“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” – Assata Shakur

On Saturday March 26th, over a thousand people gathered for #BlackOut Against Police Brutality to demand justice for Andrew Loku and Alex Wettlaufer who were murdered by the pigs. On Monday April 4th, hundreds marched to Queen’s Park, demanded and were granted an audience with Kathleen Wynne, who admitted “I believe that we still have systemic racism in our society”.

Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) forces onlookers to recognize that police brutality exists and that black people in this city are specifically targeted by the police. It also gives voice to the ways that black people and people of colour experience racism in Canada today. Occupying a space like Police HQ shows that people can come together to build inclusive spaces that rely on the contributions, support and commitment of people across the city.

The Black Lives Matters Toronto movement has made concrete their solidarity with Indigenous organizers. BLMTO stood side by side with occupiers of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) office in Toronto, just as indigenous allies had stood with the people occupying TPS headquarters when they were attacked by the pigs in the middle of the night.

As a result of Tent City and other actions, Toronto City Council voted to restore Afro-Fest to a full two-day event and unanimously voted to review the province’s Special Investigations Unit through an ‘anti-black racism lens’. Kathleen Wynne committed to meet again with BLMTO organizers and the Ontario Coroner opened an inquest into the death of Andrew Loku. And Michael Coteau, the Minister Responsible for Anti-Racism has promised there will be public meetings to talk about anti-blackness in policing.

But now that Tent City has come to an end, how will the community prevent police from harassing and killing our people? How will we prevent more state-sponsored murders, such as those of Jermaine Carby, Sammy Yatim, and Andrew Loku? Demanding inquests into the murders of people at the hands of police is not something new and has never changed the way police brutalize and murder the people in our communities.

The state has a long history of maneuvering around the demands of protest movements. In the 1990’s, the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) agitated against the Toronto Police to stop the police’s investigation of police, which led to the formation of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). However, provincial and municipal governments have always found ways to protect the police because the police are accountable to the state, not the people. Today, the SIU is filled with people who are ex-cops and apologists who do nothing but uphold the current system of exploitation that allow these murders to happen in the first place.

We have to ask ourselves: what is it going to take to build strong and independent communities, to disrupt police brutality, and to challenge state power?

Basics Community News Service members have been working with the families of the victims of police brutality for almost a decade now from Alwy al-Nadhir to Junior Manon to Sammy Yatim to Jermaine Carby. In spite of increasing public awareness, the law continues to drag its feet year after year in the case of Jermaine Carby, who was murdered in December 2014. In the case of Sammy Yatim, the law was used to justify the clearance of murder charges against Officer James Forcillo.

“We are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults at it” – Amilcar Cabral

Despite vocal protests against state violence, the demands formed during Tent City will not provide the people with any way of protecting themselves from being brutalized, because the demands are not focused on building up our own power and capacity – they rely on the state agreeing to change for the better. BLMTO organizers frequently chant “the system isn’t broken, it was built this way”. But if the system is working the way that it is supposed to, why do we insist on asking this very system–directly responsible for the oppression we face–for small and incremental changes that don’t address the root of the problem?

The law will never go after the cops who killed Andrew Loku last July, even if they are identified, because that’s the way the system works.

We cannot ask to participate in the colonizer’s power. ‘Freedom’ does not look like black consultation with the SIU or a new body that will replicate the same incompetence. A number of public meetings that were held throughout the province last year had a resounding message: eliminate the practice of carding immediately. But even with all of these public meetings and promises that were made by Yasir Naqvi, the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, carding has merely been ‘regulated’ and in some cases temporarily suspended while under review.

But the practice of racial profiling and police targeting black people and people of colour still continues. What will these new meetings on anti-blackness in policing reveal that we didn’t know already? What can they change if the enforcement completely relies on the state and police to follow through on their empty promises?

Do we want to be on their investigation committees after they shoot our families and friends, or should we make sure that another pig does not dare kill another one of our own? Our power and freedom will come from protecting each other, and from creating our own autonomous communities that maintain the livelihood of the people within them.

“Whether it’s in America or the rest of the African world, black lives will never matter until we attain BLACK POWER; which is power in our hands to determine our future for subsequent generations to come.” – Black is Back Coalition

The people who are incarcerated by police know that they are human and deserve justice. What they don’t have is an organized community that has their back. We cannot ask the state to recognize the value of our lives; we cannot ask them for power. Black lives have never mattered to the Canadian state, and they will never matter, regardless of how much we plead for recognition.

For police violence to end in our communities, we must work towards building genuine people power that can be organized to prevent or respond to state violence. Building genuine people power means that we create alternative structures that directly challenge the repressive power of the state.

We don’t ask to be accommodated in the system or try to hold it accountable to the people. You don’t ask your enemy to solve your problems for you — especially when they are the ones who created the problem in the first place.

These tactics have proven successful in communities throughout the city including in the Esplanade, Dufferin and Eglinton and in Jamestown. Community members have made significant interventions the moment cops attempt violence on the streets.

In the Esplanade, when the TPS attempted to falsely arrest a young black man, accusing him of committing a murder that he had no involvement in, the Esplanade Community Group (ECG) intervened and prevented his arrest. When the community faced ongoing harassment and brutalization by constant police patrols, ECG members organized a cop watch and systematically intervened by gathering people around the police and recording video of police interactions. When a member of the ECG was targeted by police who attempted to throw him down a set of stairs, once again the community was there to protest police violence. Actions cannot just invite community members to attend, support and then leave, but must actively integrate them into the organizing.

In the neighbourhood of Dufferin and Eglinton, the police of 13 Division had targeted and terrorized the community to the point where black youth could not move freely in the community. If youth were in groups larger than two people, police would stop them and subject them to pat down searches and other forms of harassment. Youth who were most impacted by this police terrorism decided that they had to organize to change these conditions.

They began meeting regularly in the basement of a local bookstore to discuss the issues of police harassment and engaged in political education including knowing their rights when dealing with the police. This organizing work led to the creation of the Black Fist Defence Brigade in the community, and after a period of six months of organizing, youth would be able to walk the streets in their neighbourhood in groups of five, ten, or more without fear of police harassment. The police could no longer stop and harass these youth, because they had an organization to back them up and the support of elders their community.

