Leftist former soldier rises in Peru election poll

A left-leaning former army officer has risen quickly into contention for Peru's presidency and may even be leading the tight five-person race for the first-round vote on April 10, according to a poll released Sunday.

Ollanta Humala, who lost the 2006 election to President Alan Garcia, was favored by 21.2 percent of those polled across the country on March 21-24. That was up from 15.7 percent a week before in the CPI poll sponsored by RPP radio.

Congresswoman Keiko Fujimori, daughter of disgraced and imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori, was backed by 19.9 percent while Alejandro Toledo, Peru's president from 2001-2006, was favored by 18.6 percent. Both are roughly even with Humala because the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.

The race is volatile because roughly a quarter of voters say they are still undecided or might change their minds.

Humala, who is popular in Peru's poor, rural heartland, favors a stronger state role in the economy and was once close to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, though he has distanced himself recently from Chavez, who is unpopular in Peru.

He advocates renegotiating free trade agreements and has spooked investors by calling for taxing "windfall profits" in the mining sector, which accounts for the bulk of Peru's exports.

Noting Humala's surge in the polls, Peru's leading newspaper, El Comercio, last week painted him a socialist who would "try to nationalize companies" and impose the very model that led to the collapse of eastern European economies under Soviet rule.

The director of the CPI polling company, Manuel Torrado, told RPP that while Humala's rise may spread fear among the wealthy, the one-third of Peruvians who are poor have no "fear of change. It doesn't hurt them because they have nothing."

Toledo, an economist and Peru's first president of largely Indian ancestry, has slipped back into the pack after leading with about 30 percent in early February.

The poll shows a race so tight that the candidate who could beat any other in a likely runoff, former Lima Mayor Luis Castaneda, is running fifth in the pack and could be eliminated in the first round of voting.

Castaneda, who led opinion polls for all of 2010, was the first choice of just 15.5 percent of those polled.

But in a head-to-head competition, he topped Humala 52-37, led Fujimori 49-33 and was ahead of Toledo 50-34.

While Humala has risen quickly, he still trails Toledo and Fujimori in a runoff scenario.

Also in contention is former Economy and Prime Minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was backed by 16.1 percent of the 4,688 people polled in person across the country.

Like Humala, Kuczynski has surged lately in the polls.

London's biggest protest since Iraq war in 2003

More than 250,000 people took to London's streets to protest the toughest spending cuts since World War II — one of the largest demonstrations since the Iraq war — as riot police clashed with a small groups. More than 200 people were arrested.

Although most of Saturday's demonstration was peaceful, clashes continued into the night as dozens of protesters pelted officers with bottles and amonia-filled lightbulbs. Groups set several fires and smashed shop windows near tourist landmarks such as Trafalgar Square.

Teachers, nurses, firefighters, public sector workers, students, pensioners and campaign groups all took part in Saturday's mass demonstration."They shouldn't be taking money from public services. What have we done to deserve this?" said Alison Foster, a 53-year-old school teacher. "Yes, they are making vicious cuts. That's why I'm marching, to let them know this is wrong."

Britain is facing 80 billion pounds ($130 billion) of public spending cuts from Prime Minister David Cameron's coalition government as it struggles to slash the country's deficit. The government has already raised sales tax, but Britons are bracing for big cuts to public spending that are expected next month.

Treasury chief George Osborne has staked the government's future on tough economic remedies after Britain spent billions bailing out banks. Some half a million public sector jobs will likely be lost, about 18 billion ($28.5 billion) axed from welfare payments and the pension age raised to 66 by 2020.

Commander Bob Broadhurst of the Metropolitan Police confirmed more than 250,000 people had marched peacefully, but said around 500 caused trouble.

Hundreds were arrested and police expected that number to rise. Dozens were injured, and several were admitted to hospitals for a range of problems, including shortness of breath and broken bones. Five police officers were also injured.

The demonstration began in the afternoon. Police said one small group of protesters broke away from the main march, scuffling with police officers and attempting to smash windows on two of London's main shopping streets. Others threw objects at the posh Ritz Hotel in nearby Piccadilly.

The protesters, shouting "Welfare not Warfare!" outnumbered the police. Some attacked police officers with large pieces of wood. A handful of bank branches were damaged when groups threw paint and flares at buildings.

Still, the day's protest otherwise had a carnival feel with music, big screen TVs and performers in Hyde Park, one of London's biggest public gardens.

