This week a proposal of statement for the May Day 2013 comes.
It follows the line and agenda of the joint statement of May 2012, signed by: the Communist
(Maoist) Party of Afghanistan; Communist Party of India (M-L)
[Naxalbari]; Maoist Communist Party–France; Maoist Communist
Party–Italy; Maoist Communist Party of Manipur; Revolutionary Communist Party, Canada;
Founding Committee for the (maoist) Communist Party, Austria; Maoist
Communist Movement, Maoist Communist Organization, Tunisia;
Marxist-Leninist-Maoists of Morocco; Organization of Workers of
Afghanistan (M-L-M); People Struggle Committee Manolo Bello, Galicia,
Spanish State; Revolutionary Praxis, United Kingdom; Servir le Peuple,
Occitany, French State, Democracy and Class struggle, Wales (United Kingdom).
It is addressed to all the MLM forces which participated in the international conference in Hamburg: Communist Party of the Phillipines; Communist Party of Galizia, Spanish State; Great March towards Communism, Madrid; Mass Line,Holland; Maoist Communist Party of Manipur; Maoist Communist Party Turkey/Nothern Kurdistan; Red Action, Croatia; Revolutionary Construction Austria; Revolutionary Construction Switzerland; Revolutionary Front to defend the rights of people, Brazil; Turkish Communist Party Marxist/Leninist;
It is open to all MLM parties and organizations in the world with no discrimination.
Let us unite on the proletarian internationalism.
Let us unite for the world proletarian revolution
maoistroad
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Friday, April 5, 2013
CPP Philippines Denounces arrival of 4,000 US armed troops in the Philippines
CPP denounces arrival of 4,000 US armed troops in the Philippines
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) today condemned the planned entry of up to 4,000 armed US troops in the Philippines over the next few days "which is a display of extreme contempt against Philippine sovereignty and a show of force in the face of heightened US war preparations in the Korean peninsula."Up to 30 US jet fighters and an American naval carrier, the USS Tortuga, are also set to be deployed in Manila, Central Luzon and other areas, from 5 to 17 April, in line with the 2013 Balikatan military exercises between the US military and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).
"By pushing through with the Balikatan 2013 exercises amidst increasing military tensions in the Korean peninsula, the Aquino regime is allowing the Philippines to be dragged by the US government to its military conflicts against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)," said the CPP.
"The Filipino peoples denounce the Balikatan 2013 military exercises and demand the immediate pull-out of all American troops currently stationed in the Philippines, including the 700-strong Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) of the US Pacific Command permanently based in Zamboanga," added the CPP.
"The CPP denounces the US military and government for deceiving the Filipino people about the real intention of the so-called joint military exercises which are being portrayed by the US as serving humanitarian assistance and disaster preparedness," said the CPP. "For the past several years, the US has been using humanitarian and disaster operations in order to surreptitiously carry out combat and intelligence operations and setup their spy and communications network and infrastructure."
"The so-called joint military exercises are nothing but preparations and muscle-flexing of the US in order to put the Philippine military under its command and make use of the Philippines as its outpost in the possibility of launching a war of aggression anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region," said the CPP.
"The Filipino people clamor for an independent foreign policy demand that the Philippines not be dragged in any of the war being launched by the US against another sovereign country," added the CPP.
"The Asia-Pacific military strategy of the US is to keep tens of thousands of its combat troops forward stationed in the Asia-Pacific in its naval carriers, military bases and outposts from South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia to Australia," said the CPP.
"The aim is to impose its imperialist hegemony, put pressure on China and other countries to toe US economic policy and make threats of war and aggression against any country who refuse to uphold US imperialist trade and investment policy directives."
The US Pacific Command currently maintains a force of more than 80,000 armed troops in the Asia-Pacific including 30,000 troops stationed in US bases in South Korea and 50,000 American troops in Japan.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Rencontre : Répression d'Etat, Résistance Ouvrière !
Dans l’état actuel de la crise du capitalisme, le chômage a atteint un niveau record, de plus en plus de personne se rendent compte de la casse terrible à laquelle ce système nous mène. Face à la dégradation de la situation, les travailleurs et travailleuses luttent pour défendre leurs droits.
Cela commence à faire peur au gouvernement qui, soucieux de défendre la propriété privé des moyens de production, emploie la force pour maintenir ce système où la majeur partie travaille pour les profits de la minorité. Nul doute que la répression va entrainer un renforcement de l’Etat policier et s’amplifier contre les ouvriers en lutte, dans les quartiers populaires, les universités, etc.
Cette évolution est l’illustration de la montée d’une nouvelle forme de fascisme.
Face à ces attaques, la volonté de lutte des Goodyear qui ont combattu les forces de répression montre bien qu’à la force on ne peut qu’opposer la force.
Nous devons forger nos outils pour mener la lutte de classe jusqu’au bout :
- Une organisation syndicale qui défendra nos intérêts de classe contre l’Etat bourgeois, le patronat et les conciliateurs.
- Une direction politique qui se bat pour un changement radical de société.
- Elargir et amplifier sur tout le territoire la défense de nos droits légitimes.
- Etablir un rapport de force qui fasse reculer l’Etat capitaliste et son appareil répressif.
Rencontre publique
Samedi 20 avril 2013
à 15h45 au CICP
21 ter rue voltaire - métro rue des Boulets (ligne 9) - Paris
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
CPN-Maoist-aligned National Youth People's Volunteers marching against the election to be held under the Chief Justice led government
 |
| Members of CPN-Maoist-aligned National Youth People's Volunteers in Itahari, Nepal. |
AWTW NS-26 March 2013: Finance and farmers: Hunger games
This AWTWNS news packet for the week of 25 March 2013
contains one article. It may be reproduced or used in any way, in whole or in
part, as long as it is credited.
Introduction
The pernicious impact of rising food prices across the globe has exacerbated the global food crisis. The effects of climate change on crop harvests, the impact of agro-industry on farming practices and food security, the pressure of growing demand for food from the rising middle classes of Asia, the competing claims of the bio-fuels industry and the tensions created by the ongoing corporate land-grab in Africa are of course integral to understanding how the food crisis was engendered. But the price shock cannot be explained solely on the basis of these structural factors that shape the supply and demand for food.