In Jamestown, the TCHC regularly collaborates with the police at 23 Division, permits police to conduct searches of tenants’ homes, and uses the police to enforce evictions. When families came under attack by these two state institutions, local organizers in the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) mobilized their members and community supporters to defend them from being kicked out of their homes and put out on the street. InPDUM engaged community members directly with the understanding that the police are an institution of the state, which was built and maintained through the theft and destruction of Indigenous, African and other exploited peoples. With this understanding, InPDUM members did not ask the police to reform their tactics or improve their interactions with the community. Instead, the people recognized that in order to make change, they needed to be organized to contend with the power of the state and police.

These interactions with the police were successfully challenged because there was already a clearly outlined protocol in place for community members to follow. The efforts of InPDUM and the residents of Jamestown reflect how organizing – specifically, having meetings with the most affected, working class members of the community, establishing goals collectively, and demanding responsibility from each other rather than the state – all play a crucial role in developing our capacity to be leaders and protectors of our own communities. This is why organizing tactics must focus on creating trust and reliability of members within the community – our only strength is in our unity and organization. We must recognize this in order to combat a state that exists to eliminate indigenous people, brutalize people of colour and exploit the working class.

Organizing to resist and combat the violence inflicted on our communities by the police is not a simple task. But there are more of us than there are of them.

“We ain’t gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we’re gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution. That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.” – Fred Hampton

On December 9th, taxi drivers from across Toronto staged a series of protests against the rival company Uber. Protesters shut down four high traffic areas before finishing with a demonstration at City Hall, calling upon the mayor to ‘bring justice’ to drivers by stopping Uber from operating illegally. These disruptions reverberated throughout the city as thousands of commuter vehicles came to a resounding halt.

Uber is a company that uses online software to connect customers to drivers, often for much cheaper than what many licensced taxi competitors offer. Since Uber’s conception in Silicon Valley only a few years ago, it has spread to cities across the world—much to the dismay and protest of local taxi drivers. Both the Uber company and its software seem to represent where capitalism is headed right now. Many companies like Uber are moving toward a model in which they focus on the delivery of goods and services as efficiently as possible to middle class consumers using a combination of cutting edge technology and easily exploitable and disposable workers who are conveniently labelled independent contractors. The broader ‘Uberization’ of the economy is already underway, as the Uber platform is now being used from everything from package deliveries, to health care, to snow removal.

In Toronto during the December 9th strike, drivers pointed out that Uber drivers don’t pay licensing fees and undergo minimal training. As the Ontario Highway Traffic Act makes it illegal for any taxis to operate without special licensing, drivers questioned why city officials had yet to impose any restrictions on Uber operations. Mayor John Tory had indicated on several occasions that such plans were in the works, yet none had materialized.

In their protest, taxi drivers staged city hall demonstrations, road blocks, and a hunger strike. Frustrations were clearly running high: in one widely circulated video, a taxi driver was dragged down Queens Park Crescent by an Uber car; in another, a driver compared Uber to ISIS. Still, the sentiment of the protest is relatable.

Uber receives an unfair business advantage due to lack of regulation, and its introduction to Toronto has brought dramatic changes to the lives of already poorly paid taxi drivers—more than 80% of whom are working class immigrants. It is not uncommon for taxi drivers to have seen their incomes halved since the advent of Uber. “I’ve been a taxi driver for 25 years,” said one driver from Scarborough, “and this is the biggest change I’ve seen in my income over the shortest amount of time.”

Uber drivers have fared no better. Many were tempted by the flexibility of owning their own business and scheduling their own hours—something that the company advertises as a key selling point. Uber calls its drivers ‘business partners,’ only requiring them to have access to a car and a license, making it a highly accessible low-skilled job. As economic opportunities are scarce enough for those at the bottom, it’s not surprising to learn that many Uber drivers—especially those who drive for the lower-class ‘UberX’, and especially those who rely on Uber for most of their income—are working class immigrants who live in Toronto’s suburbs.

Since Uber cut its prices in 2014, many drivers now claim to work much longer hours and still struggle to make minimum wage from their fares. Even though drivers own their cars and pay for car insurance, gas, repairs, and so on, Uber still pockets 20% of their income as an access fee to the market of transporting people.

Uber drivers also depend on their customer satisfaction star-ratings, and rarely speak frankly about the conditions of their exploitation. For example, if they hold an average rating of less than 4.7 (out of 5) in many cities, they can be fired. Uber drivers have begun to organize in parts of the USA, demanding fairer working conditions and a living wage.

Parallels can easily be drawn between exploitation of both taxi drivers and Uber drivers by their respective employers. All drivers are faced with the burden of paying for the maintenance of their own vehicles. They also face daily, sometimes violent, racism. The companies that employ these drivers refuse to raise their wages, even as their livelihoods are threatened by economic insecurity. All are working longer hours and even taking on other jobs to make ends meet. Importantly, so many drivers are immigrants who came to Canada, the so-called land of economic opportunity, only to find themselves racialized and forced into cheap labour markets.

There is no doubt that the Uber corporation is worthy of contempt. Nevertheless, something missing from the recent taxi strike was a working class perspective. By directing complaint at the illegality of Uber, the protests missed the point that taxi drivers and many Uber drivers actually share a common struggle. It also shifts responsibility away from the exploitative taxi companies who continue to profit from their drivers’ labour.

Still, in the so-called Uberizing economy taxi and Uber drivers alike should take stock of the incredible power they sit on, as demonstrated by the traffic-blocking protests. In Toronto, a city where business demands the fast-moving uninterrupted flow of people and goods, taxis (and Ubers) are a vital part of the transportation infrastructure. Organizing a city-wide shutdown is undoubtedly a useful way to make one’s voice heard.

Featured image from The National Post

¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York was on display at The Bronx, El Museo del Barrio and Loisaida museums in New York this fall. The exhibit displayed the immense body of art, culture, and politics that the Young Lords produced over the years, a sort of shrine to the radical love that the movement was so committed to.

