Specializing in training activists in high-profile, non-violent tactics, theRuckus Societygained national prominence as a direct action training center in the aftermath of the anti-capitalist protests that disrupted the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. The following is an attempt to develop and ethics of organizing. Posting onKasamafor debate implies no endorsement.
At therecent Advanced Action Boot Camp for Eco-justice, participants and trainers engaged in a discussion to develop protocols for working as allies in impacted communities. It was an honest and powerful discussion. We made a commitment to share and honor these protocols in our work, individually and organizationally.
“How many times do we hear that the vote for Congress is a “referendum on Obama”? Why can’t we say: No, it is a referendum on Afghanistan, on Guantanamo, on the last 100 ICE raids, on the payoff of the Banks, on the official opposition to gay marriage, on the federal insistence on prosecuting marijuana in California?
“Why isn’t this election a referendum on the FBI raids on antiwar activists in the Midwest? Why can’t we say that, in a thousand discussions that we here are collectively involved in? And why do you believe that only the “already convinced” will hear us?”
by Nando Sims
TNL writes:
“What makes Kasama so valuable is that it is a place where ideas — theory, strategy, analysis — get argued out in a more serious way than elsewhere on the left, that it demands more of revolutionaries than indignation.”
There is, as several people point out, a burning question about what, precisely and collectively, radical people should do. Yes. But there is a somewhat separate debate over whether to be radical at all. We don’t have to fully answer that first question to weighing in on the second one.
Pointing out that we live in an empire that is savaging the world is not mere “indignation,” it is an important insight of theory and analysis, and a key starting point precisely for strategy.
And what we face, over and over, is a call for electoral tactics without revolutionary strategy. In other words, we are to act like any other “disaffected” group — lend our support and make our demands on the Democratic Party, as they (a ruling class party) make their governmental policies.
Opposing that is not mere “indignation” — but doesn’t it deserve indignation, when we can list outrages and brutalities of our time (abuse of immigrants, multiple colonial wars, unleashed covert ops, shameless CIA prisons, foreclosure of the people and rescue of the banks, ceding the Oil Spill henhouse to the BP fox….) and point out that this was called “Change you can believe in“?
ICE Breakers takes on the Congressional Hipanic Caucus Institute’s bourgeois gala and their cheers for the politicians debating how best to carry out mass deportations of Latino immigrants:
“If your version of ‘heat’ is uncritical support and applause no matter what, as most brown and Black folk have given Obama no matter what: please change your mind before it is too late.”
The Democrats have zero argument. They are the party of Guantanamo now. They are the party that escalates the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Their jets and navies back up a murderous order in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Their diplomats, Israeli allies and war-planners target Iran.
They coldly send murder drones and assassination squads all over the world.
Their response to the oil spill was to put BP in charge of cleanup — and to shield the oil companies and future drilling because of capitalist logic.
They have given a trillion dollar blank check to vampire banks, a debt that will bankrupt social security and tattered social nets. “Too big to fail”? While none of the people are too small to stomp.
They have escalated the heartless deportations of immigrants — in widespread communities, in factories, at the border.
The Democrats’ only hope is to point hysterically to the country’s ugliest fringe, the Tea Party, and proclaim “We are your protection against them.”
Bill Fletcher was a founder of Progressives for Obama, a clearinghouse for leftists attached to the Democrat Party’s 2008 campaign. Heading into the mid-term elections, Democrats are faced with an insurgent, racist right offensive and a left-wing base disillusioned with Obama’s betrayals on every issue that counts.
Those leaders who speak to an “inside/outside” strategy of participation in, and pressure on, the Democrats are re-articulating their perspective. This article first appeared on the website of Progressive Democrats of America.
Publication here on Kasama obviously does not imply endorsement of the views presented — but the creation of an opportunity to debate them.
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“Unfortunately, the main problem rests neither with the Obama administration nor the Democrats in Congress. It rests with the failure of the social forces that elected them to keep the pressure on. Too many of us expected results without continuous demand.”