The TUC, the main umbrella body for British unions, says it believes the cuts will threaten the country's economic recovery, and has urged the government to create new taxes for banks and to close loopholes that allow some companies to pay less tax.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said he regretted the sporadic violence.

"I don't think the activities of a few hundred people should take the focus away from the hundreds of thousands of people who have sent a powerful message to the government today," he said. "Ministers should now seriously reconsider their whole strategy after today's demonstration. This has been Middle Britain speaking."

Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, likened the march to the suffragette movement in Britain and the civil rights movement in America. "Our causes may be different but we come together to realize our voice."

The Ethics of Revolution: Self-Defense and the use of Legitimate Force

I've recently had a discussion with a group people who believed, in summary, that Communism was an ideology which had absolutely no use for any ethical terminology, and that any grounds upon which you may try to justify it was nothing more than "petty moralism". They instead proposed that people should just do whatever is "useful" or "helpful", and that whether or not one should want Communism simply, ultimately, came down to a personal preference which they held for the reason that Communism would be "helpful" for them.

Ultimately, this is just shielding an ethical question in "practical" terms while overlooking the overall statement being made. When a person says that people should do whatever is "helpful" or most "useful" they are actually taking a thinly-veiled utilitarian stance. They believe that one should engage in whatever act, and support whichever ideology most increases utility. However, by de-emphasizing the social role of that utility (and reducing it to individualistic terms) they reduce even utilitarianism to a type of rational egoism (a person has a rational self-interest, and they should pursue whatever actions maximize their interest) which reeks of so-called "Libertarian" ethics and Ayn Rand's "Objectivism". While I will not take the time here to critique the myth of the rational self-interest, I will note that an egoistic, consequentialist or objectivist ethical framework can justify absolutely any political system insofar as it benefits the class in power.

I would imagine that most leftists would not agree to such a stance. They see capitalism as inherently unjust, indefensible and see communism/anarchism (these are interchangeable for the purpose of this discussion, as their differences are not a key factor for this purpose) as ethically superior, either because of a rational social consequentialist position (more people will be better off under an anarchist/communist politico-economic system) or, as I think is usually more the case: a deep-seated ethical conviction which can be rationalized using a utilitarian framework, but which is ultimately a "felt" belief more than a rationalized one.

I don't believe that there is any rational basis for human ethics (insofar as humans do not consult any rationally defined framework to judge the moral quality of their actions before they do them). However, a society has certain basic ethical intuitions, which develop over time, both through socialization (an ethical rule is created based either on rational framework or inner ethical convictions, that rule is disemminated through the society, and after several generations becomes a cornerstone of that society's ethical thought: good examples are relatively recent convictions that slavery is wrong, racism is unjustifiable, and an increasing awareness that discrimination on the basis of sexuality is indefensible, etc) and through evolution (our baser moral instincts: convictions against pointless murder and other violence is perhaps the strongest example). Because these moral intuitions are entirely relative (yet have served society well, and have not given us any good reason to discard them) there is a certain degree to which they can be trusted to guide us on the ethical basis for deciding which politico-economic system "ought" to be adopted, to help us answer questions not of what is but what should be. You need ethics to answer the question "Why should we adopt communism/anarchism?".

Perhaps the greatest, simplest and most effective ethical justification I have yet found for the overthrow of capitalism is based on the notion of "Legitimate Force". Society at large has decided (and there is evidence of this being nearly universal) that the killing of other humans is only fully justified when it is done in self-defense. This is how wars are justified (even pre-emptive wars), this is why people who kill another when defending themselves from attack are exonerated and let free without consequence, and if we extend this intuition to all violence (as many liberal 'pacifists' do, a position which deeply resonates with many people despite its obvious deficiencies) we can discover an ethical basis for the destruction of capitalism.

If, as most basic moral intuitions would tell us, the only legitimate (read: just) use of violence is in self-defense, this STRONGLY strengthens the revolutionary position. While a bourgeoisie or liberal pacifist would interpret this as meaning that violent revolution is not justifiable, as revolutionaries it is our job to probe further than this most superficial understanding of violence and see it for what it truly is. Let me quickly somewhat formalize the proposition I am making here with regards to violence.

1) The use of force is legitimate/just if and only if that force is used to defend oneself against the perpetration of illegitimate or unjust force.

2) Only so much force as is necessary to end the perpetration of unjust force is legitimate/justified.

