Date: Tuesday, November 15
Time: 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm (2h)
Location: University of Chicago, Harper Memorial Library, Room 150, 1116 E. 59th St.
Topic: Crisis of the Left
This event is sponsored by the Platypus Society.
The other panelists include Roberta Garner (contributing editor of Science and Society) and Alex Hanna.
More information and posters for the event will be posted here.
Speakers’ bios (will add other panelists as that becomes available)
Mike Ely is a veteran revolutionary who works with Kasama’s project for reconceiving the communist movement.
He started political life with the early SDS and the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, and spent time in France and Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia during the heady year 1968.
During the 1970s, Mike worked as a communist organizer within waves of coal miner wildcat strikes in Appalachia, and participated in the debates and organizational shakeouts of the New Communist Movement.
“I heard Ralph Nader praise “the brave founding fathers , who settled this land”. I thought I would throw up listening, but I have run into that kind of stuff in many cases in this movement.”
Many people have been trained to think of the settler/slaveowners of the early U.S. as “their” founding fathers. And Louise is deeply correct that this is mistaken, and has ongoing implications for politics. History is not just about the past, but about the present.
This country was founded in genocide and slavery. It was built and maintained by some of the most vicious exploitation imaginable — obviously of kidnapped Africans but also of impoverished immigrants from Asia and Europe who were herded into mines, and mills.
And it is not just that the “founding fathers” were slave traders, capitalists, and slave owners (and therefore not “ours”) — but (more controversial even) their very political system, constitution and even their concepts of property, authority, law, and morality were all deeply marked by this exploitative, expansionist and genocidal nature.
They are not “our” founding fathers — but the founders of the empire we now confront, and within which we seek to act as an increasingly conscious and determined force of negation.
The eruption of occupations from Tunisia to Oakland put difficult and inspiring questions on the table. Kasama’s sister site, Khukuri, has been digging into these issues from the perspective of communist theory.
“We must not be afraid to engage in the aesthetic renaissance which made the original communist experiments so appealing. It is too common to refuse irrationalist forms of evangelism by comparing them to the fascist propaganda machine (the aesthetics of which were, of course, co-opted from early communist movements) or to today’s capitalist marketing empire.”
I think this is important… and we don’t have a common language around this (and for that reason alone a lot of people first said “I’m intrigued, but I don’t yet know exactly what he is talking about.”)
These issues come up in many ways (including whenever posters, graphics, covers, design, symbolic logos, and banners are proposed).
JFSP, for example, opened with a question about the Oakland Strike poster Kasama prominently reprinted:
“Wasn’t the black cat an old Anarchist threat known as the sabo-cat, sabotage cat?”
Yes.
Or rather, to be more specific, the black cat is a contemporary radical symbol of struggle — that is lifted and continually reworked from the imagery of the early revolutionary movement Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
I spoke last night with someone in our Kasama project about a pro-Occupy meeting with many local union officials. One thing jumped out at me.
An emerging truth is now being spoken out loud:
That Occupy Wall Street is not some progressive “constituency” that unions and others need to “relate to.”
Things have gone far beyond that. This is now a historical moment, a true tear in previous politics, alignments, possibilities and silence. It is a rupture and an opening where everyone needs to act, based on their understandings and political concerns.
And the implication of this is profound: This is no longer just about “go down to the occupations and hook up with what they have created.” The opening is there for many kinds of people to speak — from where they sit in society, about what they see — and to be part of something new erupting within the power relations of society.
The occupations remain (symbolically, politically, visually) the core of this. Their growth, spread, survival, maturation and defense is an important part of this moment.But (again) this is not JUST an occupation event — it has become a large, open flapping tear in fabric of deadly normal/official politics, in its language, allignment and assumptions.
This historical sketch was written fourteen years ago for the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. It has since been published in many places and languages.
This is the story of how the revolutionary communist movement first emerged from the fusion of deep theoretical work and fearless revolutionary practice. And we are sharing it to inspire the work for a fresh fusion of revolutionary theory and practice that is so urgently demanded today.
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by Mike Ely
In mid-February 1848, a new communist pamphlet rolled off the presses of a small print shop on London’s Bishopsgate. It was written in German and entitled Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei.
