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• General strike in eastern & central India against looming anti-Maoist
offensive
• Legal victory for J-M Sison
• If they can't save this fish, don't trust them with the planet!
------------------------------------------
General strike in eastern & central India against looming anti-Maoist
offensive
12 October 2009. A World to Win News Service. The Communist Party (Maoist)
of India called a two-day bandh (general strike) throughout eastern and
central India beginning on 12 October against police atrocities and the
central government's plans to send a massive paramilitary force into the
forest areas where the party is leading a revolutionary upsurge among tribal
people and others.
According to initial reports by The Hindu and BBC, the armed shutdown was
especially strong in the states of Bihar, where all movement and markets
ceased in the rural areas, and Jharkhand, where rail and bus traffic and
coal mining stopped. Also said to be affected were Chhattisgarh,
Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Some trains were redirected,
and the Railway Protection Force deployed along other lines.
The central government has announced that it will send 70,000 paramilitary
police, commandos and special forces units into seven states. Some 20,000
are to be sent to Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, where 35,000 troops are
already operating. (Christian Science Monitor, 6 October). The paramilitary
Border Security Force is to play a major role, under the protection of Air
Force helicopters. Indian government officials said their goals were to
"wipe out the top leadership" and secure some 40,0000 square kilometres of
territory now largely controlled by the Maoists. Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh soberly warned a September meeting of police chiefs that so
far the government's campaigns against the Naxalites, as Maoists are known
in India, had failed to produce results. (BBC, 9 October)
"I have consistently held that in many ways, left-wing extremism poses
perhaps the gravest internal security threat," he said. "I would like to say
frankly that we have not achieved as much success as we would have liked in
containing this menace." (The Hindu, 11 October)
As preparations for this central government offensive were underway,
guerrillas attacked a police station in Gadchiroli district in the western
state of Maharashtra, killing at least 17 police, including a "top
commander". (BBC, 8 October) It was the third major successful attack on
police units this year in this forest area near the Chhattisgarh border.
Preparations for the anti-Maoist offensive are being accompanied by a
campaign of government-paid advertisements in the newspapers to portray the
Maoists as heartless killers.
There have been some very serious arrests accompanied by such propaganda. On
5 October West Bengal police arrested two leading members of the
Revolutionary Democratic Front in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). They were
charged with ties with the CPI(Maoist), which was banned on a national level
in June.. Under the 2008 Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, people can be
imprisoned for guilt by association even though there are no specific
charges against them. Both men, Raja Sarkhel and Prasun Chatterjjee, are
well-known long-time West Bengal activists, said a 6 October press release
from the RDF (rdfindia@gmail.com). The two have been involved in the
movement against police atrocities in Lalgarh, a West Bengal area where
tribal people in the forests rose up at the end of last year under CPI(M)
leadership.
Earlier, on 26 September, police posing as journalists kidnapped Chhatradhar
Mahato, the prominent leader of the People's Committee Against Police
Atrocities in Lalgarh. The Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners
(185/3, Fourth Floor Zakir Nagar, New Delhi 25) said he was seized without
an arrest warrant and illegally held and tortured before being charged with
"20 to 22 cooked-up cases". This, too, was accompanied by an
officially-inspired vilification campaign against him in the media. The
CRPP emphasized that the authorities were trying to use these cases to
frighten Kolkata intellectuals who have notably supported the people of
Lalgarh, seeking "not only to demean the Lalgarh struggle but also to force
the intellectuals to disassociate themselves from the people's movement in
Lalgarh by constant threats of arrests and other forms of intimidation."
As the article "Uprising in Lalgarh" in AWTWNS090629 explained, "Central
government troops and state police and militias are continuing the brutal
assault on the adivasis (tribal people) and the Communist Party of India
(Maoist) in and around Lalgarh in the West Midnapore area in the state of
West Bengal that began in mid June. Indian Air Force helicopters rained down
leaflets on the masses warning them not to support the Maoists. While the
repressive forces boast that they will achieve a quick victory, the
Maoist-led guerrillas melt away and reappear in other villages and forests
nearby Lalgarh with the support of the people. Urban intellectuals from
Kolkata who have gone to the Lalgarh area confirm that the armed forces are
beating and humiliating the masses in every way imaginable and herding them
into refugee camps.
"The area encompasses vast tracts of the forests of West Midnapore, Purulia
and Bankura districts of West Bengal and adjoins parts of the states of
Jharkhand and Orissa, where the CPI(Maoist) enjoys strong mass support.
Unrest in Lalgarh had been going on for a number of months, reaching a
boiling point last November with the arrests, torture and rape of women and
children after a bombing that almost killed a West Bengal chief minister.
The state has been dominated by a reactionary so-called Left Front led by
the Communist Party (Marxist). Decades ago this oppressor party abandoned
any semblance of Marxist or communist thinking and joined forces with the
Indian ruling classes to suppress and exploit the people and steal their
land. After making a series of demands, the tribal people of the area took
matters into their own hands, forcing out government agents and police.