3) The use of force can be legitimate/just pre-emptively if and only if there is a reasonable expectation that the use of a lesser force pre-emptively can prevent the use of a greater force later, and the consequences of allowing the would-be perpetrator of illegitimate force to remain unhindered can be reasonably forseen. (This is a complex one, so I'll provide an example: It is legitimate to, for instance, sieze, arrest, or even injure or kill a group of neo-nazis with a rope in hand walking towards a gay black man's house. It is illegitimate to use force pre-emptively to, say, drop a nuclear weapon on a populated city to keep them from potentially later causing more death because you cannot reasonably forsee the consequences of not dropping that weapon, and you cannot reasonably predict that your action will result in lesser force needing to be exerted later)

Capitalism is an institution which runs on structural violence, an illegitimate force which is not based on self-defense but defense of property. The capitalist system, which coerces labor power by restricting access to basic human needs except to those who provide their labor (from which the capitalist extracts surplus value) ensures that only those who provide them with labor survive. This is absolutely a form of violence against any and all people either employed for a wage (victims of structural violence, kept in line by threat of further violence) or unable to procure a wage (victims of structural violence, starving). The extraction of value from the producing class is, in its design, a form of violence which is wholly illegitimate. Revolution, then is an act of self-defense of the working class: an absolute expression against the perpetration of violence, and the amount of force necessary to end the perpetration of that violence is exactly the destruction of the system and power structures which create that violence... the abolition of private property.

This also provides great insights into questions such as the death penalty and abortion.

When a murderer is in the act, about to kill a person and they act out in self-defense, killing the attempted murderer, that is justified because it is reasonable to believe that killing the perpetrator was the only viable course of action which would result in the saving of the victim's life.

However, after the act of murder has been committed and the murderer caught, killing is no longer the only viable course of action which would prevent the further perpetration of violence by that murderer (nor is it even the cheapest, or most practical) so the use of lethal force is no longer legitimate in light of the fact that the use of restraining force is sufficient to keep people safe from that murderer.

In the case of abortion: the fetus is, for all intents and purposes engaging in an act of violence against its carrier. The woman carrying the fetus, can reasonably either choose to consent to this violence (knowing fully the risks, and desiring the long-term consequences of doing so) or to, in an act of self-defense (in protection of her body, state of mind, etc.) abort the fetus. An ethical position on violence based upon the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate force seems to be the most consistent with our ideals, the best expression of our values, and can be used to justify the entirety of our long and short-term revolutionary goals.

Why should we pretend to abandon ethics in its entirety (while merely shielding an ethical opinion in so-called "practical" lanuage) when ethics, and basic, human moral convictions about the legitimacy of the use of force so well defends our revolutionary and post-revolutionary goals?


THANK'S :- http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=458

Che Guevara a revolutionary man

One revolution, in this case, was not enough. Having played an instrumental role in the overthrow of the Batista regime in Cuba, Che soon set about to extend the revolution throughout the rest of Latin America. Within months of Fulgencio Batista's defeat in January 1959, Che had initiated a training program for revolutionary aspirants from elsewhere in the hemisphere so they could learn from the Cuban experience and return to their countries of origin to begin revolutions of their own. Within the next several years, this effort would send forth revolutionary hopefuls to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, all thought to satisfy the conditions for a successful revolutionary takeover.

Within 11 months of his arrival in La Paz, Che would be dead, executed at the hands of the Bolivian army. As Kierkegaard once observed, "The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins." So it was with Che. Although his revolutionary convictions inclined him toward tyranny, he died a martyr's death. As influential as he was in life, his influence and power over others increased dramatically after he was gone. Over the next three decades, he would be held up repeatedly as a model of fortitude, self-denial, and heroism, all of which were exemplified by the courage with which he faced his executioners.

His legend and its appeal were reinforced by the mysterious disappearance of his remains. After his death, his hands were cut off and preserved in formaldehyde to prove to his followers that he had been captured and killed. They were later smuggled out of Bolivia to Cuba. The rest of his remains simply vanished. According to one local legend, he had been reincarnated and would eventually return in another form to exact his revenge.

At least part of this mystery has now been solved. In late June 1997, near the remote Bolivian town of Vallegrande, Cuban and Argentinean forensic specialists uncovered the grave of seven individuals. One skeleton, partially covered by a decaying olive drab army jacket like the one worn by Che in the last photograph taken of him while he was alive, had no hands.The search for Che Guevara's remains had been spurred a year and a half before by the man who had been responsible for presiding over his secret burial, retired general Mario Vargas Salinas. Che and a number of his guerrilla fighters, he claimed, had been buried at night on the edge of a small airfield in Vallegrande. Eighteen months of searching had yielded a number of corpses, at least one of which had been identified as one of Che's men, but not the remains of Che himself. The discovery in June finally ended this search. Dental records and bone chips consistent with the pattern of gunshot wounds sustained in his execution confirmed that the skeletal remains were those of Che Guevara.