Copies were rushed off to the mainland of Europe. Uprisings and disturbances had broken out in most of the main population centers of the continent. Small cores of revolutionary activists were waiting for a high-powered declaration that could guide their work and rally people to a thoroughgoing revolutionary movement.
The bold opening lines of this pamphlet threw down a challenge:
“A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre…. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”
This work was quickly translated into many languages of Europe and the Americas. In English it became known as the Communist Manifesto. In one early English version, published in 1850, the previously unknown authors were listed for the first time: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
While countless other documents and manifestos of those days lie forgotten and dust-covered in library archives, this Manifesto lives, studied intensely in slums, jungle base areas, and even classrooms all over the world — still inspiring and training one new revolutionary generation after another.
The Communist Manifesto is the visionary founding document of the modern communist movement. Here is the story of how the Manifesto came to be.
Protests have sustained through the first week on New York City’s financial district. NYPD have increased their pressure, using mass arrests and pepper spray on non-violent protesters. State violence appears to have increased the resolve of the encampment.
With mainstream media ignoring (or belittling) the protests, you can be the media. Click here for downloadable flyers to put up at your school, workplace, local train station or wherever.
Theoretical work of Chile’s Revolutionary Communist Party is now available — as they summed up their experiences in the Allende years, the Pinochet coup, and the international communist movement.
This work is available here, on Kasama, in Spanish — as a series of pdfs. These essays are from the period of the late 1970s to 1981 — when the RCP of Chile was seeking to help regroup the international communist movement, and thinking through the implications of events in China after the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping and his pro-capitalist politics.
(One of the articles deals with Pinochet going on a state visit to China.)
We would like to thank those who did the work of making this material available and Rosa Blanc.
The journal Causa M-L is in Spanish. We would welcome English translations of key articles.
Background:
The great radical upsurge of Chile’s people in the early 1970s, included a number of revolutionary currents that grew, even as the electoral-socialist Allende government came to power.
Among them was the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile — which was formed as a Maoist party in 1966 and played an important role in the events that followed, including the resistance to the 1973 U.S.-backed fascist coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.
Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek with Verso Books at Cooper Union, New York
October 14th-16th 2011
By Rowan Wilson
A new conference with leading thinkers to discuss the continued relevance of the communist idea.
‘The long night of the left is coming to a close’ wrote Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas in their introduction to The Idea of Communism. The continuing economic crisis, the shift away from a unipolar world defined by American hegemony, and the ecological crisis mean that growing numbers of people are keen to explore an alternative, and to re-discover the idea of communism. With the advent of the Arab Awakening millions have sought new ways to overcome corruption and dictatorship.
Responding to Alain Badiou’s proposition of the ‘communist hypothesis,’ the leading thinkers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common.
Several people asked to have this 1969 Red Papers call for communist collectives posted from – so its ideas (and our own ideas!) can be discussed in their own thread.
This was a rather ground-breaking 1969 document — that shaped (in many ways) the formation of the previous communist movement.
It set important terms for an emerging communist movement — and strongly influenced even the radicals who went on to form other, opposing communist trends. And of course it became the basis on which the Bay Area Revolutionary Union grew into the national Revolutionary Union.
The document gives a sense of how that generation of communists’ “basis of unity” was being developed — and how communist collectives started formed.
We will excerpt the section on forming collectives, then follow that with the full document.
The power of a call
But first a few introductory comments….
I want to mention (again) the kind of impact a document like this can have. Lots of people were at that moment (1969) coming out of more liberal or at least less consolidated radical organizations — and were looking for a way to move forward. Red Papers 1 dropped at the same moment that SDS fell apart.
When I received (from afar) a copy of Red Papers 1, I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I read it over and over until the print started to fade — and until the many strange and difficult concepts were burned into my brain. It left me as a fierce partisan of its proposals. And I worked to circulate Red Papers 1 and 2 with everyone I met.
A year later (under the influence of this approach) I was in a revolutionary collective off campus (with people of quite diverse radical views), and working in a shoe factory. Our main work was organizing white working class youth to fight the system in ways inspired by the Black Panther Party, and to build a revolutionary anti-racist movement among them.
