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.
“The rightist deviation; which dissolved the Peoples Liberation Army that has sacrificed itself for the peace and transformation, will be demised soon. Hundred thousands of new PLA soldiers will take birth from the ashes of the dissolved PLA. The land lords, puppets, imperialists and the expansionists; who are exchanging their happiness, will have no more time to feel their happiness because we are with people and their happiness.”
A momentous clash has broken out in Nepal.
The prime minister of Nepal and the historic chairman of the Maoist party (two men once prominent in the revolution ) have declared the dissolution of the Peoples Liberation Army.
In quick opposition, organized revolutionary forces within their own party and leadership declared a determination to preserve the people’s armed forces — by rebuilding the Peoples Liberation Army if necessary.
On November 2, the dissolution of the PLA was announced in the form of a new Seven Point Agreement which was reached between Bhattarai, Prachanda and the other parties that make up Nepal’s Constituent Assembly.
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.
* * * * * * * * *
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.
Dil Sahni, is a renowned writer, professor, and Maoist sympathizer in Nepal. He works as the coordinator of the M.A. English Department at Butwal Multiple Campus, Nepal.
This poem was published most recently by Winter Has Its End, which is offering a series of poems by revolutionaries in Nepal.
Comrade
by Dil Sahni
Comrade!
When you were in the street
You spoke revolution
Comrade!
When you were in the slums
You spoke liberation
Comrade!
When you were with the people
Like the fish in the water
You spoke Marxism
You spoke Leninism
You spoke Maoism
You spoke so much
Socialism and Communism
And what not
But now Comrade!
When you are in the chair
You do not hear
What the street would say to you
When the old wheel no longer serves your purpose....
The following is an essay by the Freedom Road collective in Tennessee. They describe themselves this way:
“The Tennessee District of Freedom Road is an all young people collective of rank-and-file, former student, and labor activists. “
Posing these important questions is itself a contribution to us all.
This first appeared on the FRSO/OSCL site. Thanks to Harry Sims for suggesting that we post this.
* * * * * * *
“…we’re afraid that we find ourselves doing this kind of thing out of the powerful forces of habit and history instead of a shared and unified vision for how we make revolution out of—prepare yourself for scare quotes—’reform’ work we’re doing together.”
“I’m doing a lot of thinking and asking questions about the mass work, how we do it, what we’re doing even, and that really fundamental and existential question: why do we do this at all? Why fight?”
“We don’t just need a communist commitment to mass work, but a communist method of mass work—and we’re not convinced that we have that yet.
“We’ve heard people talk about mass work before in ways that are already figured out; ‘we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.’ Of course, the reason the wheel never needed to be reinvented is because it worked; it moved us from here to there.”
“How is what we’re doing going to get us from here to there, to revolution?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Why We Fight:
Three Ideas on Why Revolutionaries Should Do Mass Work & a Salvo on How
Written by Comrade Tennessee
I’ve been having a kind of existential crisis about my mass work recently—a real, deep crisis, like getting beat up over and over again by a question you can’t shake.
This lengthy Minimum Security sequence, which ran May 31- June 29, occurs after Kranti, Javier and Bunnista blow up a power relay station as an attempt to damage the system’s infrastructure and slow down the destruction of the planet. Electricity is soon restored, and those in power are pleased to have this new excuse to institute more intense police-state measures.
This is the third of four parts we’ll be running. The first and second can be found here and here.
One of many blockades throughout the country. photo credit: Eric Ribellarsi
UPDATE FROM NEPAL:
We have just learned that the Prachanda and Bhattarai factions of the Maoist party in Nepal have announced that they will not step back from their moves to disarm the Peoples Liberation Army. Not only will they order then hanging over of keys to weapons storage containers, but they will also begin moving the containers themselves out of three of the cantonments. (Cantonment is the name for the treaty-supervised bases where the PLA forces are concentrated.)
