communism

"If Ray Alexander-Simons landed in Cape Town today, on the 7th of November 2016 and started organising workers five days later, which indeed she did when she landed in Cape Town in 1929, she would find a vastly different scenario," he said."

"the late activist would have her work cut for her, as she would find 3.11 million workers representing 25.3% of the workforce organised in trade unions, a shop steward movement which I believe has 300 000 men and women in almost every industry"

"Mrs Alexander-Simons's daughter, Ms Tanya Barben, said: "It is appropriate that the function takes place on the 7th of November for it is the date on which teenager Rachel Esther Alexandrowich (Ray Alexander) arrived in Cape Town from Latvia and it is also the anniversary of the October Revolution [which took place in Petrograd, Russia, from the 7th to the 8th of November, 1917]. She was undaunted when facing the bosses, the bargaining councils or the police forces. She sacrificed a lot, including her own family to fight for a democratic South Africa"

"She would also take a fresh look at the structure and role of the trade unions in South Africa, especially the methods of organisation and the scourge of corruption. And the duplication of trade union organisations competing against each other for members and revenue. For example, there are five unions servicing the transport industry and a large number of unions servicing the security industry - the largest security service in the world, which employs 450 000 people"

"She will have legislation on Employment Equity, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act which incidentally updates the one Ray and her fellow unionists fought for in the late 1920s and 30s in the last century"

"She will have in her toolbox the most vanguard industrial labour relations, processes and procedures, rights and obligations in the Labour Relations Act"

"In Japan, the Communist Party has been particularly diligent in mounting a decade-long campaign against the Unification Church, promoting hate speech, weaving webs of falsehoods, and exciting politicians, media and public opinion against “the cult.”"

"A larger effort along these line was launched by our group in March 1952 from a new platform suggestively named Society for Defence of Freedom in Asia (SDFA). ... It "placed anti-communism squarely on the map of political India"... It was perhaps the most painful experience of our lives to see the Prime Minister of a democratic country openly patronising the Chinese lobby led by the Communist Party of India, and angrily denouncing tried and tested patriots of a long standing in India's freedom movement. The communist press in India and abroad came out against the SDFA since its very inception... The Russian and Chinese embassies started sending memoranda to our External Affairs Ministry protesting that their countries were being systematically "blackened" by the SDFA... H.D. Malaviya, editor of the official Congress fortnightly AICC Economic Review, had started heaping abuses on us under the pretext of reviewing some of our publications...Prem Bhatia of The Statesman, another spokesman for Soviet Russia, Red China and Krishna Menon in those days, had also displayed malice towards our work in the columns of that important daily. ... In February 1955, I received an invitation to attend the forthcoming Conference of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League in Formosa. I sent the entire correspondence - including a very warm letter written to me personally by President Chiang Kai-shek - to our External Affairs Ministry, saying that I would accept the invitation only under advice from them...Meanwhile, I had applied for a passport ...But when I approached the Bureau after more than two months to find out the status of my case, they told me confidentially that my case was receiving attention from the Prime Minister himself."

"There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party."

"The specific kind of anti-communism that took shape in these years was partly based on value judgements: the widespread belief in the United States that communism was simply a bad system, or morally repugnant even when effective. But it was also based on a number of assertions about the nature of Soviet-led international communism. There was a widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe. It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide, and that whenever communists were present, even in small numbers, they probably had secret plans to overthrow the government. And it was considered gospel that anywhere communists were acting, they were doing so on the orders of the Soviet Union, part of a monolithic global conspiracy to destroy the West. Most of this was simply untrue. Much of the rest was greatly exaggerated."

"While all these untoward events were taking place, amid a ceaseless chatter of well-meant platitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, a new and more terrible cause of quarrel than the imperialism of czars and kaisers became apparent in Europe. The Civil War in Russia ended in the absolute victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet armies which advanced to subjugate Poland were indeed repulsed in the Battle of Warsaw, but Germany and Italy nearly succumbed to Communist propaganda and designs. Hungary actually fell for a while under the control of the Communist dictator, Bela Kun. Although Marshal Foch wisely observed that “Bolshevism had never crossed the frontiers of victory,” the foundations of European civilisation trembled in the early post-war years. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. While Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German officer class in Munich by arousing soldiers and workers to fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid the blame of Germany’s defeat, another adventurer, Benito Mussolini, provided Italy with a new theme of government which, while it claimed to save the Italian people from Communism, raised himself to dictatorial power. As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction."

