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On the political journey and legacy of Syed Jamaluddin Naqvi, a pivotal leader of Pakistans leftist politics, who passed away last week

Syed Jamaluddin Naqvi remained a nonconformist till his death last week. Till the 1990s, he was not only raising some basic questions regarding Marxism but had also advised his comrades to strive for civil space in Pakistan.

He must have read the saying If you are not a communist in your 20s, you have no heart but if you remain a communist in your 30s then you have no brain; only in his case, he stayed a communist till the age of 58 in 1990.

In 2007, Jamal Naqvi was in Lahore where he explained his thoughts and change of heart to comrades openly. It was a time when the Lawyers Movement was at its peak and some left-wing intellectuals had declared it a 1968-like situation. Jamal did not agree with this analysis and told us that we had to concentrate on seeking democratic options as well as strengthening of civil space in Pakistan.

It reminded me of the famous Hala Conference (1970) in which many revolutionaries including Mairaj Muhammad Khan had pressurised Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to boycott the elections but the smart ZAB did not listen. Had leftists and nationalists, in and outside the PPP, supported the ZAB government with the goal of strengthening civil space in the 1970s, things would be much different. This was the first democratically-elected government and should have been analysed and interpreted as the first experience in democracy rather than a perfect government.

Since 2008, Pakistan has been confronted with various questions associated with civil space and supremacy of the civilian government among other things. More recently, during the Panama Case, some of our senior leftist friends found some love even for the Joint Investigation Team (JIT). We can check the money trail of politicians only but no one dares talk about the money trail of non-elected elite.

Jamaluddin Naqvi was born in 1932. In his early 20s, he joined communist groups, and formed his own faction (Communist Party of Pakistan) in the first half of 1960s along with Imam Ali Nazish remaining with it till 1990. According to his fellow comrades, he was the sole dictator in the party till late 1970s after which he was imprisoned by General Zia. Along with Nazeer Abbasi, he was arrested on July30, 1980 from Karachi. Only ten days after the arrest, Abbasi was killed in custody on August10. Jamal, however, was released in the mid-1980s.

But the nonconformist Jamal did not limit his options. I too, have many reservations regarding his ideas and politics. I met him many times and talked about my reservations but one thing that I can credit Jamal with is his ability not to remain silent when it came to his politics.

In the late 1970s, Jamal started losing the grip over his party, partly due to young Turks and also due to the influence of Afghan politics. This revolt within his party may have compelled Jamal to revisit his politics and ideology. So after spending 38 years with communist politics, in 1990 in a party congress, along with comrade Ramzan, he proposed open politics and rejected underground politics. He was defeated not only by his comrades but also by his time-tested friend Imam Ali Nazish. But he did not falter from this position at all.

From 1990 onwards till his death, he developed alternative thoughts and solutions, recorded interviews and wrote books. Like senior comrade C.R. Aslam, he openly supported globalisation. His book Leaving the Left Behind that was published in 2014 was discussed a lot among the progressive circles.

According to him, both Russia and China had changed their old ideological positions: the USSR accepted this openly but the Chinese did it without announcing it. They even called it socialist capitalism. In fact, both Russians and Chinese used state capitalism and successfully transformed their societies.

After the end of the Cold War, separatist movements had no scope at all. Classes are there and so is class struggle; yet in the last 100 years many new classes have emerged and we have to acknowledge it. In the past, due to our overemphasis on labourers and peasants we had ignored lowest classes like dalits, musalihs etc, it was a big mistake.

Imperialism and colonialism were a part and parcel of world politics but due to the Cold War, we failed to understand it. In the post-Cold War era, we cannot rely on an old definition of imperialism.

Labour is among the various factors in value-addition so it is essential to reconsider the theory of surplus value.

Democracy is the only solution we have. There is no alternative to it. It does not mean that I am rejecting class struggle. We have to raise the issues of lower classes, but without strengthening the civil space in Pakistan we cannot help lower classes at all. Participation of citizens in decision-making processes will strengthen the lower classes role and leftists can play their role as a catalyst.

Strengthening of the prime ministers office will increase civil space in Pakistan.

Big and small provinces and nationalities is a hard fact. We can neither expand Balochistan population nor reduce that of the Punjab. Artificial solutions like parity proved fatal in the past so federating units should resolve the disparities with consensus. But if we have a strong civil space than we can resolve it too.

Civil space will increase in Pakistan gradually and every new PM will demand more. It is the prime contradiction in Pakistan.

We should not oppose US and the West in a way to strengthen religious fundamentalists.

Jamal recorded these thoughts in 2007 and remained loyal to these ideas. Unlike his comrades, he raised some fundamental questions regarding Marxism that turned many of his friends against him. A baseless campaign was launched against him by his fellow comrades. But having spent 38 years with the movement, he had every right to follow his intellectual pursuits.