Che's homecoming, after three decades in the field, took place in July in a solemn ceremony presided over by an aging, gray-beamed Fidel Castro, who proclaimed 1997 to be "The Year of the Fallen Revolutionary." The event seemed designed both to honor his old companero as well as to breathe new life into what remains of the Cuban Revolution. But Che is also the object of a resurgence of interest after some two decades of neglect in both the United States and Europe.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, and into the 1970s, he was the darling of the New Left. His image could be found in campus dorm rooms across the United States, next to posters of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and other similar fallen heroes. With the eclipse of campus radicalism, the memory of Che declined. He is now reemerging, however, as a figure of pop culture. His image, as one commentator has noted, has been "recycled." His revolutionary life and death have given him market power, which is being used to sell everything from T-shirts, key chains, and compact discs to cigars and a new brand of beer.

Che Guevara has become many things to many people. Many of these things are clearly contradictory. In Cuba, he increasingly represents the memory of what might have been. Throughout the rest of Latin America, he continues to personify the spirit of national liberation. The power of his example and of his theory of insurrection have inspired thousands to follow in his footsteps to their deaths. The consequences of these efforts have shaped much of the political history of the hemisphere since the Cuban Revolution.

In the West, Che has long been a romantic symbol of personal rebellion and of the power of individual expression. It is this imagery that is now being packaged and sold so successfully. That Che would have used the royalties from any such commercial ventures to destroy the social and economic system that produced them seems not to matter to the consuming public in the least.

Che's continuing influence, at some level, appears paradoxical. He was, first and foremost, a "hands-on" professional revolutionary. As such, however, he left a mixed legacy. His theory of revolutionary warfare, which was highly influential, was flawed and arguably contributed to the defeat of scores of attempts throughout the hemisphere since 1959 to replicate the Cuban insurrection. His own efforts to employ his theories failed dramatically.

Marxian communism

Karl Marx was born in the German Rhineland to middle-class parents of Jewish descent who had abandoned their religion in an attempt to assimilate into an anti-Semitic society. The young Marx studied philosophy at the University of Berlin and received a doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, but he was unable, because of his Jewish ancestry and his liberal political views, to secure a teaching position. He then turned to journalism, where his investigations disclosed what he perceived as systematic injustice and corruption at all levels of German society. Convinced that German (and, more broadly, European) society could not be reformed from within but instead had to be remade from the ground up, Marx became a political radical. His views soon brought him to the attention of the police, and, fearing arrest and imprisonment, he left for Paris. There he renewed an acquaintance with his countryman Friedrich Engels, who became his friend and coauthor in a collaboration that was to last nearly 40 years.

The son of the co-owner of a textile firm with factories in Germany and Britain, Engels was himself a capitalist who helped to manage the firm’s factory in Manchester. Like Marx, Engels was deeply disturbed by what he regarded as the injustices of a society divided by class. Appalled by the poverty and squalor in which ordinary workers lived and worked, he described their misery in grisly detail in The Condition of the English Working Class (1844).

Marx and Engels maintained that the poverty, disease, and early death that afflicted the proletariat (the industrial working class) were endemic to capitalism: they were systemic and structural problems that could be resolved only by replacing capitalism with communism. Under this alternative system, the major means of industrial production—such as mines, mills, factories, and railroads—would be publicly owned and operated for the benefit of all. Marx and Engels presented this critique of capitalism and a brief sketch of a possible future communist society in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), which they wrote at the commission of a small group of radicals called the Communist League.

Marx, meanwhile, had begun to lay the theoretical and (he believed) scientificfoundations of communism, first in The German Ideology (written 1845–46, published 1932) and later in Das Kapital (1867; Capital). His theory has three main aspects: first, a materialist conception of history; second, a critique of capitalism and its inner workings; and third, an account of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its eventual replacement by communism.

Historical materialism

According to Marx’s materialist theory, history is a series of class strugglesand revolutionary upheavals, leading ultimately to freedom for all. Marx derived his views in part from the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, who conceived of history as the dialectical self-development of “spirit.” In contrast to Hegel’s philosophical idealism, however, Marx held that history is driven by the material or economic conditions that prevail in a given age. “Before men can do anything else,” Marx wrote, “they must first produce the means of their subsistence.” Without material production there would be no life and thus no human activity.

