Gynocide: Recognising the 20th Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre of Fourteen Women, Killed on 6 December 1989

[memorial image with names of women is from here]

"We have been asked by many people to accept that women are making progress, because one sees our presence in these places where we weren't before. And those of us who are berated for being radicals have been saying: 

'That is not the way we measure progress. We count the number of rapes. We count the women who are being battered. We keep track of the children who are being raped by their fathers. We count the dead. And when those numbers start to change in a way that is meaningful, we will then talk to you about whether or not we can measure progress.'"--Andrea Dworkin [this quote is from:]

MASS MURDER IN MONTRÉAL -- The Sexual Politics of Killing Women, in Life and Death.

I remember the day very well. It was a horrible thing to learn about; the details unfolded and I can recall specifically when the misogynist assassin's statement was released, and the terror of knowing that now feminists and women who are perceived as such will not just be mistreated, misunderstood, maligned, and viciously degraded by corporate pimps. Now men will kill women "more efficiently", not just one by one privately, but in groups in social spaces. I knew this was, in no uncertain terms, a political act of misogynistic terrorism. And I remember being furious that the press kept focusing on the mass murderer, on his life, as if there were secrets in his past that could explain this.

What more of an explanation is there than the fact that in North American in 1989, as before and ever since, woman-hating is enacted by men violently and systematically against the minds and bodies of women, with systems of white male supremacist power firmly in place to ensure such men don't stop. I remember being shaken by the virulence of the killer's woman-hating--so undisguised, so utterly blatant, and so terribly lethal.
Surely now, I thought twenty years ago, we--the many citizens and the press and other media of the West--cannot deny that gynocide (or as many women say, femicide) is a fiction. Surely now it is plainly clear to all that this is much more than an idea in many men's minds, that it isn't just privatised and happening to one woman at a time.

What I didn't quite imagine--only because I didn't want to believe that men would remain so grotesquely callous--is that twenty years later there would be men, individually and in groups, who celebrate the murderer as a hero for men. Knowing this, and everything else that I know that men do to women to control them and to harm them, means that nothing is off limits in the misogynist imagination, and that as long as State power is on men's side, as long as there are male supremacist States, there can be no meaningful progress, no significant movement toward safety and dignity for girls and women.

So my hope and my support for a revolution led by women grows stronger every day, as I know nothing short of radical change will do. And this shift must include the removal not just of all who harm women misogynistically, but also the removal of those men, each and every one of them members of the dominant gender class, who would consider a killer of eleven women going to an engineering school a hero for men. If one's humanity is so void, so bankrupt, then let these beings disappear from the Earth, for the good of all.

If you don't yet know the horrific story, just below is a link to the powerful telling by Lee Lakeman of Vancouver Rape Relief. To read her account, click on the following URL: http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/dec6/leearticle.html

ALL OF WHAT FOLLOWS is a news article offering some reflection on what's happened in the last twenty years. And remembrances of that awful day. It is from here.

'Progress and regress' in women's rights since Montreal Massacre: Prof.

Friday, December 4th, 2009 | 1:00 pm

Canwest News Service

Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of the day Marc Lepine walked into Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique and, in the guise of fighting feminism, killed 14 women in the deadliest shooting in Canadian history.

For many Canadians, who will never forget where they were when they heard the news, the day is seared into their consciousness and a rallying point in combating violence against women. But today's campuses are filled with undergraduates who were toddlers, or not yet born, when the Montreal Massacre occurred and for whom the event has little, if any, direct resonance.

"I think we have to acknowledge that Dec. 6, 1989 changed how Canadians think about violence against women," said Connie Guberman, status of women officer and women's studies professor at the University of Toronto.

"So whether one is 18-years-old and wasn't born yet, the historical reality for those of us who have been around awhile (is that) that mass murder, which is the largest in Canada's history, changed our consciousness about the issue of violence against women. Prior to 1989, those of us active in this movement had to convince people that it was a real issue."

U of T held ceremonies at all three of its campuses on Friday, she said, with the focus on fighting violence against women as well as paying tribute to the 14 lives lost.

Ecole Polytechnique will mark the sombre milestone with a ceremony that's expected to draw 1,000 people, and they're encouraging members of the community to leave flowers at a memorial bearing the names of the 14 women killed.

At Montreal's McGill University, the student society's Sexual Assault Centre is hosting a memorial on Sunday, but Daniel Redmond, a 24-year-old social work student who spearheaded a white-ribbon campaign for men against violence against women, was surprised more wasn't done to honour the 20th anniversary.

