After careful study and consideration, our collective, the FIRE Collective, has decided to formally affiliate ourselves with the Kasama Project. Kasama is a communist network in the US dedicated to a revolutionary reconception of communism. Further, we have decided to announce ourselves as a Kasama Collective.

In September of 2009, a group of us in Houston, Texas formed an independent communist collective, The FIRE Collective (standing for Fight Imperialism, Rethink and Experiment).

In both the US and around the world, we saw there was a process of refounding the communist movement that was both deeply necessary and at a beginning. This included a process of reconceiving the communist project, and we wanted to make our own contributions to that process together with our comrades.

We have been engaged in study and struggle for over a year. We've grown in numbers, developed our understanding of revolutionary theory and history, and forged a higher degree of political unity.

Revolution is not only a local exercise. It requires the strategic thinking, study, and coordinated practice of comrades throughout the country (and ultimately the world). The work of reconceiving cannot be confined to a locality, but rather it needs forms that can give expression to its fearless journey to places still unexplored, and questions unsettled. We believe there needs to be a combination of our local contributions to theory and practice with that which is developing on the national plane.

For these reasons, we are excited to join with the work the Kasama network has been engaged in, and contributing to charting an uncharted course to a communist future. Other similar collectives have also started to form as part of Kasama’s network, and we look forward to sharing theory and practice, learning from one another as we move.

The following piece originally appeared on Kasama.

“While it is deeply important to fight the attacks on Wikileaks, perhaps the greatest possible potential in the leaks lies not in the US government’s suppression of speech (which it actually does on a pretty regular basis), but in the content of these leaks themselves.

“These leaks contain great amounts of information about the functioning of the US empire, its moves to suppress resistance, it’s preparations for military coups, it’s war crimes, and more. The potential to draw revolutionary lessons about the world imperialist system from these cables is huge.”

by Eric Ribellarsi

As more and more cables have been released, I have watched the actions and preparations of many different trends in how to struggle around these events. We’ve seen the Wikileaks domain snatched up, its leader arrested, and there continues to be a threat of greater repression. At the same time, we’ve watched as the New York Times and other bourgeois media institutions work closely with the United States government to learn how they should report [distort] the content of the leaks, what to ignore, and what to promote from the leaks to add further weight to the legitimacy of US imperialism.

I will try to survey some of those developments here, and put forward my own proposal of how we (communists around Kasama) could move forward around this, while opposing a “just do something” framework.

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Thanks to Matthew C. for sharing this with us.

WILL NEW WITNESS STOP TEXAS EXECUTING AN INNOCENT MAN?

Harris County, Texas - October 2nd, 2010. Robert Gene Will was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a Harris County Deputy in January 2002 and sentenced to death. Robert has always maintained his innocence. Since his conviction a total of 4 new witnesses have come forward and provided sworn affidavits that state Robert Will is not the killer and have named the real murderer, his co-defendant Alan Michael Rosario. The latest witness statement provides new hope for Robert and is vital in his and his supporters fight for justice.

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Thanks to Koba for pointing this out. The following video features footage from this year's Black Friday, in which many people were trampled in a consumerist hysteria.

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The following critique of Negri and Hardt's theory on precarious labor is written from Silvia Federici, a Marxist Feminist. Thanks to In the Middle of a Whirlwind for pointing it out.

"What Negri and Hardt do not see is that the tremendous leap in technology required by the computerization of work and the integration of information into the work process has been paid at the cost of a tremendous increase of exploitation at the other end of the process. There is a continuum between the computer worker and the worker in the Congo who digs coltan with his hands trying to seek out a living after being expropriated, pauperized, by repeated rounds of structural adjustment and repeated theft of his community’s land and natural sources...

They are blind to not see the capitalist destruction of lives and the ecological environment. They don’t see that the restructuring of production has aimed at restructuring and deepening the divisions within the working class, rather than erasing them. The idea that the development of the microchip is creating new commons is misleading. communalism can only be a product of struggle, not of capitalist production."

Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint

Tonight I will present a critique of the theory of precarious labor that has been developed by Italian autonomist Marxists, with particular reference to the work of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and also Michael Hardt. I call it a theory because the views that Negri and others have articulated go beyond the description of changes in the organization of work that have taken place in the 1980s and 1990s in conjunction with the globalization process– such as the “precariazation of work,” the fact that work relations are becoming more discontinuous, the introduction of “flexy time,” and the increasing fragmentation of the work experience. Their view on precarious labor present a whole perspective on what is capitalism and what is the nature of the struggle today. It is important to add that these are not simply the ideas of a few intellectuals, but theories that have circulated widely within the Italian movement for a number of years, and have recently become more influential also in the United States, and in this sense they have become more relevant to us.

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