NEPAL:

THE MAOISTS CASH IN:

It seems that a career as great and glorious leader of the struggling people can pay off quite handsomely. Here's a recent article from the LibCom board about the perks of government that the Maoists of Nepal expect to share in very shortly, after winning up to 1/3rd of the seats in recent elections to the Constituent Assembly. Nothing like rolling in the people's dough. Not that this is all bad-really ! Corruption is actually the only barrier to murderous tyranny once a Leninist party gains power-short of an external threat. The more corrupt the new ruling class is the less likely it is to engage in fantastical acts of murder and tyranny to bring its ideological dream to fruition. Every dollar/rupee spent on the creature comforts of the Maoist leadership may save dozens of innocent lives. One of the quite amusing facts quoted in the following article is the actions of the Bolsheviks in 1919, during a time of famine in Russia, in ordering 70 more Rolls Royces in order that the "leaders of the proletariat" could be chauffeured around in style. Love it !

As an aside some may wonder why Molly bothers to berate the increasingly rare Maoists, long after their implosion in popularity and long after they have ceased to be any sort of contender for power in any country in the world outside of Nepal. Why bother ? All that I can say in apology is that I am merely following the dictates of many millions of years of evolution here. Way back when, long before our ancestors and those of the chimpanzees diverged, there was an action that conferred great fitness on its actors and one whose tendency we have therefore inherited. If you see a sick vicious poisonous snake, or you manage to beat it down, don't stop there. Keep on beating it until it is dead 8 times over. Don't let it live to bite again. Poisonous vipers, smallpox viruses, plague germs, Maoists...all are things the world can very well do without. Make sure they don't rise to bite again.

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Nepal; a nice little earner for the Maoist ruling class - in Lenin's footsteps
Nepal's Maoist Party has won around 220 seats in the recent Constituent Assembly (CA) election, about one-third of the total. Though the largest party, they don't have an overall majority; they have stated their wish to lead a coalition government.

But as the result became clear Maoist leader Prachanda told journalists “I will be declared the acting President of this country very soon…which will be followed by occupying the post of the all powerful President of New Nepal…this is the peoples’ mandate…no force on earth can disobey this mandate”. (Telegraphnepal.com 26/4/2008); the man who has long talked of his wish to 'abolish royal autocracy' now speaks of his "all powerful" role.

Recent news reports reveal the wages and expenses of the newly elected members of the Assembly. While they spend an indefinite period drawing up a new national Constitution they will be paid - by Nepali standards - enormous wages;each CA member will receive net salaries of 23 thousand one hundred rupees per month [£176/$345/Eur224]. On top of this they'll get expenses for drinking water, electricity, telephone, rent, newspapers & "miscellaneous". These expense allowances bring the total income of a CA member to 45 thousand 98 rupees [£345/$674/Eur437] each per month.

The CA President (probably Maoist Party boss Prachanda) will have a monthly salary/expenses income of 60,600 rupees [£463/$905/Eur588] - plus a petrol allowance of 24,500 rupees [£187/$366/Eur237]. The vice president will scrape by on a few thousand less.

So the ruling class, led by the Maoist 'proletarian vanguard', feather their nest. These salaries must be compared with the Nepali average wage of just $200 a year [£102/Eur129]; Nepal is the poorest country in Asia. Around 10% of the population takes 50% of the wealth, the bottom 40% takes 10%. 85% of Nepalese people don’t have access to health care. So the monthly income of a CA politician is well over three times the annual national average wage! Jobs within the CA are already being allocated by all the various member parties to their friends and family.

