This Kasama site has recently been accused by the Revolutionary Communist Party of setting up their members and leadership for state repression.
The RCP’s recent statement is called “Outright Piggery from the Camp of Counter-Revolution” — so their charge is right in the title.
Extreme accusations demand a response.
Here it is: These claims are utterly false. The RCP does not give examples, evidence or proof of their accusation because they have none.
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Here is their central charge:
“Specifically, including very recently, there has been a whole practice of naming individuals who are identified on the Kasama site as being connected to the RCP, and then encouraging people to try to find out about individuals, their relationship to the Party, and speculation about the composition of different bodies and membership in the Party. And there has been an ongoing campaign of posting ad hominem (personal) attacks on Bob Avakian in particular. This alone puts it in the same camp as reactionary and vicious right-wing blogs and websites, doing the work for government agencies whose mission is to collect this kind of information which is then used to destroy individuals and organizations they deem to be a threat.”
In fact: Kasama has published politicalcriticisms of the RCP. If that has been damaging to the RCP it is because their politics are self-isolating and unattractive.However Kasama discussion has never breached the security of any organizations.
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.
The road forward involves a necessary summation of the past. This becomes particularly poignant whenever people propose strategic plans today that echo things attempted (once, twice, several times?) in previous decades.
How do we regroup communist forces? What was the experience of dividing the previous communist movement into warring mini-parties? What were the important “lines of demarcation” that divided people? And which ones were important to observe and fight out?
Paul Saba has (together with many others) created the EROL (Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online). It is exploding with previously unavailable information — documents, memoirs, articles, and increasingly graphics/cartoons.
I have been participating (to the extent I can) by suggesting materials, critiquing some of the intros, and writing blurbs on experiences I was close to.
Each time I go to the EROL i’m stunned at the materials now available — and a bit overwhelmed by its complexity and detail. It is a case where some things are really trivia (not relevant then or now) while other things are truly gems being made available to a new generation. (And where I assume there will be debate over which is the trivia and which is the gem!)
I am hoping we can all help promote these materials — and help each other identify specific parts that remain relevant today.
I plan (over time) to share links that strike me…. and to give brief explanations of their relevance. Here is a first installment.
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.)
Mao Zedong's road of protracted peoples war emerged in opposition to the Comintern's strategy of basing revolution on urban workers and using rural base areas to seize urban areas.
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 wish to extend special thanks to Paul Saba, whose work has been tireless and extremely important to both our common ongoing project of communist summation and coming project of communist regroupment.
In the next few days, we will point out some of the remarkable documents now available online.But for the moment we will start here:
Over and over, we have received requests (on Kasama) for reposting a particular document: the Revolutionary Communist Party’s sharp and extensive critique of Hoxhaism.
This 1979 piece on Mao and Hoxha was one of the more effective and powerful polemics made on a number of key questions dividing the international communist movement in the late 1970s — in the wake of the counter-revolutionary events engulfing China after Mao’s death.
We have gotten these requests because the dispute between Maoism and Hoxhaism is one of the sharp historic collision points between creative Marxism and dogmatic Marxism — and because Hoxhaism concentrated a number of arguments for Comintern-era thinking that have maintained power within parts of the international communist movement.
This document is extensive, and we will simply make it available here. It was first published in the RCP’s theoretical journal The Communist #5.
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Beat back the dogmato-revisionist attack on Mao Tsetung Thought
Comments on Enver Hoxha’s Imperialism and the Revolution
by J. Werner
Introduction
Upon first examining Enver Hoxha’s new book, Imperialism and the Revolution, one is tempted to dismiss it as a petty and shallow hatchet job and refer the reader to the works of Mao Tsetung, which make clear that most of the charges hurled at Mao are simply the worst type of blatant misquotations, distortions and downright lies, and also refer the reader to the many Soviet criticisms of Mao which, while sharing the same method and most of the same arguments as Hoxha, at least have the virtue of a more systematic and well-rounded presentation of the revisionist line.
“I think there’s a temptation to conclude from the failure of the 60s and 70s upsurges that the problem was precisely the introduction of all these new ideas, that somehow these ideas were/are inherently “petty bourgeois revisionism” and that if only the people had stuck to “the true Marxist-Leninst” path (by which is meant the official Marxism-Lenism put forward by the CPSU in 20s — not necessarily Marxism-Leninism as it actually developed in Russia) then all would have gone swimmingly.