CPI(Marxist) officials were run out of the villages and some killed. Their
offices as well as many police stations were torched. Trees were felled to
block roads and prevent security forces from re-entering the area.
"The CPI(Maoist) have broad support in the Lalgarh area due to their
uncompromising stand against rich landlords and corrupt officials. They
recently claimed the area as the first liberated zone in West Bengal."
For a condensed version of an article appearing in People's Truth on the
situation in Lalgarh area and background, see AWTWNS090629, or for the full
version, peoples-truth.googlepages.com
-end item-
Legal victory for J-M Sison
12 October 2009. A World to Win News Service. Jose Maria Sison, founding
chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, won an important legal
victory when the European Court of First Instance ruled that the European
Union must remove his name from its so-called terrorist list.
He was placed on this list in 2002 under pressure from the U.S., the former
colonial owner and still overseer of the Philippines, and at the instigation
of Holland, where he has lived in exile for two decades. Last year the Dutch
courts rebuffed repeated attempts by the country's prosecution office to
bring him to trial for murder in connection with the armed struggle led by
the CPP-led New People's Army in the Philippines, and earlier this year the
case was dropped, but the Dutch government and the EU Council have not
ceased their attempts to persecute him.
This EU court ruling will bring a restoration of Sison's rights to travel,
work or receive a pension, use a bank account, receive housing and health
benefits, and apply for asylum. He can sue the state for the moral and other
damages suffered because of the blacklisting.
He announced in a 1 October press statement that this decision would allow
him "to act freely and fruitfully as the chief political consultant of the
National Democratic Front of the Philippines in peace negotiations with the
Government of the Republic of the Philippines and not be persecuted and
placed under duress." Those negotiations have been suspended.
- end item-
If they can't save this fish, don't trust them with the planet!
12 October 2009. A World to Win News Service. People who are looking to the
upcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Conference or some other international
body of today's capitalist states to save the planet should consider the
death sentence the European Union may have just issued for the Atlantic
bluefin tuna.
The Atlantic used to be full of bluefin, but they only bred in the Gulf of
Mexico and the Mediterranean. Now, with their numbers greatly depleted, the
Mediterranean has become critical for their survival as a species. Yet the
European Union has refused to back a plan to cut the yearly bluefin catch to
a level where they could escape extinction.
The bluefin tuna is one of the most magnificent of the world's fishes. (The
tuna most people eat from cans is a different species.) Because of their
unique metabolism, muscular structure and almost perfect hydrodynamic shape,
they can push their great size (up to four metres long, and weighing as much
as three-quarters of a tonne) from one end of the Atlantic to the other,
cruising at several kilometres an hour with bursts of up to 80, and diving
half a kilometre deep. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered them
beautiful and fascinating. Since then they were considered good for nothing
but sport fishing until only a few decades ago, when the global market got
hold of them. Now just one can be sold at the price of an ordinary car, and
a big one at the price of a Rolls Royce.
High in a healthy kind of fat, many people believe that their red meat
tastes particularly delicious raw. But don't blame anyone's ancestral
tastes for the popularity that may prove to be fatal for this species. Noble
Japanese used to agree with their American counterparts that this fish was
not fit for their consumption. The market demand for them has been socially
determined, involving, it is true, the fact that people can acquire a love
for their flavour, but also the bluefin's iconic brand status as one of the
world's most prestigious foods amid the boom in luxury consumption in the
home countries of the imperialist (monopoly capitalist) world economy. In
fact, the development of the productive forces played a more decisive role
in developing today's taste for open-ocean fish than any age-old cravings,
since it was only with the spread of household refrigerators in rich
post-war Japan and elsewhere that the common people could eat much raw fish
at all. Modern fishing equipment and refrigerator ships made it highly
profitable to catch and transport bluefin tuna by industrial methods and in
industrial quantities. With these conditions met, the market manufactured
the popularity of this commodity by introducing it to sushi or sashimi
(Japanese-style raw fish dishes) menus that, thanks to their profitability,
have taken the better-off countries by storm.
Today, with the number of full-sized adult bluefin greatly reduced in the
Mediterranean, fish crews generally catch them while they are young and
small, and then put them in ocean pens to fatten them for a few months
before driving a nail into their brains and selling them on ice. For some
years the idea was promoted that this kind of capital-intensive fish farming
could save the species, but in fact it made the problem worse, because the
number of fish left to grow to reproductive age has dropped drastically and
the bluefin has not bred in captivity.