Apart from the underlying structural factors there is clearly something more going on. This something else is the role of finance – the banks that have been betting recklessly on food prices.
Finance has seized commodity markets and overwhelmed their functioning. Apart from transforming the structure of food production globally, this reign of finance has also fundamentally altered the manner in which food markets work. Before telling that story, however, a brief discussion of the commodity futures market would be useful in clarifying the link between the role of finance and the food price hike.
The futures market
A futures contract is a tradable agreement to buy or sell a specified quantity of a commodity at a future date. Futures in agricultural markets have a long history and in theory play a crucial role as a hedge against unexpected price movements. For the seller of the commodity like a wheat farmer, the agreement to supply the good at a future date (a short position) at the price locked in by the future contract is a hedge against any fall in the price. For the buyer – say a flour producer – on the other hand, the contract to acquire the good in the future (a long position) insures against any spike in price. For the advocates of futures markets, a well functioning market, besides helping to offset risks of price volatility, is also regarded as helpful to the process of price discovery – allowing buyers and sellers in the actual physical market to gauge the price prevailing in the markets, and make sensible decisions about production and delivery. As futures prices rise above spot [immediate delivery] prices, the argument goes, producers will start expanding production, while buyers will try to stock up in the present so that spot prices rise and future prices tend to fall. Futures price and actual spot price would, in this scenario, tend to converge and so the prices prevailing in the futures market serve as useful benchmark for pricing actual trades in the spot market, particularly in the context of globalized integrated markets.
Though futures may have been devised to facilitate actual physical trade, the prospect of returns brought in speculators who did not need any actual hedge [in this case, investment] in the actual physical commodity. The speculator, in the ideal world of mainstream economic theory, takes on the brunt of price risk while providing more funds and liquidity to the market, for instance by buying wheat futures from a farmer when flour mills and other buyers are not in the market, in the hope of making a profit from price movements. Unlike the hedge contracts of the actual physical traders, which are one time transactions where they either deliver the good or sell the future before the delivery date, speculators trade these futures many times. The commodity futures market is a peculiar hybrid of these two types of traders and its evolution in the recent decades reflects the process by which finance has come to dominate this global market.
Financialization of commodities
In the postwar period, the focus of policies to stabilize agricultural and other commodity markets shifted to price support and public buffer stock policies. After the crisis of the seventies, however, futures markets were promoted as the favoured strategy for stabilizing commodity prices. In 1974 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was set up to regulate commodity futures and option markets in the United States and for a while the markets remained tranquil.
In 1991 Goldman Sachs came up with an innovation that would transform the market. The bankers devised the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index, a weighted average of the future prices (based on contracts of between one to three months) of a basket of twenty-five commodities including agricultural goods, livestock, energy and metals. The wizardry of financial engineering transformed a mathematical construct into an engine of easy earnings! Other banks, like J.P. Morgan in 1994 set up similar index funds. The GSCI index was followed by the Dow Jones –AIG index (now Dow Jones U.B.S index). Index speculation began to pick up.
The rise of the index speculator
Investors were caught up in the search for new avenues of profit in the wake of the dot com bust were drawn into a favoured way investing called index swaps. They were touted by the dealers as an "asset class" in their own right, and had the added "virtue" of performing well when equities [stocks] went into a downturn and when inflationary pressures picked up. They were offered to clients, including pension funds and mutual funds, with the promise of "equity-like" returns and risk diversification, and the swap-dealers grew richer on the proceeds. With the collapse of the housing bubble, and the unravelling of the architecture of fancy and arcane financial products that was built around the housing bubble, commodities became even more attractive market. Over the counter commodity derivatives trade, which had been growing steadily through the decade surged sharply in 2007-8 before plunging as financial markets imploded. Speculation in commodity derivatives rose against the backdrop of a falling dollar.
The big impetus, however, came from the growth of index speculation. In 2008, 85-90 percent of index speculators traded through swaps and four swap dealers – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J. P. Morgan and Barclays – controlled about 70 percent of commodity index swap positions. Exchange traded funds are another way for investors to bet on commodity indices. The added wrinkle is that investors can buy and sell shares in the fund. The growing dominance of index speculators and the concentration of the market for commodity derivatives in the hands of a few big banks has transformed the commodity futures market completely.
The long shot
Futures markets were supposed to provide a hedge against risk and facilitate price discovery. In an ideal world "traditional" speculators would enter into both long positions and short positions, so that the pressure on prices would in the normal course swing either way. In stark contrast the index speculator enters only into "long positions" and quite often intend to maintain these positions for a long time. The index fund managers keeps accumulating "long positions" since they continue to buy passively, regardless of price. To avoid having to actually make a delivery the trader simultaneously buys a more distant future and sells the expiring future, a double transaction called the calendar spread. Physical delivery becomes irrelevant as the transactions can continually rolled over in this way. A vibrant market for these calendar spreads has emerged. In effect the index funds are hoarding commodity futures and pushing futures prices upwards, independent of any future market.
In fact, index speculators bought more commodities futures than physical traders and traditional speculators put together in the period from 2003 to 2008. In the hybrid futures market index speculators effectively cornered the market through this unrelenting stream of buy orders. This corner has emerged quite independently of any stockpiling of actual commodities or any real physical orders!
The absence of physical hoarding has been one argument raised against those who blame speculation for the steep rise in food prices. The argument is that rising future prices will raise current prices only if suppliers start hoarding food and artificially restricting food supply. The fact of the matter is that speculative pressure can inflate future prices quite independently of physical hoarding. Index speculators, who entered the fray in search of returns, to hedge against inflation or the falling dollar or simply to diversify their portfolio, have added a whole new dimension to demand. Funds invested in commodity index replication strategies grew from $13 billion in 2003 to $317 billion in July 2008 and are still rising. At the same time the prices of the 25 commodities that made up the index rose by an average of over 200 percent.
A paradoxical and perverse impact of the surge into index funds was that commodities, whose prices earlier moved in unrelated ways, began after 2004 (even before the collapse of the housing bubble) to move together and exhibit spillover effects as investors would trade in and out of the entire group of commodities constituting the index at the same time. Energy commodities dominate these indices while food commodities are a much smaller share. Future prices of the non-energy commodities in the index began to display stronger correlations with that of energy commodities after 2004. This suggests that grain and agricultural prices could in a sense be swayed by the tide of energy prices, without regard to the actual situation in their own markets. The illusory alchemy by which a number was turned into profits, it turns out, had far-reaching consequences beyond the calculations of the financial engineers who devised them.