Kiran, Dev Gurung, and Biplab boycotted the meeting.
* * * * * * * * **
Eric is writing his eyewitness reports from Kathmandu itself, the capital of Nepal. He and co-workers are scrambling to understand and describe events that are breaking around them. Their reports often appear first on their team’s blog Winter Has Its End.
By Eric Ribellarsi
Today, the Kiran faction of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has launched a major protest program against the disarming of the People’s Liberation Army being led by Nepal’s new Prime Minister, Baburam Bhattarai. The Maoist rebels are demanding the immediate reversal of the decision to disarm People’s Liberation Army, a process which has already begun.
In the early 1960s, Indonesia had the third largest communist party in the world. This PKI had deep roots among millions of people, and was seeking ways to acquire the political power to enact fundamental changes. It was also bureaucratized, sluggish, over-confident, and rooted in parliamentary routine within the capital.
But this party chose not to develop an actual peoples army — and believed they could transform the existing state, an anti-colonial government headed by Sukarno that had emerged out of the guerrilla days of World War 2.
That is not how things worked out. With secret CIA backing, the Indonesian military staged a surprise attack in 1965 and a historic bloodbath over many months , murdering and torturing hundreds of thousands, included especially the most conscious and dedicated servants of the people.
The victorious army established a fascist dictatorship (under General Suharto) that survived for decades (with U.S. and other foreign backing) as a major bureaucrat capitalist regime. And the communist movement in Indonesia was never able to bounce back — rebuild its ranks and influence, or regain the peoples trust. Now, unfortunately, the antigovernment sentiments of Indonesia are often attracted to Islamist forces — who have no visions of progressive radical change.
The history of Indonesia in 1966, like the history of Chile from 1973, is a terrible lesson paid for in blood. Revolutionaries all over the world need to understand these events.
These documents are a product of their times — with all the gaps and flaws that go with that. We suggest a critical evaluation.
We want point out that there have been deep, painful experiences with unarmed attempts at revolution in Indonesia and Chile — where the people rose up to make radical change, but the modern weapons of society remained the exclusive property of the existing army. We should all absorb those lessons and apply them creatively.
“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.
“The revolutionary worker doesn’t swagger or boast and has little sense of ego. He or she is serious-minded and self-disciplined. The revolutionary knows that like a strike, the revolutionary struggle must be a united mass struggle, and that it will take quite some time to succeed….
“In contrast to the proletarian’s practice and outlook, the lumpen schemes and preys upon others to acquire survival needs and personal wealth, which renders him or her indifferent to the effects visited upon others and society as a whole….
“Translated into the revolutionary movement, the lumpen tendency has some thinking that militant swaggering, posturing, and ”talking shit,” is acceptable behavior for revolutionaries, which is very wrong and demonstrates political immaturity and lack of a true proletarian outlook.”
“Democracy and Class Struggle publishes this paper of Comrade Kevin “Rashid” Johnson because a lot of the message in this article is relevant to the struggle in Britain in 2011. The question of a Vanguard Party and its engagement with the Lumpen Proletariat is addressed in this article,these are key questions in the current Uprising in Britain in 2011.”
Kasama is sharing this essay here without (as usual) endorsing this specific analysis. We are not previously aware of this organization, New Afrikan Black Panther Party. On Rashid’s own site the original name of this essay is “The New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter: Our Line.” More on Rashid and his writings can also be found on kersplebedeb‘s valuable website.
By Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson (Defense Minister, NBPP-PC)
Introduction
In this paper, we outline the political and ideological line of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter.
The NABPP-PC, an all Afrikan people’s revolutionary party, proposes through its work and example to spread its line to the general NABPP on the outside, and to all revolutionary-minded New Afrikans, and Ultimately to expand the Party into a broad international vanguard of all Afrikan people the world over. We are in full accord with the analysis set forward in ‘The Panther and the Elephant,” which this paper intends to further illuminate..