A year after that, I was in the Midwest, working with the Panthers there, and working in a steel forge.
And a year after that, I was (barely 20, but with a bit more experience) starting a protracted project with other communist organizers in the West Virginia coalfields.
These Red Papers and the line of march that they sketched took many of us in a common communist direction. It inspired us to understand the importance of a particular kind of urgent experimentation. It suggested a form of organization. It situated our work within the international communist movement of that time and within the history of previous revolutionary attempts.
We may not today write the same words. We have learned many things in the intervening year. And our conditions are quite different. But we want to aspire to the same impact, clarity and symbolic power.
Note: the Revolutionary Communist Party discussed in this piece is the RCP of Canada (which has no connection with the RCP,USA, despite their similar names).
The Revolutionary initiative wrote as their introduction:
“The following is a statement from the RCP Information Bureau concerning the arrest of four activists in Montreal, including a supporter of the RCP Patrice Legendre. It goes without saying that R.I. condemns the arrests and unequivocally supports the comrades and supporters of RCP, an organization with which we have fraternal relations and are in a unity struggle with. Let’s build a revolutionary movement to defend against and repel these attacks at all levels!”
Montréal, July 5th — On June 29th, 2011, the Anti-Gang unit of the Montréal Police Service’s Organized Crime Division arrested four political activists —including Patrice Legendre, a communist worker and supporter of the RCP. The police searched their homes and arrested them in connection with the most recent May First demonstration, organized by Montréal’s Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC). Nearly 30 officers were involved in the operation, which occurred early in the day.
“We cannot surrender. We cannot become traitors. We cannot kill our own dreams. We cannot give our arms to the enemy. We cannot betray the revolution.”
This first appeared on the Winter Has Its End site for revolutionary journalism.
by Liam Wright
I lifted my eyes as I wiped a streak of sweat from my face. The place was packed. About a thousand people crammed into a theater meant to hold nine hundred. The center aisle was filled with people perched on impromptu seats all the way to the back row. Some stood peering through the entryway. Up top, the balcony was filled to the brim as well. And… it was hot.
We had traveled overnight out of the mountains, on an eleven hour bus ride to get to Butwal, a small city in the sweltering lowland Terai region of Nepal. This city is an historic spot. It is the place where the renowned Nepalese warriors, known as Gorkhas, defeated the British East India Company in 1816, maintaining Nepalese independence.
It seems only appropriate that we would come here, a place where Nepal had fought so decisively for sovereignty long ago, to see a performance organized by a section of the Maoist’s who want to fight to continue their revolution now. The performance, Samana or Resistance, we were told was, “both a call to the people and a warning to our leaders.”
The whole way over I was excited. I’d been mulling over this for a bit. How would the Nepalese revolutionaries go forward? How would they settle the debate over whether to dissolve their People’s Liberation Army or not? Would they move to break through? To go for power? Or would those among the Maoists party’s leadership who want to consolidate a capitalist democracy win the day?
This program promised to give us a hint of how the revolutionaries among the Maoists planned to tell the people: “We’re going to move. Be ready.” We were told that the program is going on tour through forty-five places in all, each with a couple showings. If each is overflowing like this, they were going to reach a lot of people.
Interview with Vice-commander in the Nepal Peoples Liberation Army. His nom de guerre is Tarzan.
“If we were to integrate the Peoples Liberation Army and Nepal Army under the terms and conditions of the bourgeois army, then we believe the revolution will not be completed.”
This video interview first appeared on the blog of the Winter Has Its End team for revolutionary journalism.
The reporters wrote:
“While on our journey to Thawang, the village where Nepal’s people’s war began, we had the great opportunity to visit with Binprasad, (party name: Tarzan), a People’s Liberation Army member out on break from the cantonments (sites where the revolutionary army has been confined during the period of Nepal’s ceasefire).
“Tarzan spoke with us about his concerns about the future of the People’s Liberation Army, and the future of the revolution itself.”
Watch the video interview and read its transcript here >>
In the last months the EROL archives has posted a rich new body of past communist writings. (EROL is the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-line) We extend special thanks to Paul Saba, whose work is so important to our ongoing project of communist summation.