In a public appearance last week Maoist leader Prachanda said, “I had the opportunity to play the role of Lenin itself in Nepal”. With his fat salary and perks he is certainly following in Bolshevik footsteps; Lenin travelled in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, as did other government officials. "Autocracy’s main enemy, Vladimir Lenin, had no reservations about inheriting the hated old regime’s automobile collection. Lenin used the Tsar’s Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost to drive around town while his colleagues divided up the rest of the collection among them. But two revolutions and a civil war had taken their toll on the cars, and in 1919 [during a time of famine and extreme hardships for the poor] the Council of People’s Commissars had to order 70 more from London." (Aeroflot site). Lenin moved into a dacha (country house) previously owned by a millionaire, while much of the other Bolshevik leadership took occupation of the luxurious Lux hotel in Petrograd,dining on preferential food rations.[1] Then and now, for those who inherit the State, its perks and luxuries are clearly irresistible and seen as just reward for their conquest and devotion to power. And so the new Nepalese republic is born - the furniture and faces at the top have been shifted around a little, and that is all.

There's another interpretation (though less likely) of the reference to Lenin - as a coded pointer towards a historical precedent; that Prachanda's long-term plan is for the Constituent Assembly in Nepal to share the same fate as it did in Russia. When the Bolsheviks were ready to seize sole power for themselves, a revolutionary guard (led by Anatoli Zhelezniakov[2], an anarchist sailor[3]) dismissed the CA, dominated as it was by indecisive bourgeois moderate politicians. The Bolsheviks saw its dissolution as a decisive step in the progress from a bourgeois to a proletarian revolution (though the fact that, unlike Nepal's Maoists, the Bolsheviks did not emerge victorious from the CA elections may have influenced their choices too). The Maoists might, ideally, like to achieve a neat Leninist orthodoxy by replicating this state of affairs, but they know the necessities of 'realpolitik'. External geo-political pressures and economic realities mean that - for the moment, at least - they need to play the democratic game in order to attract foreign investment, so as to try and build up a sound politico-economic base. A strong and stable State power is always a class relation based on efficient exploitation and its rewards.
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NOTES
[1] "Ante Ciliga described what he called the state capitalists' 'morals on the morrow of the October revolution' as follows:
From the first days of the October revolution, the Communist [sic] leaders had shown a great lack of shame in these matters. Having occupied the building, they furnished it with the best furniture from shops that had been nationalized. From the same source their wives had procured themselves fur coats, each taking two or three at a time. All the rest was in keeping. (Ciliga, 1979, p. 121)
Far from the emergence of the privileged consumption enjoyed by the state capitalist class coinciding with Stalin's rise to power, some of the state capitalists of Stalin's day looked back with nostalgia to the comfortable life they had experienced during the early years of Bolshevik rule:
During the winter of 1930 fuel ran short and we had to do without hot water for a few days. The wife of a high official who lived at the Party House was full of indignation. `What a disaster to have this man Kirov! True, Zinoviev is guilty of 'fractionism' but in his day central heating always functioned properly and we were never short of hot water. Even in 1920, when they had to stop the factories in Leningrad for lack of coal, we could always have our hot baths with the greatest comfort.' (Ibid., pp. 121-2)
Another illustration that Stalin was not personally responsible for establishing state capitalist privilege in Russia is that during the period 1923-5, when Stalin had only an old car at his disposal 'Kamenev had already appropriated a magnificent Rolls' (Medvedev - 1979, p. 33)."
( State Capitalism - the wages system under new management, Buick & Crump.)
[2] On Zhelezniakov, see; http://libcom.org/library/zhelezniakov-biography-avrich-1917
[3] The Ukrainian anarchist "Makhno defended that action and explained that Zhelezniakov, a Black Sea sailor and delegate to Kronstadt, had played one of the most active roles in 1917. Makhno merely expressed regret that the fiery sailor, who enjoyed great prestige among his colleagues, had not simultaneously seen fit to dismiss Lenin and his "Soviet of People's Commissars" which "would have been historically vital and would have helped unmask the stranglers of the revolution in good time." "http://libcom.org/library/makhno-bibliographical-afterword-skirda

