Pamphlets
Order pre-printed pamphlets for mail delivery: Kasama Press is now available. Order Kasama writings online — and have the high quality printed pamphlets delivered to you by mail. 15 different Kasama essays are now available for order.
Or download them and print them yourself: The following pamphlets and flyers are available here in PDF form — to read , print and circulate on lit tables.
Kasama Essays for Discussion are now available in a book form that you can order online.
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Greece’s Communist Organization: Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather
Click to download
Two essays on the Communist Organization of Greece. — a creative revolutionary formation playing a leading role within Greece’s “movement of the squares.” It is now available for download in printable PDF format. And will soon be available in epubs format for e-readers.
Download the pdf pamphlet
The pamphlet features Eric Ribellarsi’s essay Greece’s Communist Organization: Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather.
The one thing in this experience that I have been most impressed with was the KOE’s creativity and willingness to shift when something unexpected happens, and at the same time holding on to a revolutionary strategy.
In addition this new pamphlet also contains the KOE’s own essay on their communist regroupment and subsequent development: “The influence of the Chinese Revolution on the Communist Movement of Greece May 2006.”
“Instead of a heavy and cumbersome organizational form with very insufficient content of internal discussion, what was necessary was a political operation that would arm the whole organization for the particular needs of an ideological, political and organizational strengthening.
“At the same time, measures should be taken
- against the creation of ‘independent kingdoms’ inside the organization in several Greek cities,
- against the strangling of the desire for study and research,
- against dogmatism and blind self-confidence,
- against the cultivation of several ‘mythologies’.”
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Report from Kathmandu, April 2010. Available in web form on Kasama and on Jed’s own blog.
May First: High Noon in Nepal (b-&-w) (color)
by Jed Brandt
Excerpt from opening:
APRIL 21 — There are moments when Kathmandu does not feel like a city on the edge of revolution. People go about all the normal business of life. Venders sell vegetables, nail-clippers and bootleg Bollywood from the dirt, cramping the already crowded streets. Uniformed kids tumble out of schools with neat ties in the hot weather. Municipal police loiter at the intersections while traffic ignores them, their armed counter-parts patrol in platoons through the city with wood-stocked rifles and dust-masks as they have for years. New slogans are painted over the old, almost all in Maoist red. Daily blackouts and dry-season water shortages are the normal daily of Nepal’s primitive infrastructure, not the sign of crisis. Revolutions don’t happen outside of life, like an asteroid from space – but from right up the middle, out of the people themselves.
Passing through Kathmandu’s Trichandra college campus after meeting with students in a nearby media program, I walked into the aftermath of bloody attack. Thugs allied with the Congress party student group had cut up leaders of a rival student group with khukuri knives leaving one in critical condition. Hundreds of technical students were clustered in the street when I arrived by chance. The conflict most often described through the positioning of political leaders is breaking out everywhere.
Indefinite bandhs are paralyzing large parts of the country after the arrest of Young Communist League (YCL) cadre in the isolated far west and Maoist student leaders in Pokhora, the central gateway to the Annapurna mountain range. The southern Terai is in chaos, with several power centers competing and basic security has broken down with banditry, extortion and kidnapping are now endemic. Government ministers cannot appear anywhere without Maoist pickets waving black flags and throwing rocks.
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This work was first published on our sister site Khukuri — where it appeared in three parts. Here is the whole work in a highly printable PDF format.
Into the Wild:
Badiou, Actually-Existing Maoism, and the “Vital Mix” of Yesterday and Tomorrow
by Bill Martin
From the opening:
Can we fashion an approach to the communist project that allows us to sift through certain experiences and ideas and evaluate them without becoming stuck in a backward-looking posture? Can we forge some new roads, or find these roads, or perhaps let these roads find us, without entirely forgetting some of the places where we have been? Can we truly go someplace new, “into the wild”?
For those of us who want to set out on this journey, and who see the necessity of it, it might help to have a “workbook” of sorts (or several of them). Our theoretical work in this phase cannot help but be a bit “raw,” which is not to say that we should not aim for as much refinement as we can attain along the way. But the point is that it is “theory” done “along the way,” in something closer to “real time,” what Edward Said called “traveling theory.”