The food bubble
There has been some debate on the mechanisms by which rising future prices pull up spot prices and whether speculation played a role in the food price rise. There is empirical evidence suggesting that spot prices are led by future prices. In grain and energy markets in particular the common practice is to price the spot transaction at the future price plus or minus a spread (to take into account local factors like transportation costs). With futures being promoted for their role in price discovery, it is not surprising that the future prices are regarded as a good signal of market conditions. It does make intuitive sense that as exchanges for agricultural commodities develop and become more globally integrated, dispersed agricultural markets will rely more and more on centralized future markets as benchmarks for spot transactions, more so with the spread of electronic trading and the larger volume of information flows. With the promotion of futures trading exchange trading, a dealer of grain in exchange, say in India, would turn to the global trends in the futures markets as a reference pricing transactions.
The dominance of speculative finance however distorts the relation between future prices and market conditions. This is not to say that the fundamentals of supply and demand are irrelevant to soaring prices. Recurrent and persistent drought conditions in different parts of the globe, dwindling investments in agriculture, the switch of vast swathes of land to bio-fuels, for instance, have all without doubt played a role. But the dominance of speculators in the market has swamped the food market. The commodity futures market has undergone a sea change in the past decade. In 1998, in the US, only 7 percent of all long open interests – outstanding future buy orders that are unfulfilled at a particular date – were held by index speculators and another 16 percent by other speculators. The bulk (77 percent) of these contracts was held by physical hedgers [investors] who were actually involved in buying and selling commodities. By 2008 the share of index speculators had grown to 41 percent, the traditional speculators to 28 percent while physical hedgers had fallen to about 31 percent. About two-thirds of futures positions are held by speculators today. In these ten years the positions of speculators rose by about 1,300 percent while that of commercial hedgers (actually trading in the commodity) rose by only 90 percent. There is thus a huge source of speculative demand that is unrelated to actual demand and supply of these commodities.
The problem is not simply that the futures market is inherently pernicious. It is the logic of finance that has taken hold of the commodity markets that has made the market a hunting ground for finance in its continual search for new prey. The futures markets have become compromised, both as a mechanism of price discovery and means of insurance against price volatility, by the frenetic forays of finance to exploit every speculative opportunity.
Futures trading has been promoted in India as enabling small farmers to benefit from high prices and sidestep the rapacious middlemen-traders, and become a player in a more globally integrated market. With the growing dominance of global investors in these futures markets, the middlemen – who would tend to enter the futures market primarily as hedgers (even while fleecing small farmers who supply the grain) – would get swamped by global investors seeking speculative returns. The spike in prices as a result of this speculation, however, need not translate into higher earnings for small farmers, who could continue to sell to the middlemen at low distress sale prices. Nor do they lead to higher levels of investment in agriculture in the absence of necessary infrastructural and related support to small farmers. While global agro-industrial capital has been engaging in a renewed land grab, in particular in Africa, for global institutional investors it is more profitable and easier to play with commodity index funds rather than in direct investment in agricultural production.
The tragedy is that this gamble on food and commodity prices is depriving more than a billion hungry and impoverished families of access to food and grain.
Finance and farmers:
Hunger games
25 March 2013. A
World to Win News Service. As enormous amounts of investment are sifting into
agricultural-related activities, instead of solving the food problem there are
dire consequences for the world's people and the planet. The capitalist system,
which can only work through the obscene accumulation of wealth in the hands of
a tiny handful of people, is the main reason why getting adequate nourishment
continues to be such a problem for so much of the world's population.
In AWTWNS 130225 we
examined the consequences of the land grab going on in Africa and elsewhere. To
look at the question of food from another angle, we are reprinting the
following excerpts from an article that appeared in the West Bengal-based journal Sanhati (no. 11, 1 December 2012).
Here Ramaa Vasudevan gives her views on one of the new factors keeping "a
billion families hungry and impoverished", the role played by financial
speculation and the food commodity markets. The full article, including the
footnotes, is at www.sanhati.org.
Introduction
The pernicious impact of rising food prices across the globe has exacerbated the global food crisis. The effects of climate change on crop harvests, the impact of agro-industry on farming practices and food security, the pressure of growing demand for food from the rising middle classes of Asia, the competing claims of the bio-fuels industry and the tensions created by the ongoing corporate land-grab in Africa are of course integral to understanding how the food crisis was engendered. But the price shock cannot be explained solely on the basis of these structural factors that shape the supply and demand for food.
Apart from the underlying structural factors there is clearly something more going on. This something else is the role of finance – the banks that have been betting recklessly on food prices.
Finance has seized commodity markets and overwhelmed their functioning. Apart from transforming the structure of food production globally, this reign of finance has also fundamentally altered the manner in which food markets work. Before telling that story, however, a brief discussion of the commodity futures market would be useful in clarifying the link between the role of finance and the food price hike.
The futures market
A futures contract is a tradable agreement to buy or sell a specified quantity of a commodity at a future date. Futures in agricultural markets have a long history and in theory play a crucial role as a hedge against unexpected price movements. For the seller of the commodity like a wheat farmer, the agreement to supply the good at a future date (a short position) at the price locked in by the future contract is a hedge against any fall in the price. For the buyer – say a flour producer – on the other hand, the contract to acquire the good in the future (a long position) insures against any spike in price. For the advocates of futures markets, a well functioning market, besides helping to offset risks of price volatility, is also regarded as helpful to the process of price discovery – allowing buyers and sellers in the actual physical market to gauge the price prevailing in the markets, and make sensible decisions about production and delivery. As futures prices rise above spot [immediate delivery] prices, the argument goes, producers will start expanding production, while buyers will try to stock up in the present so that spot prices rise and future prices tend to fall. Futures price and actual spot price would, in this scenario, tend to converge and so the prices prevailing in the futures market serve as useful benchmark for pricing actual trades in the spot market, particularly in the context of globalized integrated markets.
