Interview with Balasingham Skanthakumar by Eric Toussaint. Reposted from CADTM, August 7, 2022.

Emerging from the social upheavals of the 1960s, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) counted many dedicated organizers in its ranks who were inspired by the ideas and the example of Maoist China. The party used Maoist theory not only to plan for a future socialist revolution, but also to grapple with the complicated history of Stalinism and its impact on the international communist movement and the USSR. While the RCP did confront some of the dogmas and myths of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, in the end they were unwilling and unable to effectively understand Stalinism.

Before the 2014 war, Pavel Lisyansky, founder of the Eastern Human Rights Group, was a miner and trade union activist in the Donbas. If it were not for Russia’s aggression, he would still be working in the mines, he says. “This is my life,” is how he signed the photo from his personal archive accompanying this interview. Today, Pavel Lisyansky and his colleagues from the Eastern Human Rights Group (EHRG) founded in July 2014 in Debaltseve actively document and report on human rights violations in the Russian-occupied territories and help local residents facing lawlessness.

When today’s historiography refers to the debate about economic reforms in Eastern European countries during late communism, it often uses the term the “long transition”. It shows that the economic transformation from state socialism into neoliberalism was a process that took off in some of the countries in Eastern Europe in reaction to the oil crisis in 1973.

The Kurdish women's movement is at the heart of one of the most exciting revolutionary experiments in the world today: Rojava. Forged over decades of struggle, most recently in the fight against ISIS, Rojava embodies a radical commitment to ecology, democracy and women's liberation. But while striking images of Kurdish women in military fatigues proliferate, a true understanding of the women's movement remains elusive.