Two somewhat rough-and-ready terms that I would like to introduce in what follows are “actually-existing Maoism” and the “vital mix.” I will also introduce the term “socialist hypothesis,” in contrast to Badiou’s term, the “communist hypothesis.” I hope that these terms will help our work and that they might gain some currency.
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Walking with the Comrades
by Arundhati roy
This is a brilliantly written and subtle journalist’s description of this living revolutionary movement, its activists and their hopes.
Who needs to see this? Where should this be posted?
Email this pdf to friends. Share it on e-lists. Post it on significant related discussions.
This piece is also available here on Kasama in web format.
An Excerpt:
I arrived at the Ma Danteshwari mandir well in time for my appointment (first day, first show). I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone was watching me and having a laugh. Within minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish on his fingernails. No Hindi Outlook, no bananas. “Are you the one who’s going in?” he asked me. No Namashkar Guruji. I didn’t know what to say. He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said “Outlook nahi mila.” (Couldn’t find Outlook)
“And the bananas?”
“I ate them”, he said, “I got hungry.”
He really was a security threat.
His backpack said Charlie Brown — Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.
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A Letter from Kathmandu
by Jed Brandt
We now have Jed’s first report from Nepal available in printable PDF pamphlet form. The is tabloid sized and folds into an illustrated pamphlet. The original first appeared in English on jedbrandt.net.
March 7, 2010 — I can’t leave home for a few weeks without everything going crazy.
It took a bit for my time to adjust, to see things as they are coming here and where they’re coming from. Not the instant back-and-forth rhythm of New York multi-tasking anxiety time. Most days the electricity is out in Kathmandu. You can hear chickens in the morning, children playing after school and quiet talk at night when the old women laugh and call across the rooftops. Blackouts make working a computer hard, but the pace of people living by hands and minds alone, without so much mediation, is not a place I’ve ever spent much time. And I do love it here. The city is dirty. The people are upright, direct and curious. I’ve made friends quickly, though I’ve gotten the impression its easier to get married than find a date…..
Did I mention there is a revolution going on?
We haven’t seen a revolution in our lifetime. Not a communist revolution anyway, with broad support and participation sustained, growing over such a short period of time.
The Maoists are unorthodox, to be sure. They have defied everyone’s expectations, friend and foe alike. To their credit, they haven’t let their enemies tell them who they are or been confined to some historical script handed down by the Comintern in 1930-whatever. After a 10-year People’s War, starting in 1996, they grew exponentially among the rural people who make up the heart and body of Nepal.
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Where’s Our Mississippi?
Memories of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964
By John Steele
(Available here in web format)
In the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. They are known to the world as Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. But back then, in the days before they died, I knew them as Andy, JE, and Mickey.
I want to share with you my memories of the time we drove south together to join the Mississippi Freedom Summer project. I want to tell a bit of the story of that summer, and tell it for a purpose. I believe it has implications for today.
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Revolution in India – Lalgarh’s Hopeful Spark
by Sam Shell
At this moment an incredible event is taking place in the West Midnapore district of West Bengal. Before the eruption, this sleepy area was little known except to its own inhabitants. Now, a people’s movement of unprecedented size to West Bengal has risen from the suffering of its adivasi (tribal) inhabitants, galvanizing the region, and shocking greater India. This movement has been popularly termed “the Lalgarh uprising.”
Although one could accurately say the point of eruption of this rebellion occurred early in November of 2008, it is necessary to step back further in order to appreciate the context within which these events have unfolded. Lalgarh is an incredibly impoverished area of West Bengal. It contains one well-developed road—built to accommodate police—that is of little use to its indigenous inhabitants to whom even a motorbike is a rarity. Neither clean water nor electricity is available. Police brutality was a regular occurrence where villagers were detained and tortured for little or no reason—some singled out for repeated horrific abuse. (Dec. 2008) For many years the State promised development in the area, yet little to none was seen.