People his age or slightly younger know about Dec. 6 and its significance if they're socially aware, he says, but "it's not visceral to this age group anymore."

"I think part of it comes from an overall desire to move past it and to let it go," he said of the relatively quiet passing of the anniversary. "Too many people are not recognizing that it is still an issue."

Monique Frize had just assumed the national role of Nortel-NSERC Women in Engineering Chair at the time of the shooting, and her first duty was attending the funeral services of the victims. She remembers looking at the white caskets and the families, she said, and vowing to draw more women into the field where Lepine felt they didn't belong.

Since then, there's been "progress and regress" in women's rights, she said, but Dec. 6 taught her and many others the meaning of feminism – a lesson she believes is needed now for younger generations who are adverse to the term and being "gagged."

"People would say: 'Are you a feminist?' and I'd say no because I didn't know what it was, but I'd been a feminist all my life without knowing," said Frize, now an engineering professor at Carleton University, with a joint appointment at the University of Ottawa. "I took the massacre as violence against women in an ultimate, extreme way, but it also to me represents violence in families and homes, in the military, violence to women in general."

Recent cases have seen women and girls targeted for mass murder by men who blamed them for their problems, as Lepine did.

George Sodini opened fire on an aerobics class full of women in Pennsylvania in August, after posting online diary entries ranting about his rejection by the opposite sex.

In 2006, Charles Carl Roberts entered an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, ordered the boys to leave and shot the girls in the head, killing five of them aged seven to 13. A suicide note he left for his wife claimed he had molested two young female relatives years earlier and feared he would do so again.

The Women's Resource Centre at the University of Calgary co-ordinates a Polytechnique memorial every year, says executive director Stephanie Garrett, and the event is one of the university's biggest in terms of drawing people from the wider Calgary community.

"The people who come every single year are always the same people, of a certain generation where they were either at university at the same time as this took place, around the same age as the women that were killed, or else they were in some way related to the issue so they feel a strong need to remember once a year and reflect on what happened," she said.

They work hard to help younger students understand the context of Dec. 6 and how it relates to them now, Garrett said, and they've seen students tackling these issues in contemporary ways, hosting social networking groups and screening Polytechnique, the 2009 film dramatization of the events.

"Having not faced all of the news and understanding of it at the time, it's different for them," she said. "But we also live in a completely different world where they have far more international media and communications around the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there's a more global feel to the issues."

In a statement, Ecole Polytechnique said the courage, solidarity and accomplishments of members of the school community over the last 20 years are the best homage they can offer to the victims' memory.

"On this occasion, we would like to reaffirm our hope and faith in the future," the school said. "Time does not heal a tragedy like this one, but life is here and waiting for us to live it.

14 women died at Marc Lepine's hands on Dec. 6, 1989:

Genevieve Bergeron
Helene Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
Maryse Laganiere
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michele Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte

Canadians of different ages have different impressions of the event, but many will never forget where they were when they heard the news.

– "I was living in Moncton and I was upstairs reading and my husband called from downstairs, 'Monique, Monique, come and see this!' I went down (to watch the news) and we were both in tears, it was unbelievable. My first day on the job, instead of being in my office at the University of New Brunswick, it was at the cathedral in Montreal for the funeral. It was a hard way to start a job attracting more women into engineering."

– Monique Frize, retirement age, an engineering professor at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa who had just been appointed Nortel- NSERC Women in Engineering Chair at the time of the shooting.

– "I know exactly where I was. Dec. 6, 1989 was a Wednesday; for many years I taught the introduction to women's studies course on Wednesdays at that time and it was the last class of the term. The class ended at 9 o'clock and we all said goodbye, and by the time I got home, I had calls from students saying, 'Are you all right? I need to connect with you.' They felt that they would have been the targets if it had been on our campus, students in women's studies. They phoned me at home and they left messages at my office to say, 'I need to connect with someone. Can you believe this happened? How do we make sense of it?'"

– Connie Guberman, 54, status of women officer and professor of women's studies at the University of Toronto.

– "I'm not sure how well I understood it. All I knew is that in your gut, anytime you hear that multiple women were killed by a man who believed they shouldn't be studying what they were studying, you know that you want to do something about that. You know that those people still exist; violence takes place in different ways now."

– Stephanie Garrett, 29, executive director of the Women's Resource Centre at the University of Calgary.