The Vanguard Party
As a vehicle for coordinating masses of people for action, organization is necessary. Planning is necessary, and so is assigning roles and tasks to those most capable of performing them, and holding them accountable for performing their assigned tasks completely and to the best of their abilities. Coordinating the activities of the active forces of the Afrikan Nation in America towards the achievement of full democracy and national liberation requires a genuine vanguard party based among the masses. No revolutionary or genuine national independence struggle has ever succeeded without a party to organize and coordinate the energy of the struggling people into focused result-oriented action.
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 >>
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.
* * * * * * * * * * *
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.
Geoff called our attention to his review in our discussion of Black Bloc, White Riot. His piece first appeared on Institute for Anarchist Studies.
“Where then are social movements fighting for justice in the United States? What is the state of resistance inside the borders of the imperialist superpower? How should we understand the struggles that take place here, and what are their potentials? AK Press has given us two new books that begin to answer these questions by addressing radical movement building in North America in recent years.”
“Team Colors argues that the new movements developing now are fundamentally different than those of the past and are more “whirlwinds” than fires. Exactly what the differences are is not entirely clear, and one is left with the feeling that “whirlwinds” and “flames” are an attempt to use poetry as theory. While poetic images of fires versus whirlwinds are powerful, they fail to fully explain the ways in which the context, politics, strategies, and tactics of 1960s militancy differs from struggles today.
“They go on to critique the cooptation of social movements through non-profit organizational structures and lack of revolutionary vision. They also argue that we must build movements that engage in real community organizing around oppressed people’s needs while continuing to ask the big questions about transforming the world.”
Writing Resistance:
Team Colors Collective’s Uses of a Whirlwind and
A.K. Thompson’s Black Bloc, White Riot
By Geoff Bylinkin
The world cries out for resistance: glaciers melt, species go extinct, poor youth are shot down in the streets by police or warehoused in prisons, families are evicted from their homes, queers are beaten down, and workers labor long hours at miserable jobs for too little money. Across the planet, power exploits and brutalizes the lives of most people.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
by Mike Ely
Bobh wrote a series of sharp questions over how to evaluate and discuss the uprising in London — including the burning of property and looting. This is a valuable discussion and these are crucial questions. Bobh’s comments appear in an earlier thread.
He starts in the following way:
“I understand that riots are a form of class struggle, and I understand Mao’s classic argument about excesses during mass uprisings, etc. What I find, though, is that simple arguments about the hypocrisy of the ruling classes and the class nature of riots, violence, etc. are often perceived as completely hollow by people from working class and/or immigrant backgrounds.”
Let me respond, starting with some distinctions. When faced with a large violent spontaneous outbreak there are three different discussions we are potentially involved in:
Discussions with ourselves (among communists and conscious revolutionaries) over where to stand and how to view the people and their actions
Discussions with people involved in that struggle itself (over politics, demands, tactics, what to target, how to express the message, “what’s next after the uprising dies out,” and so on) and,
Discussions with various audiences in the larger public arena which involves seeking to initiate and wage a tit-for-tat fight for public opinion with immeasurably more powerful, reactionary, opinion-making media.
Mao’s essay is a discussion among communists. He is arguing for clarity among communists — first a sense that these eruptions are manifestations of potential and a sign of the need for renewed engagement and urgency among communists. We will all have to choose (he is saying) — because something big is coming, and if you can’t understand this uprising and take a good stand, you can’t possible appreciate or help organize a possible, coming revolution.
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.
“It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.
“A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
This is a very basic question of world-view and class stand — including right now when the whole world is awash in propaganda and hand-wringing denouncing the rebels of London.
If we don’t speak out for them — what are WE about?!
Here is a crucial essay from communist history — a story of orientation when class struggle breaks out, in all its shocking and disruptive forms.
Peasants rose up in China’s rural Hunan province in 1927, — and many observers, virtually ALL of them, even among the communists, declared it was “terrible.”