"The [Axis] occupation of Europe could now be reconfigured. Invasion of the Soviet Union was represented as a 'crusade for Europe'; the entire continent could unite in a 'European United Front against Bolshevism'. Just as the invasion of the European empires in Asia would allow the Japanese to recast their own imperialism in terms of East Asian 'Co-Prosperity', so now the Germans could portray the European Grossraumwirtschaft (literally, 'great space economy') as a German-led bulwark against Bolshevism. Collaborators in occupied Europe latched on to this new theme of propaganda with alacrity. On October 30, 1941, Marshal Pétain, the doddering figurehead of the Vichy regime, vowed that France would flourish 'within the framework of the constructive activity of a New European order'. Similar sentiments were expressed in Belgium, Finland and elsewhere. The Nazis' European rhetoric struck a chord with all those conservatives for whom German dominance seemed a lesser evil than Soviet Communism. Only as the war in the East turned from blitzkrieg to attrition, and the need supervened to wring every last penny out of the occupied West, did the emptiness of this rhetoric gradually manifest itself."

"Every political debate these days contains a lot about economic policies. So much so that sometimes I think people get a little tired of hearing about them. Naturally there is a cry that Government must put people before economics. Who could disagree? That is the very reason why we in our Party have constantly fought Marxism and Communism. Fought Marxism because of —its compulsory society —its nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. —its attempt to snuff out individual conscience. —the absence of the great voluntary societies which are so much a part of our way of life. —its denial of freedom to choose —its elevation of the values of the State above those of religion. Its denial of the right to educate children outside the state system. —its extinction of private property because property rights support human rights."

"The irony is rich. In a country that officially espouses atheism, the Party has become the most zealous proselytizer of all. Its gospel is nationalism, its saints are revolutionaries, and its miracles are economic statistics. The faithful are expected to genuflect not to gods, but to growth charts and five-year plans. Xi [Jinping] is not just the architect, he is the icon. His personal involvement in religious affairs is no longer symbolic; it’s structural. The message is clear: religion must serve socialism, not the other way around. The Party is the new clergy, and Xi its infallible pontiff."

"A century after the Party was founded by a young Mao Zedong and other students of Marxism-Leninism, it aspires to achieve the ultimate dream of authoritarian politics: an encompassing awareness of everything in its realm; the ability to prevent threats even before they are fully realized, a force of anticipation and control powered by new technology; and economic influence that allows it to rewrite international rules to its liking."

"The United States and other democratic nations do so much business with China that there is a tendency to turn a blind eye towards the Communist Party’s abysmal human rights record. The Chinese Communist Party’s strategy of liberalizing its national economy while harshly rejecting democracy has become the model for modern dictatorships. Hu Jintao and his party control all media in China, between 250,000 and 300,000 Chinese citizens, including political dissidents, are incarcerated in “reeducation-through-labor” camps and the conviction rate in normal criminal trials is 99.7 percent. Less than 5 percent of trials include witnesses. China executes more people than all other nations combined most of those executions are for nonviolent crimes. Amnesty International has reported that school children have been bused to public executions as field trips."

"The Chinese Communist Party turns every walk of life into a battlefield."

"As China grew richer and stronger, we believed, the Chinese Communist Party would liberalize to meet the rising democratic aspirations of its people. This was a bold, quintessentially American idea, born of our innate optimism and by the experience of our triumph over Soviet Communism. Unfortunately, it turned out to be very naïve."

"The CCP’s presence on overseas campuses subverts academic freedom, while undermining the integrity and security of the international research enterprise by enticing foreign researchers to engage in deceptive and illegal activities for the PRC’s economic, scientific, and military gains."

"Driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology and imperialist nostalgia, the CCP silences dissent and restricts the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, to include forced population control, arbitrary detention, censorship, forced labor, violations of religious freedom, and pervasive media and internet censorship. The CCP continues to commit abuses against Uyghurs, Christians, and other religious and ethnic minorities. It maintains an iron grip on Tibet while continuing to assert control and silence foreign critics in Hong Kong. The CCP manipulates international organizations, democratically elected governments, and companies to mask its human rights abuses at home and abroad."

"The CCP remains alert at all times to its historic mission and responsibility; it is always acutely sensitive to the political tasks that lie before it in the present transitional phase. History and politics delineate its mission. Neither permits it to relax its initiative or to share its responsibility fully with others. Both require it to devise practical working methods that ensure to it the substance of absolute control. For the present, it mouths democratic slogans and operates behind a formal fade o interparty government, considering these to correspond to the political necessities of a Marxist-Leninist revolution now in a pre-socialist stage."

"Awareness of the reprehensible and ongoing actions carried out by the CCP under Xi Jinping is crucial at a time when the regime is exporting its malign activities outside mainland China. The free world must do all it can to stop the CCP from using its economic muscle to hoodwink gullible leaders into supporting its self-interested aims, which run counter to freedom and democracy. The CCP and its rogue leaders must be held accountable for their crimes against humanity over the past 100 years."

"Xi Jinping has done his best to dismantle Deng Xiaoping’s achievements. He brought the private companies established under Deng under the control of the CCP and undermined the dynamism that used to characterize them. Rather than letting private enterprise blossom, Xi Jinping introduced his own “China Dream” that can be summed up in two words: total control. That has had disastrous consequences. / In contrast to Deng, Xi Jinping is a true believer in Communism. Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin are his idols. At the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the CCP he was dressed like Mao while the rest of the audience was wearing business suits."

"Westerners are never far away from [CCP ideologist Qiu Jini’s] argument [about national security, which Qiu defines as the protection of the absolute control on the country by the CCP, its Central Committee, and its General Secretary], but they are seen like a threat, a continuous conspiracy to impose on the Chinese something different from Marxism and from the control of everything by the Party, the Central Committee, and Xi Jinping. They should read more texts like Qiu’s, which would help them understand that more economic development does not mean for China less Marxism and less totalitarian control by the Party."

"The party has led the country from the era of Chairman Mao to become the economic powerhouse is it today, but along the way has tolerated no opposition and quashed dissent."

"Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning the well of our higher education institutions for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and American national security. If we don’t educate ourselves, if we’re not honest about what’s taking place, we’ll get schooled by Beijing."

"Beginning in the late 1970s, China overcame centuries of stagnation precisely because Mao’s successors understood that they had to decentralise the People’s Republic, giving economic if not political power to the people. If western commentators are right, Xi Jinping wants to go in the opposite direction. If the Chinese are lucky, he will turn out to be an enlightened absolutist, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. If they are unlucky, he will be just another emperor who fondly dreamt of controlling a fifth of humanity."

"[The] Yan’an [Soviet] is [a] synonym of crushing dissent, real or invented, by torturing and killing. As [Communist Party member] Cai Qi reminded the audience at the April 28 [2024] symposium, the Yan’an Rectification Campaign was plotted by Mao, but its main organizer was Ren Bishi."

"The warrior generations to which the remilitarisations gave birth in Algeria, China, Vietnam, and what was once Yugoslavia, are growing old today. The revolutions for which they and millions of unwilling participants paid such a terrible price in blood and anguish have withered at the roots… The Chinese greybeards of the Long March have preserved the authority of the party only by conceding economic freedoms wholly at variance with Marxist doctrine."

"The irony, at least for westerners, is that Chinese communism has survived and prospered because of the very thing that Marxism was meant to wipe out – a profit-hungry private sector."

