At the end of our third year, Kasama is presenting a series of readers gathering together some of our more significant and controversial posts. We will group them loosely by topic. Thanks to Enzo for gathering the titles and links.
There are almost certainly things missing from these lists. If some of your favorites were overlooked just let us know.
At the end of our third year, Kasama is presenting a series of readers gathering together some of our more significant and controversial posts. We will group them loosely by topic.
Many people have asked for this… so here it is. If some of your favorites are missing (or overlooked) just let us know.
At the end of our third year, Kasama is presenting a series of readers gathering together some of our more significant and controversial posts, usually followed by rich threaded debate. We will group this loosely by topic.
Many people have asked for this… so here it is. If some of your favorites are missing (or overlooked) just let us know.
* * * * * * *
Shaping The Kasama Project: Contributing to Revolution’s Long March
That essay has gained traction and support in some places, especially following the arrest of the Tarnac 9. As always, Kasama’s publication of documents and viewpoints here does not imply agreement.
“While the Invisible Committee’s writings are a sincere strike against a certain arrangement of lies, there are a number of operations they perform in how they communicate that exacerbate other of their weaknesses, and lead to a certain problematic ordering of revolution.”
“They fail to answer or even ask what in my mind is the most important question regarding the defeat of this strategy: how to build the communes and the material basis for self-sufficiency—thus creating something to lose—while continuing to act like you have nothing to lose, which is to say, without falling into a defensive posture that facilitates recuperation or at the very least stagnation, seeking some uneasy truce with the dominant order.”
By Alex Gorrion
A cartography of The Coming Insurrection, Tiqqun, and their Party
“I didn’t come to praise Caesar, but to bury him.”
The Emperor is missing some clothes
I want to critique The Coming Insurrection and some of the writings of Tiqqun not because I dislike these texts but on the contrary because I like them, because I find them interesting, and because they have become so popular. I focus on the weaknesses because I find their strengths to be self-evident and through this review I hope to encourage more people to read them, but in a critical way. The aura of fashion that has surrounded them encourages one to swallow these texts wholesale and uncritically, so that they become digested as a style rather than as an analysis.
We received the following list in honor of the new year and our third anniversary.
by Red Fox
Congratulations on the last 3 years! Here’s to hoping that the next 3 years+ will be even better.
I’m certainly very excited to start engaging with Kasama’s network, as well as people interested in the reconceiving process here locally.
Here are my favorite articles from the last year. We have been sending out some of them to folks we know on our city. Sorry I can’t go further back than that, but I am relatively new to Kasama.
What symbol should Kasama adopt -- radical, simple, fresh, evocative -- got ideas?
“We need to carry out a great work that places creative reconception above rigid routine continuity.”
“Let’s cunningly choose ideas, methods and political battlegrounds with which to initiate a new struggle for the overthrow of this system.”
“Kasama means those who walk the road together. We would like to extend our invitation again: Come walk the revolutionary road with us. For those of you who feel a close support — consider joining our project and helping our organized work escape its current primitiveness.”
“Comment on our Kasama site and our fragile Kasama project. Thoughts? Suggestions?”
By Mike Ely
Three years ago, at the end of 2007, we started this Kasama site — with the publication of our 9 Letters to Our Comrades. It was a declaration — a call for a project that could combine shockingly revolutionary politics with the actual people living in our times.
It is a bit of a surprise that this particular site has continued to grow over those three years. Hundreds of regular readers come every day — making this a platform where revolutionaries school and provoke each other.
This is (as you know) a somewhat difficult time to attempt a new revolutionary movement and upsurge:
The most revolutionary forces are quite scattered (and sometimes barely on speaking terms),
Restless forces among the oppressed are rarely connected with consciously radical currents,
Because of the Obama presidency, pro-government sentiments and fantasies are startlingly influential among progressive people,
Communism itself needs a fresh presentation to gain a hearing, and
We revolutionaries do not have (yet) any common strategic vision of how liberation might be carried through in North America.
But despite those difficulties – perhaps because of those difficulties — Kasama has been a way of engaging for all of you reading these words.
Kasama’s existence has made one fact apparent:
There are circles of radical people who are discontent with the formations and theories of the current left. Some share a common sense that our inherited left is stuck in exhausted assumptions, outdated divisions and profoundly lowered sights. Some are frustrated with deadening routine and encapsulated scenes. There is a general desire to see principled engagement across old divides.
Deep in a cave in the forests of northern Spain are the remains of a gruesome massacre. The first clues came to light in 1994, when explorers came across a pair of what they thought were human jawbones in the cave, called El Sidrón. At first, the bones were believed to date to the Spanish Civil War. Back then, Republican fighters used the cave as a hide-out. The police discovered more bone fragments in El Sidrón, which they sent to forensic scientists, who determined that the bones did not belong to soldiers, or even to modern humans. They were the remains of Neanderthals who died 50,000 years ago.
Today, El Sidrón is one of the most important sites on Earth for learning about Neanderthals, who thrived across Europe and Asia from about 240,000 to 30,000 years ago. Scientists have found 1,800 more Neanderthal bone fragments in the cave, some of which have yielded snippets of DNA.