Jumping ahead of myself:
In our recent trip to Europe we visited Vienna and Venice as well as Prague. Prague impressed me the most, but there were interesting things in the other cities as well. One of these was the Cafe Central in Vienna.
Vienna has long been known as the "home of the coffeehouse". According to legend the love affair of Vienna and coffee dates back to the siege of Vienna by the Turks in the 1680s. When the Polish army came to the rescue the Turks reportedly fled leaving a great number of sacks of coffee behind. The Viennese used these and became quite wired on the bean.
Whether this is an exact description of the rise of the Viennese coffeehouse is debatable, but there's little doubt that the institution dates back many centuries in Vienna, and the Viennese coffeehouses are the very model for the coffeehouses across the world.
The Cafe Central in the Palais Ferstl is perhaps the most famous of the lot. This cafe has been a Viennese institution since 1860, though its location has changed several times. There is some dispute about when the present location opened for business. Some say 1975. Others say the 1980s. In any case the present location is "high bourgeois" to say the least. From the plush armchairs, to the life size portraits of various Hapsburgs on the wall, to the little glass of water along with the coffee, to the delicate Viennese pastries served as an imitation of food, to the piano player whose repertoire is part classical and part movie scores and to the high gilt ceilings the place pretty well reeks of decadence.
In different locations in the past the Cafe Central was the meeting place of the usual motley crew of artists and bourgeois intellectuals and revolutionaries. It was frequented by the likes of Goethe, Freud, Beethoven, Mahler and even the trinity of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Even Adolf Hitler used to drop by to try and sell his paintings before his two rejections to enter the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts (though his usual haunt was a coffehouse closer to the school that rejected him). The ironies of history ! I have several photos of said school. If Hitler had been just "slightly" better as an artist or if the standards of the Academy had been just "slightly" lower what would our world have been like today. The entrance to the Academy is very much nondescript, and a casual passerby would never know that the history of a good chunk of the 20th century was determined behind those doors by a coterie of stuffy academic dons.
Anyhow, the prices in the Central Cafe were high but nowhere near as outrageous as I expected. I sunk myself in Cafe Mozart and Irish Coffee. The cafe has a little rep in travel books because of its association with Leon Trotsky who lived in Vienna from 1907 to 1914. At that time the coffeehouses provided not just coffee but also a mail drop, a meeting place and even a supply of pens and paper for the usual bohemian crowd. Given that rep I noticed a few entrants to the Cafe who were obvious Trotsyists. It's hard to mistake them. They have the air of innocence trying to be decadent and rebellious hovering about them that exudes across any room. From the carefully trimmed beards of the males to the very ! proper feminist attire of the females (not too loud and aggressive mind you, but very much a fashion statement) the crew is unmistakable. Cute, I must admit and probably much better people overall than some of my own insane anarchist comrades. Hard to dislike but basically very boring. (note to self- get a decent haircut and beard trim soon).
I wonder what these tourists would think if they found out that the bullshit-central of good old Lev was actually somewhere else- the guides usually don't mention the shifting of location. I even wonder whether the contrast between the high bourgeois atmosphere and the purported history strikes them at all. It certainly struck me. What came to my mind was not favourable to the average lefty plotter. It looked like a place where the "outs" of the declasse intellectuals would come to admire the works of the ruling class of their day and plot to become a new and "improved" ruling class. That sort of thing is usually beyond most Trotskyists- it's a "thought crime" to even slightly entertain the idea that this is the motivation of some "revolutionaries".
Ah well, be that as it may, Trotsky and Lenin were reported to have played chess in the confines of the Cafe Central. Obviously Trotsky won as Lenin had more than a few nasty words to say about good old Lev, like the following from 1912,
"I advise you to reply to Trotsky through the post: "To Trotsky (Vienna). We shall not reply to disruptive and slanderous letters". Trotsky's dirty campaign against 'Pravda' is one mass of lies and slanders....this intriguer and liquidator goes on lying, right and left....It would be still better to reply in this way to Trotsky through the post: "To Trotsky (Vienna). You are wasting your time sending us disruptive and slanderous letters. They will not be replied to."
Oh yes they were. This is a little example of high words substituting for the phrase "fuck-off" long before the internet could even be conceived in the imagination.
Molly