“I think a better way to look at this period is to see it as one in which necessary elements for something new and liberatory emerged but, due to many factors (including, but not limited to, massive state repression, factionalism, adventurism, and very sharp generational contradictions), they never quite congealed.”
by Red Fly
Maybe a (generational) outsider’s perspective here could be helpful.
As a younger communist I have no direct experience of the 60′s and 70′s. But in studying the period I often get the feeling that I’m not getting the real 60′s and 70′s, but an idealized, often even romanticized version of the past. And I’m not just talking about the commodification and promotion of a false pacifism of the era by the capitalists and certain bourgeois historians, but also a tendency among the revolutionaries that came out of that time to embrace, sometimes unwittingly, a politics of nostalgia.
I have many thoughts on each of John-John’s questions — and (i suspect) a rather different starting point.
This is a discussion about both the past and the future. What do we need or want from the past? How creatively do we prepare for the future? How much of the theory we need will emerge from our own coming practice?
I’m a partisan of appropriating what was revolutionary in the past — I think it is precious and that there is no way of facing the future without it. I am skeptical of the idea that our theory should come mainly from our own practice (since that is usually an approach that goes over to routinized and unimaginative activism). Yes our ideas and organizations will be tested (and transformed) in coming fires — and we need to prepare now energetically and expect then to be transformed again and yet again.
Our new Kasama pamphlet contains two essays on the Communist Organization of Greece. — a creative revolutionary formation playing a leading role within Greece’s “movement of the squares.” It is now available for download in printable PDF format. And will soon be available in epubs format for e-readers.
What unfolded in Athens’ Syntagma Square was not expected, and for much of the left in Greece, there is a real fury that something like this dared to develop without them. There is a painful irrelevance settling in on strategies that have no faith in the people and their uprisings, and instead wish to fold everything into official political arena and its parliament.
The one thing in this experience that I have been most impressed with was the KOE’s creativity and willingness to shift when something unexpected happens, and at the same time holding on to a revolutionary strategy. Without calling for imposing a very different situation on our own in the U.S., I will say that I think there is a great deal to learn from the methods of revolutionaries like the KOE and others. And there are also things to learn about the intense tensions this has produced in and around KOE – as they try to resist tailing a new movement, as they try to replace discarded assumptions, and as they face inevitable generational differences (which are naturally intensified by new and younger recruitment).
“The emperor can burn villages, but the people are forbidden to even light a candle.”
The blood-curdling howls from Britain’s political establishment can be heard all the way across the Atlantic. They are outraged over intense nights of uprising in British cities — at the street-fighting, at the open violence against police, and of course at the looting.
The hypocrisy and double-think are massive — ruling classes armed with nukes scream against kids with stones. The perpetrators of historic arson (Dresden!) suddenly quiver over a few burning cars.
That class that now fetishizes “peaceful protest” secretly unleashed killers on Bloody Sunday and suppressed knowledge of their crimes for years.
Those who have everything now denounce the looting by those who have nothing. A ruling class built on the plunder of a global empire denounce no-future kids for a little street-level redistribution of wealth. We Maoists jokingly call looting “anticipatory communism” — to each according to their need!
“We make the following rightful and righteous demands:
1. that the Marxist-Leninist methodology of dialectical and historical materialism be applied to the gay question and that subjectivist, “natural” bourgeois ideas based on no investigation be cast aside;
2. that serious criticism/self-criticism be made of anti-gay attitudes among comrades;
3. that gay people who hold ideological, political and organizational unity with a communist organization be allowed membership;
4. that the democratic rights of gay people be firmly upheld and struggled for by communists;
5. that evidence of anti-gay attitudes among the working class be struggled with by showing whose interests such prejudices actually serve.”
Paul Saba has encouraged Kasama to post the following document — a critique of anti-gay positions within the revolutionary movement, written by a collective of Maoist lesbians in 1975.
What stands out in reading this analysis is that it targets and convincingly refutes arguments that still lingered (inexplicably and shamefully) for almost 30 more years.
After reading this, no one can say that the error of anti-gay bigotry was unknowable at that time — because it was laid out here quite clearly, in a document that was widely circulated. No one can say that inherited communist thinking made it impossible to break with anti-gay bigotry — because here its refutation is conducted on the basis of careful Maoist investigation and methodology.
This critique includes (as an appendix) the document of the Revolutionary Union that they are refuting.
We have been excavating the mistreatment of gay people within the revolutionary movement. Every day, we receive new information, suggestions, personal testimony and documents.