Thanks to Brad Sigal for sharing this report with us. It appeared (along with more important information) on the site of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.
Palestine Solidarity Group Chicago Condemns
New Subpoenas Issued to Palestine Solidarity Activists
Submitted by stopfbi on Mon, 2010-12-20 21:22
December 20, 2010 – The Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago (PSG) strongly condemns the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s continued harassment and repression of solidarity and anti-war activists with the issuance of five new subpoenas in the Chicago area to Palestine solidarity activists on Friday December 3 and Wednesday December 8.
This continues the assault on the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movement that began on September 24th. This case began with 14 subpoenas delivered to anti-war, labor and solidarity activists in coordinated raids that swept the Midwest, involving scores of federal agents. A total of 19 people have been subpoenaed. “The FBI is continuing their campaign to intimidate the movement,” stated Joe Iosbaker of the national Committee to Stop FBI Repression. Iosbaker was one of those raided and subpoenaed in September.
Thanks to Gary for suggesting this. It appeared in the British Independent.
Few things are more subversive, bold, desperate and lofty than fraternization in battle. This is a story from World War 1 (1914).
The Christmas truce: When the guns fell silent
So extraordinary was the Christmas truce of 1914 that some no longer believe it could have happened. But as a new film recreates those days, Stanley Weintraub says it was no myth
by Stanley Weintraub
Live-and-let-live accommodations occur in most wars. Chronicles since Troy record stops in fighting to bury the dead, to pray to the gods, to assuage a war-weariness, to offer signs of amity encouraging mutual respect. But none had happened on the scale or duration – or the potential for change – as when the shooting suddenly stopped on Christmas Eve 1914.
The difference then was in its potential to become more than a momentary respite. In retrospect, the interruption of the horror, to soldiers “the sausage machine”, seems unreal, incredible in its intensity and extent, impossible to have happened without consequences for continuing the war. Like a dream, when it was over, troops wondered at it, then continued with the grim business at hand.
Posting essays here on Kasama does not represent endorsement of the views presented. We share it here because it is of interest to our readers, and will encourage discussion on the lessons of the socialist revolution in the twentieth century.
To engage one of the key assumptions of this essay here in our introduction: Tariq Ali essay repeats an assertion common to many Trotskyist and “post-Trotskyist” analysis — that the way to understand the Chinese revolution, its politics and contradictions is to view it as a variant of Stalinism (and to act as if a 1930s Trotskyist critique of Stalinism is the prism through which one can understand Mao and Maoism over the next forty years).
For example Tariqi Ali writes:
“One of the tragedies of world communism was that most of the parties it spawned came of age and became mass organizations during the 1930s and 40s. By this time the early traditions of dissent and debate within the Bolshevik Party had been suppressed and most of their participants—including 90 per cent of those who served Lenin’s Central Committee—brutally exterminated. The model that new Communists imbibed was the one they encountered in Moscow: a social dictatorship of the Party/bureaucracy that was master of all public life and sustained by institutionalized networks of repression. This was the system put in place when they came to power or even within parties active in the capitalist and colonial worlds. The stifling of debate weakened both Party and state.”
Is this true? Is this sufficient? Is the party and state of the Chinese experience merely a reproduction of the Soviet “model” — or is this experience a struggle between several poles: Chinese feudalism, pro-western capitalist modernization, the Stalin model, and then a distinctive Maoist alternative to all three?
Then, at the same time Tariq Ali makes another point which confronts us all (whether we are sympathetic to Maoism or not):
“As Chinese capitalism proceeds further, creating even more social and economic disparities, perhaps some of Mao’s ideas might be deployed by the insurgent masses as they seek to storm the heavens once again.”
A Combat Zone iPhone? Soldiers Have an App for That
By Nathan Hodge
In the military’s vision of future, the real trick will be getting information down to the individual soldier on the battlefield. Now the Army plans to test a smartphone for soldiers that will have mobile applications that could — in theory — access everything from technical manuals and maintenance records to maps and cultural intelligence.
In a discussion yesterday with reporters, Maj. Gen. Keith Walker, director of the Army’s Future Force Integration Directorate at Fort Bliss, Texas, said that around 200 soldiers would receive an “iPhone-like device” with digital apps installed.
Walker said the devices would have “various apps for system maintenance, instruction manuals — that we can all remotely upgrade. Also, we’re working to allow soldiers to have a distributed way of getting feedback to us on the equipment, where they can do Wikipedia-style upgrades to tactics, techniques and procedures, and comments on performance of hardware and software.”
Further down the road, Walker said he could envision tactical applications, like an app with GPS capability that could pinpoint the user’s location, or a digital tool that would allow troops to analyze terrain.
Summing up the 1970s New Communist Movement is an important part of reconceiving and regrouping communist efforts today. This interview appeared on the Platypus Society site (December 2010).
Up in the air: The legacy of the New Communist Movement
Spencer Leonard: To start off in the broadest possible way, how and when did the New Communist Movement emerge? What sort of politics did it espouse?
Max Elbaum: During the late 1960s there was a broad radicalization across many sectors of society, responding mainly to racism and the Vietnam War.