Though futures may have been devised to facilitate actual physical trade, the prospect of returns brought in speculators who did not need any actual hedge [in this case, investment] in the actual physical commodity. The speculator, in the ideal world of mainstream economic theory, takes on the brunt of price risk while providing more funds and liquidity to the market, for instance by buying wheat futures from a farmer when flour mills and other buyers are not in the market, in the hope of making a profit from price movements. Unlike the hedge contracts of the actual physical traders, which are one time transactions where they either deliver the good or sell the future before the delivery date, speculators trade these futures many times. The commodity futures market is a peculiar hybrid of these two types of traders and its evolution in the recent decades reflects the process by which finance has come to dominate this global market.
Financialization of commodities
In the postwar period, the focus of policies to stabilize agricultural and other commodity markets shifted to price support and public buffer stock policies. After the crisis of the seventies, however, futures markets were promoted as the favoured strategy for stabilizing commodity prices. In 1974 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was set up to regulate commodity futures and option markets in the United States and for a while the markets remained tranquil.
In 1991 Goldman Sachs came up with an innovation that would transform the market. The bankers devised the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index, a weighted average of the future prices (based on contracts of between one to three months) of a basket of twenty-five commodities including agricultural goods, livestock, energy and metals. The wizardry of financial engineering transformed a mathematical construct into an engine of easy earnings! Other banks, like J.P. Morgan in 1994 set up similar index funds. The GSCI index was followed by the Dow Jones –AIG index (now Dow Jones U.B.S index). Index speculation began to pick up.
The rise of the index speculator
Investors were caught up in the search for new avenues of profit in the wake of the dot com bust were drawn into a favoured way investing called index swaps. They were touted by the dealers as an "asset class" in their own right, and had the added "virtue" of performing well when equities [stocks] went into a downturn and when inflationary pressures picked up. They were offered to clients, including pension funds and mutual funds, with the promise of "equity-like" returns and risk diversification, and the swap-dealers grew richer on the proceeds. With the collapse of the housing bubble, and the unravelling of the architecture of fancy and arcane financial products that was built around the housing bubble, commodities became even more attractive market. Over the counter commodity derivatives trade, which had been growing steadily through the decade surged sharply in 2007-8 before plunging as financial markets imploded. Speculation in commodity derivatives rose against the backdrop of a falling dollar.
The big impetus, however, came from the growth of index speculation. In 2008, 85-90 percent of index speculators traded through swaps and four swap dealers – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J. P. Morgan and Barclays – controlled about 70 percent of commodity index swap positions. Exchange traded funds are another way for investors to bet on commodity indices. The added wrinkle is that investors can buy and sell shares in the fund. The growing dominance of index speculators and the concentration of the market for commodity derivatives in the hands of a few big banks has transformed the commodity futures market completely.
The long shot
Futures markets were supposed to provide a hedge against risk and facilitate price discovery. In an ideal world "traditional" speculators would enter into both long positions and short positions, so that the pressure on prices would in the normal course swing either way. In stark contrast the index speculator enters only into "long positions" and quite often intend to maintain these positions for a long time. The index fund managers keeps accumulating "long positions" since they continue to buy passively, regardless of price. To avoid having to actually make a delivery the trader simultaneously buys a more distant future and sells the expiring future, a double transaction called the calendar spread. Physical delivery becomes irrelevant as the transactions can continually rolled over in this way. A vibrant market for these calendar spreads has emerged. In effect the index funds are hoarding commodity futures and pushing futures prices upwards, independent of any future market.
In fact, index speculators bought more commodities futures than physical traders and traditional speculators put together in the period from 2003 to 2008. In the hybrid futures market index speculators effectively cornered the market through this unrelenting stream of buy orders. This corner has emerged quite independently of any stockpiling of actual commodities or any real physical orders!
The absence of physical hoarding has been one argument raised against those who blame speculation for the steep rise in food prices. The argument is that rising future prices will raise current prices only if suppliers start hoarding food and artificially restricting food supply. The fact of the matter is that speculative pressure can inflate future prices quite independently of physical hoarding. Index speculators, who entered the fray in search of returns, to hedge against inflation or the falling dollar or simply to diversify their portfolio, have added a whole new dimension to demand. Funds invested in commodity index replication strategies grew from $13 billion in 2003 to $317 billion in July 2008 and are still rising. At the same time the prices of the 25 commodities that made up the index rose by an average of over 200 percent.
A paradoxical and perverse impact of the surge into index funds was that commodities, whose prices earlier moved in unrelated ways, began after 2004 (even before the collapse of the housing bubble) to move together and exhibit spillover effects as investors would trade in and out of the entire group of commodities constituting the index at the same time. Energy commodities dominate these indices while food commodities are a much smaller share. Future prices of the non-energy commodities in the index began to display stronger correlations with that of energy commodities after 2004. This suggests that grain and agricultural prices could in a sense be swayed by the tide of energy prices, without regard to the actual situation in their own markets. The illusory alchemy by which a number was turned into profits, it turns out, had far-reaching consequences beyond the calculations of the financial engineers who devised them.
The food bubble
There has been some debate on the mechanisms by which rising future prices pull up spot prices and whether speculation played a role in the food price rise. There is empirical evidence suggesting that spot prices are led by future prices. In grain and energy markets in particular the common practice is to price the spot transaction at the future price plus or minus a spread (to take into account local factors like transportation costs). With futures being promoted for their role in price discovery, it is not surprising that the future prices are regarded as a good signal of market conditions. It does make intuitive sense that as exchanges for agricultural commodities develop and become more globally integrated, dispersed agricultural markets will rely more and more on centralized future markets as benchmarks for spot transactions, more so with the spread of electronic trading and the larger volume of information flows. With the promotion of futures trading exchange trading, a dealer of grain in exchange, say in India, would turn to the global trends in the futures markets as a reference pricing transactions.
