“A Maoist Vision for a New Nepal”

international | anti-capitalism | other press

Monday September 29, 2008 17:21

by Drew - WPRM

“A Maoist Vision for a New Nepal” - here are MP3 recordings of a talk by Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, aka Prachanda, presented by the India China Institute of New School University.

These MP3 recordings include remarks by Professor Andrew Arato, the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory at New School University; remarks by Kul Chandra Gautam, advisor to the Nepal Democracy and Development Initiative at the India China Institute; as well as a Q&A between PM Pushpa Kamal Dahal and the audience.

MP3s:

Speech by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (13:53)

Remarks by Professor Andrew Arato (12:10)

Remarks by Kul Chandra Gautam (4:48)

Here are some excerpts:

Prachanda:

Why can’t we have multiparty competition? Why we have raised the questions of election constituent assembly. Why we participate in government and the radical change, and radical restructuring of the state. According to my understanding, this is the development of ideology. This is the development of science itself. And we do not want to be rigid, to be static, to be sectarian and dogmatic. We want to be more vibrant.

When we were in the war itself, 5 years after the initiation of war, we had a serious debate and disucussion inside our ranks, one and a half years of debate about the democracy.We devised this multi party competition while we were in the war. We were waging war and we were victorious at that time, you know.

At that time we have a serious discussion and what we devised is that if Lenin had lived another 5 or 10 years he would also introduce multiparty competition, this is my understanding. (Applause, few words from Prahanda unclear).. so creative and so dynamic that, during this New Economic Policy, just after War Communism had finished, and the civil war had finished, he introduced NEP, this NEP was in essence a capitalistic economic policy.

He gave the slogan” Organize Socialist Competition in the Economy”… When he introduced the slogan of organizing competition in the economy. If he would have lived another 5 years he would have introduced competition in politics.

Therefore it is not something we are suprisingly making this multiparty competition. Because Stalin had made a serious mistake of ideology, in philosophy, in science- and all of the workers movement has taken so much loss from this deviation from dialectal materialism. This is our understanding — what we think and believe.

We are fully confident that we are developing the ideology from Lenin, not from Stalin. And this multi-party competiton is the product of that ideological development.