It is hard to keep track of all the revisionism in Nepal. The so-called Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) is fertile grounds for just about every kind of revisionism known: First Worldism, Kautskyism, Liu Shaoqi-Dengism, Trotskyism and so on. However, recently, they’ve outdone themselves. In a recent article in The Red Star, “Communist” Party member, Krishna Bahadur Mahara, appointed as Minister of Information and Communication in the cabinet headed by Prachanda, praised Juche as “leading to socialism.” Also, “Kim Ill Sung has developed the Juchhe ideology as a unique contribution to the international communist movement.” Such a claim is a blatant rejection of Maoism as revolutionary science. Prachanda rejected revolutionary science a long time ago. More recently, the leadership in Nepal has moved to drop even their nominal Maoism. That a high level cadre in Prachanda’s cabinet would endorse Juche as a road to socialism is not surprising considering the rampant revisionism in their party.
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Prachanda proposes the Dengist path for Nepal, typical
Prachanda proposes the Dengist path for Nepal, typical July 2008 LLCO.org The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is a party that emerged out of the revisionist cesspool known as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM). The party waged a people’s war for many years and seized power in much of Nepal. Very abruptly, the leadership called off the people’s war …
Review of Some of Us, Part 2
Some of Us is an anthology of autobiographical writings by Chinese women from petty-bourgeois backgrounds who grew up during the Cultural Revolution decade, but later moved to the United States to pursue academic careers. The authors are not representative of the majority of Chinese women. Many of the authors are hostile to communism. In addition, the compilation suffers from the inherent limits of oral history, anecdotal approaches. Nonetheless, the book complicates the victim/victimizer narratives of the Cultural Revolution decade; it contains important insights into gender in the Mao era. Despite its flaws, the book provides a welcome contrast to mainstream anti-communist history.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs documents the rise of what she calls “raunch culture” and the roles that women in the United States play in that culture. The book documents something very real. However, it is not just a sociological report. It is also a polemic of sorts against the now popular camp of bourgeois feminists known as “sex-positive feminism.” The book is a return to the second wave bourgeois feminism. Levy has more in common with a Catherine Mackinnon or Andrea Dworkin than her sex-positive contemporaries. The book represents one kind of bourgeois feminism arguing against another. The book never overcomes the limits of bourgeois thought and bourgeois conceptions of gender. The book does not cover how its topic intersects with global class and imperialism.
A Rough Estimate of the Value of Labor
Now that virtually the entire world’s economy is integrated into one giant imperialist formation, we can use Comrade Marx’s labor theory of value to determine what labor is worth. Comrade Marx pointed out that labor is the substance of value. He said that the number of hours of average abstract socially necessary labor needed to produce a commodity represents its value. That means labor of average productivity under the given working conditions for the specified type of work. Therefore, if traded at value, one hour of labor put into harvesting parsnips is exchangeable against one hour of assembling washing machines (if the labor in both cases is of average productivity).