"It is more important than ever to understand the nature and power of this organisation; its strengths and weaknesses; its ability to capture the imagination of the people — and interestingly, the youth. It has refuted prognostications of its demise with its capacity for reinventing, regenerating and renewing its compact with the people, strengthened, among other things, by its ability to continue learning from history. The world is dealing not merely with a nation state but with an authoritarian party-state that foregrounds its civilisational culture — and at its helm is an organisation that is steering the country towards its own tryst with destiny. It remains to be seen whether the CPC is still on the right side of history, but the party is by no means over."

"is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it."

"We have to thank Japan, without Japan's invasion of China, we would not have been able to achieve the cooperation between the Communist Party of China, we would not have been able to develop and eventually gain power."

"The CPC’s longevity is due in large measure to its ability to sum up the lessons of history and change course quite drastically, if required."

"In the sphere of theory, destroy the roots of ultra-democracy. First, it should be pointed out that the danger of ultrademocracy lies in the fact that it damages or even completely wrecks the Party organization and weakens or even completely undermines the Party's fighting capacity, rendering the Party incapable of fulfilling its fighting tasks and thereby causing the defeat of the revolution. Next, it should be pointed out that the source of ultra-democracy consists in the petty bourgeoisie's individualistic aversion to discipline. When this characteristic is brought into the Party, it develops into ultra-democratic ideas politically and organizationally. These ideas are utterly incompatible with the fighting tasks of the proletariat."

"For the [Chinese Communist Party] it is better to have a bureaucrat who is not very bright but is fanatically loyal to the Party than a very intelligent bureaucrat who thinks independently."

"…Summing up, the CCP, through [the China Anti-Xie jiao Association (中國反協會)], tells us that the Tokyo verdict applies the same categories used against religion in China, benefits [the Chinese Communist Party's] interests, destroys an anti-communist organization, prepares a broader crackdown on religions in Japan, and may inspire other countries to do the same. We knew it all along."

"The [Chinese Communist] Party doesn’t just want to govern China; it wants to define governance itself."

"The CCP’s goal is not silence but isolation: you can say things, but you can’t organise."

"Since the 1990s, the CCP has shown a technocratic capacity to respond to the developmental stresses brought on by China’s dizzying economic rise. Today, the party has harnessed the rewards of globalization and economic development, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty. The CCP has reimagined itself as a driver of change, guiding the country’s path to wealth and fueling a sentiment of national pride."

"To counter threats to its control, the CCP has sought to further embed itself across layers of Chinese society and the economy."

"Authoritarian regimes also find a judicious use of the past a useful means of social control. In the 1990s, when the Chinese Communist Party grew concerned about the waning of communist ideology and the demands for greater democracy, which had led to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they called in Chinese history In 1994, a member of the Politburo, the central body of the Party, attended a memorial for the Yellow Emperor, a probably mythical figure from five thousand years ago who was said to be the father of all ethnic Chinese. It looked suspiciously like ancestor worship, one of the many traditional practices the Communists had condemned. The following year the authorities allowed a major conference on Confucius. Twenty years earlier under the approving eyes of Mao, Red Guards had burned the great Confucian classics and done their best to destroy the sages tomb. The Party also sponsored a major campaign for Patriotic Education, which emphasized, as the official directive put it, “the Chinese peoples patriotism and brave patriotic deeds.” The Great Wall, which had in previous decades been condemned for its cost in ordinary Chinese lives, now became the symbol of the Chinese will to survive and triumph. Very little was said about the joys of socialism, but Chinas past achievements were neatly linked to Communist Party rule: “Patriotism is a historical concept, which has different specific connotations in different stages and periods of social development. In contemporary China, patriotism is in essence identical to socialism.” In other words, being loyal to China means being loyal to the Party. Chinese history was presented as the story of the centuries-old struggle of the Chinese people to unite and to progress in the face of determined interference and oppression from outside. China's failure to get the 2000 Olympic games, the Opium Wars of the early nineteenth century, foreigners condemning the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Japanese invasion in the twentieth century were all wrapped up into one uninterrupted imperialist design to destroy the Chinese nation."