The dominance of speculative finance however distorts the relation between future prices and market conditions. This is not to say that the fundamentals of supply and demand are irrelevant to soaring prices. Recurrent and persistent drought conditions in different parts of the globe, dwindling investments in agriculture, the switch of vast swathes of land to bio-fuels, for instance, have all without doubt played a role. But the dominance of speculators in the market has swamped the food market. The commodity futures market has undergone a sea change in the past decade. In 1998, in the US, only 7 percent of all long open interests – outstanding future buy orders that are unfulfilled at a particular date – were held by index speculators and another 16 percent by other speculators. The bulk (77 percent) of these contracts was held by physical hedgers [investors] who were actually involved in buying and selling commodities. By 2008 the share of index speculators had grown to 41 percent, the traditional speculators to 28 percent while physical hedgers had fallen to about 31 percent. About two-thirds of futures positions are held by speculators today. In these ten years the positions of speculators rose by about 1,300 percent while that of commercial hedgers (actually trading in the commodity) rose by only 90 percent. There is thus a huge source of speculative demand that is unrelated to actual demand and supply of these commodities.
The problem is not simply that the futures market is inherently pernicious. It is the logic of finance that has taken hold of the commodity markets that has made the market a hunting ground for finance in its continual search for new prey. The futures markets have become compromised, both as a mechanism of price discovery and means of insurance against price volatility, by the frenetic forays of finance to exploit every speculative opportunity.
Futures trading has been promoted in India as enabling small farmers to benefit from high prices and sidestep the rapacious middlemen-traders, and become a player in a more globally integrated market. With the growing dominance of global investors in these futures markets, the middlemen – who would tend to enter the futures market primarily as hedgers (even while fleecing small farmers who supply the grain) – would get swamped by global investors seeking speculative returns. The spike in prices as a result of this speculation, however, need not translate into higher earnings for small farmers, who could continue to sell to the middlemen at low distress sale prices. Nor do they lead to higher levels of investment in agriculture in the absence of necessary infrastructural and related support to small farmers. While global agro-industrial capital has been engaging in a renewed land grab, in particular in Africa, for global institutional investors it is more profitable and easier to play with commodity index funds rather than in direct investment in agricultural production.
The tragedy is that this gamble on food and commodity prices is depriving more than a billion hungry and impoverished families of access to food and grain.
Monday, April 1, 2013
MAY FIRST 2013: Comrades, oppose bourgeois society! Resist capitalist exploitation! Unite with your fellow comrades and fight for people’s power! - By RCP Canada
MAY FIRST 2013
Comrades, oppose bourgeois society! Resist capitalist exploitation! Unite with your fellow comrades and fight for people’s power!
Comrades, oppose bourgeois society! Resist capitalist exploitation! Unite with your fellow comrades and fight for people’s power!
An economic storm is brewing in Canada. The
strength of domestic financial and real estate markets will inevitably
crumble with the intensification of the global crisis. In the wake of
the U.S., Canada will intensify the terrible battle that all the
bourgeoisies are waging to lower labor costs. The capitalists command of
proletarians: “Workers, take your pay and give your boss what he
wants!” And so, capitalists are demanding their governments: “Make the
workers obey! Unleash your police against them, corrupt their leaders
and break their strikes —our future depends on it!”
Who can still believe that the federal or provincial government
is siding with us workers and that we just have to elect a “good one”
in order for things to change? Throughout the country, the unemployed
are affected by the cuts imposed by the Harper government and are facing
harassment from EI investigators. In Quebec, the supposedly
“progressive” PQ government has just imposed additional constraints and
cuts on welfare recipients and plans to increase university tuition
fees. Meanwhile, the Charbonneau Commission has exposed systematic,
massive corruption involving construction contractors, engineering firms
and politicians. In Toronto, shelters for the homeless are full while
city and provincial authorities are washing their hands. Meanwhile, the police are accentuating the repression against those who dare to protest and take part in demonstrations. The governments at all levels are giving them new legislative and regulatory weapons to increase repression, such the new regulations against the wearing of “masks,” with penalties up to 10 years prison!
Meanwhile, the fortune accumulated by the 1,426 billionaires of the world has increased by 800 billion USD over the last year —an increase of 14.8%! Totalling 5.4 trillion dollars, this global wealth from a small number of individuals ranks third after that of the governments of United States and China.
The future of the capitalists depends on our subjection. Our future as workers depends instead on our insubordination. That is, our disobedience to the bourgeois order and consequently, our determination to fight for collective ownership of the means of production, for socialism and workers’ power.
We need to take inspiration from what our comrades are doing in Dhaka factories in Bangladesh, in the streets of Athens and in the mines of Spain; we need to resist like our fellow workers in Europe and China, like the poor peasants and popular masses in India, and in the streets of Montreal.
The Revolutionary Communist Party calls on all workers, unemployed, retired, youth and students to make May 1st, International Workers Day, a moment when the bourgeoisie will fear our class is in the process of choosing insubordination; that we are rising and reclaiming the essence of our legitimate struggles —including those powerful ones that will radically change the face of Canada.
Let’s protest by the thousands in all major cities across the country. Let’s brandish our red flags everywhere and throughout this whole day of struggle. Prevent the police from seizing and destroying the red flags and class struggle banners. Let’s forge a new fighting spirit made of unity and militancy. Shoulder to shoulder, let’s answer the various calls that will arise by May 1st. Workers, students or pensioners, let’s make May First a powerful day of revolutionary action!
• In Montreal: Rally the red contingent from the PCR-RCP Canada in the May Day demonstration organized by the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles (CLAC-Montréal)! Gathering at exactly 6pm at Place Jacques-Cartier (in front of City Hall).
• In Ottawa: Take part in large numbers in the event organized by the PCR-RCP Canada at the Babylon Night Club, 317 Bank Street. Doors open at 9 pm.
• In Toronto: Join the May First demonstration initiated by the PCR-RCP Canada (details soon)!
* * *
We want serious changes. The whole society must change.
With its facade of democracy and its rampant inequality, corruption,
wasting of resources, exploitation of workers who are discarded after
use; with the consumerism that handcuffs us to goods instead of freeing
us from our needs; with all these diseases arising from the competition
between private corporations, this system is not ours. We are the ones
who work so that it can survive, but we do not support it and are
fighting for a change. This necessary struggle for change will
necessarily be a revolution.From one country to another, pillars of the bourgeois society are proving increasingly fragile. The capitalist economy is facing one crisis after another. Austerity measures that are implemented to solve one crisis only create others. This is a testimony of the cycle of decay of capitalism in which we are entered. Recessions are lasting five years or even more, as in Greece. Unemployment is affecting a quarter of the working class, as in Spain. Youth are literally sidelined, as is North Africa and many European countries. The real wages of workers are reduced by the fifth or quarter, as in the United States and Britain. Workers’ pensions are attacked as in Canada, Italy and elsewhere. For the majority, labor income is literally stolen by the interest on credit, taxes, and various fees imposed on public services. What a worker gets, the bankers, the capitalists and their governments are quickly retaking it.