Enthusiasm? I’m Not Interested in Things Getting Worse
By Bill Fletcher
There has been a lot of discussion about the apparent enthusiasm gap between Democratic voters and Republican voters. While it is beyond question that the Obama administration has accomplished significant reforms in its first two years, the manner in which these have been accomplished, combined with the fact that they were generally not deep enough, has led many liberal and progressive voters to despair.
We have been discussing a wave of anti-communist charges that have been aimed at the revolutionary Maoist period in China.
In that discussion, we noted that a new book is appearing: Frank Dikötter’s 2010 book Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe. It is advertised to be an exposure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (and the food shortages of 1958-62).
This book itself has not yet been extensively dissected and vetted. However there is already an exposure of a falsification concerning the book’s cover.
That cover appears on the right. The website “Genocide Studies Media File” has documented that this cover photo is a misrepresentation. (Thanks to BJ for suggesting that we expose this.)
One of the frustrating things about communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is his blanket acceptance of many anti-communist summations, made even as he provocatively puts forward, in his own idiosyncratic way, the communist cause and its giant figures like Lenin and Mao.
“[Žižek] makes no distinction between the USSR under Stalin, the USSR under Khruschev, China under Mao, and China since the 1980s, and classifies it all as ’20th century Communism.’ A lot of us, I’m sure, would want to say that there are qualitative distinctions within that melange and that it doesn’t all fit under that label. So the challenge is to analyze and think, and not dogmatically from the past.”
In one notorious example, Žižek helped publish and promote a new edition of Mao Zedong’s philosophical essays “On Practice and Contradiction” — which is a much-needed development bringing important communist essays (once again!) into countless college classrooms. But then he prefaced it all with his own ominously named essay “Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule.” That preface is complex and not easily characterized — but among its themes is, once again, that very strange willingness to simply accept (to swallow whole) extreme anticommunist charges as if they were true.
The Red and Black Cafe in Portland, Oregon refused service to a cop. The following video consists of voicemail messages they recieved in response. Discuss.
In 2005, the British publisher Jonathan Cape launched Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, to great fanfare. The book pictures Mao as a liar, ignoramus, fool, philistine, vandal, lecher, glutton, hedonist, drug-peddler, ghoul, bully, thug, coward, posturer, manipulator, psychopath, sadist, torturer, despot, megalomaniac and the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century – in short, a monster, equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin. He cared nothing about the fate of the Chinese people and his fellow human beings, or even his close friends and relatives. He was driven by bloodlust and the craving for power and sex. He ruled by terror, led by native cunning, and defeated Chiang Kai-shek by leaning towards Stalin and treacherously insinuating moles and sleepers into the Guomindang.
The book rocketed to the top of the best-seller list in the UK and elsewhere and was hailed as a bombshell, triumph and irrefutable authority. Its success was due in part to the popularity of Wild Swans (1991), a family biography of Chang herself, her mother, and her grandmother, which sold 12 million copies and made her an international celebrity; but also due to the rapturous welcome press reviewers gave the expertly marketed Mao. The media ferment was in turn part of the larger political context of selective China-bashing in the long aftermath of the Cold War, with Mao still haunting the intellectual debates beyond China’s borders about the legitimacy of its post-Mao order.
October 26, 2010 — I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir.
I said what millions of people here say every day. I said what I, as well as other commentators have written and said for years. Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state.
Yesterday I travelled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice.
Interview with Olivier Besancenot, spokesperson for the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA), one of the political players in the recent upsurge within France.
The original article “Besancenot : ‘Bloquer l’économie pour bloquer la réforme’” was published in Le Monde on 19 October 2010. The interview is moderated by Caroline Monnot. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi. Also available on MRZine.
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Esteban: Hello, this Tuesday’s action is a symbolic last-ditch stand, isn’t it?
Olivier Besancenot: No! It’s another stage toward the general strike which is beginning to happen. On Tuesday night, strikes will be renewed, and there will be new demonstrations, as well as numerous blockades. The question posed now is about blocking the economy to block the reform.