Our chant that day: "Mao Zedong did not fail, Revolution will prevail"
“It was an advanced action — it was a communist action by communists in defense of communism. That was its basis of unity.
“It was a public declaration in defiance of the notion that communism had failed, and that Mao’s politics had been repudiated by the rise of Deng (and restoration) in China.
“We all (each of us) burned the American flag, and marched through the streets holding Red Books. The street-fighting broke out under a rain of coca-cola bottles that flew out of the crowd. One of the chants was “Mao Zedong did not fail. Revolution will prevail.”
“The action was built as part of a much larger campaign to make the restoration of capitalism in China a major issue among progressive people — and to seek to regroup a new communist movement internationally that would not follow the Deng forces on their road.
“But then I came back to the coal mine after having been in the thick of the fighting — and I had been badly beaten by police with stitches on my head and baton bruises that covered one side of my body. And as I stood there naked in the bathhouse, looking like a pink and black zebra, people suddenly really wanted to know why China was important to us revolutionaries (who they already identified closely with working class militancy).
“Why should their most die-hard militants want to fight over the events in China? And they wanted to know about the fighting.
“I told how they had brought both demonstrators and injured cops into the same emergency room, and how we had started to fight there in the hospital, and how the doctors had to create two emergency rooms to separate us, so that the demonstration would not spill further into the hospital itself. And how TV camera crews had come to the hospital to fill the carnage, and how the cops had attacked them, right there, in the waiting room, and smashed their cameras and driven them out.”
Miles Ahead recently raised our “No Cheap Shots” discussion, and rereading it I stumbled upon our August 2010 discussion of the 1979 Deng demo. Maoists in the U.S. engaged in street-fighting in Washington DC to protest the visit of Deng Xiaoping — to make a military alignment with U.S. imperialism. This was in the years shortly after the anti-Maoist coup in China, and at a time when revolutionary communists around the world were still scattered and often confused about the events in once-socialist China.
I would like to repost the comments on this Deng demo here… because (as you will see) it touches on many matters — and not just the history of the communist movement in the U.S. I am excerpting here from a series of comments made on this subject. (Respect to CWM, May 9, Hobgoblin, Alastair who engaged in the discussion below.)
If anyone wants to scan the incredible pictures from the following special issue of the Revolutionary Worker — we will gladly post them here as illustrations.
This film hit the political scene in the 1960s like a bolt of lightening — it announced that a new political force had arrived. In Detroit, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary autoworkers had fused together to form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Their mass formation DRUM (Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement) was suddenly a powerful presence in the factories — gathering together radical Black workers, challenging the racist UAW, and leading struggles among the autoworkers.
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.
Let me start here: I listened to someone explain the formation of the Zapatistas. The process involved understanding that there were nodules or pockets of the very advanced in very particular conjunctural places among the oppressed people.
And those nodules — concentrated in particular regions, and in this case, within the Catholic lay structure — involved the emergence of literate, energetic and very radical circles within the people themselves, who were able to “hook up” with organized revolutionary intellectual forces (from outside) in ways that are mutually transformative.
I think that the previous communist movements have not been able to find or connect with such advanced forces (in the U.S., in several decades.) I think our previous communist movement was perhaps able to “see” them sometimes, but not know what to do with them.
Particularly: I don’t think our movement was able to transform itself in order to fuse with the advanced (in those specific moments over decades where they emerged and the movement ran across them). Certainly our movement was not able (through and with them) to develop a partisan connection to the broader people (which would need to happen in the course of powerful moments of struggle).
Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both communist abstentionists and figures like Nader argue that the two main parties are virtually identical "corporate parties." This has a great deal of truth, but also collides with the increasing ideological polarization of bourgeois politics.
“Those communists who believe electoral abstention is a simple principle have assumed that the mere participation of Nepal’s Maoists in national elections in the summer of 2006 was proof they had taken some terrible turn onto the “peaceful road.” It was (and remains) a line that can’t even start to calculate the options and openings created for revolution and legitimization by the Maoist victory in those elections.”
Electoral abstentionism has never been a revolutionary communist principle. Or to put is more clearly, non-participation in elections is a strategic question, but not a simple strategic principle. That is not a surprise to many communists around the world — but it is often comes as a surprise to some communists in the U.S. (and also India) because of particular developments and traditions within the Maoist movements of those countries.
Revolutionary communists have historically held that electoral options need to be explored in their particularity (even if, in the U.S., the answer may come back repeatedly that revolutionaries should expose “both sides” from outside the electoral arena).