The Young Lords Party (YLP) was a group of mainly Puerto Rican socialist revolutionaries who organized in cities across America during the 1960s-80s. The party was influenced by groups such as the Black Panther Party. YLP gradually transformed itself from a small network of gang members into a broader human rights movement pushing neighbourhood empowerment and Puerto Rican self-determination as its core missions.

Lining the walls of the Bronx Museum in particular are dozens of copies of Palante, The Young Lord, and Pitirre, the three newspapers produced by the party. These newspapers recounted the stories and culture that gave life to the Young Lords movement, and it is for this reason that the newspapers are still admired and displayed in museums to this day.

The newspapers documented the atrocities committed against these racialized working class groups over the years—violent racism, poor housing conditions, police brutality, and even a CIA undercover program to flood Puerto Rican neighbourhoods with heroin.

Countless other historical examples can be drawn of newspapers acting as a central means of uniting people by documenting struggle—notably, the Black Panther Party paper, which outlined the famous 10-point program calling for ‘Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, and Peace’ among other demands. Another is the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement newspaper, Inner City Voice, that was not only the voice of radical politics in working class black Detroit but also published articles on guerrilla movements in Latin America, women’s liberation, and anti-war movements during the 1960s. The titles of the headlines in this paper make it clear the ideological agenda it promoted: “Michigan Slavery”, “Cops on rampage- 14 year old shot”, or “Black worker uprising”, to name but a few. The newspaper here was used as not only as a tool for education and empowerment, but also to counter the hegemonic discourse of capitalist publications that were all but silent on the substantive issues of class, race, or gender.

The culture of revolution: Documenting and archiving the Young Lords struggle in New York circa 1970

While the newspaper can be a tool used for social change, if in the hands of the wrong people it can also be a tool used to control people. The bourgeois mass media—most large-scale television, radio, and newspapers that are run to make a profit—don’t tell the stories that reflect people’s struggles. Rather, they skew and distort stories to make them more palatable, pleasant, and less ‘threatening’ to the social order. This is because the mass media is controlled by people who have a vested interest in the status quo, and whose profit or dominance is threatened by the idea of large-scale social change–that is, they are capitalist enterprises.

Stories that are run by the bourgeois media claim to take a ‘neutral’ stance, but in truth they are pushing a very carefully constructed, de-politicized point of view. They could not, for example, publish an article pushing a specific anti-capitalist, anti-racist, or anti-colonial perspective.

Even the best left-wing journalist enterprises are most often bourgeois media, and because of this their stories are limited in scope and purpose. The Toronto Star is an excellent example of this. The Star can run an editorial on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the settler colony Israel but at the same time endorse Liberal leader Justin Trudeau for Prime Minister–a man who is a professed Zionist and apologist for Israeli apartheid.

Likewise, right-wing publications in Toronto appeal outright to populism with no attempt at critical commentary. The Toronto Sun, for example, has strong ties to capitalist think-tanks (the Fraser Institute, C.D. Howe Institute, or Conference Board of Canada to name a few) that are funded by corporations or political interests with deep pockets.

The community newspaper, then, has a duty to expose these faults in the mass media, to poke holes in its ideology at every opportunity, and to document instead the stories that reflect the experiences of the working class.

Archived front pages of Young Lords newspapers on display at the Bronx Museum, New York

It is newspapers like those produced by the Young Lords that recount the story of revolution and a creative imagination of another world that is possible. More than that, it reminds us of the need to document and archive struggle. In many ways this same documenting and archiving drives hip hop’s need to preserve the history and legacies of slavery and racism in America, and other artistic representations of suffering and loss. And, because the newspaper is mass-distributed, it is a useful tool for uniting many of us in a common struggle—to bring people together by documenting the livelihoods, stories, and collective memory of exploitation endured by working-class people.

Archives of Palante can be found online here.

Radio Basics interviewed the Young Lords founder José Cha Cha Jiménez, archived here.

Dennis Edney has spent the last decade of his life defending Omar Khadr. He may have done more than any living person to rescue Khadr from the racist collusion of the Canadian and American governments, which together sought to keep him locked up in military prisons for the rest of his life. In return for thousands of hours of labour and endless stress, Edney has received some small amount of fame, a Wikipedia page, and next to no money. So he deserves immense praise and respect for his principled, decade-long stand.

However, the BASICS editorial team wishes to correct what we view as certain erroneous views about the “rule of law” which Edney expressed to his audience as a solid basis from which to oppose the government’s treatment of his client.

The rule of law is a phrase typically used to mean that everyone within a given country is subject to a single set of laws—both private citizens and the government. If the government or any citizen appears to have broken the law, the police have a responsibility to investigate, and the state has a responsibility to prosecute any crime uncovered. If the prosecution makes a case which a jury can be convinced is true, a person is deemed guilty, convicted, and receives a sentence.

Canada is a country in which, supposedly, the rule of law applies. When speaking of Omar Khadr’s treatment, Edney continually referred to the need to follow the rule of law, cultivate respect for the rule of law among politicians and ordinary people, and rely on the law for protection and the defence of one’s rights. His condemnation of Khadr’s treatment, in other words, was not that it was merely brutal, but more importantly that it was illegal.

What is important, in our view, is that what is evil and racist is not necessarily the same thing as what is illegal. That the government refused to protect one of its citizens and knowingly left him to the tender mercy of American “enhanced interrogation techniques” is clear; that by doing so it broke the law is not.

If, in this case, it actually did break the law, we can be very certain that no Canadian Prime Minister or Foreign Minister responsible for these actions will actually be brought to punishment. And if it did not break the law, it seems quite clear to us that the law does not exist to protect Canadian citizens.

We hear distantly, from the ranks of liberal policy-makers, opinion-writers, and analysts, a cry go up: “This is going too far! A single example of abuse doesn’t prove that the whole system must come down.”

And, if only the single example existed, the argument would be true. BASICS exists, however, to prove the opposite: where laws exist to protect working people, Canada’s indigenous population, migrant workers, racialised individuals, women, and queer and trans folk, they are extensively and routinely violated by the Canadian government, its officials, its police forces, and its army. Very often, however, there are either no laws, or the laws simply exist to aid in oppression and exploitation.