According to Marx, material production requires two things: “material forces of production”—roughly, raw materials and the tools required to extract and process them—and “social relations of production”—the division of labour through which raw materials are extracted and processed. Human history is the story of both elements’ changing and becoming ever more complex. In primitive societies the material forces were few and simple—for example, grains and the stone tools used to grind them into flour. With the growth of knowledge and technology came successive upheavals, or “revolutions,” in the forces and relations of production and in the complexity of both. For example, iron miners once worked with pickaxes and shovels, which they owned, but the invention of the steam shovel changed the way they extracted iron ore. Since no miner could afford to buy a steam shovel, he had to work for someone who could. Industrial capitalism, in Marx’s view, is an economic system in which one class—the ruling bourgeoisie—owns the means of production while the working class or proletariat effectively loses its independence, the worker becoming part of the means of production, a mere “appendage of the machine.”

Critique of capitalism

The second aspect of Marx’s theory is his critique of capitalism. Marx held that human history had progressed through a series of stages, from ancient slave society through feudalism to capitalism. In each stage a dominant class uses its control of the means of production to exploit the labour of a larger class of workers. But internal tensions or “contradictions” in each stage eventually lead to the overthrow and replacement of the ruling class by its successor. Thus, the bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocracy and replaced feudalism with capitalism; so too, Marx predicted, will the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie and replace capitalism with communism.

Marx acknowledged that capitalism was a historically necessary stage of development that had brought about remarkable scientific and technological changes—changes that greatly increased aggregate wealth by extending humankind’s power over nature. The problem, Marx believed, was that this wealth—and the political power and economic opportunities that went with it—was unfairly distributed. The capitalists reap the profits while paying the workers a pittance for long hours of hard labour. Yet it is the workers who create economic value, according to Marx’s labour theory of value, which holds that the worth of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour required to produce it. Under capitalism, Marx claimed, workers are not paid fully or fairly for their labour because the capitalists siphon off surplus value, which they call profit. Thus, the bourgeois owners of the means of production amass enormous wealth, while the proletariat falls further into poverty. This wealth also enables the bourgeoisie to control the government or state, which does the bidding of the wealthy and the powerful to the detriment of the poor and the powerless.

The exploitation of one class by another remains hidden, however, by a set of ideas that Marx called ideology. “The ruling ideas of every epoch,” he wrote in The German Ideology, “are the ideas of the ruling class.” By this, Marx meant that the conventional or mainstream ideas taught in classrooms, preached from pulpits, and communicated through the mass media are ideas that serve the interests of the dominant class. In slave societies, for example, slavery was depicted as normal, natural, and just. In capitalist societies the free marketis portrayed as operating efficiently, fairly, and for the benefit of all, while alternative economic arrangements such as socialism are derided or dismissed as false or fanciful. These ideas serve to justify or legitimize the unequal distribution of economic and political power. Even exploited workers may fail to understand their true interests and accept the dominant ideology—a condition that later Marxists called “false consciousness.” One particularly pernicious source of ideological obfuscation is religion, which Marx called “the opium of the people” because it purportedly dulls the critical faculties and leads workers to accept their wretched condition as part of God’s plan.

Besides inequality, poverty, and false consciousness, capitalism also produces “alienation.” By this, Marx meant that the worker is separated or estranged from (1) the product of his labour, which he does not own; (2) the process of production, which under factory conditions makes him “an appendage of the machine”; (3) the sense of satisfaction that he would derive from using his human capacities in unique and creative ways; and (4) otherhuman beings, whom he sees as rivals competing for jobs and wages.

Revolution and communism

Marx believed that capitalism is a volatile economic system that will suffer a series of ever-worsening crises—recessions and depressions—that will produce greater unemployment, lower wages, and increasing misery among the industrial proletariat. These crises will convince the proletariat that its interests as a class are implacably opposed to those of the ruling bourgeoisie. Armed with revolutionary class consciousness, the proletariat will seize the major means of production along with the institutions of state power—police, courts, prisons, and so on—and establish a socialist state that Marx called “the revolutionarydictatorship of the proletariat.” The proletariat will thus rule in its own class interest, as the bourgeoisie did before, in order to prevent a counterrevolution by the displaced bourgeoisie. Once this threat disappears, however, the need for the state will also disappear. Thus, the interim state will wither away and be replaced by a classless communist society (see classless society).