It was a time when the Third World was alive with national liberation movements, most of which identified with some form of Marxism or Marxism-Leninism: the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnam, Southern Africa, and a number of political movements in the Middle East. Revolution seemed like a possibility to many. People were looking around for some framework.
While Trotskyism and the established Communist Party [CP] had their adherents, the majority of those who turned to revolutionary politics looked toward Third World national liberation movements. They embraced various versions of Marxism-Leninism influenced by what they thought—what we thought—were the lessons of those Third World revolutions. Many decided that building some kind of new Leninist party would harness the emerging revolutionary sentiment.
“We thought we were incandescent. It was thrilling to be alive, to feel ourselves as part of a movement of liberation, to dedicate our lives to that movement, to be caught up in the urgency of transformation of ourselves and lives and planet, to take risks, to transgress, to feel a new love, and to feel a new rage.”
“I do not want to disappoint, but I have not changed at all. I renounce nothing I ever did. I am critical about some aspects of the past, but even then I don’t renounce any of it. And I’m not tired.”
“In the 1950s, I never would have expected the sudden burst we experienced in the 1960s, so the impossible does happen, and happens suddenly. It is not going to come from where we expect it. So, we talk about the long haul, and the work we do now in different ways is the seedbed, so that when that spark happens I think it is going to be greater than the 1960s.”
On Nov. 9, 2010, Platypus hosted the public forum, “Rethinking the New Left,” moderated by Spencer A. Leonard.
“The old view that ‘if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won’t have to fight them here’ is just that – the old view.”
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
Democracy Now writes:The Washington Post has revealed new details about how the United States has assembled a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
As part of the system, the FBI is operating a massive database known as Guardian with the names and personal information of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents who have never committed a crime but were reported to have acted suspiciously by a local police officer or a fellow citizen.
The database contains over 160,000 suspicious activity files. Despite the sweeping size of the database, the FBI says it has resulted in only five arrests and no convictions. In addition, the Post reveals the FBI is storing 96 million fingerprints in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
The Post also reports local law enforcement agencies have begun using surveillance equipment designed for war zones. In Memphis, Tennessee, some police patrol cars now contain military-grade infrared cameras that can snap digital images of one license plate after another while analyzing each almost instantly.
A leaked cable documents the Indian government torture in Kashmir. Photo: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images
“In 852 cases, the detainees reported ill-treatment, the [Red Cross] said. A total of 171 described being beaten and 681 said they had been subjected to one or more of six forms of torture.
“These included 498 on which electricity had been used, 381 who had been suspended from the ceiling, 294 who had muscles crushed in their legs by prison personnel sitting on a bar placed across their thighs, 181 whose legs had been stretched by being “split 180 degrees”, 234 tortured with water and 302 ‘sexual’ cases, the ICRC were reported to have told the Americans.”
The central Indian government has long threatened and dominated people on India’s border regions. They invaded East Pakistan, they absorbed Sikkim, they have waged war on their borders with Pakistan and China, and they have engaged in intrigues within Sri Lanka.
Indian domination — through unequal treaties, political infiltration and economic weight — is one of driving concerns of the Maoist revolution in Nepal.
Now Wikileaks has provided a chilling insight into the ruthless and and brutal mechanisms of that Indian domination: the massive dump of U.S. government cables includes evidence of systematic torture by Indian forces in the occupied northern border region of Kashmir — where the people have long struggled for self-determination and independence.
The cables also reveal that the U.S. has had detailed knowledge of that Indian torture for years: The same U.S. government that has tortured its own Muslim opponents in a secret network of CIA prisons around the world turns a blind eye when its Indian ally carries out torture of Kashmir’s people on their own soil.
The following from the British Guardian (December 16).
African American fighters formed part of the armed force that destroyed American Southern slavery
“In the United States of North America every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
150 years ago, on Dec. 20, 1860, the state of South Carolina voted to secede from the United States. It was triggered by the election of Abraham Lincoln to the White House the preceding month.
Southern slave owners believed that Lincoln represented a die-hard anti-slavery faction within U.S. politics. A frenzy of secessionism followed the presidential victory of the radical new Republican Party.
Mississippi soon followed South Carolina, seceding a few weeks later. And on January 9, 1861, the armed forces of South Carolina opened fire on a merchant ship bringing supplies to Fort Sumter — which sat in Charleston harbor and was defended by Federal troops.
These events triggered an intense four year armed struggle that wracked the U.S. from the plains of Virginia to the Mississippi — and that ended with the defeat of the Southern slaveowners and the emancipation of African American slaves.
This second revolution also forged the basis for modern industrial capitalism — which sprang out of the defeat of the South with incredible power, consolidating a continent-wide national market through the transcontinental railroad and and the final genocidal defeat of Native peoples on the Great Plains. After the bitter struggle and hard won victories of this war, a period of revolutionary change followed, called the Reconstruction. This moment of liberation and promise ended in a historic betrayal and reversal in 1877 — leading to the long harsh night of Jim Crow and lynch law for African American people.
The revolutionary war of 1860-1865 will be remembered and commemorated over the next few years in the U.S. — as forces from many different political trends and outlooks express their views on these events.