Corporations make the law and the governments implement it, but neither the one nor the other have the interest of the masses at heart. Bourgeois politics, with its degenerating parties, its endemic corruption, its ridiculous leaders and sterile debates, is largely seen as a circus going around in circles in a deserted tent. Bourgeois democracy is only a shadow of itself. There is nothing to gain from fighting for it. The people’s democracy we need will only happen by fighting against the rotten bourgeois system. It will be a hundred times better than the doubtful legacy the bourgeois system leaved us. We are demanding global and full-scale changes: that’s why we are revolutionaries!
* * *
Solidarity against police repression in Montreal: We will not submit to the municipal by-law P-6With this public declaration, we assert our opposition to by-law P-6: we will continue to demonstrate without negotiating our demo routes with police, and we will systematically challenge all tickets that arise from this by-law.
The past year has been marked by an escalation of police repression against political protesters in Montreal. As our political movements take to the streets in larger numbers, with more frequency and militancy, we are attacked more brutally and arbitrarily than ever, with batons, pepper spray, tear gas, sound grenades, and rubber bullets. Our friends are mass arrested, humiliated, kettled, and in many cases badly injured.
Within this context of police escalation against political protesters, the Montreal police (SPVM) are attempting to normalize another practice: arresting demonstrators before they can even begin to demonstrate, or even gather to demonstrate. Three times within one week - March 15 on the International Day Against Police Brutality; March 18 before a planned night demo; and March 22 on the anniversary of student strike protests - the Montreal police stopped demonstrations before they could begin by surrounding protesters with riot police and arresting them en masse, in the hundreds. One clear goal of the police tactic is to scare demonstrators, and potential demonstrators, from taking to the streets
The SPVM can’t be bothered to make criminal charges. Instead, they use municipal by-law “P-6” which makes demonstrations that don’t provide an advance itinerary to the police to be a contravention of the by-law. A municipal by-law offense is not a criminal charge, it’s the equivalent of a parking ticket. However, the P-6 offence was raised to more than $500 ($637 with fees) for a first offence last May in the context of the student strike movement.
The P-6 by-law prohibits “obstructing the movement, pace or presence” of citizens who are also using public space at the same time. How can we take the streets without obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic? Moreover, the P-6 by-law demands not only communicating demo routes in advance, but also the approval of our routes by the police. This is the equivalent of giving the police the arbitrary power to refuse our routes if they judge them to be too disruptive, and also to prevent marching to locations that have been chosen as political “targets.”
We refuse to negotiate with the police our freedom of expression, our right to demonstrate and our right to disrupt the existing social, political and economic order that we consider profoundly unjust and illegitimate.
Part of the response is in our hands, as part of grassroots, autonomous community organizations. There is no obligation to provide the police our demo routes, and the Montreal police in particular, who abuse their authority with impunity, don’t deserve any accountability from us. Instead, we’re accountable to each other, and the social movements we come from. We always retain the right to protest spontaneously, and with demo routes that reflects our needs and demands.
In the face of police repression, let’s take back the streets with our weapons of solidarity and support.
This statement is endorsed by:
The Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC)
No One Is Illegal-Montreal
Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) at Concordia
Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR-RCP Canada)
Press Release from REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATIC FRONT (RDF) - India
Press Release from REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRATIC FRONT (RDF)
Condemn the cold blooded killing of ten Maoist cadres in a joint covert operation by the police and TPC in Chatra, Jharkhand!
Release the twenty persons abducted by TPC immediately and without harm!
Constitute a judicial enquiry into the killing and punish the perpetrators!
29 March 2013
The media has reported the claim made by the Jharkhand police that ten CPI (Maoist) cadres were gunned down by the Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) during a “fierce gun battle” that started in the afternoon of 27 March 2013 and continued till the next morning in the Lakarbandha forests in Chatra district of Jharkhand, which falls under Kunda police station limits. Around 25 other Maoists have been abducted after the battle as per media reports. Lalesh Yadav alias Prashant, Secretary of the Bihar Jharkhand North Chhattisgarh Special Area Committee of CPI (Maoist), Jaikumar Yadav, Platoon Commander, Dharmendra Yadav alias Biru, Sub-Zonal Commander of Chatra Palamu, and Prafulla Yadav, Sub-Zonal Commander of Koleswari are reported to be among the dead.
According to the police version of the incident, it had received information about an ongoing gun battle between the CPI (Maoist) cadres and TPC members in the evening of 27 March. Around a hundred armed men of CoBRA battalion of the CRPF and District Armed Police left at 10pm on the same evening, who reached the site of the encounter at 3am in the morning. The paramilitary and police forces engaged in a gunfight from 3 to 4 am in which they fired 80 to 90 rounds of bullets. By daybreak, the police claims, the belligerent CPI(Maoist) and TPC cadres retreated from the spot. During a search of the area, the police is said to have recovered ten bodies of CPI (Maoist) members, nine in uniform, along with seven weapons, cane bombs, empty cartridges and Maoist literature from the encounter site. Though the police have said that two TPC members died as well, the bodies of the supposedly dead TPC members have not been recovered by the police.
CPI(Maoist), however, has refuted the police story. A spokesperson of the party in his telephonic statement to the PUCL Jharkhand told that there was no encounter or gun battle as claimed by the police. According to him, it was a joint operation planned and executed by the central paramilitary forces and state police in collusion with the TPC. The state armed forces and the TPC used covert operatives to mix poison in the food served to the Maoists. When they were in an unconscious state after consuming the poisoned food, their arms were first taken away and then were selectively killed by the TPC and the armed forces. The rest of the 20 to 25 Maoists were later abducted and taken away by the TPC men. The spokesperson also confirmed that the four leaders named by the media are among the dead. The spokesperson has also confirmed that there were 200 armed personnel in the operation from TPC and paramilitary and Jharkhand police.