"Yet China remained a one-party dictatorship and its labour camps – the infamous laogai – continued to hold between four and six million inmates in shocking conditions. Mao’s gigantic image was still displayed in Tiananmen Square. There was no true pluralism of intellectual and political discourse at the highest official levels. Interest groups of employers were not allowed to function. Trade unions were emasculated. The importance of military power went on being promoted. Tibet languished under China’s despotism and its levels of literacy and material provision remained low; and the construction of a railway across its territory, much vaunted in Beijing as showing its wish to share the benefits of modernisation, was seen by Tibetans as a means of reinforcing central control. Great regions such as Xinjiang in the north-west of the People’s Republic were held in a suffocating grip. There the Chinese authorities feared that Islam and Uigur nationalism might breed a separatist movement. Freedom of religious expression was only patchily respected across China. Falun Gong, an indigenous faith of massive popularity, was systematically persecuted. Communist doctrines remained an obligatory ingredient in the school curriculum and a qualification for a serious public career. Marxism-Leninism was otherwise honoured only in the breach."

"The Party is always there, but you can’t always see it. And yet, citizens always know that there is a limit to what they can do that is bound by whatever the Party is deciding at a particular time. It is obviously the core institution in China at a political level. Even though there are a number of other political parties, they’re irrelevant in any genuine sense. So if you want to understand China, you need to understand the Party and its relationships with different aspects of society and the system."

"China had become the only communist state which developed a vibrant economy by giving it over to capitalism. By the beginning of the third millennium the country was already pointed in the direction of becoming the world’s largest manufacturing nation. It was its social cohesion and political durability that remained questionable. Deng was the last supreme ruler to have taken part in the Long March; his successors lacked the aureole of legitimacy as revolutionary veterans. Measures to deal with popular discontent were either crudely punitive or merely palliative. Party officials, faced with a choice between Maoist ideology and self-enrichment, invested in apartment blocks, coal-mines and computer technology. No one was able to tell how long this situation could last. No one today can tell any better."

"Rural discontent was spreading. Peasants had benefited from the dissolution of the land communes under Deng Xiaoping and traded their growing harvests for profit. But they were taxed ever more heavily. Regional and local administrators illegally dispossessed them of their fields on the edges of cities. The cranes and bulldozers were kept working twenty-four hours a day in the great cities as the massive economic boom continued. Where was it going to end? There was no equivalent in the history of world communism. Ideas of ‘market socialism’ – for example, in the USSR in the 1920s, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in the 1970s – had never proposed a system with the capitalist sector outgrowing the parts of the economy owned by the state. Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards asserted that they were developing a ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’. The red-dyed gauze no longer occluded reality. The communist order was retained only as a means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social components were blown to the winds. Concepts of Mao Zedong Thought were abandoned except insofar as they promoted the goals of national identity, centralised administration and superpower status. An extraordinary hybrid was created."

"The Chinese Communist Party’s drive to revive public faith in its history and values goes well beyond textbooks to include film, television, museum exhibitions — and even ice cream wrappers."

"The CCP is aware of the myriad challenges Beijing faces, but it believes its top-down system is capable of handling today’s complex environment. The party trusts that it can marshal the resources necessary to eradicate poverty, redress inequality, and drive innovation, as well as respond to major global trends: deglobalization, climate change, technological disruption, and shifts in the international balance of power."

"Communism was to be China’s weapon for modernization, according to the party’s propaganda. It would make the country rich and strong. But Mao’s agenda went further than the creation of a modern, wealthy country. He wanted to transform Chinese society and people’s ways of thinking. It was “old China” that was to blame for the country’s weakness, Mao thought, more than even British, Japanese, or American imperialists. He liked to compare traditional, Confucian forms of thinking to women with bound feet, hobbling along while being disdained by others. His “new China,” on the other hand, should be youthful, progressive, and militant. Those who stood in the way were “pests” to be exterminated; landlords, priests, and capitalists were holding China back on purpose, in order to serve their own interests. They had to go, as did all those forces that blocked the new society the Communists would create. For Mao this was a millennial struggle. It was China’s last chance to redeem itself and retake its rightful position in the world."

"China is not a monarchy or a declared dictatorship. But it is ruled with dictatorial zeal by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."