The following is one of the few existing histories of the RCP,USA. It is that organization’s own history — though this document has been buried and forgotten by the organization that wrote it.
We will now make it available for critical summation.
There is a lot to say about the real strengths and real weaknesses of the previous communist movement. To even start to understand them, we all need a common sense of what that history was, and how it was viewed (at that time) by those involved.
This essay was written in the wake of the RCP’s split with the RWH — over an economist view of work in the working class, and over a (relatedly) conservative view of what constitutes socialism and our revolutionary goals.
There are many levels on which to approach this document, and many ways in which to assimilate it. For now, we in Kasama are simply offering it for study and discussion — as part of the appropriation of previous communist history, and as part of the reconception based on that experience.
(We would like to make this available in pdf format. If you create such a pdf, share it with us, and we will post it as a pamphlet.)
Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA
by Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas, leading members of the Central Committee of the RCP
This history is written in the light of the struggle against the Jarvis-Bergman clique, opportunists (led by Mickey Jarvis and Leibel Bergman) who attempted a revisionist coup to seize leadership of the RCP, and failing that tried to wreck, and then led a split from, the Party in the winter of1977-78. In the course of this struggle, it became clear that a summation of not only the current struggle, but of previous line struggles that went into forging a vanguard of the U.S. proletariat would be extremely valuable. This summation was originally written as an internal document of the RCP and on the basis of discussion within the Party, it has been rewritten in some parts for publication.
Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end. (Mao Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 317.)
These are the last days of Black August 2011…. remembering George today and forever.
I can still taste my own tears on the moment we heard the terrible news. I remember our meetings where we asked each other how we could fill his place.
Gina climbed on a table in the factory, stopped the line, and explained to fellow workers the bitter killing that had gone down. In darkness across our city (and many cities) people worked to spread the word — with posters, spray-painting….. And more. There was more.
Sabin, fighter in Nepal's Peoples Liberation Army. Photo credit: Zack
The following piece was written from Nepal’s remote Rolpa district as part of the Winter Has Its End revolutionary journalism team.
“During the battle, some of the Royalist Nepal Army soldiers left the camp. Some crawled into the toilets to save their own lives. That was the condition of the RNA.”
“If the revolution does not succeed, it will be very difficult for us.”
Introduction and Interview By Jim Weill
For ten years, the Maoist fighters of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) waged a guerrilla war for power starting in now-famous rural base areas in the Rolpa and Rukum districts of western Nepal. They fought first against the Armed Police in the rural countryside, and then against elements of the Royalist Nepalese Army (RNA).
After negotiations in 2006, both major armies were regrouped in specific areas – the NA in its barracks and the PLA in new bases called “cantonments.” Over the ensuing years, the political focus of the opposing forces has been in the capital, Kathmandu, where the king had been overthrown and where different class forces put forward contrasting proposals for a new Nepal. Part of the controversy has been what to do with the two opposing armies – with reactionaries demanding the disbanding of the PLA, and the revolutionaries demanding the subordination of the NA to popular rule, and with both sides calling their opposing proposals “a process of integrating armies.”
We met Sabin, a platoon commander of the PLA, during a visit to Rachibang commune, in the Rolpa district. Sabin is also a district committee member of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and is on leave from the Dahaban cantonment due to his wife’s pregnancy.
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How did you become involved in the PLA?
People in Rolpa were quite oppressed and politically conscious. The government suppressed the people, so we were always in favor of revolution and destroying the monarchy. When the new party was formed by 1994, we were quite affected by its plan and the demands that the party brought. We thought this (CPN Maoist) should be the revolutionary party. I joined by 1996. Later I actually participated in the birth of the party, being involved in Young Communist League (YCL) and organizational work. At that time I was a part-timer. Then my organizational work was in the YCL and the student revolutionary front. In 2002 I became a full-timer in the PLA.
The following interview is with Kassie Hartendorp (Wellington Workers Party branch organiser and Schools Out facilitator and chair of Queer Avengers).
