Summer 2002 edition of Asian Marxist Review out now!
Here we are publishing the editorial to the current edition of the Asian Marxist Review. This edition of the AMR contains the following articles:
- India and Pakistan - Hostage to the threat of war
- The Palestinian Tragedy continues - From Statelet to Protectorate
- Opinion - Some stray thoughts on war
- Turkey - A brief history of capitalist development and the working class movement in Turkey
- Afghanistan - Loya Jirga - Adding insult to injury
- The role of women in the trade unions and the struggle of the PTUDC
- Football World Cup 2002
At times the seemingly infinite capacity of human endurance is baffling. Behind this endurance is the basic human instinct for survival. Yet this very instinct at other times turns into a thunderbolt of revolts which smashes all those forces of human exploitation and repression. At the present juncture we are witnessing a similar scenario.
The plagued capitalist economy effuses the bubonic sores and poxes on its political face in the of likes of these poltroons like Bush, Blair, Schroeder, Berlusconi, Chirac and other pathetic creatures dominating the political arena today. Their Asiatic replicas if anything are even worse.
The brutal arrogance of Sharon and the genocide being unleashed by the Zionist state even surpasses the devastation, destruction and mayhem inflicted upon humanity by the Tartars and the Mongols. Some senior US politicians like Newt Gingrich are suggesting nuking the Palestinian people into oblivion. Next would be Iraq and the story will continue till perhaps the elimination of all humanity from the planet, except perhaps the US bourgeoisie. One can't comprehend what they will be doing on a radioactive planet on their own?
But long before all that, it is a horrified world staring with disdain at the unprecedented bestiality, belligerence and massacres being carried out in the ancient land of Palestine, at the behest of Imperialism.
The cancerous wound of Kashmir has metastasised deep into the body of the South Asian subcontinent. Like Palestine, in Kashmir the shedding of innocent blood is being given the holy justification of "War on Terror". Hypocrisy, deceit, newspeak, tyranny and belligerence rule supreme.
There is not a single entity on this planet where this crude madness and obtuseness of imperialist aggression does not expose the rapid collapse of even bourgeois morality, culture, diplomacy and civility. From the Chinese bureaucrats to the Arab despotic rulers, and from the Hindu chauvinist products of the farcical Indian Democracy to the wavering generals of Pakistani theocracy, all are jostling for a share of American patronage. American hegemonic arrogance seems to have conquered the world. Yet it has no more control over the world than the forces of Israeli re-conquest of the West Bank and Gaza.
Behind this media-prompted imperialist extravaganza are lurking shadows of a rising tide of mass revolt. The present jittery state of these rulers depicts their fear of a rapidly eroding social base and huge contradictions building up - that can put these states and societies into shambles. If we exclude the rhetoric, peel of the demagogic mockery, we witness a world rapidly falling into an abyss of misery, poverty and disease. According to the UNCTAD the present number of people living at less than one dollar a day was set to jump 30% by the year 2015, and this is a conservative estimate.
Hence this madness of imperialism has a method in it. So has the subservience of most other regimes, a virtue for their existence. The system they are ruling over and that they have to protect is rotten beyond repair. Hence the hue and cry over terrorism, blatant acts of repression by decaying states and the splintering of the states and state espionage agencies into groups like al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc, who have dialectically turned into their opposites - created by the imperialist states they now have become a threat to these states. But that is not the real threat the rulers are worried about. In fact they are blowing up this "threat" out of all proportion in order to undermine the real threat - the threat of a class struggle - a mass revolt. Such is the rising potential of this threat that the capitalist ruling classes have gone berserk with fear.
But whatever they may do, however loud they yell and shriek at the top of their voices, this threat is not going to subside. The general strikes in Italy, Greece and Spain are the knell of the advancing caravan of the proletarian revolution.
Their echo will come from Asia and around the world sooner rather than later. After the football frenzy, the clash of the Korean navies is another false manoeuvre to curb the strike wave of an upbeat South Korean working class. With more than a million troops amassed "eyeball to eyeball" the Indian and Pakistani rulers are playing the game of "escalation" and "de-escalation" of the "threat of war". This heinous exercise is extracting billions from the sweat and blood of some of the most impoverished people on earth. Yet this very gimmickry is being used to drill fear and agony into the hearts, souls and psychology of the already brutalised masses of the subcontinent. But this vicious cycle will inevitably spiral out of control and the ruling classes will be faced with the danger of a war or a revolution or both. In both cases their demise would be definite and complete.
Elsewhere in Asia and the world over, beneath the conflagration of conflicts, bloodshed and a flurry of non-issues, hundreds of thousands of battles of class war are being fought - some won, others lost. In spite of the criminal silence by the bourgeois media these battles will enter into a ferocious class struggle which will tear apart this strategy of censorship.
The oppressed cannot and shall not endure this exploitation and insanity of the ruling classes. Unprecedented mass upheavals and volcanic eruptions loom large on the horizon. These revolutionary movements will storm the heavens, break the shackles and dislodge these rotten regimes - it is bound to happen, it is a law of history.
To avoid anarchy, chaos and vandalism, these movements will need a clear programme, perspective and direction. Hence to intervene and guide these blizzards of mass revolt to a revolutionary victory, a Marxist alternative has to be built, and built fast. Time is running out. In this epoch of the death agony of capitalism a new wave of class struggle will break through the barriers and remove every obstacle to create a revolutionary situation. It is above all for Marxists to move shoulder to shoulder, along with the youth, workers, toilers, women and the oppressed, to ensure that this revolutionary opportunity is not lost this time. Socialist victory will ensure the end of human exploitation and grief, and by eliminating all the prejudices between men and men, women and women, it will create the conditions for the ultimate and invincible unity and brotherhood of the human race - Communism.