The way in which the Canadian state has interacted with Onkwehonwe (First Nations) peoples provides an object lesson in a whole legal regime designed explicitly to destroy a population and its way of life. The routine seizure of Indigenous children by child welfare authorities on the slimmest pretexts, the serene disregard of investigators for the extensive sex-trafficking and murder of Indigenous women, the everyday brutality with which police treat Indigenous men (exemplified by but not limited to so-called “starlight tours”), and the undisguised glee with which policymakers and bureaucrats seize the land of bands across the country and distribute it to resource extraction companies such as Enbridge and Barrick Gold: all of these taken together form a genocidal policy, in some ways sanctioned by the law, in other ways against it, but in general, simply outside its purview.

What we mean is that no case in any Canadian court will ever be able to stop the genocide of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Telling Indigenous people to have respect for the law or to address their concerns with recourse to law, is to tell them to accept slow strangulation, isolated from reliance on one another.

It is the position of BASICS that the same is true for Black and racialised people, trans people, working people, women, migrants, and the whole spectrum of oppressed peoples in Canada.

The law will never go after the cop who killed Jermaine Carby last September (whose name the Peel Police still refuse to publish). The law drags its feet year after year in punishing James Forcillo, the murderer of Sammy Yatim.

Therefore, when Dennis Edney stands up in front of an audience of Muslim Canadians and explains to them that Guantánamo Bay is uniquely horrible as “a world outside the reach of the law”, we regard this as evidence of either some naiveté on his part or an explanation concocted to justify his profession.

The law certainly exists in Guantánamo, as it does in Canada. It simply decides to recognise some wrongs and not others. When a torturer in Guantánamo beats his prisoner, the law is perfectly silent, as it is when a Canadian police officer executes a young Black man in the street. In both places, the law offers certain rights, privileges and protections to everyone—on paper. In both places, when we see the law in action in real life, we recognise very quickly that these rights, privileges, and protections mostly exist for white people and rich people and mostly don’t exist for anyone else.

Edney believes, correctly, that the government in power right now is subverting the law in service of a racist agenda. But he also believes that if the dispossessed only speak loudly enough, if we only demand firmly enough, if we only elect a liberal enough government, that the law can be turned to our advantage. In this respect, he believes in a fictional equality. Every guard at Guantánamo knows, like every TPS pig who’s assaulted a kid for giving him attitude knows, that the law serves those who enforce it.

(Photo Credit: Jennifer Poburan/CBC)

by Shafiqullah Aziz

After a seven month suspension with pay, Constable James Forcillo, who killed Sammy Yatim on July 27, 2013,  returned to work with the Toronto Police Services (TPS). Forcillo has now been assigned to the Crime Stoppers unit, and has been on the job since February 11, 2014.

Police Chief Bill Blair’s decision to reassign Forcillo has reignited a sense of outrage and disappointment from many Torontonians who feel that the man who shot and killed 18-year old Sammy Yatim should not be allowed to return to work. The shooting, which was caught on camera by several witnesses, mobilized thousands to take to the streets last summer to demand justice and accountability.

As a result of these mobilizations demanding justice for Sammy and other victims of police violence, the TPS and the province’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) approached the issue very differently than they have in past cases of civilian deaths at the hands of police. In a rare decision, the SIU decided to press charges of second-degree murder against Forcillo. This is only the second time in the SIU’s 24-year history that a cop has received such a serious charge. In most cases involving working-class and racialized youth such as Junior Manon, Alwy Al-Nadhir, and Byron Debassige, the police have received legal impunity, seemingly operating above the law.

Since the shooting, mainstream media sources have taken an unusual stance on the issue, calling for police accountability and critiquing what many have referred to as the ‘blue wall’ of protection that police receive from the legal system. One of the primary reasons for this shift in the conversation around policing is the existence of hard evidence of the shooting on YouTube that clearly show that Forcillo’s actions were completely unnecessary.

Although it is a positive outcome that Forcillo has been charged with second-degree murder, a negative consequence was that popular support around Sammy’s Fight Back for Justice has been completely demobilized since late August 2013. It seems as though the public believed that their demands for accountability were met once the charges were laid, and that mass mobilizations were no longer necessary.

Fast forward seven months and Forcillo is quietly reassigned to the force. This fact was hidden from the public for over two months, in a clear effort to prevent remobilization of massive support for Sammy’s Fight Back for Justice campaign.

Currently, Forcillo is attending court for a preliminary inquest that will determine if there is enough evidence for the case to move forward. But where does this situation leave us in the discussion around demanding an end to police violence, ensuring accountability and the dismantling of the ‘blue wall’? If Forcillo’s case does move forward in court and he is convicted of second-degree murder, does this mean that we carry on with business as usual?

Of the approaches to changing policing in Toronto, there have been several suggestions made for calls to have police use body-worn video cameras, or for the TPS to make a greater effort in building relationships with Toronto communities. However, as working-class, racialized, indigenous peoples, immigrants and people with mental health issues know very well, these soft changes to policing in the city will completely avoid addressing the root causes of police brutality, and the legal impunity that violent officers receive.

We have seen, time and again, that any efforts the police or government institutions make to address public concerns are simply to pacify the public, and break apart any efforts to organize for real change. This is clearly the same tactic that has been used in this situation, as exhibited by Forcillo’s reassignment to the force once the public outcry over Sammy’s death had effectively been silenced.

As the economy falls apart, as people can’t find jobs, and the government cuts back social services, more cops are sent into our street. Ultimately we must realize that police are not keeping our communities safe. Instead, they are serving the purpose of keeping us in check by maintaining an overt presence in our schools and neighbourhoods and continuing to create divisions in our communities.

No amount of sensitivity training or workshops will fundamentally change the way police deal with working-class people in the city. Therefore, any demands made to change policing must be grounded in the building of working-class organization and unity in our neighbourhoods — and must also think of challenging the broader economic and political situations because of which cops are even necessary.

There is a definite need for working-class people to organize and build autonomy on a local level, from hood to hood. Police violence will not end by begging for reforms, but will only be addressed through building strong, united and organized communities prepared to defend themselves.