As part of the campaign, books were written just to accuse him of betraying the party during the Zia era. His commitment was challenged by those who were his blind followers in the past and had never questioned his authoritarianism in party for once. Had he kept himself from challenging the basic principles of Marxism like many of his contemporaries and remained silent on the past politics, he would not have faced such a reaction. I can give many examples of many progressive people who did group politics for many years and left due to various political and personal reasons but neither did they register their grievances nor they put these in writing. Some of them joined NGOs, others went into journalism; yet they did not pen what they had experienced in the leftist politics.

But the nonconformist Jamal did not limit his options. I too, have many reservations regarding his ideas and politics. I met him many times and talked about my reservations but one thing that I can credit Jamal with is his ability not to remain silent when it came to his politics.

In a meeting in Lahore a few years back, he advised his comrades either to join the PPP or PML-N. All remained silent except his daughter who said, Baba, aap satheyaa gaye hain kya? (Father, have you lost your mind?). He smiled his trademark smile and said, I said what I think is right.

Well-played, Jamaluddin Naqvi!

(He passed away on August 3, 2017)

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From communism to democracy and civil space - The News on Sunday

TIRANA, Aug. 10 In May 1987, Dutch photojournalist Piet den Blanken visited communist Albania as part of a travelgroup of fellow comrades.

Despite the prohibition on contact between Albanians and foreign visitors and the ban on taking streetphotos, he managed to take many pictures of Albanians and their daily life under the communist regime.

Thirty years later, his pictures are back to Tirana as part of a travelling exhibition featuring twelve Dutch photographers looking back on the work they made in Central and Eastern Europe between 1979 and 1991.

Albania was one of the most closed countries in Europe until 1990. It was difficult to travel to Albania, similar to the way it is difficult for travel to travel to North Korea. The only way to photograph in Albania was to visit the country as a tourist with a group tour led by an Albanian guide, says photographer Piet de Blanken as quoted by the exhibitions organizers.

De Blanken, now in his 60s, photographed especially early in the morning and late in the day.

During the day, he followed the official group program. In this way, he tried to get another image of the country, an image that was not shown in the official group program. In addition, he was repeatedly brought back by the police to a group and guide because it was not the intention of a westerner to explore and photograph the environment alone.

By the end of the trip, his films and stuff were seized. The Whites were already prepared for the various incidents with the police, so he had given his full shot of precautionary films to a group member. Johan Janse hid the movies in his luggage and took out the country thanks to him to see these photos here.

The 12 Dutch photographers showcased in the travelling The other side exhibition were witnesses of historical moments, such as the emergence of the Polish trade union Solidarnosc in Gdansk in 1980, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian revolution of 1989.

Supported by the Dutch embassy in Tirana, The other side of Albanian communism exhibition will be open at Tiranas National History Museum from August 17 to 30.

Continue reading here:
'The other side of Albanian communism' - Tirana Times (subscription)

by Rob Harding

Lets leave the sordid world of Earth behind for a bit, and explore the potential of a concept thats kind of easy to dismiss out of hand.

In his venerable Culture series, Iain M Banks describes a future society based around Minds, unimaginably super-intelligent AIs that control vast ships and space-going habitats, on which a massive collection of alternately hedonistic and depressed lesser-biological beings (assumed to be human, although its never made explicit) live pampered and comfortable lives. The Culture is semi-utopian, although, if it resembles any society, it resembles the US in its relations with other civilisations, The books frequently focus on both the skulduggery necessary to keep the civilisation running and the injustice of being born outside it. Nonetheless, it is a portrait of a society in which humans (probably) are protected, cared for and treated equally through advanced technology.

Because utopias arent easy or fun to write, few societies like the Culture have appeared in fiction before or since. There is one notable version, however, in the form of an oddly idealistic leftie meme: Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

FALGSC (Sometimes just called FALC, because space is admittedly unlikely and gays apparently arent allowed to be involved in these things) is often an expression of frustration, tempered (especially recently) with a fatalistic sense of humour and understanding that well never get there. In a world that sees Trumps and Assads, Dutertes and Al-Baghdadis, in a world where petty fascist shitheads are coming out of the walls on every continent and fundamentalists grow louder with every day, something as optimistic is impossible. More knowledgeable people scoff that Communism is a flawed system vulnerable to human nature, they delicately refuse to engage with the Gay part and make accusatory comments about entitlement because of the Luxury bit.

However you parse it, FALC and FALGSC are envisaged as post-capitalist utopias.