The numbers are so clear that you'd almost think that they alone would
settle the argument. The quota for the world's total bluefin catch was
22,000 tonnes this year. The real amount taken in is thought to be two or
three times as much, because there's not much checking-up on catches
declared by registered fishing vessels, and illegal fishing by unauthorized
boats is rampant. If the quota were set at 15,000 tonnes and enforced for a
sufficient length of time so that the fish population could recover, then
according to the prominent fish NGO Oceana, about 45,000 tonnes of bluefin
could be harvested every year indefinitely. That would be a sustainable
level, and is about the amount of bluefin regularly taken in a decade ago.
Yet the EU refused to back a proposal that the international body in charge
of such things set the quota at that sustainable level.
That body is the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic
Tunas (ICCAT), nicknamed, by the exceedingly pro-business publication The
Economist, "the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna" (30 October
2008) because it really represents the global fishing industry countries.
The EU itself split right down the line you'd expect: the tuna-catching
countries along the Med took a stand for the freedom to fish (including
France, whose President Nicolas Sarkozy had recently made a speech posing as
the tuna's new best friend), while countries like Germany and the UK, whose
waters have been emptied of bluefin, were in favour of the new quotas.
This is not just the result of pressure from commercial fishing companies,
although there's plenty of that. The nature of capital and the workings of
the market, above and beyond anyone's will, is the deeper explanation.
First of all, there's the question of timeline: bluefin live for decades and
may not be able to reproduce until the age of eight or more; right now they
are often caught when only a year or two old. So rebuilding the stock would
take some time. Secondly, because there's so much money to be made in
cheating, quotas might not be enforceable. This factor interpenetrates with
another one: capital is nationally rooted, and every government would be
under pressure to look the other way and let their fishing fleets do as well
as those of the next coastal country. Maybe only a total ban, including on
marketing bluefin, would work. Long-term reduced quotas would be very good
for fishing, but the question of "saving the fishing industry" is not a
question of saving some abstract industry. The undeniable fact is that
today's fishing companies would be thinned and shrink at best, and the
capital invested in them might never be recovered.
Thirdly, for capitalist production such questions are considered
"externals": the cost to society and the planet of not reducing fishing
quotas – or of not preventing other kinds of damage to the environment – is
enormous, but that cost is not necessarily borne by any individual
capitalist or capital formation. From the point of view of profits for
fishing companies and the banks that finance them, and the various national
monopoly capitalist economies in which this industry operates (injecting the
capital obtained by profitable fishing into the larger circuits of capital
by purchasing boats and other equipment, etc.), the most rational thing is
to fish bluefin until there are no more.
This short-sighted approach is insane even from the point of view of
capitalist profit in the long term, let alone the interests of the people
and the planet. The Sunken Billions project of the World Bank and the UN's
FAO points out that the more capital invested in fishing, the more fish are
caught and the less fish stock is left, requiring even more capital (more
boats fishing for longer periods, etc.) to catch them and reducing the
overall profitability of the industry, although they fail to point out that
this does not necessarily apply to the profit of any particular company,
which can thrive by swallowing competitors. "If fish stocks were rebuilt,
the current marine catch could be achieved with approximately half of the
current global fishing effort," the report concludes. In fact, one reason
why the fishing companies require government subsidies to keep up their
profitability is because there is too much capital invested in fishing.
(Other reasons include global warming, a problem not unrelated to the
dictates of profitability and the market.)
Ocean fish are part of the productive forces, like land, raw materials,
machinery and technology, and people and their skills, that produce wealth.
They have the unusual particularity of being the common property of mankind
(sometimes called "the commons"), just as land once was before the
development of class society and especially capitalism.
Fish have the potential to be an enormously important source of high-protein
nourishment for humanity, and for its pleasure as well. But "the commons"
and even more the collective labour of people all over the world cannot be
used for the benefit of humanity and its planet as long as the monopoly
capitalist system based on private profit prevails and the monopoly
capitalist class holds political power.
The problem lies in what capitalism requires – what capital itself requires,
which is antagonistic to the interests of humanity and the planet. The
governments must respond to the dictates of profit or economic chaos will
result. The politicians who represent capital may or may not want to save
the bluefin but there are far more powerful forces at work than their
individual consciences. Even where laws have been passed to save locally
beloved specifies by restricting catches (eels in Holland, king salmon in
Alaska – both, significantly, involving low-capital fishing), the
international character of fish lifecycles and the overall environmental
effects of capitalism and the global market have limited the success of such
efforts.
As Karl Marx's close collaborator Frederick Engels wrote in Dialectics of
Nature, "Let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us.
Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we
expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first...
"And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better
understanding of these laws [of nature] and getting to perceive both the
more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the
traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made
by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a
position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural
consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more
this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness
with nature...
"By long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing
historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the
indirect, more remote social effects of our production activity, and so are
afforded an opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well.
"This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It
requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production
[capitalism], and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary
social order."
When it comes to something as complex, long-term and truly global as
reducing greenhouse gas emissions and beginning to deal seriously with the
threat of global warming, then the fate of the bluefin, which, after all, is
just a fish, should serve as a warning.
-end item-
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