Image: Noaman G. Ali

The recent elections in Nepal appear to spell a heavy retreat for the country’s Maoist movement. After initiating a People’s War in 1996 that lasted ten years and saw it in control of the majority of the countryside, the popular Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) formed a front with mainstream political parties to overthrow the monarchy and institute a democratic republic in the 2006 People’s Movement. Thereafter, the CPN(Maoist) emerged as the largest party in the 2008 Constituent Assembly (CA) elections.

However, by November 19, 2013, the date of the second set of CA elections, the party had split into two factions that both appeared to have failed in their goals. On one hand, the reformist, electoral Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), or UCPN(Maoist), lost much of its support and was reduced to third-party status in the new assembly. On the other hand, the election boycott called by the revolutionary Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-Maoist) is alleged to have failed, seeing as there was a “record” turnout of voters (as we will see, the reality is more complex).

Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist-Leninist (UML), which despite its name does not pretend to have revolutionary or even broadly progressive politics, has come in second place after the Nepali Congress, whose politics is hard to tell apart from that of the UML. Their victory then seems like a gain for the right in Nepal.

But putting elections at the centre of our analysis can take away from understanding politics in Nepal. Dramatic changes in Nepal’s recent political history have occurred as a result of non-electoral politics that have often been spearheaded by or have involved considerable popular communist agitation. What’s more, Maoists came third in the 1991 elections (with 9 seats) and boycotted elections in 1994 and 1999, but that didn’t stop them from becoming the country’s largest and most influential political force by 2006.

Let us then turn to understanding four questions: First, what led to one Maoist faction engaging in elections and the other deciding to boycott the CA process in its entirety? Second, what were the reasons for the boycott called by the CPN-Maoist? Third, why did UCPN(Maoist) lose the elections? Fourth, was the CPN-Maoist boycott a failure?

1. Why did the Maoists split?

In order to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic, the Maoist leadership, particularly the reformist faction led by Chairman Prachanda and Vice-Chairman Baburam Bhattarai, entered into a compromising peace process with the mainstream political parties (Congress and UML). The Maoists also compromised on their own revolutionary ideals, a betrayal that greatly disappointed core supporters and non-core swing supporters, not to mention the radicals in the Maoist party.

The reformist Maoist leaders pushed to dismantle the system of popular power they had developed in villages across Nepal in the course of the ten-year People’s War. Rather than people having to go to district capitals to settle their disputes in formal courts, an arduous and expensive process, the Maoists had developed people’s courts that would settle disputes quickly and usually fairly. Ordinary people were brought into people’s committees with Party cadre in order to make decisions about village affairs. In many places, semi-feudal landlords were driven out of villages and land was redistributed among the landless. This is not to romanticize what the Maoists achieved, certainly these developments were uneven and not all rosy—yet they were real gains that made Maoists popular among broad masses. These achievements were actively reversed in order to enter into the peace process that led to the CA elections.

Upon forming government, the Maoists found that the institutions of the state were not in their favour, as these institutions are heavily structured by Nepal’s ruling classes and foreign domination. The Maoists resigned in protest in 2009 as they could not exercise civilian control over the chief of the Army, which was backed by the United States and India. The Maoists did not take the reigns of government again until 2011, only to soon dissolve the CA in 2012. Out of five years of the CA, the Maoists governed more-or-less for two years, where the institutions of the bourgeois, neo-colonial state were hostile to them. Clearly, this wasn’t going to help the masses build confidence in the CA or in the Maoists as an electoral party.

To be clear, the first government of the Maoists was widely applauded due to Bhattarai’s finance ministry, which controlled prices of some commodities, in part by extracting greater tax revenue than had ever been extracted before—and in the process, further antagonized the corrupt bureaucracy. Yet, the second government was led by Bhattarai as prime minister, and this time there was no plan to combat inflation, to safeguard Nepal’s economic sovereignty against Indian and Western intervention, or to put a hold on neoliberal capitalism. Instead, Maoist leaders—especially those who had seats in the CA—were seen to have become increasingly corrupt, enriching themselves off of deals with contractors and real estate developers. “They used to be thin during the People’s War,” someone told me back in 2010. “But now in the cities they have become fat.”

Meanwhile, the peace agreement held that the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would be integrated into the Nepal Army. The goal was to integrate entire units, yet the actual integration took the form of individuals being recruited into the Army. Some former PLA soldiers were given jobs like park rangers, while others were given cash payments to demobilize entirely. The integration turned out to be a sham, and an affront to the dignity and sacrifices of far too many PLA fighters. Over 14,000 people died in the ten-year People’s War, most of them as a result of the violence of the state.

Activists of the National Youth People’s Volunteers (NYPV), youth wing of revolutionary Communist Party of Nepal – Maoist, marched in Kathmandu in late August, 2013, to protest the upcoming elections. (Photo: Bikkil Sthapit)

The reversal of popular power and other gains of the revolution, the increasing corruption in the ranks of the party, and the undignified assault on and dissolution of the PLA were not taken well by the rank-and-file of the party or by the more radical leadership, headed by Vice-Chairman Kiran—who had been protesting the turn of events in the party for many years. In a bid to maintain party unity, radicals held on until 2012, but increasing differences finally led to a split. The UCPN(Maoist), by now, had decided to continue on to the electoral process in order to achieve a “capitalist revolution.” The CPN-Maoist, however, decided to stick to the line of “new democratic revolution,” building the power of the working class and the peasantry in a way that would lead to socialism.

2. Why boycott a new constituent assembly?

Nepal’s politics and economy have historically been dominated by external powers, particularly India to its south. Western powers have come to exercise considerable influence in Nepal through foreign aid and NGOs. What international powers want in Nepal is for there to be no radical social and economic transformation. In India, Maoists constitute the severest “internal security threat” to the ruling classes—a communist revolution in Nepal would reverberate not only in India, but across the region and across the world as the first successful socialist revolution since 1979.

Yet, international powers also have no desire to address the factors that led to the insurgency and revolution in the first place—underdevelopment, widespread poverty and inequality, caste and gender discrimination, ethno-national oppression, and so on. What they would like is a pastiche of India, a liberal, parliamentary democratic set up with no real substantive transformation of society. Due to this external influence, Nepal has not been able to engage in autonomous development.