Marx’s vision of communist society is remarkably (and perhaps intentionally) vague. Unlike earlier “utopian socialists,” whom Marx and Engels derided as unscientific and impractical—including Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen—Marx did not produce detailed blueprints for a future society. Some features that he did describe, such as free education for all and a graduatedincome tax, are now commonplace. Other features, such as public ownership of the major means of production and distribution of goods and services according to the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” remain as radical as they were in Marx’s time. But for the most part, Marx believed that the institutions of a future communist society should be designed and decided democratically by the people living in it; it was not his task, he said, to “write recipes for the kitchens of the future.” Yet, though Marx was reluctant to write such recipes, many of his followers were not. Among them was his friend and coauthor, Friedrich Engels.

Communism in India

Why is the most densely populated state in India, which also suffered the greatest famine in India’s history in 1943, now the third largest economy in the country with a very rapid growth rate that is the third fastest among all the states, a power infrastructure that is the best in the country, soaring agricultural yields and a crime rate that is half the national average?

It is mainly down to its governing communist-led front that is the world’s longest running democratically elected government- since 1977. Although in next year’s state elections it is likely tobe ousted, partly out of the electorate’s boredom with it and partly because of its corruption (although its opposition, an offshoot of India’s ruling Congress Party, is also corrupt).
No one epitomized communist rule more than its long time former leader, Jyoti Basu, who died last week at the age of 96. Television and the newspapers were full of not much else for five days. The crowds at his funeral filled the centre of the city. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, despite having been in Kolkata the week before to say goodbye, and Sonia Gandhi, the head of the Congress Party were in attendance.
Not only was Basu in power for decades he nearly became prime minister in 1996 and would have been if his communist party had not been so factionalized and couldn’t be relied on to support him in parliament.
But at home he towered over everybody else. Although he had to face splits aplenty on his home ground he knew how to get things done with a firm but non-antagonistic hand. He failed on some key issues but overall his rule was a triumph. In his book the British writer, Geoffrey Morehouse, wrote that he and the poet Tagore were the two people who made Bengal “what it is today”.
No one changed the face of communism more than Basu did, leading the party to give up its line on ‘armed struggle” and acceptparliamentary democracy. Basu's first government inherited a situation where in the rural areas the so-called “Naxalites’ were leading an armed struggle to re-order land holdings. Landlords were often decapitated and a harsh rule enforced. The newly installed ruling communists were swift to deploy their own armed cadres to defeat the Naxalites. (The same thing is happening today with the Maoists who, over the last ten years, have played on the shortfalls of recent development in the rural areas. Almost every day they clash with the police and the communist cadres.)
The new government pushed through a democratic land reform that totally changed the face of West Bengal. Landlords were generously compensated and unlike a number of failed land reforms elsewhere the government managed to do the follow up work of settling peasants on their own land and bringing in agricultural advice. Schools and health clinics were introduced into every village. On a visit to one rural area I was amazed to find peasants with sewerage systems, television and electric fans. It was also a bit mind boggling to see lonely villages with the hammer sickle on a red background fluttering from many of the houses.
Meanwhile the urban industrial areas atrophied. The heavy hand of state control augmented by out of control unions that would strike at the drop of a hat made for stagnation. It is to Basu’s credit that hetook these forces head on. In 1985 he pushed through the new economic agenda for the party. Inspired by Deng Xiao Ping’s capitalist reforms in China he created state and private sector partnerships. In fact Basu was ahead of practices in the rest of India where in the same year Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi took the first steps to open the country to the free market, multinationals and the latest imported technology. After economic liberalization was introduced into India in 1991, Basu was among the first to create a new industrial policy.
But the party itself was often his main antagonist and over time the gap between him and his party widened. He could not overcome the backward, primitive attitude of his party in education that patronized mediocrity, destroying standards of excellence. The teachers’ union called the shots. Learning in English was regarded as elitism (although Basu sent his own children to upper crust English speaking schools).
During Basu’s tenure some of the best educated Bengalis left Kolkata for pastures elsewhere. Not until he retired in 2000 was his successor, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, able to start to make the deep transformation that West Bengal and Kolkata desperately needed in order to succeed in the modern age - and partly succeeded it has even as communist rule shows up the serious defects that will probably push it into the  political wilderness next year.