– "People who are specifically fitting in my age group or the year or two around that, there does tend to be some awareness of it, despite the fact that personally, I would have been four when the massacre occurred. At each point that I've looked at it and kind of taken it in, you get that drop in your stomach. Every time, I'm just horrified and I hear his words and it just, for lack of a better word, it just shreds me."

– Daniel Redmond, 24, social work student at McGill University who's running a white-ribbon campaign for men against violence against women.

From Marx to Morales: on Eurocentrism, Marxism, and Latin American Liberation Struggles

Please let me know if there are other writings like this by Latina and Central and South American women, particularly Indigenous women. I greatly prefer herstory/history and analysis from the people who are doing the activism, especially from women of color in countries and regions that are and are not white-majority. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor indicated, generally speaking, a Latina woman is going to be smarter and wiser about most things than a U.S. white man, given life experience, political/structural location, and the lack of entitlements to not be aware of what's happening to women of color, who are, after all, the human majority. This global majority includes Black women, Asian women, and Indigenous women globally, in and beyond the Americas, across the so-called Northern and Southern hemispheres of the Earth.

On occasion, white men do occasionally have something critically insightful to say about our ecocidal ways of being and the political practices that enforce and constitute our manhood, our heterosexism, our whiteness, or our Western biases and eurocentrism. Hence my recommendations that Western white men read the work of both Derrick Jensen and fellow radical, but not a relative, Robert Jensen whose work I deeply appreciate and am happy to promote. For the record, I am not a marxist, not that there's anything wrong with that. I am a radical profeminist/pro-Indigenist. And to my knowledge, there few to no marxists who are both of those things, hence my allegiances elsewhere.

To be clear: ALL THAT FOLLOWS (including the image beginning this post) IS FROM HERE.

John Riddell is co-editor of Socialist Voice, a newsletter and content service that provides news and analysis of today’s struggles of the workers and oppressed, from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism. It is based in Canada but is international in scope. He is also the editor of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, a six-volume anthology of documents, speeches, manifestos and commentary. This article is based on his talk at the Historical Materialism conference at York University in Toronto on April 26, 2008.

Karl Marx

Over the past decade, a new rise of mass struggles in Latin America has sparked an encounter between revolutionists of that region and many of those based in the imperialist countries. In many of these struggles, as in Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales, Indigenous peoples are in the lead.

Latin American revolutionists are enriching Marxism in the field of theory as well as of action. This article offers some introductory comments indicating ways in which their ideas are linking up with and drawing attention to important but little-known aspects of Marxist thought.

Eurocentrism

A good starting point is provided by the comment often heard from Latin American revolutionists that much of Marxist theory is marked by a “Eurocentric” bias. They understand Eurocentrism as the belief that Latin American nations must replicate the evolution of Western European societies, through to the highest possible level of capitalist development, before a socialist revolution is possible. Eurocentrism is also understood to imply a stress on the primacy of industrialization for social progress and on the need to raise physical production in a fashion that appears to exclude peasant and Indigenous realities and to point toward the dissolution of Indigenous culture.[1]

Marx’s celebrated statement that “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed”[2] is sometimes cited as evidence of a Eurocentric bias in Marxism. Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, Marxist theorists of the pre-1914 period, are viewed as classic exponents of this view. Latin American writer Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa quotes Kautsky’s view that “workers can rule only where the capitalist system has achieved a high level of development”[3] — that is, not yet in Latin America.

The pioneer Marxists in Latin American before 1917 shared that perspective. But after the Russian Revolution a new current emerged, now often called “Latin American Marxism.” Argentine theorist Néstor Kohan identifies the pioneer Peruvian Communist José Carlos Mariátegui as its founder. Mariátegui, Kohen says, “opposed Eurocentric schemas and populist efforts to rally workers behind different factions of the bourgeoisie” and “set about recapturing ‘Inca communism’ as a precursor of socialist struggles.”[4]

National subjugation

José Carlos Mariátegui

Pérez Hinojosa and Kohen both take for granted that Latin American struggles today, as in Mariátegui’s time, combine both anti-imperialist and socialist components. This viewpoint links back to the analysis advanced by the Communist International in Lenin’s time of a world divided between imperialist nations and subjugated peoples.[5] Is this framework still relevant at a time when most poor countries have formal independence? The central role of anti-imperialism in recent Latin American struggles would seem to confirm the early Communist International’s analysis.