The Nepali Congress and UML are close to India and have no agenda for autonomous development in Nepal, and the reformist factions of the Maoist leadership have become more in tune with neoliberal capitalism—and more in tune with India. (In fact, Bhattarai’s government entered into even more unequal treaties with India, among other things resulting in the further opening up of Nepal’s hydroelectric potential to Indian exploitation.)

In four years of the CA, the constant political posturing and bickering of the parties (with four prime ministers in four years) was stoked by constant meddling by India and other foreign powers, seeking to secure their own interests in Nepal. Rather than the CA as a whole, responsibility for decision-making was delegated to party leaderships who would conduct negotiations to reach a consensus. Most of the articles of the constitution had been agreed upon, with only a few issues outstanding—mainly on how to set up a proposed federal structure, and with what number and kind of new provinces to be created. No consensus was reached before the final deadline as set by the Supreme Court.

The four “big” parties—UCPN(Maoist), Congress, UML and the United Democratic Madheshi Forum—decided to turn over the government to the Chief Justice (against the terms of the Interim Constitution of 2007) to supervise a new round of CA elections.

For the CPN-Maoist, this was an absurd proposition. The Chief Justice—notoriously anti-Maoist—was undemocratically and unconstitutionally appointed prime minister by fiat (remember, the CA had been dissolved). In fact, the appointment of the Chief Justice was heavily favoured by the international powers as well. Moreover, what would a new CA do to resolve the political differences that led to the failure of the last one? Instead, the CPN-Maoist, leading an alliance of 33 parties also represented in the first CA, called for a round-table conference of all political parties to hammer out the outstanding issues and then take a constitution to the masses for ratification.

Rejecting this, the four mainstream parties and the international powers pushed ahead with the second CA elections. As a result, the CPN-Maoist and the 33-party alliance called for a boycott. Fifty-two election observation NGOs became operational, the seven largest of which are funded by Western donors—for example, the National Election Observation Committee (NEOC) is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the European Union—the very donors pushing hard for elections. In violation of the peace agreement of 2006, the Nepal Army—backed and trained by the US and India—took to the streets to guarantee that the elections took place. The mainstream parties and international powers cannot abide a power vacuum in Nepal that may open up opportunities for popular revolutionary mobilization.

3. Electoral failure of UCPN(Maoist)

The Maoists’ personal sacrifice and simple lifestyles, which were then translated into systems of popular power, brought hope for a new form of political engagement throughout the country. In parliament, the reformist factions lost their discipline and degenerated into a corrupt, purely electoral formation. If there was no alternative to be expected from the electoral activities of the Maoists, then the non-core voters who supported them in 2008 had no reason to support them again. Congress and UML could play the game of mainstream politics far better—and that might explain why these elections have seen a reversion to the mainstream parties, especially in urban centres.

Ironically, the reversal of land reforms and institutions of popular power in the countryside might have helped Congress and UML win in the rural centres as well. Relatively powerful landowners can influence and facilitate access to governmental and judicial services. This political monopoly over state patronage is what got Congress and UML elected in previous elections. Even if feudalism as it once existed was greatly weakened after the People’s War, reconfigurations of power relations were probably much better exploited by the mainstream parties, with their long experience in the matters, than the UCPN(Maoist).

Crucially, at least part of the collapse of the electoral UCPN(Maoist) has to be explained by the CPN-Maoist call for boycott. The core electoral base of the Maoists appears to have decided not to vote at all, or were prevented from voting—leading to the UCPN(Maoist)’s dismal showing. Thawang, a village in district Rolpa that has been the epicentre of peasant revolt and Maoist support, recorded zero votes.

In sum, the electoral failure of the reformist, electoral UCPN(Maoist) has to be attributed to its reneging on revolutionary politics, reversing the political and economic gains of the revolutionary process, and its increasing greed. Indeed, in general, the Maoists achieved great victories when they produced new rules themselves based on popular power. They lost when they submitted themselves to the rules set up by the ruling classes and imperialists. This understanding is what led the revolutionary CPN-Maoist to boycott the elections.

4. Failure of CPN-Maoist boycott?

The boycott led by the revolutionary CPN-Maoist was widely declared a failure by mainstream media because there was a “record” 70% voter turnout. But in number terms, there were well over one million less people voting in this election than the last one. Five million less people even registered to vote in this election. Part of this lower registration was apparently due to tighter control over voter registration by electoral bodies, but at least part of the lower registration can be explained by the political skepticism that runs deep in the Nepalese population. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people who did vote in this election have very little faith in it actually achieving much.

In these senses, the CPN-Maoist led boycott did in fact tap into a great vein of disappointment among the population, and especially the electoral base of the Maoists. This is a slap in the face of the UCPN(Maoist) that vindicates the CPN-Maoist line of boycott.

Moreover, the fact that one of the largest political forces in the country, the CPN-Maoist, has stayed out of the CA process (and seems intent on staying out of it) calls into question the very credibility of the CA. After all, the goal of a CA is to form a constitution, and that requires the participation of a wide range of political opinions in the country—not least one of the largest and influential ones.

The idea that the CPN-Maoist, by rejecting the elections and promoting a boycott, were engaged in anti-democratic behaviour is absurd. The entire political process in Nepal has been characterized by politicking that violates previously agreed-to rules and liberal democratic norms—such as the separation of powers between the judiciary and executive, the primacy of parliament, the demobilization of Nepal Army, the immense foreign interference, and so on.

What the boycott failed to do was to stop the elections altogether. This was certainly a goal of the revolutionary Maoists and they did not achieve it, but it was also an important method for them to assess the spread of support and influence they have in the country. In February 2013, a senior revolutionary Maoist leader told me that if they stopped the elections, we could expect a quicker path to revolution, and if they did not, we could expect a more protracted approach. In other words, the boycott is a tactic in a developing and shifting strategy.