COMMUNISM: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW STAGE

Exploitative economic and social relations, including the systematic domination of women by men and the division of human society into different classes with conflicting interests, have not always existed among human beings. A situation in which a small group monopolizes not only wealth but the very means to live, and thereby forces far greater numbers to slave under their command, in one form or another, while that small group also monopolizes political power and the means of enforcing this exploitation and dominates the intellectual and cultural life of society, condemning the vast majority to ignorance and subservience—this has not always been part of human society. Nor is this destined to remain the way human beings relate to each other, so long as human beings continue to exist. These oppressive divisions arose thousands of years ago, replacing early forms of communal society, which themselves had existed for thousands of years, and which were made up of relatively small groups of people holding in common their most important possessions and working cooperatively to meet their needs and to raise new generations.

The break-up of these early communal societies was not due to some “natural inclination” of people to seek a superior position above others and to “get ahead” at the expense of others, nor to some supposed “genetic predisposition” of men to subjugate women or of one “race” of people to conquer and plunder other “races.” No doubt there were conflicts at times when people in early communal societies encountered each other and were not able to readily reconcile the differences between them, but these societies were not characterized by institutionalized oppressive divisions with which we are all too familiar today. To people in those communal societies the idea of some people within these societies establishing themselves as the masters over others, and seeking to acquire wealth and power by forcing others to work for them, would have seemed strange and outrageous. Rather, the emergence of class divisions and oppressive social relations among people was owing to changes in the ways human beings interacted with the “external” natural environment, and in particular changes in the ways these human beings carried out the production of the material requirements of life and the reproduction and rearing of new generations.

In particular, once the organization of this production and reproduction began to be carried out in such a way that individuals, instead of society as a whole, began to control the surplus produced by society, above and beyond what was necessary for mere survival, and especially once people settled more or less permanently on specific segments of land and began to carry out agricultural production on the land they settled, then the long night was ushered in, in which human beings have been divided into masters and slaves, the powerful and the powerless, those who rule and those who are ruled over, those whose role is decisive in determining the direction of society, and those whose destiny is shaped in this way, even while they have no effective role in determining that destiny.

Throughout these thousands of years of darkness for the great majority of humanity, people have dreamed of a different life—where slavery, rape, wars of plunder, and a lifetime of alienation, agony, and despair would no longer constitute “the human condition.” This yearning for a different world has found expression in different forms of religious fantasy—looking beyond this world to a god or gods who supposedly control human destiny and who supposedly will, in some future existence, if not in this life, finally reward those who have endured endless suffering during their time on earth. But there have also been repeated attempts to actually change things in this world. There have been revolts and uprisings, massive rebellions, armed conflicts, and even revolutions in which societies, and the relations between different societies, were transformed in major ways. Empires have fallen, monarchies have been abolished, slave owners and feudal lords have been overthrown. But for hundreds and thousands of years, while many people’s lives were sacrificed, willingly or unwillingly, in these struggles, the result was always that the rule of one group of exploiters and oppressors was replaced by that of another—in one form or another, a small part of society continued to monopolize wealth, political power, and intellectual and cultural life, dominating and oppressing the great majority and engaging repeatedly in wars with rival states and empires.

All this remained fundamentally unchanged—the light of a new day never appeared for the masses of humanity, despite all their sacrifice and struggle... Until, a little more than 100 years ago, something radically new emerged: people rising up who embodied not only the desire but the potential to put an end to all relations of exploitation and oppression and all destructive antagonistic conflicts among human beings, everywhere in the world. In 1871, amidst a war between “their” government and that of Germany, working people in the capital city of France, long exploited, impoverished, and degraded, rose up to seize power and established a new form of association among people. This was the Paris Commune, which existed only in that one part of France, and which lasted for only two short months, but which represented, in embryonic form, a communist society in which distinctions of class and oppressive divisions among people would be finally abolished. The Commune was crushed by the weight and force of the old order—with thousands slaughtered in a valiant but ultimately vain attempt to keep the Commune alive. But the first steps had been taken toward a new world, the path had been opened, the way shown, if only fleetingly then.