Pérez Hinojosa tells us that Mariátegui recognized the impossibility of national capitalist development in semi-colonial countries like Peru. The revolution would be “socialist from its beginnings but would go through two stages” in realizing the tasks first of bourgeois democratic and then of socialist revolution. Moreover, the Peruvian theorist held that “this socialist revolution would be marked by a junction with the historic basis of socialization: the Indigenous communities, the survivals of primitive agrarian communism.”[6]

Subsequently, says Kohen, the “brilliant team of the 1920s,” which included Julio Antonio Mella in Cuba, Farabundo Martí in El Salvador, and Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua, “was replaced … by the echo of Stalin’s mediocre schemas in the USSR,” which marked a return to a mechanical “Eurocentrist” outlook.[7]

Writing from the vantage point of Bolivia’s tradition of Indigenous insurgency, Alvaro García Linera attributes Eurocentric views in his country to Marxism as a whole, as expressed by both Stalinist and Trotskyist currents. He states that Marxism’s “ideology of industrial modernisation” and “consolidation of the national state” implied the “‘inferiority’ of the country’s predominantly peasant societies.”[8]

Cuban revolution

In Kohen’s view, the grip of “bureaucratism and dogmatism” was broken “with the rise of the Cuban revolution and the leadership of Castro and Guevara.”[9] Guevara’s views are often linked to those of Mariátegui with regard to the nature of Latin American revolution — in Guevara’s words, either “a socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution.”[10] That claim was based on convictions regarding the primacy of consciousness and leadership in revolutionary transitions that were also held by Mariátegui.

Guevara also applied this view to his analysis of the Cuban state and of Stalinized Soviet reality. Guevara inveighed against the claim of Soviet leaders of his time that rising material production would bring socialism, despite the political exclusion, suffering, and oppression imposed on the working population.[11] (See “Che Guevara’s Final Verdict on Soviet Economy,” in Socialist Voice, June 9, 2008¹.)

Marx’s views

In Kohen’s opinion, the Cuban revolution’s leading role continued in the 1970s, when it “revived the revolutionary Marxism of the 1920s (simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist) as well as Marx’s more unfamiliar works—above all his later works that study colonialism and peripheral and dependent societies. In these writings Marx overcomes the Eurocentric views of his youth.”[12]

Kohen identifies the insights of the “Late Marx” as follows:

• History does not follow an unvarying evolutionary path.
• Western Europe does not constitute a single evolutionary centre through which stages of historical development are radiated outwards to the rest of the world.
• “Subjugated peoples do not experience ‘progress’ so long as they remain under the boot of imperialism.”[13]

Latin American thought here rests on the mature Marx’s views on capitalism’s impact on colonial societies, such as Ireland. It also intersects with Marx’s late writings and research known to us primarily through Teodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road.[14] Shanin’s book can now be usefully reread as a commentary on today’s Latin American struggles.

Marx devoted much of his last decade to study of Russia and of Indigenous societies in North America. His limited writings on these questions focused on the Russian peasant commune, the mir, which then constituted the social foundation of agriculture in that country.

Russia’s peasant communes

The Russian Marxist circle led by Plekhanov, ancestor of the Bolshevik party, believed that the mir was doomed to disappear as Russia was transformed by capitalist development. We now know that Marx did not agree. In a letter to Vera Zasulich, written in 1881 but not published until 1924, he wrote that “the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.” The “historical inevitability” of the evolutionary course mapped out in Capital, he stated, is “expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe.”[15]

The preliminary drafts of Marx’s letter, included in Shanin’s book, display essential agreement with the view of the revolutionary populist current in Russia, the “People’s Will,” that the commune could coexist harmoniously with a developing socialist economy.[16]

Ethnological Notebooks

These drafts drew on Marx’s extensive studies of Indigenous societies during that period, a record of which is available in his little-known Ethnological Notebooks.[17] We find his conclusions summarized in a draft of his letter to Zasulich: “The vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies.”[18]

In her study of these notebooks, Christine Ward Gaily states that where such archaic forms persist, Marx depicts them fundamentally “as evidence of resistance to the penetration of state-associated institutions,” which he views as intrinsically oppressive.[19] The clear implication is that such archaic survivals should be defended and developed.