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click for the printable pamphlet
This first-hand account of communist work in the coalfields available as a printable pamphlet:
Ambush at Keystone No. 1:
Inside the Coalminers’ Great Gas Protest of 1974
[available in web version here]
by Mike Ely
Coalminers in Appalachia waged a 10-year movement of illegal walkouts called wildcat strikes, starting in the late 1960s. Tens of thousands of miners repeatedly confronting the federal and state authorities, the courts, the police, the mine owners, the media, and their own top union officials. Most strikes involved individual mines and local grievances – and lasted a day or two. But especially after 1974, some strikes started to spread from mine to mine, county to county, state to state – challenging government policies and court repression. The hard fought strikes lasted for weeks. The leadership of these strikes was entirely at the grassroots, among the working miners and sometimes the local elected leaders at their mines. This was one of greatest upsurges of working class struggle in modern U.S. history. And yet it is virtually unknown.
This essay is a personal recollection of the first major strike that comrades of the Revolutionary Union participated in — shortly after we arrived in the coalfields. The strike erupted before we were widely known as communists and atheists. These were days when we were first learning the lay of the land and first meeting the main players in the rank-and-file struggle. In the raw experiences of this strike, new perceptions collided constantly with our own preconceptions.
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The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project
[Available in a web version on Kasama.]
[Also available in a smaller version suitable for saddle stapling.]
by Chris Day
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Click for the pamphlet
Kasama Articles: On the Maobadi and the Crisis in Nepal
If you want a crash study in the controversies the revolution in Nepal….. read this. And share it with others.
Far too few people in the world know about the communist revolution in Nepal — the promise it holds and the danger it is in. And, remarkably, a sharp struggle has broken out among those who do know about it — among the communists and Maoists of the world. And that struggle (strangely enough, sadly enough) has focused on whether or not to denounce the Maoists of Nepal (for wandering too far and too creatively from certain cherished formulaic precepts).
In a previous pamphlet, we gave great space to arguments denouncing the Maobadi as “revisionist” — as we reprinted the exchange of letters between the RCP,USA and the UCPN(M).
By contrast, this new pamphlet is sharply about extending internationalist political support for the revolutionary people in Nepal — and opposing a sterile, influential dogmatism that has gotten in the way.
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Open Letter to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
[also web version]
“…in the name of struggle against dogmatism, there have been serious deviations in the International Communist Movement (ICM), often going into an even greater, or at least equally dangerous, abyss of right deviation and revisionism. In the name of creative application of Marxism, communist parties have fallen into the trap of right opportunism, bourgeois pluralist Euro-Communism, rabid anti-Stalinism, anarchist post-modernism and outright revisionism…”
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Click for the pdf pamphlet
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Shaping the Kasama Project: Contributing to Revolution’s Long March
A Discussion Paper by Enzo Rhyner, J.B. Connors, John Steele, Kobayashi Maru, Mike Ely, Rita Stephan, and Rosa Harris
includes the previous web docs:t 1: Grabbing Pitchfork or Theoretical Knife, 2: Revolutionary Work and the Pull of the Sect
Excerpt:
We are trying to build something new and very revolutionary from scratch — based on the “9 Letters” call for a radically different kind of communist politics, and based on the work we have done together since that call….
We will not arrive on the scene like some magical galvanizing thunderburst to tell everyone else what to think and do. Let’s have some scientific non-messianic modesty and not perpetuate Avakian-style grandiosity. We will strain to make real contributions. There may be contributions that only we can make. And that matters. But we expect much from many other people.
Forming a new sect would be not breaking with the errors that brought us here. The theoretical knife has to cut deeper.
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This Kasama leaflet in color and black-and-white.
They told us communism is dead & capitalism is forever…. THINK AGAIN
THEY TELL US: You have to give the banks trillions because “We can’t live without this financial system.” Sure we can! We don’t need these mountains of debts and mortgages, or these parasites robbing the whole world. We don’t need a system where nothing moves unless some monstrous corporation can get fat off of it. Their profit and survival is not our concern. Let them fall! We have dreams of something better, where human beings not dollars rule. Let’s take over the banks, and the corporations, and control them ourselves, or take them apart when their only function is exploitation. Let’s have a socialist revolution where debts are canceled, and human beings are not measured by money, where all the crimes of this system are uprooted. And where we concern ourselves with a whole world of humanity, not with their bottom lines and profit margins.
