March 22, 2010
Outlookindia.com/Dawn.com

 Last month, quietly, unannounced, Arundhati Roy decided to visit the forbidding and forbidden precincts of Central India’s Dandakaranya Forests, home to a melange of tribespeople many of whom have taken up arms to protect their people against state-backed marauders and exploiters. She recorded in considerable detail the first face-to-face journalistic “encounter” with armed guerillas, their families and comrades, for which she combed the forests for weeks at personal risk.

[For more discussion on China's economic and political development, click HERE.]

Ian Parker reflects on a recent visit to China

November 9, 2011 -- Socialist Resistance -- Capitalism in China is rapidly uprooting and throwing into the marketplace all that seemed fixed and frozen since the revolution in 1949, but -- as with all other forms of capitalism -- this market is all but free. The bureaucracy holds in place systems of authority necessary for capital accumulation, and the Chinese state is a key player in the enrichment of a new bourgeoisie. There are particular political-economic and ideological conditions for this transition, of course, and one of the most important is the legacy of Maoism, and how the claim to be a socialist country is squared with the rapid abandonment of each and every tenet of socialism.

Amir Khadir, currently Québec solidaire's sole member of the Quebec legislature, the National Assembly.

August 31, 2011 -- Life on the Left, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission and that of Alternate Routes -- The following article is scheduled for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Alternate Routes. It is an expanded and updated version of a presentation to the third annual conference of the Critical Social Research Collaborative, held March 5, 2011, at Carleton University, Ottawa, on the theme “Varieties of Socialism, Varieties of Approaches”. Part II (below) will discuss the evolution of Québec Solidaire since its founding.

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By Richard Fidler

May Day 2011, Kathmandu.

This statement emerges from within the Kasama Project — in internationalist communist solidarity with the revolutionary movement of Nepal’s people. Kasama submitted it to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal for publication.

By Eric Ribellarsi and Mike Ely*

June 30, 2011 -- For more than 20 years, the impoverished and isolated peoples in the southern Himalayan foothills have risen up to remake themselves and their world. Now, after the sacrifices of a whole generation, the future of their movement and society hangs in the balance.

Will the revolutionary sections of the people be able to carry through the struggle to create the radically new Nepal they have dreamed of? Or will the accomplishments of their struggle so far be consolidated into something that falls short of liberation?

Two roads sharply posed

Different futures confront each other. Those opposing roads have become concentrated in a very stark set of opposing choices.

[For more on China, click HERE.]

By Chris Slee

Preface to the revised edition (2011)

June 6, 2011 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- There are a number of changes in this edition compared to the first edition (Resistance Books 2010). Most of these changes merely expand on points made in the original, supplying more detail in the text and/or the footnotes. Others take account of new developments in the year since the first edition was published.

The biggest change is in the discussion of the Great Leap Forward, which has been significantly expanded and rewritten. I felt this was necessary for two reasons. First, I wanted to acknowledge that natural disasters as well as mistaken policies played a role in the reappearance of famine in 1959-61. Second, I wanted to explain in more detail what the policy errors were, and why I consider that Mao was largely responsible for them.

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West Bengal's defeated chief minister, the CPI (M)'s Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, addresses a mass rally.

By Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation

[This article is the editorial in the forthcoming June 2011 issue of the CPI (ML) Liberation's journal Liberation. It is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission.]

Full Quarter Storms
By Sonny Melencio
2010, Transform Asia Inc.
Order from transform.asia1@gmail.com

Review by Tony Iltis

February 27, 2011 -- Green Left Weekly -- Veteran Filipino socialist activist Sonny Melencio’s political autobiography, Full Quarter Storms, covers a lot of history. The book tells the story of the “First Quarter Storm”, the student uprising in 1970 (from which the book draws its title) and the driving of this powerful movement underground by the declaration of martial law by then-president Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.

The book gives a first-hand view of the mass popular struggles followed by the difficult and dangerous experience of operating underground — one step away from Marcos’ brutal thugs.

In fact, the book opens with the story of Melencio’s detention and torture by the military in 1977 — and his dramatic escape, a tale worthy of any Hollywood thriller.

Vietnamese navy personnel patrol Truong Sa (Spratly) islands.

By Michael Karadjis

February 2, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Over the last year or so, tensions have been heightened in the dispute over two island groups in the South China Sea (also known as the East Sea in Vietnam), involving rival claims to some or all of the islands by Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and even Brunei. The first three of these countries claim all of both island groups.

