by UCPN - M has already achieved great successes, the communist movement shows the power that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism gives to the liberation movement of oppressed peoples and to the emancipation movement of the popular masses and of the workers from the imperialist bourgeoisie and from other exploiting and ruling classes. We believe that the communist movement will soon be back at the head of the masses who struggle for social emancipation, for national liberation and for human progress, in every country to establish a system of social relations with a new and more advanced system of international relations.
Long live the rebellion of the oppressed people!
Long live the emancipation of the exploited classes!
The communist movement led the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is alongside with those who struggle against imperialism, neo-colonialism, national oppression and class exploitation, and to radically eliminate all forms of exploitation and oppression of man on man once and for all!
(new) Italian Communist Party ((n)PCI)
Association for Proletarian Solidarity (Italy) (ASP)
Struggling Workers Union (Naples - Italy) (SLL)
Party of the Committees to Support Resistance – for Communism (Italy) (P-CARC)
Democracy and Class Struggle - British Isles
George Jackson Socialist League - Britain
The PanAfrikanVoice - Britain
Revolutionary Initiative - Canada
We call on other organisations ,groups and individuals to sign this statement
George Jackson Socialist League - Britain
The PanAfrikanVoice - Britain
Revolutionary Initiative - Canada
We call on other organisations ,groups and individuals to sign this statement
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