In 1967, a small group of young revolutionaries decided to move from the Berkeley to the nearby industrial city of Richmond California.
They were determined to start bringing communist politics and organization to working people outside radical student enclaves.
This early Maoist collective was one of dozens of radical organizing projects happening around the country.
The Richmond collective (and the following summation article) became particularly influential among young activists attracted to Maoist communism and the Black Panther Party . Quite a few of us drove across country to Richmond and the Bay Area to meet the people of that project, and to learn how to initiate something similar. Many went on to help create a country-wide Revolutionary Union based on the politics and methods used in the Bay Area.
The following article summed up then early Richmond experience. It appeared in the important revolutionary newspaper The Movement (December 1969). The piece was published (and actively circulated to new audiences) in the Revolutionary Union’s opening manifesto Red Papers 1 — which served as one Iskra-like pole for forming a new multinational communist organization.
The Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line (EROL) is now starting to post previously rare materials from the New Communist Movement (NCM) — the currents of Maoist revolutionaries that emerged in the U.S. from the 1960s.
Kasama will be posting key documents from this EROL project as they are available.
The following incudes some of EROL’s initial materials on the Maoist organization the Revolutionary Union (1968-1974).
A team associated with the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA) is creating the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line (EROL). This important project is now starting to post precious materials from the New Communist Movement (NCM) — the currents of Maoist revolutionaries that emerged in the U.S. from the 1960s.
Kasama will be posting key documents from this EROL project as they are available.
The following is the opening essay for the NCM archive, and some of its initial links. We will post their beginning archive of materials from the Revolutionary Union (1968-1974).
A call for volunteers: We are looking for a volunteers (or two) to help the EROL expand its offerings. In particular, they need someone to scan or xerox the 1980 pamphlet on the history of line struggles in the RCP, and other works that some readers may have on their bookshelves. If you are interested in helping scan such materials, please contact Kasama by email [kasamasite (at) yahoo.com]
More: If you know of essays and pamphlets that should be included in this archive, please pass on suggestions.
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U.S. Anti-Revisionism:
The New Communist Movement: The Early Groups, 1969-1974
The New Communist Movement emerged in the late 1960’s, as the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements became increasingly radicalized. Students and youth began to reject ’working within the system’ and lost faith in electoral politics and nonviolent tactics. These activists gravitated toward organizing in working class settings: workplaces, particularly factories; neighborhoods; community colleges, and military bases. Though many things helped trigger the emergence of a new movement of communists, four especially significant influences stand out:
TNL suggested that we post this as its own thread.
“If we (as a new revolutionary movement) are not prepared to ‘get it’ when some new wave of alienation breaks, and if we are not prepared to see the positive factors within cultural explosions (and their intimate connection with political possibilities), and if we are not prepared to fuse our communist insights with such new radical social divergence emerging within growing pockets of new generations — then everything else we do now is a waste of time.”
“I didn’t live in the 1960s, but it seems to me very tragic that Abbie Hoffman and people like him promoted the idea that drug use was somehow revolutionary. (To his credit, Hoffman discouraged the use of heroin and methamphetamine — but on the other hand, he also claimed that cocaine wasn’t addictive). Abbie Hoffman seemed to truly believe that the 1960s youth culture, including (and maybe even especially) the aspects revolving around drugs, presented a radical challenge to capitalist society. In fact, the 1960s youth culture was easily co-opted by capitalist society, and continues to be sold today. Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that the widespread use of marijuana and other drugs may have seriously reduced the revolutionary potential of US radicals in that time period.”
I think it is hard for post-60s generations to “capture” for themselves the social meaning and impact of various 60s cultural forms.
In themselves, long hair, worn clothes, smoking pot, public dancing, new forms of music (especially Black music and its descendants), traveling instead of careers, experiments with communal living, erosion of traditional sexual mores, saying fuck in public, the sense of getting back in touch with the natural …. they don’t all look sharply subversive , or that obviously connected with a revolutionary overthrow of an existing empire.
But that is (in part) because they had a huge impact on the subsequent culture, and so (now) don’t look that shocking. You can’t recapture the shock of the new two decades later. It always just looks old. But we live history going forward — and we have to anticipate that there will be new, shocking and highly attractive ruptures (that in their initial content often don’t seem literally revolutionary).
It is hard to re-capture today how threatening the Temptations could be. Or the idea of young white girls listening to Little Richard.
This Kasama site has recently been accused by the Revolutionary Communist Party of setting up their members and leadership for state repression.