Indeed, when the united Maoist party entered into the peace process in 2006 and elections in 2008, these were also seen as tactical moves—not as a strategy for achieving socialism. Despite their overwhelming control of the countryside, Maoists could not enter the cities due to their being heavily guarded by the Royal Nepal Army—funded and backed by the US and India. Their idea was thus to use a peace deal to enter into the cities and rebuild organizations there, for an eventual urban insurrection to overthrow the government. The insurrection nearly materialized in 2010, with Kathmandu shut down by a general strike organized by the Maoists. Yet, the reformists in the leadership decided to call the general strike off to return to electoral politics.

The electoral loss of the UCPN(Maoist) will likely lead many rank-and-file cadre to reconsider their engagement with the reformist leadership and question whether or not the electoral path is the best means of achieving socialism. They may well swell the ranks of the revolutionary CPN-Maoist—very important as the party seeks to restructure, restrategize, and regain the confidence of the masses after the betrayals of the reformist leadership of the UCPN(Maoist). Meanwhile, that UCPN(Maoist) leadership has been forced to understand that it cannot play by the rules of the ruling classes and the imperialists. It remains to be seen whether they can throw off the ideological cobwebs induced by mysticism of class collaboration and return to the revolutionary road of class struggle.

Further reading:

• Noaman G. Ali, “Nepal’s unfinished revolution”: /2013/03/nepals-unfinished-revolution/
• Ian Paxson, “Issues behind the election boycott in Nepal: a heroic attempt to reinvigorate the struggle for socialism”: http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/issues-behind-the-election.html
• Peter Tobin, “Haunted by a red spectre – dark forces threaten Nepal”: http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/haunted-by-red-spectre-dark-forces.html
• Shiela Singh, “Emancipation of women: election or revolution?”: http://ignitesouthasia.com/emancipation-of-women-election-or-revolution/
• Eric Ribellarsi, “No, 70% of Nepalis did not vote in the rigged elections”: http://kasamaproject.org/threads/entry/no-70-of-nepalis-did-not-vote-in-the-rigged-election

In order to help the growth and development of Basics as an organization, the general membership has created a Women’s Committee. For the working class to organize themselves, we need a media apparatus that reflects our struggles. Although Basics strives to present all issues in a way that addresses the most oppressed and exploited group of people, the perspective of working class women is not always reflected in our journalism.

To improve the quality of our journalism, the Women’s Committee will contribute to the editorial process, ensuring that working class women’s perspectives are reflected throughout all of our media productions. The Women’s Committee will also contribute to the internal growth and development of the organization by facilitating workshops and educationals on issues of concern and importance to women.

Some of the issues we hope to address include women’s mental health, the unemployment and underemployment of women, childcare and lack of social services, to name a few. We need to address all of these issues and more so that we can contribute to the struggle for women’s liberation.

For more information or to join the struggle send us an email at [email protected].

War drums are beating in Western countries, sizing up Syria for some kind of military intervention. In Britain, parliament has voted against any military intervention – embarrassing the ruling Conservative party’s leader David Cameron – but that hasn’t stopped the US and French governments from carrying on with plans to strike.

The immediate justification for the pending intervention is the use of chemical weapons on the outskirts of Syrian capital Damascus that have killed perhaps over 1,400 people in a most brutal way. In two years of civil war between the dictatorship headed by Bashar al-Assad and an assortment of opposition groups, over 100,000 people are alleged to have died and several millions have become refugees.

Western governments claim that the Assad regime carried out the chemical attacks. But even if it didn’t, the Assad regime has shown incredible brutality against its population through conventional weapons, funded and backed by Russia and Iran. Long before the anti-regime movement was militarized, peaceful protesters were being massacred with impunity.

In such times, well-meaning people often wonder why it is that we – our governments – don’t do anything to intervene and stop the killing. When Western governments start talking about using military intervention, many folks think it’s for the best. But this approach forgets that Western ruling classes have already been intervening, both in Syria and in the region at large. That’s partly why the mess is such a mess to begin with.

The Syrian regime itself came to power in the 1960s through a popular revolution led by military officers against pro-Western elites. The new regime tried to build an economy independent of negative Western influence by investing in industry and agriculture and raising the living standards of significant sections of the population, especially in rural areas. This degree of economic and political independence has never gone over well with Western ruling classes.

Over time, the expansion of the government and especially the armed forces and secret police developed into one of the more frightening and restrictive regimes that dot the region, often putting down even minor signs of opposition. The regime moved away from its radicalism, and based its repressive aspects on the bargain that it would provide for relatively decent living standards and defense from warmongers like the US and Israel and their allies, the Gulf states.

But more recently the secret police and army apparatus have been used to line the pockets of newer and newer sections of the Syrian elite, while impoverishing the masses and fueling greater inequality. The Israeli state has become ever more unaccountable, continuing to occupy Syrian territory and carrying out strikes inside the country, with no check from the Syrian military – except through roundabout support for the resistance movements Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. The Syrian ruling classes had simply become satisfied with their status quo, sometimes even happily aligning with Western imperialism, such as during the invasion of Iraq in 1990.

The fear and paralysis in Syria ruptured in 2011 when, along with massive eruptions in Tunisia and Egypt, the Syrian masses took to the streets month after month, unarmed, protesting against the Assad regime, saying, “Yalla, irhal, ya Bashar!”—“Go on, leave, Bashar.” The regime responded with incredible brutality – including massacres, disappearances, torture and assassinations – falsely claiming that the protesters were armed terrorists.

Many groups did eventually take up arms and many Syrian soldiers defected from the armed forces in order to defend the masses, forming several commands under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. These groups bravely improvised tactics, strategies and even weapons in their rebellion against the regime. Rather than realizing the historic opportunity for a political settlement, the Assad regime simply continued its brutality. Yet, rebels managed to hang on to and then even take over territory as the war proceeded. The historically oppressed Kurdish people in northern Syria also formed self-defense units, and soon formed an autonomous political unit of Western Kurdistan.

But Syria’s geopolitical enemies, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar – all of which are allies of Western imperialists such as the US, Britain, France and Israel – have taken advantage of the disorder to fund and arm some of the groups that are aligned with their interests. Many of these groups are hardline Islamists who seek to make sectarianism worse by targeting religious minorities, including Christians and Alawites. These reactionary groups have engaged in seriously brutal massacres and disappearances of civilians, and have increasingly sidelined the popular and democratic opposition – especially because they have received the bulk of funds and arms from international sponsors.

