We send our congratulations and support to those students of Oxford University who have initiated a campaign to topple Cecil Rhodes Statue, which stands outside Oriel College, half-way up the well known university town’s High Street (pictured). Continue reading “Rhodes Must Fall!”→
Mao, it turns out, brought into being 800 million, well fed, well clothed and well educated human beings: A fact that not only China, but all of us should celebrate. China’s rise has been a great source of enlightenment that exercises a positive influence on human civilisation.
Carlos Martinez, secretary of the “Hands off China” campaign, gives a speech on the legacy of Mao Zedong’s Life, and the impact that his outstanding leadership of the Chinese revolution had upon China and the wider world, at a meeting held jointly with the CPGB-ML to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. It is a legacy that all progressive humanity should celebrate and applaud.
And yet the neoliberal imperialist narrative, ground out by official capitalist academia and popular media, tries to pass off Mao as some kind of social criminal and mass murderer – when in fact he helped to lift fully one quarter of humanity out of feudal and colonial oppression, and the stultifying and backward mode of existence, rife with starvation, disease, famine and war, crushing oppression of the masses, and of women in particular, that characterised pre-revolutionary china.
For detailed refutation of the standard bourgeois lies regarding the Great Leap forward, this article from LALKAR is instructive: http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/nov2012/china.html
The question we should ask, is not how many people died during the years of industrialisation in china, but rather, how many Chinese and other human beings owe their lives to the communist revolution that gave birth to the People’s Republic of China, and the development of modern china; a revolutionary process that Mao played such a major part in initiating, leading and trying to secure against capitalist restoration.
Carlos points out that the population of China was long stagnant at 500million, with a miserable life expectancy of just 35 years in 1949, on the founding of the PRC, when Mao famously declared “the Chinese people have stood up!”
At the time of Mao’s death, 27 years later, in 1976, the population had reached 900 million, and life expectancy 67. If today China is a modern, enlightened, broadly socialist country – not withstanding the encroachments of capitalist economy upon its economic and political life – then 1.3 billion Chinese have much to thank Mao for.
All those countries who rely on China to give them some economic and political breathing space from the crushing weight of Anglo-American imperialist oppression, likewise have much to celebrate on the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.
Long live Socialist China! Long live the memory, teaching and example of Mao Zedong!
This interview with comrade Teodora Gomes, member of the PAIGC, and comrade in arms of legendary liberation fighter Amilcar Cabral gives an insight into a little known chapter of the anti-colonial struggle in the former Portuguese held territories in Africa.
There are real lessons for sincere progressives, anti-racists, anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists that are of great relevance today.
Legendary Marxist-Leninist Liberation fighter, pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist Amilcar Cabral had the following to say on the nature of our fight against imperialism:
“I should just like to make one last point about solidarity between the international working class movement and our national liberation struggle. There are two alternatives: either we admit that there really is a struggle against imperialism which interests everybody, or we deny it. If, as would seem from all the evidence, imperialism exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate the working class in all the advanced countries and smother the national liberation movements in all the underdeveloped countries, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting. If we are fighting together, then I think the main aspect of our solidarity is extremely simple: it is to fight.”
Cabral died just 9 months before the party he founded – the PAIGC – liberated his homeland, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, from 500 years of Portugese Colonialism, bringing the downfall of the Potugese fascist junta in its wake.
He and his comrades from the PAIGC also played a vital part in the liberation of other (Particularly, but not exclusively, Portugese speaking) African nations. He was a founding member of MPLA (Angola) and the Portugese Communist Party, inter alia.
Comrade Teodora Ignacia Gomez, Womens’ activist, liberation fighter and comrade in arms of Cabral, features in this video interview, which is an exert from a longer interview she granted to comrades of the CPGB-ML on her recent visit to London.
She outlines the supportive relationship that Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya had fostered with Guinea Bissau, as so many other African Nations. Libya had tried to bring about sustainable infrastructural and agricultural development in Guinea Bissau, she tells us, both through the African Bank and independently granted aid.
As a result of NATOs genocidal war on Libya, and the illegal ousting of her legitimate government – and now Gaddafi’s cowardly and brutal assassination, which foul deed took place 24 hrs after this interview – the people of Guinea Bissau and all Africa will suffer, she says.
“Capital hates the absence of profit or small profits as nature hates vacuum. If the gain is adequate, it becomes brave: if 10% of gain are secured, it is ready to invest in any place , 20% and it heats up; 50% and it becomes reckless; 100% and it tramples on all human laws; 300% and there is no crime that it dare not commit, even at the risk of the gallows. When it can make profit through disorder and discord, it encourages both, as evidenced by the smuggling and the slave trade”.