The facts and circumstances of the incident, the modus operandi of the state’s armed forces and the history of the notorious TPC in Jharkhand indeed point strongly towards a covert operation, a staged ‘encounter’ and cold blooded murder of the ten Maoists. It is difficult to believe that ten members in a large team of 30 odd armed Maoists fell in a gun battle while none of the TPC goons or the armed forces engaging them survived without any casualty. The police itself have admitted that none of their troops sustained even injuries. The claim by the police that two TPC members were killed and one was injured in the ‘encounter’ is highly doubtful, given the fact that the police did not recover the bodies of the TPC members. In spite of the contrary claims by the government, the collusion between the Jharkhand police, the paramilitary forces and the TPC in conducting operations against the Maoists is well known. Therefore, it can be assumed that the state’s armed forces had full knowledge of the Maoist team’s presence in Lakarbandha forest, and that they directed and participated in this dastardly covert operation from the beginning to the end. TPC as a mercenary vigilante gang propped up by the government was one of the instruments in executing this extrajudicial killing.
This is not the first time that covert and deceptive means of poisoning was used by the Indian state to eliminate Maoist leaders and cadres by planting moles and informers. Three Central Committee members of the erstwhile CPI(ML) Peoples’ War – Shyam, Mahesh and Murli – were first poisoned by using an informer in Bangalore, abducted and flown to Andhra Pradesh, tortured and later shot dead in December 1999. Then the police floated the story that the three were killed in an ‘encounter’ in Karimnagar district of AP. A villager residing near the so-called encounter site was also picked up and killed by the police and shown as a squad member to bolster their Goebblesian lie. The demand by the civil rights organisations and democratic forces for a judicial enquiry into the incident was declined by the government. The guilty police officers and their political bosses are yet to be brought to book for this fascist murder, and indeed enjoy full state protection.
Similarly, Chhattisgarh police claimed to have killed 14 members of a Maoist squad in Bijapur district on 18 March 2008 after a ‘fierce encounter’, even though not a single policeman was even injured as a result. The villagers who were eyewitnesses later told the media and civil rights organisations that the police story of the ‘encounter’ was to cover up the fact that the squad members were poisoned by using spies and killed. The government and the police have never acknowledged this covert and cold blooded mass murder, and rather hailed it as “the biggest ever counter-insurgency operation in the state”. These are just two of the innumerable instances of fascist murder by the state’s forces against the revolutionary movement using spies, coverts and vigilante gangs, and then boasting of shooting down revolutionary leaders, cadres, sympathisers and civilians in ‘heroic’ battles. The latest killing of ten Maoists in Chatra district of Jharkhand points to a similar cold blooded murder for which the Indian state and its armed forces are equally responsible as its foot-soldiers – the TPC. This covert operation smacks of the fascist former CRPF boss K Vijay Kumar’s involvement, who is presently the advisor to the governor of Jharkhand and virtually running the home ministry in the state which is presently under President’s rule.
TPC was formed by renegades of the CPI(Maoist) after deserting the party in 2001. The Indian state, its armed forces and intelligence agencies were instrumental in its formation and continued presence in Chatra, Latehar and Ranchi districts. TPC has established a reign of terror in these districts, indulging in killings, kidnapping, extortion and torture – all under the patronage of the state and its armed forces. It has particularly targeted the revolutionary organisations and their mass base during the twelve years of its existence. This is because TPC considers the revolutionary masses and their movement as the biggest impediment for its expansion, which is coterminous with the safeguarding the political power of the reactionary ruling classes comprising of the feudal forces and the comprador big bourgeoisie.
TPC is only one of the vigilante gangs run by the ruling classes. In Jharkhand itself, the Indian state has promoted other fascist execution squads which go by the names of Jharkhand Prastuti Committee, Shanti Sena. There is hardly any difference between TPC of Jharkhand and the Salwa Judum of Chhattisgarh, Ranvir Sena of Bihar, Sendra and Narsi Cobra of Andhra Pradesh, Shanti Sena of Odisha, Ikhwan of Kashmir and Sulfa of Asom. They are all sponsored, nurtured and used by the Indian state to crush the democratic and revolutionary movements of the oppressed peoples and nationalities. Only, TPC claims itself to be a ‘Maoist’ group, and the state too conveniently portrays them as such!
RDF demands that a judicial enquiry be immediately conducted to enquire into the killing of ten Maoists in Chatra, Jharkhand, so that the facts of the incident can be brought to light and those guilty of this cold blooded murder be brought to book. We also believe that the lives of the twenty people kidnapped by the TPC are in danger. Whether they are presently in the custody of the TPC or the police, all measures must be taken to save their lives. All of them must be produced before a magistrate immediately. In addition, TPC must be disbanded without delay, and the Indian state must stop its patronization of vigilante gangs in the country, including TPC in Jharkhand.
Varavara Rao, President
Rajkishore, General Secretary
Condemn the cold blooded killing of ten Maoist cadres in a joint covert operation by the police and TPC in Chatra, Jharkhand!
Release the twenty persons abducted by TPC immediately and without harm!
Constitute a judicial enquiry into the killing and punish the perpetrators!
29 March 2013
The media has reported the claim made by the Jharkhand police that ten CPI (Maoist) cadres were gunned down by the Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) during a “fierce gun battle” that started in the afternoon of 27 March 2013 and continued till the next morning in the Lakarbandha forests in Chatra district of Jharkhand, which falls under Kunda police station limits. Around 25 other Maoists have been abducted after the battle as per media reports. Lalesh Yadav alias Prashant, Secretary of the Bihar Jharkhand North Chhattisgarh Special Area Committee of CPI (Maoist), Jaikumar Yadav, Platoon Commander, Dharmendra Yadav alias Biru, Sub-Zonal Commander of Chatra Palamu, and Prafulla Yadav, Sub-Zonal Commander of Koleswari are reported to be among the dead.