After all, there were excesses in these disturbances. The urban educated ones found these rough out-of-control farmers terrifying. There was often no sign of tight control OVER the peasant associations. And there was a sense of “where will this go if not contained?”
Indeed!
Mao Zedong, then a young communist activist, went to Hunan for one month of investigation during this 1927 uprising. He declared that all these critics were fundamentally confusing right and wrong — and more, were unable to see what was arising and most promising within society.
“All talk directed against the peasant movement must be speedily set right.”
We are publishing a few excerpts from this essay — and the reason for this should be obvious: The great uprising in Britain has even well meaning people muttering — and too often people question whether it is OK to react to police murder in such extreme and shocking ways. If we don’t get this right, we won’t get anything right.
The following lecture is by Gregory Lucero. It touches on his personal views about talking revolution — the one-on-one moment of agitation and communication.
This statement emerges from within the Kasama Project — in internationalist communist solidarity with the revolutionary movement of Nepal’s people
By Eric Ribellarsi and Mike Ely
Co-signers: Firewolf Bizahaloni-Wong, Jed Brandt, Luis Chavez, J.B. Connors, Joel Cosgrove, Gregory E, Red Fox, Gary, chegitz guevara, Rosa Harris, Lee James, Eddy Laing, Bill Martin, Stephanie McMillan, Giovanni Navarrete, Stiofan Obuadhaigh, Radical Eyes, Redpines, Alastair Reith, Enzo Rhyner, Harry Sims, John Steele, Kathie Strom, Tell No Lies, Adolfo V., Nat W., Fanshen Wong, Liam Wright
For over twenty years, the impoverished and isolated peoples in the southern Himalayan foothills have risen up to remake themselves and their world. Now, after the sacrifices of a whole generation, the future of their movement and society hangs in the balance:
Will the revolutionary sections of the people be able to carry through the struggle to create the radically new Nepal they have dreamed of? Or will the accomplishments of their struggle so far be consolidated into something that falls short of liberation?
What is the relationship between strategy and tactics? How should revolutionaries prepare for decisive struggles? What form of organization should they build? How do they build it?
Although written in 1901, these questions continue to challenge new generations of radicals. We’re posting it here as part of our ongoing discussion on revolutionary strategy.
In recent years the question of “what is to be done” has confronted Russian Social-Democrats with particular insistence. It is not a question of what path we must choose (as was the case in the late eighties and early nineties), but of what practical steps we must take upon the known path and how they shall be taken. It is a question of a system and plan of practical work. And it must be admitted that we have not yet solved this question of the character and the methods of struggle, fundamental for a party of practical activity, that it still gives rise to serious differences of opinion which reveal a deplorable ideological instability and vacillation. On the one hand, the “Economist” trend, far from being dead, is endeavouring to clip and narrow the work of political organisation and agitation. On the other, unprincipled eclecticism is again rearing its head, aping every new “trend”, and is incapable of distinguishing immediate demands from the main tasks and permanent needs of the movement as a whole. This trend, as we know, has ensconced itself in Rabocheye Dyelo.[3] This journal’s latest statement of “programme”, a bombastic article under the bombastic title “A Historic Turn” (“Listok” Rabochevo Dyela, No. 6[4]), bears out with special emphasis the characterisation we have given. Only yesterday there was a flirtation with “Economism”, a fury over the resolute condemnation of Rabochaya Mysl,[5] and Plekhanov’s presentation of the question of the struggle against autocracy was being toned down. But today Liebknecht’s words are being quoted: “If the circumstances change within twenty-four hours, then tactics must be changed within twenty-four hours.” There is talk of a “strong fighting organisation for direct attack, for storming, the autocracy; of “broad revolutionary political agitation among the masses” (how energetic we are now—both revolutionary and political!); of “ceaseless calls for street protests”; of “street demonstrations of a pronounced [sic!] political character”; and so on, and so forth.
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.