Zbeul: In your opinion, is this strike a political strike expressing general discontent or a social strike focused only on retirement?
The discontent goes beyond the retirement issue, but, at the same time, it is crystallizing through it. Many workers and many young people are truly fed up with the government’s double standards and are indeed seeking, through this strike about retirement, to settle accounts with the Sarkozy government from which they have suffered for too long.
Abdelmallik: What do you think will happen after the trade union action if the law gets passed?
The law isn’t a law in effect until it appears in the Official Gazette. And even if it gets into the Official Gazette, the social history of our country reminds us that what the Parliament — the Assembly and the Senate — decides can be defeated by the street.
Fred: Even with 3 million demonstrators, does the street have the same legitimacy as an elected parliament?
Today, it’s the street that has legitimacy, and the street can be more powerful than a government. That was so in 1995 at the time of the Juppé plan, and equally so in 2006 at the time of the First Employment Contract.
Moreover, our main social gains, from the beginning, were extracted by the struggles and mobilizations of our forebears. If our grandparents hadn’t struck in 1936, today we wouldn’t be the beneficiaries of paid annual leaves.
Communist philosophers Badiou and Zizek appeared at New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery on October 15. Readers of this site attended, and Radical Eyes wrote a report on the event.
“With so many crisis, it’s bewildering how, based on the summation, they couldn’t speak to any concrete strategy/line.”
Why?
Are you assuming that it is always possible and always necessary to lay out a “concrete strategy/line”?
Why would we assume that it is the job of communist philosophers to develop communist political strategy? Perhaps it is wise for them to stay on the terrain of their life’s work and is perhaps someone else’s responsibility to develop “concrete strategy/line.”
I went to lectures by Stephen Jay Gould on evolution, including a discussion of dialectics in biology — but it didn’t occur to me to blurt out “That’s all very good Stephen, but what precisely should we communists now do concretely based on your insights?” Why would we approach radical philosophers differently from radical biologists? Or (another example) Bob Dylan writes (in his autobiography) that people kept coming up to him wanting his suggestions for political action (as if the radical poet was, at the same time, the radical leadership they needed). It was (to put it mildly) frustrating for him.
Or after a discussion by J. Arch Getty, should we respond, “That’s all very interesting about the 1930s and all…. but we live in the twenty-first century, and you didn’t say anything (not a THING!) about what strategic line we communists should adopt now?” Is that any way to respond to a radical historian laying out massive amounts of important work?
Last Friday evening, October 15, around 200 people gathered in the tight if posh quarters of the Jack Tilton Art Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to listen to a “dialogue” between world renowned radical philosophers, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, on the topic of “Philosophy and Communism.” The event was organized to promote the release of the most recent issue of the journal Lacanian Ink .
Certainly it is a promising sign that so many people, particularly so many young people –graduate students, undergrads, artists and others—came to hear an exchange of views on this important theme. Several individuals that I spoke with had travelled hours to attend the event. Tickets (free actually) were “sold out” a full week in advance, while dozens of us who had not reserved spots waited on the steps and sidewalk outside the Tilton Gallery for as long as two hours to assure a standing room space inside. There is, obviously, considerable enthusiasm out there, both for these speakers, and for the topic of Communism.
Strikes and protests have spread to every corner of France as President Nicolas Sarkozy pushes for a final vote in parliament on his proposal to ‘reform’ the country’s national pension system.
Every day last week has seen strikes, blockades and demonstrations. Police attempted to break up blockades at oil refineries and supply facilities after weeks of oil workers and their supporters stopping fuel deliveries, but the actions frequently resumed after police left. Almost all of the country’s ports are still struck – according to reports, 52 oil tankers are at anchor off the coast of Marseilles, still waiting to unload.
The biggest actions have come when the unions have called nationwide strikes, but rolling walkouts and protests continue every day. This week, police have lashed back at youth demonstrators, fighting running battles in cities around the country – with the media parroting Sarkozy’s denunciations of “lawbreakers.”