Islamist armed groups have also attacked the autonomous political unit in Western Kurdistan. Most likely, the Islamists are acting in support of their sponsors in Turkey, who are opposed to any sort of self-determination for the Kurdish people. The largest population of Kurds is currently in Turkey, and they have been fighting for self-determination for over three decades. The Syrian Kurds, in turn, have attempted to prevent Turkey from intervening against the Assad regime – despite opposing it themselves. In Lebanon, Assad regime forces have sought to pressure any anti-regime activity, including through bomb attacks. The Lebanese group Hezbollah, which defeated Israel in 2006, has intervened in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime.

All this goes to show that the conflict is not simply about the Assad regime fighting a domestic opposition. The civil war is also part of a larger attempt to change the balance of forces in the Middle East, especially attempts by the Gulf states (particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar) to weaken the influence of Iran. But what’s more important is that the rulers of Gulf states and Turkey have also tried to weaken the power of the popular masses rising up in their own countries and in others such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya – the Syrian popular masses are also their targets.

Victims of a chemical attack carried out on August 21, 2013, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria. (REUTERS)

These objectives line up with those of the US, Israel and European powers. As the Assad regime appears to have gained the upper hand in the conflict, the chemical attack took place at the outskirts of Damascus and all of these states started rattling their war sabres at a feverish pitch. But Western military intervention is not selfless, nor done with the best of intentions.

As the experience of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya shows, new regimes that come to power at the hands of Western imperialists are not any less corrupt, unequal, or repressive than the ones they replace. Relative economic independence is transformed into total subordination to the world market under Western imperialism. Elements of the former regime as well as new groups form insurgent forces that keep destabilizing the new regimes backed by occupying powers. In Syria, it’s not even clear that military intervention seeks to end the war, it might just be intended to prolong it.

For all these reasons, it’s important for well-meaning people in the West to oppose foreign military intervention in Syria – the only decent solution in this mess is a political settlement. Any bombing will hurt even more civilians, not make things better for them. We should make no mistake here: One major reason that the idea of Western military intervention is facing so much difficulty is that many Syrians on the ground and in the diaspora, representing the popular democratic forces, have strongly resisted such intervention. We should stand with them morally in opposing the Assad regime, and concretely oppose the imperialism of our own ruling classes.

Toronto Police constable James Forcillo (left) was charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of 18-years old Sammy Yatim (right).

This Monday morning, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) charged Constable James Forcillo for second-degree murder in the shooting of 18-year old Sammy Yatim on July 26, 2013.  Various YouTube postings of the initial civilian footage clearly show that a distressed Yatim—armed only with a 3 inch blade, isolated in a streetcar and surrounded by Police—was of little threat to anyone prior to being shot 9 times and then tasered.

The ruling has been received with a mixture of shock, relief and jubilation.  From Sammy’s family and friends came the joy of seeing some potential of justice emerging from the murder of their loved one.  “The SIU charged the cop with 2nd degree murder!!! Good morning JUSTICE,” wrote Sammy’s sister Sarah over Twitter.  Indeed, much of the commentary over social media shows the extent to which people were incensed by this tragedy, and relieved to see some sign that the perpetrator would be held accountable.

Shock, of course, because this type of ruling isn’t the norm.  Forcillo is just the 7th police officer to be charged by the SIU with manslaughter or murder since 1990.  Importantly, however, all previously charged officers have been cleared in court.

There is no doubt that public opinion has forced the hand of the police services and the beleaguered SIU, generated in no small part by the direct footage from the scene of the murder along with the significant mobilization led by Sammy Yatim’s family and supporters.

Toronto Police Chief Chief Bill Blair, after an endless streak of scandals since the G20 debacle, scrambled to provide a response that could temper the outpouring of indignation. Blair’s appointment of retired Justice Dennis O’Connor on August 12 to undertake a ‘review’ of police handling of these type of scenarios was quite obviously an attempt by the police chief to take some initiative in light of the public relations disaster that the killing of Sammy Yatim has become. (It should be noted, though, that the review is not binding and O’Connor’s law firm has established ties with the Police.) The week before, Ontario’s Ombudsman André Marin had announced a probe into the training of Toronto police, a move that led to some vicious slander on Facebook after a Durham police officer allegedly claimed Marin was a member of Al Qaida.

For its part the Special Investigations Unit—under harsh scrutiny since the release of a damning report from Marin in 2011 that highlighted the toothless and nepotistic nature of the SIU—was facing a situation where much of the public was anticipating an acquittal of Forcillo given the history of the organization.  This time around, however, with the public evidence circulating and public anger high, the SIU was under intense pressure to charge Forcillo and shore up some legitimacy.

Indeed, this is a small victory especially for those who have lost a brother, a son and a friend. And perhaps the charging of Forcillo is a blow to the culture of police impunity in this city.

At the same time, we must remain cautious and vigilant.  An SIU charge does not mean that Forcillo will go to jail.  In fact, history shows that he stands a good chance of walking free.  At the least, his charges will almost certainly be reduced, carrying a far lighter sentence.  If the statistics give people cause to question the credibility of the SIU, then the courts need to also be questioned, especially as concerns the holding police accountable.

Not addressed in this ruling but at least as important are the changes needed to the police force itself.  This incident has generated unprecedented debate in Toronto not only on the conduct of certain officers, but also on the very structures of policing in this City—do frontline police officers really need guns that they appear to misuse so frequently? why is the police budget so large, and why are there so many cops in the streets? The incident has moreover activated hundreds of people who have taken to the streets, unafraid to challenge the police.

This debate will not end, and the mobilization should not stop.  This ruling was the product of the actions of people—from the family of Sammy, to the brave people who filmed and published the video, to those who spoke to media and came out on the streets.  Remaining active and continuously organizing around issues that face working-class and racialized people is the only way to secure justice for Sammy and to try to ensure that no more lives will be lost in this way.