The uprising of the Polytechnic School of Athens, Greece in 1973

Learnings for the revolutionary movement in our country

The uprising of the Polytechnic School of Athens in 1973 was the most important highlight in the class struggle after the revolutionary civil war that followed the Nazi occupation in our country. For this reason, the learnings of the uprising are crucial to the revolutionary movement and the communists in Greece. In order to understand these learnings, it is necessary to describe the situation before the uprising.

Greece. Two days of solidarity to the arrested militants and the revolutionary movement of India

On the occasion of the mass arrests of militants, activists and revolutionaries in India, a two-day program was organized, of informing the people about the popular and revolutionary movement in India, as well as denouncing these very arrests in that country.

On Friday the 5^th of October, a panel discussion took place at the books store of  “Outside of the walls” in Athens. There were many participants who were interested in finding out about the truth, in the revolutionary, workers' and popular movement, as well as in the democratic rights movement of India. The interest was apparent since all of the participants stayed until the end of the discussion but also because of the various contributions in the discussion and questions that followed. A contribution was also made by a representative of the Turkish magazine “Partizan”.

Antonio Gramsci: Unions and the dictatorship

The international class struggle has culminated in the victory of the workers and peasants of two international proletariats. In Russia and in Hungary the workers and peasants have established the proletarian dictatorship and in Russia as much as in Hungary the dictatorship had to sustain a bitter battle not only against the bourgeois class, but also against the unions: the conflict between the dictatorship and the unions was thus one of the causes of the fall of the Hungarian soviet, since the unions, though they never openly attempted to overthrow the dictatorship, operated always as “splitting” organisms of the revolution and incessantly planted discontent and cowardice amongst the workers and the red soldiers. Even a rapid examination, of the reasons and the conditions of this conflict cannot fail to be useful in the revolutionary education of the masses, the which, if they must be convinced that the union is perhaps the most important proletarian organism of the communist revolution, because on it must be founded the socialization of industry, because it must create the conditions in which private enterprise disappears and cannot be reborn, must also be convinced of the necessity of creating, before the revolution, the psychological and objective conditions under which will be impossible every conflict and every division of power between the various organisms in which the struggle of the proletarian class against capitalism is embodied.

What Makes an Urban Naxal?

Bernard D’Mello* writes about his former colleague, “urban Naxal” Gautam Navlakha.

 

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government and the Hindutvavadi “nationalist” movement’s demonic drive for cultural orthodoxy seems to know no bounds. What is alarming is the former’s support for and complicity in the acts of the latter, as also the Indian state’s control of its “necessary” enemies through the use of state terror, with the category “urban Naxals” singled out in the latest of such drives (in June and August 2018) that otherwise routinely target Muslims, militant oppressed nationalities, and “Maoists.” In the government’s categorisation, the “urban Naxals,” at least so far, are lawyers, rights activists, poets, writers, journalists, and professors, deemed to be “active members” of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist).

# MeTooUrbanNaxal: Arundhati Roy

This morning’s papers (August 30, 2018) settle something that we have been debating for a while. A front-page report in the Indian Express says “Police to Court: Those held part of anti-fascist plot to overthrow govt.” We should know by now that we are up against a regime that its own police call fascist.In the India of today, to belong to a minority is a crime. To be murdered is a crime. To be lynched is a crime. To be poor is a crime. To defend the poor is to plot to overthrow the government.
When the Pune police conducted simultaneous raids at the homes of well-known activists, poets, lawyers and priests across the country, and arrested five people—high-profile civil rights defenders and two lawyers—on ludicrous charges, with little or no paperwork, the Government would have known that it was stirring up outrage. It would have already taken all our reactions into account, including this press conference and all the protests that have taken place across the country, before it made this move. So why has this happened?

V. I. Lenin On the Significance of Militant Materialism

''One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action. A vanguard performs its task as vanguard only when it is able to avoid being isolated from the mass of the people it leads and is able really to lead the whole mass forward. Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.''



Comrade Trotsky has already said everything necessary, and said it very well, about the general purposes of Pod Znamenem Marksizma in issue No. 1-2 of that journal. I should like to deal with certain questions that more closely define the content and programme of the work which its editors have set forth in the introductory statement in this issue.

This statement says that not all those gathered round the journal Pod Znamenem Marksizma are Communists but that they are all consistent materialists. I think that this alliance of Communists and non-Communists is absolutely essential and correctly defines the purposes of the journal. One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action. A vanguard performs its task as vanguard only when it is able to avoid being isolated from the mass of the people it leads and is able really to lead the whole mass forward. Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.

“We Rise Together, Homie”

An interview with Antoine Dangerfield, whose video of an Indianapolis wildcat strike went viral this week — and led to his firing. He doesn't regret it, though.

Interview by Micah Uetricht 

Source: Jacobin Magazine

 

US labor history is full of moments of tremendous drama and upheaval. That history is riveting stuff, but getting a raw, unfiltered view of the human drama of workers fighting their bosses on the shop floor, the place where the day-to-day confrontation between workers and bosses takes place (and occasionally boils over), is rare.

Which is what makes Antoine Dangerfield’s recent viral video a must-watch. A thirty-year-old welder in Indianapolis, Dangerfield worked for a construction contractor building a UPS hub. On Tuesday, he says that a small number of Latino workers (millwrights, welders, and conveyor installers, in his telling) working for a different contractor but in the same hub were ordered home after disobeying the orders of a white boss he calls racist.
In response, the entire group of workers — over a hundred, in Dangerfield’s estimation — walked out.