Killing Has Become the Norm

Aruni Kashyap blogs on the recent repression by the Indian government on the people of India:

Manoj Deka’s brutal murder by Asam police in the name of counter insurgency operation holds multiple shocking implications about current politics in Assam. Manoj Deka was a senior leader of the Communist Party of India, Assam and held the post of the Morigaon district CPI General Secretary.

[Hat Tip: Bhupinder]

The Talaban and Debates Within the Communist Sphere of Pakistan

Vidrohi blogs:

The recent military operations by Frontier Corps (FC) on the religious extremist groups around Peshawar led to a series of debates and discussion amongst the CMKP members regarding the position to be adopted on the question of Taliban and religious-extremists. The conclusion of the debate has been summarised by Ali Jan that is being presented as follows with minor  editions

Hero from Egypt

Roobing blogs:

If your hero is Justin Timberlake or Santa Claus, Madonna or the Tooth Fairy… or any such legend or fluff merchant you’re wrong. Your hero is actually Hossam el-Hamalawy, currently reporting the uprising in Egypt, led by the textile workers of Mahalla.

Hossam reports:

The Textile Workers’ League activists Kamal el-Fayoumi and Kareem el-Beheiri, as well as a number of the Mahalla detainees, are currently undergoing interrogation at the Tanta Prosecutor’s Office. I have a report from an activist, which I couldn’t confirm yet, that Kareem was subject to severe beatings in police custody. The activist I spoke with said he heard this from one of the recently released detainees. We should know soon whether Kareem and the others were abused in custody or not when the lawyers who are attending the interrogation come out…

…

For continuous updates on the detainees, please follow Tadamon, April 6th Strike, Abna2Masr and the HMLC blogs, especially as reports are coming out that those ordered by the prosecutor to be released in Alexandria and Mansoura, remain in police custody… Shehab Ismail also called me from NYC yesterday to say his sister Sarah who had been detained earlier in Cairo was still in police custody despite a release order…

160 Years Ago in February

Bhupinder blogs:

This little book was first published 160 years ago on 21st February 1848.

The world has not stopped listening to it ever since.

Thanks to Marxists Internet archives, you can actually now listen to the audio.

The RCP’s Idol Worship

Burningman blogs on the Revolutionary Communist Party’s response to the Nine Letters to our Comrades, which was a group of critical letters on the RCP and it’s leadership by a former RCP member:

The Revolutionary Communist Party has decreed on a “matter of basic orientation.” The unsigned author(s) don’t mention the object of their scorn by name, but they call the Nine Letters to Our Comrades nothing but “completely dishonest and unprincipled attacks, including crude distortions of our views, aims, and methods.” The distortions and purported lies are not discussed, noted in particular or corrected. Off limits and not up for consideration. Decided. Think about that. Read the Nine Letters, then the RCP’s initial public response and hear the elastic snap.

Sartre’s Godless Philosophy and those of the Bourgeoisie

Lenin, of Lenin’s Tomb, blogs about Sartre and atheistic, or non-theistic, philosophy:

The trouble with the professional atheists or anti-theists these days is, apart from everything else that is bad and reductionist and ridiculous in what they write, that their apparently passionate commitment comes too cheap. It doesn’t require that they give anything up, change anything about themselves, or challenge anything fundamental about the society. They don’t have to engage in any analysis deeper than that which finds religious doctrine to be literally false, philosophically shallow, socially repressive and politically dangerous. Big deal. It never seems to have occurred to them that there might be more radical consequences of the absence centre of ontology than that you should support the teaching of evolution, not kill people for God, and support the right of knocked up teenagers to have abortions. Actually, there is nothing there but the regurgitation of bourgeois wisdom and morality, both of which are pretty contemptible.

90th Anniversary of the Revolution Against Das Kapital

The blogger at A Reader’s Words writes:

On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Great October Revolution, 17 leading academicians from Russia, among them Roy Medvedev and Mikhail Shatrov have issued an appeal reiterating the achievements of the Revolution and criticizing post- USSR attempts to whitewash that period of history.

Jose Maria Sison, Founder of Communist Party of the Philippines, Arrested

Carol P. Araullo, chair Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance, or BAYAN) comments on the recent arrest of Jose Maria Sison in the Netherlands and the Philippine’s government corrupt and deadly practices:

Simply put, the “peace” Mrs. Arroyo refers to would be the outcome of the projected defeat of the communist-led revolutionary movement through yet another “all-out war” effort with a supposedly much better trained and equipped military (courtesy of hiked US military aid and bigger budgetary allocations); resort to a dirty war that includes rampant violations of human rights as a means to terrorize the rebel movement’s mass base in the countryside and legal, unarmed activists in the urban areas; and forcing the NDFP panel to capitulate in the peace negotiations by agreeing to a purported “final peace agreement” that oversees laying down of arms by the NPA in exchange for illusory socio-economic and political reforms and some form of amnesty.

16th International Communist Seminar

A blogger at leftspotblog.com posts a blog on the International Communist Seminar:

Earlier this month, the 16th annual International Communist Seminar took place in Belgium. This is an important event that brings together many of the most important communist parties and organizations in the world (including some parties that hold state power and many that don’t). The seminar aims to unite communists, many of whom have previously been divided, around an ongoing commitment to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. A basic statement of the politics that guide the seminar are in the declaration from the 1999 seminar.

Christianity and the Working Class Movement

In subliminal tyranny G. posts an excerpt from Milan Kundera’s The Joke:

 “The churches failed to realize that the working-class movement was the movement of the humiliated and oppressed supplicating for justice. They did not choose to work with and for them to create the kingdom of God on earth. By siding with the oppressors, they deprived the working-class movement of God. And now they reproach it for being godless. The Pharisees!”

Remembering Perestroika

Recalling his youth and idealism Bhupinder Singh reminesces about the Perestroika program set off by Gorbachev:

As a young student, while wading through the eerily desolate aisles of the University library and the dusty thick volumes on the deliberations of the CPSU Congresses of the 1950s and 60s, I was bemused that the Party resolutions from those years that confidently spoke about achieving communism in the next 20 years. I was, of course, wiser and knew, in that tumultuous decade of the 1980s that it was a wrong analysis. Communism would be a long haul.