However you parse it, FALC and FALGSC are envisaged as post-capitalist utopias. As is pointed out in this video, capitalism as a civilisational operating system is starting to run into serious and systemic problems. As such, its time to start planning what society could evolve into, because there are some nasty failure stakes. Traditional extinction is on the table, of course. But, worse, we could end up with a capitalist kleptocracy, like that envisioned in William Gibsons The Peripheral, where only the rich survive the near-apocalypse, or else either a hideous famine-stricken fascist dystopia ruling the starving masses, or a segregated post-oil nightmare.

FALGSC provides an alternative to all this. Its not going to be easy to get to vested interests, human nature and conservatism all stand in the way

Bots are getting smarter and more numerous every day, and, in recent years, even self-taught neural networks have started development a huge step on the road to a self-sustaining AI. Capitalist systems almost always automate to improve efficiency from the stone-age woodcutter assembling an axe to cut more wood, to the self-service checkout in Tescos, theres always a machine to help fewer people do more work. Under a capitalist system, this process is focused on profit. This is a problem our unemployment crises worldwide are bad enough, and in many countries birth rates are still increasing. People are living and working longer, making it harder for the generations after them to get jobs, even without the economic inequality thats developed alongside that. Unemployed people can create big problems even if youre the kind of heartless Tory bastard who doesnt care about humans being starving to death the Arab Spring is partly attributable to massive unemployment rates and stunted labour markets in many Middle Eastern countries.

If you think robots cant do your job, youre being naive. Yes, even repair other robots. Even create art. All of it. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.

Traditional capitalist automation only makes this much worse robots and bots are much cheaper to run than humans, so even businesses that want to reject them and hire only humans are dooming themselves to obsolescence and rapid undercutting. Automation hasnt started to bite properly yet, and already its predicted that one in three jobs are at risk within the next twenty years. Within my lifetime, we could be looking at a society where its no longer economical to hire human workers for 90% of the jobs out there.

Universal Basic Income is a potential patch to this problem, but its a limited one and its unaffordable for many of the economies where mass automation will bite hardest the manufacturing-heavy developing countries and the industrialising third world. What happens when a third of a billion Chinese workers are out of a job thanks to automation? What happens to Indias already high unemployment rate when the robots come for everyones jobs?

Tarir Square, February 2011. Economic problems are believed to have played a key role in the Arab Spring. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.

Worse still, under a capitalist system, those that own the machines (free of the constraints of having to support a workforce) will be able to become extremely wealthy. With the natural tendency of the wealthy to want to pay as little tax as possible, and with nearly everyone else relying on universal basic income to survive (assuming a fully functional semi-universal UBI system can be implemented at all, against heavy ideological opposition from hidebound conservatives the world over), taxation becomes almost useless. We then end up in a situation where governments cant pay for themselves, or the potentially billions of unemployed, because no-ones hiring any more and the hyper-efficient automated industrial base cant sell its products because no-one can afford them. (Or maybe the new auto-industrialists will consent to paying 95% taxes and somehow keep the whole system afloat by themselves which would raise a dozen ethical questions if it wasnt blatantly unrealistic.)

FALGSC provides an alternative to all this. Its not going to be easy to get to vested interests, human nature and conservatism all stand in the way (and what the hells their plan for this? I suspect it runs along the lines of fuck you, got mine, like it usually is.). Join me next week to explore some of the winding, difficult roads that might lead to the promised land of Fully Automated Luxury Gay (Space) Communism. Its more practical than youd think.

Featured image credit: James Vaughan, Flickr.Text reads Soviet anthem is our triumph in space!

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THE ROAD TO FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNISM: PART 1 - Norwich Radical (blog)

Chinese boyband TFBoys' song "Go!AMIGO" is a big hit in China this summer. VCG/VCG via Getty Images hide caption

Chinese boyband TFBoys' song "Go!AMIGO" is a big hit in China this summer.

The first words of the hit song "Go!AMIGO" are sung in three languages: English, Spanish and Chinese. Its music video shows the three teenage members of TFBoys China's hottest boy band gathering friends for a game of baseball.

It all seems pretty innocent. But there are calculated reasons behind the song's linguistic flair, the video's focus on baseball and even the band itself: "This video is proof that Communist Party propaganda is evolving," says cultural critic Zhu Dake, who teaches at Shanghai's Tongji University.

He says the TFBoys are the latest example of a pop group engineered by a company whose aim is to champion the values of China's Communist Party. The "TF" in the band's name shares an acronym with Time Fengjun, a Beijing entertainment company that selected the boys for the group, writes its songs and produces its videos.

"This video is interesting," says Zhu as he watches the video for "Go!AMIGO." "It features baseball, a sport we don't play. It's American, so it's aspirational. But the song's message is about teamwork and serving the collective communist values. Usually, China's state propaganda is filled with dreary platitudes concocted by government workers with low IQs. But this is very clever."