The islands in question are known in English as the Paracels and the Spratlys, in Vietnamese as the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa, and in Chinese as the Xisha and the Nansha. Both island groups are uninhabited rocky islands and reefs; there is neither a Vietnamese population oppressed by the current Chinese occupation of the Hoang Sa nor a Chinese population oppressed by Vietnamese rule over most of the Truong Sa. Thus there are no questions of self-determination of actual peoples. Therefore, international law would seem to be the best way to judge the status question, unless further negotiations settle things differently.

A trader in Lijang, China, selling images of Karl Marx. Photo by Malias.

By Norman Levine

January 4, 2010 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Organised by Marcello Musto of York University (Toronto, Canada), an international delegation of scholars from Canada (Marcello Musto and George Comninel), USA (Norman Levine), England (Terrell Carver), Japan (Hiroshi Uchida and Kenji Mori) and South Korea (Seongjin Jeong) participated in a two-week series of colloquiums and lectures in China. This delegation was invited and graciously hosted by Fudan University of Shanghai and Nanjing University (two of the top five universities in China), and by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Chinese Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (CCTB) of Beijing. The faculties and administration of each of these institutions partnered in these colloquiums, which also saw the participation of Chinese academics from 23 different universities (and, among them, of many deans and chairs of departments).

"Mao images are for sale, popular in China and not just with tourists, his ideas on protracted war used frequently for `guerrilla marketing'. His fate, like that of Che, seems now to be that of a treasured commodity—all that is missing is a Chinese equivalent of the Motorcycle Diaries."

Review by Tariq Ali

Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World
By Rebecca E. Karl
Duke University Press: Durham, NC 2010
paperback, 216 pages, 978 0 8223 4795 8.

By Lance Carter

June 2010 -- Insurgent Notes -- In a country where the Communist Party (CCP) has dominated “left-wing” politics for over sixty years, dissent has often been deemed a “right-wing” or “counterrevolutionary” affair. Subsequently, many dissidents and parts of the general population have embraced the term “right wing” as implying something anti-authoritarian or progressive. To make things more confusing, since 1978 the CCP itself has moved farther and farther to the right while still claiming to be socialist. All this has contributed to a very strange political environment in mainland China.

By Mark Vorpahl

July 2, 2010 -- Workers' Compass -- The recent wave of strikes in China, most visibly at Honda factories, are testament to a growing movement of labour unrest in the country. This development is of great importance for international working-class struggle.

For the capitalists, China holds a key position in the global system of generating profits. The demands of China's workers for better conditions and a higher standard of living are in direct conflict with the international capitalists' desire to use China as a source of cheap labour. For the world's big business elite, already shaken by an international economic crisis of their own making, the growing militancy of China's workers is a great threat.

Below is an excerpt from Thai socialist Giles Ji Ungpakorn's latest book, Thailand’s Crisis and the Fight for Democracy. It provides an historical background to Thai politics from the pre-capitalist era, through the turmoil of the 1930s and 1970s, up to the present day. This historical understanding is important in locating the dynamics of the ruling class and the changing politics of revolt from the time of the Communist Party through to the creation of the NGOs. It has been posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with Giles Ji Ungpakorn's permission.

Giles Ji Ungpakorn is a political commentator and dissident. In February 2009 he had to leave Thailand for exile in Britain because he was charged with lèse majesté for writing a book criticising the 2006 military coup. His latest book will be of interest to activists, academics and journalists who have an interest in Thai politics, democratisation and NGOs.

By Mike Ely

May 4, 2010 -- Kasama Project -- May 4, 1970. Forty years have passed. It is history now in the eyes of the world. But for me, and many others, it is raw and alive. It always will be.

I won’t tell the well-known details – if you don’t know them, look them up. But I will tell you what it felt like, and looked like to a teenage boy who wanted desperately to see the liberation of the Vietnamese and Black people in America.

May Day for Bobby Seale — New Haven, 1970

On May 1 1970, I was in New Haven, Connecticut. Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party was facing a murder trial in New Haven. They had first bound and gagged him in the  courtroom of the Chicago 8, then shipped him to Connecticut to lock him up for life. We were determined to free him.

Students came from all over the US east coast to turn the city upside down. On my campus, we had worked day and night to explain the attack on the Black Panther Party – and to mobilise busloads to go New Haven.