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Click to read
Two Lines Over Maoist Revolution in Nepal
Five Letters from the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
from the Letter of the CPN (Maoist):
“The past ten years have not been years of smooth sailing for us. We have gone through twists and turns, ups and downs, and rights and lefts. Every revolution does so. When we applied our line in revolutionary practice, it not only developed People’s War in leaps but also started generating new ideas so as to enrich the philosophical arsenal of MLM. It is known to your Party that the experiences and the set of new ideas that we gathered from the revolutionary practice of the initial five years had already been synthesized as Prachanda Path in 2001. It is heading towards a higher level of another synthesis.
“From the time when we established our proletarian internationalist relations with your Party… we have not found your Party satisfied with our political line and tactics at different historical turning points. Even now, your Party, RCP, USA, is looking at our Party mainly with the same eyes with which it used to see 15 years before. Frankly, RCP never correctly understood our Party, its political line and the tactics we adopted at times. The traditional way of thinking and the dogmatic understanding of MLM that the RCP is suffering from has made your Party unable to understand ours at every turning point of history…. It is because your way of thinking is subjective and does not follow the mass line. The present letter is a proof of that. However, it is our firm belief that with the correct grasp of MLM and its creative application in our particularity we will be able to establish a new democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat, possibly soon in our country, which will objectively prove your disagreement, serious criticism and indirect accusation of revisionism raised in the letter to be utterly subjective and wrong.
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Avakian’s Assessment of Thomas Jefferson:
A Critical Reading
By Pavel Andreyev
Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the RCPand other Maoist organizations.
The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society” and is promoting it with the same urgency it devoted to the author’s Away With All Gods!earlier this year… What follows is a contribution to a critique, addressing approximately the first quarter of the work (dealing with Jefferson, his life and thought) rather than a review of the entirety. I’ll raise some questions about how we should relate to historical facts, the issue of “progress” or “directionality” in history, and the evaluation of individuals in historical periods far removed from us. In AWAG!Avakian remarks provocatively that if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t and shouldn’t like him very much (mainly because he accepted slavery). Similarly he would like us to dislike Thomas Jefferson, whom he depicts as a cynical, demagogic, slave-owning oppressor. But his depiction of the individual (whatever its own merits) is less the issue than the use of this depiction to broadly characterize and explain over two centuries of “Jeffersonian democracy.”
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Avakian’s Away With all Gods!:
Critiquing Religion Without Understanding It
By Pavel Andreyev
Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the
Revolutionary Communist Party and other Maoist organizations.
It would be wrong to suppose that Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (Chicago, Insight Press, 2008 ) is just a book.
It’s in fact a campaign by some highly motivated people to promote atheism, and a certain critique of religion (including “Christian Fascism”) in American life.
Authored by the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, it has been advertised for months with great fanfare…
Even the most significant and original contributions to religious studies are seldom publicized with this sort of (dare I say religious?) excitement. Party expectations are obviously high….
Committed to atheism and historical materialism, I myself am in principle totally sympathetic to the project. If I thought it was done well and effectively I would applaud it.
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9 Letters to Our Comrades:
Getting Beyond Avakian’s New Synthesis
by Mike Ely
How do we make revolution in a world that seems to conspire against liberation? With apparent singlemindedness, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) has been insisting that its leader, Bob Avakian, has the answers for humanity.
His new theoretical synthesis (this party says) is a major rupture with, and leap beyond, even the best of previous communism, including Marx, Lenin and Mao. And (this party says) this New Synthesis represents the best and even only hope for the future.
The Nine Letters unfold a detailed Maoist critique of Avakian’s synthesis. It engages and criticizes Avakian’s claims and methods.
The main author is Mike Ely, a former editor of the RCP’s Revolution newspaper. These Nine Letters”excavate the RCP’s inability to establish any mass base or revolutionary movement over more than thirty-five years.