Even before the events of the Paris Commune, the possibility of a radically new world, without exploitation and oppression, had been scientifically established through the work of Karl Marx, together with his contemporary and collaborator, Frederick Engels, the founders of the communist movement. As Marx himself put it, only a few years before the Commune:

Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions breaks down before their collapse in practice

The First Stage of Communist Revolution

The Paris Commune was a first great attempt to scale the heights of human emancipation, and it was a harbinger of the future, but it lacked the necessary leadership and was not guided by the necessary scientific understanding to be able to withstand the inevitable counter-revolutionary onslaughts of the forces of the old order and then to carry out a thoroughgoing transformation of society, in all spheres: economic, social, political, cultural, and ideological. Some who approach the experience of the Commune with a romanticized, instead of a scientific, outlook and method like to cite the lack of an organized vanguard leadership, unified on the basis of a scientific, Marxist viewpoint, as one of the virtues of the Commune. But the fact is that this was one of its greatest weaknesses and one of the main factors contributing to its defeat, after only a very short period of existence. The lack of such a leadership—and the attempt to immediately implement measures which would essentially eliminate any institutionalized leadership—is one of the main reasons why the Commune did not sufficiently suppress organized forces which were determined to wipe out the Commune and to ensure that the specter of communist revolution—so terrible from the standpoint of exploiters and oppressors—would never rise again. In particular, as Marx pointed out, the Communards failed to march immediately on the stronghold of the counter-revolution, in the nearby city of Versailles; and so the counter-revolution was able to gather its strength, march on Paris, and deliver the death-blow to the Commune, slaughtering thousands of its most determined fighters in the process.

But beyond the immediate consequences that flowed, to a significant degree, from the shortcomings and limitations of the Paris Commune, the reality is this: Had the Commune defeated the attacks of the counter-revolution and survived, it would then have faced the even greater challenge of reorganizing and transforming the whole society, and not just the capital of Paris, where it held power for a brilliant but all too brief period. It would have had to create a radically new and different economy, a socialist economy, in a country still made up largely of small farmers (peasants), and it would have had to overcome profound and tradition-steeped inequality and oppression, in particular the chains that have bound women for thousands of years. And here again the weaknesses and limitations of the Commune stand out: Women played a vital and heroic role in the creation of the Commune and the fight to defend it, but they were nonetheless maintained in a subordinate position within the Commune.

In less than 50 years after the defeat of the Paris Commune, beginning in the midst of the first world war among imperialists, a much more sweeping and deep-going revolutionary transformation was carried out in what had been the Russian empire. This revolution overthrew the Tsar (Russian monarch) who was the hereditary ruler of this empire, and then overthrew the capitalist class which attempted to step into the “vacuum of power” and seize control of society once the Tsar had been toppled. Through this revolution, which was led by V.I. Lenin, the Soviet Union was brought into being as the world’s first socialist state; and although Lenin himself died in 1924, for several decades after that socialist transformation was carried out in the Soviet Union, even as it faced relentless threats and repeated attacks from counter-revolutionary forces, inside and outside the country, including the massive invasion of the Soviet Union by the imperialist Nazi Germany during World War 2, which cost the lives of more than 20 million Soviet citizens and brought great destruction to the country.

In leading the Russian revolution, in its first great step of seizing and consolidating political power and embarking on the road of socialist transformation, Lenin proceeded on the basis of the scientific breakthroughs that Marx had achieved, and he continued to develop that living science of Marxism. He drew important lessons from the Paris Commune, as well as from the historical experience of human society, and the natural world, more broadly. Of great importance, Lenin systematized the understanding that a vanguard communist party was essential in order to enable the masses of people to wage an increasingly conscious struggle to overthrow the rule of the capitalists and then carry out the radical transformation of society toward the ultimate goal of communism, worldwide.

Lenin also applied and developed the understanding forged by Marx, on the basis of summing up the bitter lessons of the Paris Commune, that in carrying out the communist revolution, it is not possible to lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the old state, which served the capitalist system; it is necessary to smash and dismantle that state and replace it with a new state: In place of what is in reality the dictatorship of the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie), it is necessary to establish the political rule of the rising, revolutionary class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a radically different kind of state, which will increasingly involve the masses of people in carrying forward the revolutionary transformation of society. This revolutionary dictatorship is necessary, Lenin emphasized, for two basic reasons:

1) To prevent exploiters—old and new, within the country and in other parts of the world—from defeating and drowning in blood the struggle of masses of people to bring a radically new society, and world, into being, to advance toward the achievement of the “4 Alls.”

2) To guarantee the rights of the people at every point, even with the inequalities that will remain, to varying degrees, between different sections of the people during various phases of the socialist transition to communism, at the same time as the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to continue to uproot and eventually move beyond such social inequalities and to reach the point, throughout the world, where oppressive social divisions can no longer arise, and the state, as an institutionalized instrument of enforcement of laws and of rights, will no longer be necessary, and the state itself will be replaced by the self-administration by the people, without class distinctions and social antagonisms.