Sarkozy’s proposal would raise the minimum age for retirement from 60 to 62 and the age when retirees can get full benefits from 65 to 67. The measure was passed by the country’s Assembly and is being considered in the Senate – a vote was scheduled for October 20, but was delayed, though the Sarkozy government insists one will take place soon. Even if the measure passes, however, more protests are already planned, including at least two nationwide strikes and days of action at the end of October and early November.
One of the things that becomes clear in any deep study of Marx is that there are “many Marxes” — that is, that it is possible and legitimate, on the basis of the Marxist corpus, of Marx’s texts and writings, to go in several different directions, which will in the end not be compatible one with the other.
The reason is that Marx’s theoretical system, like that of any great thinker (I would argue), is incomplete — a fact not necessarily clear to him (or even to many Marxists who followed), but which has certainly become clear more than a century after his death.
I am by no means arguing for a “postmodern Marx,” whose meaning is indeterminate or quite relative, and neither am I proposing that we should not seriously debate and put forward interpretations of Marx’s thinking and theory. If he is important for us — and clearly he is — then what we take his meaning to be is important. But it is true that the notion of a one and only, complete and consistent true Marxism, which is purely and simply what Marx really meant and said — this notion is a mirage. In consequence, the construal of disputes about the meaning and import of Marx’s theories as questions posing a known “true Marxism” against an attempt to revise it — this is not an accurate or helpful template.
A lot could be said (and needs to be said) in relation to these issues, but for the moment, the above is simply an introduction to a review of a book which exemplifies a diversity of the meanings of Marx: Andrew Chitty, and Martin Mcivor (eds.), Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy. This review appears as a link from the Marx and Philosophy website, and the book’s contributors seem to be mainly drawn from writers who have been active in this British organization.
In this review Gray delineates two broad groupings:
This debate can be characterised very schematically as a debate between a ‘progressive Marxism’ on the one hand and a ‘negative Marxism’ on the other…. for all the contributors I have recruited to the camp of negative Marxism (although they might protest), the Marx-Hegel relation takes on a negative hue. Whereas for the progressive Marxists, the Marxian critical project might be understood as the realisation of the Hegelian one, both with and against Hegel, for the negative Marxists the Hegelian totalising subject is precisely the problem, and that which has to be abolished.
Geist stories and the struggle over modernity
by Nick Gray
Whether or not the papers delivered to the Marx and Philosophy Society, and published in Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, were actually in dialogue with each other (and a good number of them were), they can be read as if they were. This reading is one of fascinating theoretical convergences and occasional glaring divergences (one might even say outright theoretical hostilities).
Community, Solidarity, Resistance: The Conclusion of the RNC 8 Case and Some Lessons Learned
More than two years after the 2008 Republican National Convention, it appears that the last legal and political defense work is finally reaching a conclusion. Two years of standing together, not always in agreement, but bound by our outrage against a state which systematically destroys our supposed rights. Two years of coming to understand that we are not exceptional and that these rights do not actually exist for anyone except the richest of the rich. Two years of standing and fighting together anyway, retaining our dignity and our strength in our own separate ways.
Earlier today (October 19, 2010), Max Specktor and Rob Czernik pled guilty to gross misdemeanor Conspiracy to Riot, and Garrett Fitzgerald and Nathanael Secor pled guilty to gross misdemeanor Conspiracy to Damage Property. These are all non-cooperating plea agreements; they will not be called upon to testify against anyone else. All of them received 100 hours of community service to be served over 10 months, no jail time or restitution, and a $200 fine. Max and Nathanael were sentenced to one year supervised probation; Garrett and Rob, two years. We recognize that the plea deal may come as a surprising development to supporters, especially considering that the prosecution originally branded the RNC 8 “terrorists” and was still committed to securing felony convictions for certain defendants only two weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Specializing in training activists in high-profile, non-violent tactics, the Ruckus Society gained national prominence as a direct action training center in the aftermath of the anti-capitalist protests that disrupted the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. The following is an attempt to develop and ethics of organizing. Posting on Kasama for debate implies no endorsement.
