Comrades in India

The Faridabad Majdoor Samichar now have a website with translated pieces of their paper, an explanation of their project, and links other groups in the same milieu such as Gurgaon Workers News, and groups I had never heard of such as Subcontinental Upheaval and China Study Group. The video project Faridabad Workers News looks impressive and promising. FMS in brief is a "workers library" without books in one of the main industrial suburbs of Delhi. The FMS has produced a workers newsletter distributed at major points of transit in the industrial district. The content is derived from the conversations in distribution and at the FMS itself, making the paper something of a proletarian community voice of working conditions, resistance, and experiences. This article, written by Shankur who I met at FMS a few years back and who was a solid and committed participant in these struggles, is the best description of FMS, and is unparalleled compared to Loren Goldner’s schewed and somewhat distorted description in Revolutionary termites of Faridabad or whatever it was.

 

E-readers: tools for revolutionaries!

I use Mobipocket now for reading articles and books online. E-readers, I learned, give you the ability to search entire texts (or your library), to highlight/make notes/etc in a form where you have a series of links you can then pull up the section of the text from, and copy and paste it all. It streamlines writing articles beautifully and may full replace my paper books in the future!

FdCA on mass organization: it’s nature and our role

I recently re-read the FdCA’s position paper on the Mass Organization (which it should be said is only one tiny piece of their interlocking theoretical and strategic pieces).  Taken on its own the pieces main strengths are its critiques[i], it’s weaknesses I would say are its proposals for the role of revolutionaries and mass organizations. I have to preface this by saying that I am sure I’m getting some of this wrong translating from the Italian to American context, that this article is fairly schematic and connected to other pieces I don’t explore, and my reply is likewise schematic and a rough rough draft a serious response.