The Marxists of Lenin’s time were not aware of this evolution in Marx’s thinking. Thus Antonio Gramsci could write, a few weeks after the Russian October uprising, “This is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat.”[20] Yet despite their limited knowledge of Marx’s views, the revolutionary generation of Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gramsci, and Lukács reasserted Marx’s revolutionary stance in combat with the “Eurocentrist” view associated with Karl Kautsky and the pre-war Socialist International that socialist revolution must await capitalism’s fullest maturity and collapse.

Shanin generalizes from Marx’s approach to Russia in 1881 in a way that links to a second characteristic of Latin American revolution. “The purest forms of ‘scientific socialism’ … invariably proved politically impotent,” he argues. “It has been the integration of Marxism with the indigenous [i.e. home-grown] political traditions which has underlain all known cases of internally generated and politically effective revolutionary transformation of society by socialists.”[21]

Here we have a second field of correlation with the Latin American revolutionary experience, with its strong emphasis on associating the movement for socialism with the tradition of anti-colonial struggle associated with the figures of the great aboriginal leaders and of Bolívar, Martí, and Sandino. This fusion of traditions emerges as a unique strength of Latin American Marxism.

Mariátegui captured this thought in a well-known passage:

“We certainly do not wish socialism in America to be a copy and imitation. It must be a heroic creation. We must give life to an Indo-American socialism reflecting our own reality and in our own language.”[22]

Following the October revolution of 1917, Marx’s vision of the mir’s potential was realized in practice. The mir had been in decline for decades, and by 1917 half the peasants’ land was privately owned. But in the great agrarian reform of 1917-18, the peasants revived the mir and adopted it as the basic unit of peasant agriculture. During the next decade, peasant communes co-existed constructively with the beginnings of a socialist economy. By 1927, before the onset of Stalinist forced collectivization, 95% of peasant land was already communally owned.[23]

There is a double parallel here with present Latin American experience. First, the Bolsheviks’ alliance with the peasantry is relevant in Latin American countries where the working class, in the strict sense of those who sell their labour power to employers, is often a minority in broad coalitions of exploited producers. Second, survivals of primitive communism, including communal landholding, are a significant factor in Indigenous struggles across this region.

National emancipation

A third correspondence can be found in the Bolsheviks’ practice toward minority peoples of the East victimized and dispossessed by Tsarist Russian settler colonialism. Too often, discussions of the Bolsheviks’ policy on the national question stop short with Stalin and Lenin’s writings of 1913-1916, ignoring the evolution of Bolshevik policy during and after the 1917 revolution. Specifically:

• The later Bolsheviks did not limit themselves to the criteria of nationhood set out by Stalin in 1913.[24] They advocated and implemented self-determination for oppressed peoples who were not, at the time of the 1917 revolution, crystallized nations or nationalities.
• They went beyond the concept that self-determination could be expressed only through separation. Instead, they accepted the realization of self-determination through various forms of federation.
• They implemented self-determination in a fashion that was not always territorial.
• Their attitude toward the national cultures of minority peoples was not neutral. Instead, they committed substantial political and state resources to planning and encouraging the development of these cultures.[25]

On all these points, the Bolshevik experience closely matches the revolutionary policies toward Indigenous peoples now being implemented in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.

Ecology and materialism

Evo Morales

Finally, a word on ecology. The boldest governmental statements on the world’s ecological crisis are coming from Cuba, Bolivia, and other anti-imperialist governments in Latin America.[26] The influence of Indigenous struggles is felt here. Bolivian President Evo Morales points to the leading role of Indigenous peoples, “called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life.”[27]

This claim rests on an approach by many Indigenous movements to ecology that is inherently revolutionary. Most First-World ecological discussion focuses on technical and market devices, such as carbon trading, taxation, and offsets, that aim to preserve as much as possible of a capitalist economic system that is inherently destructive to the natural world. Indigenous movements, by contrast, begin with the demand for a new relationship of humankind to our natural environment, sometimes expressed in the slogan, “Liberate Mother Earth.”[28]

These movements often express their demand using an unfamiliar terminology of ancestral spiritual wisdom — but behind those words lies a worldview that can be viewed as a form of materialism.