According to the police version of the incident, it had received information about an ongoing gun battle between the CPI (Maoist) cadres and TPC members in the evening of 27 March. Around a hundred armed men of CoBRA battalion of the CRPF and District Armed Police left at 10pm on the same evening, who reached the site of the encounter at 3am in the morning. The paramilitary and police forces engaged in a gunfight from 3 to 4 am in which they fired 80 to 90 rounds of bullets. By daybreak, the police claims, the belligerent CPI(Maoist) and TPC cadres retreated from the spot. During a search of the area, the police is said to have recovered ten bodies of CPI (Maoist) members, nine in uniform, along with seven weapons, cane bombs, empty cartridges and Maoist literature from the encounter site. Though the police have said that two TPC members died as well, the bodies of the supposedly dead TPC members have not been recovered by the police.
CPI(Maoist), however, has refuted the police story. A spokesperson of the party in his telephonic statement to the PUCL Jharkhand told that there was no encounter or gun battle as claimed by the police. According to him, it was a joint operation planned and executed by the central paramilitary forces and state police in collusion with the TPC. The state armed forces and the TPC used covert operatives to mix poison in the food served to the Maoists. When they were in an unconscious state after consuming the poisoned food, their arms were first taken away and then were selectively killed by the TPC and the armed forces. The rest of the 20 to 25 Maoists were later abducted and taken away by the TPC men. The spokesperson also confirmed that the four leaders named by the media are among the dead. The spokesperson has also confirmed that there were 200 armed personnel in the operation from TPC and paramilitary and Jharkhand police.
The facts and circumstances of the incident, the modus operandi of the state’s armed forces and the history of the notorious TPC in Jharkhand indeed point strongly towards a covert operation, a staged ‘encounter’ and cold blooded murder of the ten Maoists. It is difficult to believe that ten members in a large team of 30 odd armed Maoists fell in a gun battle while none of the TPC goons or the armed forces engaging them survived without any casualty. The police itself have admitted that none of their troops sustained even injuries. The claim by the police that two TPC members were killed and one was injured in the ‘encounter’ is highly doubtful, given the fact that the police did not recover the bodies of the TPC members. In spite of the contrary claims by the government, the collusion between the Jharkhand police, the paramilitary forces and the TPC in conducting operations against the Maoists is well known. Therefore, it can be assumed that the state’s armed forces had full knowledge of the Maoist team’s presence in Lakarbandha forest, and that they directed and participated in this dastardly covert operation from the beginning to the end. TPC as a mercenary vigilante gang propped up by the government was one of the instruments in executing this extrajudicial killing.
This is not the first time that covert and deceptive means of poisoning was used by the Indian state to eliminate Maoist leaders and cadres by planting moles and informers. Three Central Committee members of the erstwhile CPI(ML) Peoples’ War – Shyam, Mahesh and Murli – were first poisoned by using an informer in Bangalore, abducted and flown to Andhra Pradesh, tortured and later shot dead in December 1999. Then the police floated the story that the three were killed in an ‘encounter’ in Karimnagar district of AP. A villager residing near the so-called encounter site was also picked up and killed by the police and shown as a squad member to bolster their Goebblesian lie. The demand by the civil rights organisations and democratic forces for a judicial enquiry into the incident was declined by the government. The guilty police officers and their political bosses are yet to be brought to book for this fascist murder, and indeed enjoy full state protection.
Similarly, Chhattisgarh police claimed to have killed 14 members of a Maoist squad in Bijapur district on 18 March 2008 after a ‘fierce encounter’, even though not a single policeman was even injured as a result. The villagers who were eyewitnesses later told the media and civil rights organisations that the police story of the ‘encounter’ was to cover up the fact that the squad members were poisoned by using spies and killed. The government and the police have never acknowledged this covert and cold blooded mass murder, and rather hailed it as “the biggest ever counter-insurgency operation in the state”. These are just two of the innumerable instances of fascist murder by the state’s forces against the revolutionary movement using spies, coverts and vigilante gangs, and then boasting of shooting down revolutionary leaders, cadres, sympathisers and civilians in ‘heroic’ battles. The latest killing of ten Maoists in Chatra district of Jharkhand points to a similar cold blooded murder for which the Indian state and its armed forces are equally responsible as its foot-soldiers – the TPC. This covert operation smacks of the fascist former CRPF boss K Vijay Kumar’s involvement, who is presently the advisor to the governor of Jharkhand and virtually running the home ministry in the state which is presently under President’s rule.
TPC was formed by renegades of the CPI(Maoist) after deserting the party in 2001. The Indian state, its armed forces and intelligence agencies were instrumental in its formation and continued presence in Chatra, Latehar and Ranchi districts. TPC has established a reign of terror in these districts, indulging in killings, kidnapping, extortion and torture – all under the patronage of the state and its armed forces. It has particularly targeted the revolutionary organisations and their mass base during the twelve years of its existence. This is because TPC considers the revolutionary masses and their movement as the biggest impediment for its expansion, which is coterminous with the safeguarding the political power of the reactionary ruling classes comprising of the feudal forces and the comprador big bourgeoisie.
TPC is only one of the vigilante gangs run by the ruling classes. In Jharkhand itself, the Indian state has promoted other fascist execution squads which go by the names of Jharkhand Prastuti Committee, Shanti Sena. There is hardly any difference between TPC of Jharkhand and the Salwa Judum of Chhattisgarh, Ranvir Sena of Bihar, Sendra and Narsi Cobra of Andhra Pradesh, Shanti Sena of Odisha, Ikhwan of Kashmir and Sulfa of Asom. They are all sponsored, nurtured and used by the Indian state to crush the democratic and revolutionary movements of the oppressed peoples and nationalities. Only, TPC claims itself to be a ‘Maoist’ group, and the state too conveniently portrays them as such!
RDF demands that a judicial enquiry be immediately conducted to enquire into the killing of ten Maoists in Chatra, Jharkhand, so that the facts of the incident can be brought to light and those guilty of this cold blooded murder be brought to book. We also believe that the lives of the twenty people kidnapped by the TPC are in danger. Whether they are presently in the custody of the TPC or the police, all measures must be taken to save their lives. All of them must be produced before a magistrate immediately. In addition, TPC must be disbanded without delay, and the Indian state must stop its patronization of vigilante gangs in the country, including TPC in Jharkhand.
Varavara Rao, President
Rajkishore, General Secretary
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)