Asia

Peace has broken down completely in the country of Muhammad Younis, the Nobel Peace prize-winner for the year 2006. The New Year started in Bangladesh with riots, strikes, political unrest, turmoil, confusion and disorder. After weeks of street violence, which has taken 40 lives, the President of Bangladesh, Iajuddin Ahmed, has been forced to step down from his post appointing Fakhruddin as the head of a state in total disarray.

The All-Pakistan Labour Conference was held in Rawalpindi on December 19, 2006, bringing together some 500 delegates from unions and workers' associations from all across Pakistan. The goal of the conference was to unite the working class under one banner and to offer a solution to the problems and misery of the people in the struggle for socialism.

From a position of enormous strength, controlling 75% of Nepalese territory, the Maoists have agreed to form a coalition government, integrate their guerrilla forces into the bourgeois army, and limit their goal to achieving some kind of Republic in the future. But this will not solve any of the fundamental economic and social problems facing the Nepalese masses.

Successful conference organised jointly by the PTUDC and the Sindh Employees Alliance was held in Karachi on November 25. The event was held in protest at the banning of trade union in education, against the Labour Unions and Industrial Relations Ordinance (IRO) 2002 and to work towards unity of all sectors concerned.

The comrades of The Struggle are celebrating the 89th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in nearly all the cities of Pakistan, under the title: “The 89th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Latin American Revolution of Today.” Here we publish the invitation card for the programme in Lahore to be held at the Kisan Hall on November 7, at 3pm. They have also published a special edition of their paper of which we provide here the front page.

In April 2006 the stage was set in Nepal for a revolution that could have not only done away with the centuries old monarchy, but also swept capitalism aside, laying the foundations of a socialist society.  However, due to the bankruptcy of the so-called Communist Parties this did not happen and the revolution in April did not fulfil its tasks.

"US imperialism faces not only a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Iraqi resistance, but faces the threat of a mass movement, which could explode at any time, in the United States itself." This is the editorial of the Autumn 2006 issue of the Asian Marxist Review.

Up until recently, while Iraq was viewed as a quagmire, Afghanistan was seen as a relatively successful part of George Bush’s “War on Terror.” Now, even this silver lining is beginning to disappear.

The Sind Employees’ Alliance, a joint body of teachers’ organizations, which has been involved in a long struggle for the right to represent teachers, has officially offered its unconditional support for the PTUDC. Read the report on the PTUDC website.

The Jammu Kashmir National Students' Federation (the JKNSF), a Marxist organization of students in Kashmir, organized a protest against the Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Authority (ERRA) for its brutal policies towards the people affected by last years' earthquake.

The media in the West insist that the war in Afghanistan is against "terrorists", but a closer look shows a people resisting imperialist aggression. The country has been brought close to barbarism, but there is still potential for revolutionary developments.

Although the dismantling of the old state owned planned economy was an enormous reactionary step backwards and Marxists are utterly opposed to it, there is one positive element in the process: the creation of the largest proletariat in the world. The development of capitalism in China brings with it class contradictions that are preparing a new revolutionary upheaval in Chinese society. Once this massive Chinese proletariat moves decisively it will shake the whole world.

Women are a doubly oppressed layer of the working population in all countries, but in countries like Pakistan the oppression of women is extreme. Nowhere more than Pakistan, however, is it clear that this oppression is class-based. The solution lies in a united struggle of female and male workers to eradicate the very system that is the root cause.

Deng’s early “reforms” initiated in the late 1970s were aimed at improving efficiency in the economy. But once the Chinese bureaucracy had embarked down the road of capitalist incentives the whole process had a logic of its own, sucking China more and more down the road of capitalist restoration. This did not happen all in one go. There were several key turning points which are analysed here.

From a Marxist point of view the 1949 Chinese Revolution, in spite of its bureaucratic deformations, was the second most important event in human history after the Russian Revolution. It led to the abolition of landlordism and capitalism and the end of imperialist domination. Now, however, capitalism dominates in China. How did this happen? Here we present Part One of a document approved by this year’s world congress of the International Marxist Tendency which looks at events from the revolution up to the end of the Mao era.