In pre-conquest Andean society, says Peruvian Indigenous leader Rosalía Paiva, “Each was a part of all, and all were of the soil. The soil could never belong to us because we are its sons and daughters, and we belong to the soil.”[29]

Bolivian Indigenous writer Marcelo Saavedra Vargas holds that “It is capitalist society that rejects materialism. It makes war on the material world and destroys it. We, on the other hand, embrace the material world, consider ourselves part of it, and care for it.”[30]

This approach is reminiscent of Marx’s thinking, as presented by John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology. It is entirely appropriate to interpret “Liberate Mother Earth” as equivalent to “close the metabolic rift.”[31]

Hugo Chávez says that in Venezuela, 21st Century Socialism will be based not only on Marxism but also on Bolivarianism, Indigenous socialism, and Christian revolutionary traditions.[32] Latin American Marxism’s capacity to link up in this way with what Shanin calls vernacular revolutionary traditions is a sign of its vitality and promise.

I will conclude with a story told by the Peruvian Marxist and Indigenous leader Hugo Blanco. A member of his community, he tells us, conducted some Swedish tourists to a Quechua village near Cuzco. Impressed by the collectivist spirit of the Indigenous community, one of the tourists commented, “This is like communism.”

“No,” responded their guide, “Communism is like this.”[33]

---

Related Reading

• Hugo Blanco. The Fight for Indigenous Rights in the Andes Today² [pdf]
• John Riddell. COMINTERN: Revolutionary Internationalism in Lenin’s Time³ [pdf]
• John Riddell. The Russian Revolution and National Freedom⁴

---

Footnotes

[1] “Alvaro García Linera, “Indianismo and Marxism” (translated by Richard Fidler), in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal⁵.
David Bedford, “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress,” in Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (1994), 102-103.
Hugo Blanco Galdos, letter to the author, December 17, 2007.

[2] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 1, p. 504.

[3] Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa, “La heterodoxia marxista de Mariátegui.” Rebelión, October 30, 2007⁶..

[4] Néstor Kohan, “El marxismo latinoamericano y la crítica del eurocentrismo,” in Con sangre en las venas, Mexico: Ocean Sur, 2007, pp. 10, 11.

[5] See, for example, V.I. Lenin’s report on the National and Colonial Questions to the Communist International’s second congress, in Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 31, pp. 240-41; and the subsequent congress discussion and resolution, in John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 216-290.

[6] Hinojosa, “Mariátegui.”

[7] Kohen, “Eurocentrismo,” p. 10.

[8] García Linera, “Indianismo.”

[9] Kohen, “Eurocentrismo,” p. 10.

[10] Ernesto Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” in Che Guevara Reader, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003, p. 354.

[11] See, for example, “Algunas reflexiones sobre la transición socialista,” in Ernesto Che Guevara, Apuntes críticos a la Economía Política, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2006, pp. 9-20.

[12] Kohan, “Eurocentrismo,” pp. 10-11.

[13] Ibid., p. 11

[14] Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the “Peripheries of Capitalism,” New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.

[15] Shanin, Late Marx, p. 124.

[16] Ibid., p. 12, 102-103.

[17] Lawrence Krader, ed., The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Assen, NE: Van Gorcum, 1972.

[18] Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989, vol. 24, pp. 358-59.

[19] Christine Ward Gailey, “Community, State and Questions of Social Evolution in Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks,” in Anthropologica, vol. 45 (2003), pp. 47-48.

[20] Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution against Das Kapital⁷”

[21] Shanin, Late Marx, p. 255.

[22] Marc Becker, “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” in Science & Society, vol. 70 (2006), no. 4, p. 469, quoting from José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversario y Balance” (1928).

[23] Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, New York: W.W. Norton, 1968, p. 85.

[24] J.V. Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Works, Moscow: FLPH, 1954, vol. 2, p. 307.

[25] See Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999;
John Riddell, “The Russian Revolution and National Freedom.” Socialist Voice, November 1, 2006⁸.

[26] See, for example, Evo Morales, Felipe Perez Roque, “Bolivia and Cuba Address the UN: Radical Action Needed Now to Stop Global Warming.” Socialist Voice, September 26, 2007⁹.

[27] Ibid.

[28] From a presentation by Vilma Amendra of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (Colombia) at York University, Friday, January 11, 2008.

[29] Address to Bolivia Rising meeting in Toronto, April 5, 2008.

[30] Interview with Marcelo Saavedra Vargas, April 21, 2008.

[31] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

[32] See, for example, speech by Chávez on December 15, 2006, summarized in “Chávez Calls for United Socialist Party of Venezuela.” Socialist Voice, January 11, 2007¹⁰.

[33] Blanco’s remarks to an informal gathering in Toronto, September 16, 2008.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Imperialism and the World Today

December 5, 2009
Author: rowlandkeshena