"We rely on each other," the TFBoys sing in "Go!AMIGO." "It's so magical to have you along the way. We'll soon reach our glittering dreams."

TFBoys fan Ren Jiaying, a 16-year-old high school junior, says the song speaks to her. Attending Chinese high school is full of pressure, she says, and the band's music reminds her that she's not alone.

"They're the same age as me, and I feel like they're with me no matter what I do," she says of the members of TFBoys. "I'm not good at chemistry, but then one day I saw a video of them reciting periodic tables between photo shoots. I feel like we're making progress together."

Ren is among tens of millions of young fans who follow the TFBoys' social media feed religiously. It's an enormously popular feed: When bandleader Wang Junkai posted a note to fans on his 15th birthday to Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform, it was shared more than 355 million times the most of any Weibo post ever.

Zhu says most of these fans live in the hundreds of cities that make up rural China. "Kids in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai dream of leaving China for America or Europe they don't care about this kind of band," says Zhu. "But rural kids won't ever get that chance, so this song provides them with dreams of playing a foreign sport in a modern, fashionable China. But who's going to play baseball with them?"

Zhu points out that other TFBoys songs including a modern revamp of the 1960s communist classic "We Are The Heirs Of Communism" show how the band is being used to promote the government's agenda.

Gao Ling, the 31-year-old manager of the TFBoys' Shanghai fan club, admits the band is promoting communist values to young people in a new, fashionable way. "But Chinese society is like this," Gao says. "We need to support our government, and these boys have been taught to be patriotic in school, so they naturally promote communist ideals. There's nothing wrong with going with the flow that's perfectly normal. They're showing a positive and bright path. They would never criticize society or government."

That's because, Gao points out matter-of-factly, "China doesn't yet have freedom of speech."

Original post:
TFBoys' 'Go!AMIGO' Is A Summery Slice Of Pop Propaganda - NPR

True socialism has never been tried. That would kill a country instantly instead of slowly weakening it.

Could someone very slowly and carefully explain to me what a buttered roll is?

Coconuts grow on deserted islands because thats the only place anyone would be tempted to eat one. So what kind of fruit does this tree have? Its a brown hairy ball full of wax. Can can trees have mental problems?

So before today, did anyone else know you could put butter on a roll and eat it? I just used rolls as something to chuck at squirrels.

Most action movies are cheering on bad guys getting shot. I guess the more grounded in reality, the more problematic that becomes. Taken was kind of in that mold, and it was very popular. At the cinema, we tend to like the simple, unapologetic solution to evil.

Is a poem written on a statue binding law? Before you answer, know that the statue is very very big.

Hes a father who after an unspeakable tragedy no longer cares if SJWs come after him en masse. Its Bruce Willis in Problematic Wish. You cant just gleefully gun down thugs without being contemplative about the underlying socioeconomic concerns! Try and stop me.

Considering the record, if you still support Communism over Capitalism, you absolutely, positively do not care about famine or the poor. With the record of Capitalism versus Communism on famine, thats like comparing a prime rib dinner to a shotgun to the groin.

Difference between Nazi and Communist is when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they dont say, Well, real Nazism has never been tried

Really, though, who cares about the NYT? When was the last time they influenced anyone who wasnt already a mindless left-wing partisan?

The difference between a prophet and a scientist is that there are more specific qualifications to being called a prophet. Wed all be much smarter if journalists were required to replace scientists say with some guys say. Then youd ask, Who are these guys and why should I believe them? Questions some people think the term scientist answers when it doesnt.

Guys, come on. Keep quiet on spoilers for the next 40 years while Im waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish the books.

NYC having best pizza sounds like a dumb urban legend. You can just copy whatever recipes they have and make it the same in any other city. Same for bagels.

Isnt limiting the acceptable areas of discussion more anti-science than anything else?

So is Google even going to attempt to refute what the guy said or are they just going to fire him?

Whoever thought promoting diversity and tolerance would so often involve screaming, Burn the witch!?

Looking like 2020 will again be an easy choice between a cartoonish, moron buffoon and people who will constantly lie and try to destroy you.

Theres a hotline to call to report any nuclear wars you see.

The North is definitely my least favorite of the Koreas.

Im all for tolerance as long as its for things I approve of.

What struck me about the Google memo was how earnest it was. He honestly thought he was going to foster a discussion. He thought response would be Heres where youre wrong and where your biases are blinding you. Instead it was You hate diversity! Fired! He comes off as this poor, naive guy who foolishly believed people who disagreed with you had other settings than Crush! Kill! Destroy! Lesson learned for other Google employees: Stick to quietly seething.

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Random Thoughts: Socialism, Communism, and Google - IMAO (satire)