They dissect the RCP’s escalating cult of personality around Avakian – with special focus on the cult’s theoretical assumptions, denial of practice, and implications for revolutionary strategy.
In a beginning way, these Nine Letters point to a different road for communists and call on others to join in a very presumptuous work of re-conception and new revolutionary practice.
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At a Fork in the Road:
A Debriefing of the RCP
by Bill Martin
The main orientation of many of my posts will be to continue what I’m going to call “a debriefment of Maoism,” with the aim of generating some terms for the next phase.
Here and there I hope to show how Alain Badiou helps us move beyond a revolutionary sequence that has become “saturated,” to use his terminology. Ultimately I hope to combine all the posts into a little book, something that would constitute a kind of “workbook” of “post-Maoism.”
I am interested in “getting there from here,” where “here” is the Maoist current in communism. But this is not only a complicated question (as I hope to demonstrate in these posts, including the present one), it may even be that there are pathways that certain currents of Maoism have taken that are effectively precluded from getting “there” (that is, revolution).
It may even be that we simply have to accept a fundamental disconnect between “here” and “there,” that seems to be one upshot of Badiou’s theory of truth-events.
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Cost of Empire:
“Time Bombs,” Anarchy, Guns and the New Depression
by Eddy Laing
“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”
(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Among its other qualities, capitalist production is governed by an incessant chase to realize exchange-value.
The circuit of capital is only concluded by selling the commodity, whatever it is, and converting the surplus-labor concretized in it into money (which can then be re-activated in the next circuit).
While every commodity must meet a social use-value in order for it to find a buyer, there is no over-all conceptualization of the extent of the social need that any set of commodities might fulfill.
There are quite typically many more commodities produced than can be circulated (at a profit) by capitalist markets. This applies to bushels of corn as well as clothing as well as sport utility vehicles.
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Slipping Into Darkness:
The Last Revolutionary Years of the Communist Party (1929-35)
by Mike Ely
This analysis examines the period considered by some the “good years” (i.e. the revolutionary period from 1928-1935) of the Communist Party of the U.S. The piece was originally written in 1980 right after I had left the coalfi elds.
It was based on research into this history but also our own experience of trying to develop revolutionary organization among workers using a left-economist approach. As I re-read this piece, after so many years, there were inevitably new questions that came to mind — but I won’t get into them here. I just want to off er it online because it think it raises important questions about how does revolutionary consciousness develop among the oppressed and because it speaks to issues around trade union organizing that have re-emerged among a new generation of revolutionaries.
I look forward to correspondence and discussion with any of you who would like to explore these historical and political questions together.
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Eyes on the Maobadi:
4 Reasons Nepal’s Revolution Matters
by Mike Ely
Something remarkable is happening. A whole generation of people has never seen a radical, secular, revolutionary movement rise with popular support. And yet here it is – in Nepal today.
This movement has overthrown Nepal’s hated King Gyanendra and abolished the medieval monarchy. It has created a revolutionary army that now squares off with the old King’s army.
It has built parallel political power in remote rural areas over a decade of guerrilla war – undermining feudal traditions like the caste system.
It has gathered broad popular support and emerged as the leading force of an unprecedented Constituent Assembly (CA).
And it has done all this under the radical banner of Maoist communism — advocating a fresh attempt at socialism and a classless society around the world.
People in Nepal call these revolutionaries the Maobadi.
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Kasama: Walk the Revolutionary Road with Us
[Printable flyer]
Kasama is a communist project for the forcible overthrow and transformation of all existing social conditions. We are open to learning, unafraid to admit our own uncertainties. At the same time, we will not shrink from what we do know: the solutions cannot be found within an imperialist world order or the choices it provides. We are for revolution.We seek to find the forms of organization and action for the people most dispossessed by this system to free themselves and all humanity.
To take this road, we need a fearless, open-eyed debate, discussion and engagement. We need fresh analyses of the rapid changes shaping the world around us. We need to sum up a century of revolutionary strategies and attempts, victories and defeats – instead of the conventional wisdom and facile verdicts that paralyze our movements. We need to re-imagine a radical politics that can take life among people and move mountains.We need a movement that can listen, as well as speak.