And Jason Frock (Wellington Workers Party branch education officer, Schools Out facilitator, and trainee-coordinator of the Wellington Gay Welfare Group and member of the Queer Avengers). Both have been in highly involved in the recent Queer the Night demonstration and in the formation of the Queer Avengers campaign organisation.
Tbe interview first appeared in The Spark, the newspaper of the Workers Party of New Zealand.
The Spark: What was Queer the Night?
KH: Queer the Night was a march organised in response to the day-to-day violence that members of the queer community face while in the streets. The fear of verbal insults and physical attacks is something queers constantly carry with them everywhere.
JF: The streets are especially dangerous places for queers. Twice as much near bars at night which are highly sexualised areas where concepts of ‘masculinity’ need to be protected. They are often impossible to pass without having aninsulthurled your way if you’re visibly gay. It was also becoming normalised in Wellington to have regular queer bashings. Within our own friend networks it was becoming roughly 1 every other month.
Walking down the wet street through Swayambhunath, a part of Kathmandu where the famous monkey temple resides, we passed a number of Nepali people who were going about their day to day; brushing their hair in the street, selling their wares, playing with the one domesticated dog I’ve seen so far (compared to the strays you see around every corner).
I’ve been in Nepal for two and a half days now, having just joined the Winter Has Its End team.
Today is my first interview.
We’ve been invited to attend a Marxist school. We’re told that it isn’t specific to any faction of the Maoists, or in fact any Marxist party. But instead the school is meant to educate young people in the basics of Marxism. It focuses in particular on those who have not yet been politicized but are curious. It starts from a beginners course, with intermediate and advanced levels yet to be developed.
Children at school in a Chinese village. photo taken this year.
We have published previous reports from our correspondent (who half-jokingly adopts the title of Kasama South China Bureau) — those previous reports touched on prostitution, capitalism, and anti-government sentiments.
by Kasama reporter in South China
As they passed through Sichuan province on the Long March, the First and Fourth Front Armies could well have seen schools like the ones shown above in a photo taken this year near Xichang.
China is an enormous country and there are enormous areas of isolated, rural communities of very poor people. The days of mass campaigns to serve the people and send teams to learn from, and help the peasants are long gone.
The particular irony of this impoverished school is that Xichang is also known as “Space City” because of the nearby launch facilities for the Long March rocket.
This biting irony was not lost on the Chinese media that publicized this photo asked why these conditions still exist. A lot of people are demanding an answer in an increasingly confrontational way.
The government stopped issuing statistics for “sudden mass incidents” in 2005 but since then there have been reliable estimates from the Shanghai Jiaotong University annual report on crisis management.
George Jackson was first known nationally through his book of letters Soledad Brother – a searing indictment of capitalism and U.S. prisons. However, he felt that his edge had been blunted (i.e. revised away) at the editorial stage. And so he wrote Blood in My Eye — a revolutionary and communist manifesto that defies anyone to misunderstand its purpose.
These works deserve to be engaged by everyone serious about ending forever the criminal rampage of U.S. imperialism. Here are a few quotations from George Jackson followed by a brief biography. We publish this in memory of George Jackson’s assassination by prison guards in San Quentin prison, August 1971.
“[The system] also breeds contempt for the oppressed. Accrual of contempt is its fundamental survival technique. This leads to the excesses and destroys any hope of peace eventually being worked out between the two antagonistic classes, the haves and the have-nots. Coexistence is impossible, contempt breeds resistance, and resistance breeds brutality, the whole growing in spirals that must either end in the uneconomic destruction of the oppressed or the termination of oppression.” (Jackson 1972: 182).
“Our purpose here is to understand the essence of this living, moving thing so that we will understand how to move against it.” (Blood in My Eye)
“Revolution is against the law….. I am an extremist, a communist (not communistic, a communist), and I must be destroyed or I will join my comrades in the only communist party in this country, the Black Panther Party. I will give them my all, every dirty fight trick in the annals of war.” “Classes at War,” Blood in My Eye
“To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t `cool’ or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred! It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction. If revolution, and especially revolution in Amerika, is anything less than an effective defense/attack weapon and a charger for the people to mount now, it is meaningless to the great majority of the slaves. If revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of `long-range politics,’ it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow.” (blood in my eye)
“Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.”
