Since we published the 9 Letters to Our Comrades, some of the most intriguing responses have come from outside our expected Maoist audiences. People have written to us from other revolutionary and leftist trends and said that our criticisms, hopes and direction echoes with their own experiences and frustrations.
I say “intriguing” because there is much I don’t know about this. I am not yet sure exactly how our criticisms of the RCP and Avakian’s new synthesis get at problems that are general with a larger range of left projects. But we am eager to share more about it.
One of the interesting responses came from Chuck Morse, a well-known figure among anarchists (and someone well-known for a certain, uh, antipathy toward revolutionary communism and Maoism.) Chuck recently posted an invitation here on Kasama to read his own summation of involvement within an anarchist circle around Murry Bookchin (who recently died).
I found Chuck’s story engrossing and revealing — and not just about anarchism (obviously) but about the dynamics of groups set on changing the world
One of the civil rights martyrs of the U.S. is Andrew Goodman (left), a Jewish anti-racist organizer killed by Mississippi klansmen together with two other SNCC activists in 1964.
by Mike Ely
“Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.”
Mao Zedong
Some people argue that Jewish people have played a special role throughout history–oppressing Black people and keeping them from achieving prosperity within the capitalist system.
It is argued that Jewish merchants and slaveowners played a special role in the brutal slave trade that brought kidnapped Africans to the New World.
It is said that Jewish merchants and landlords are a special cause of the poverty of Black communities.
It is said that “Jewish control” of the media and educational institutions has led to a conscious “Jewish conspiracy” to produce “negative images” and “self-hatred” among Black people.
These views are not true–they are based on myth, distortion and a promotion of mistaken prejudices. And all those who really want to end the oppression of Black people–and all oppressive systems–need to take a scientific approach on who is the enemy: Read the rest of this entry »
by Mike Ely (for Black History Month 2007) Slaveowners in the United States always insisted that “their” slaves were content and obedient. But research has documented at least 250 revolts, both large and small, in the U.S. during slavery times. And much was done to hide their existence. James Madison, the main author of the U.S. Constitution, warned in 1774 that it was best that “such attempts should be concealed as well as suppressed.” One of the largest revolts was led by the slave Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia during the summer of 1831.
Nat Turner was born on the Virginia farm of Benjamin Turner on October 2, 1800. It is said that his African-born mother so hated slavery that she wanted to kill Nat at birth rather than let him grow up in bondage. These were times marked by an intensifying struggle over slavery. Five days after Nat’s birth, the slave leader Gabriel Posser was executed in Richmond, the Virginia state capital. Posser, a blacksmith, had assembled hundreds of slaves on his master’s estate on August 30, 1800. He planned to recruit Catawba Indians and poor whites, and capture Richmond. Sudden rain and flash floods caused their defeat. Read the rest of this entry »
28 January 2008. A World to Win News Service. Just when Israel was squeezing its hardest to regain control over Gaza, as a central element in the Annapolis plan for American hegemony in the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – as much as half of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – broke free.It was a great week in Rafah, a sight that delighted people all over the world. But then the sunny, cold weather gave way to drenching rains and the roads turned to mud, and some harsh truths about the wider world began to sink in.
When Palestinians in Gaza first marched to the border with Egypt and demanded that it be opened 22 January, Egyptian police attacked them with batons, water cannons, tear gas and gunfire, wounding four. In the early hours of 23 January, simultaneous explosions tore large holes in the concrete and metal wall over much of its length. Rafah residents with construction machinery started to tear down and clear away more of it. By daylight, tens of thousands of people were streaming through, not just from Rafah but all of Gaza. Since Israel had told Egypt it could station only a few hundred troops at the border, the Egyptian authorities couldn’t stop them without action far more drastic than they dared to take this time, although they had opened fire with automatic weapons against smaller groups in the past. Over the next few days they used electric prods and clubs against the crowds, but when they tried to close the border they were met with stones and gunfire. More sections of the wall were toppled, until finally people were pouring through in such great waves, in trucks, cars and on foot, that a reporter called it “a seismic and unstoppable reordering of the facts of the Middle East.” (The Observer, 27 January)
On January 4, a police SWAT squad broke into the home of Tarika Wilson in Lima Ohio. They shot Tarika dead and wounded her 14 month old son Sincere. The vocal outrage among Lima’s Black community has revealed a long and bitter history of police racism and brutalization.
Police Shooting of Mother and Infant Exposes a City’s Racial Tension
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG January 30, 2008 New York Times
LIMA, Ohio — The air of Southside is foul-smelling and thick, filled with fumes from an oil refinery and diesel smoke from a train yard, with talk of riot and recrimination, and with angry questions: Why is Tarika Wilson dead? Why did the police shoot her baby?
“This thing just stinks to high heaven, and the police know it,” said Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We’re not asking for answers anymore. We’re demanding them.”
Some facts are known. A SWAT team arrived at Ms. Wilson’s rented house in the Southside neighborhood early in the evening of Jan. 4 to arrest her companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing, said Greg Garlock, Lima’s police chief. Officers bashed in the front door and entered with guns drawn, said neighbors who saw the raid.
Moments later, the police opened fire, killing Ms. Wilson, 26, and wounding her 14-month-old son, Sincere, Chief Garlock said. One officer involved in the raid, Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, a 31-year veteran, has been placed on paid administrative leave.
Beyond these scant certainties, there is mostly rumor and rage. The police refuse to give any account of the raid, pending an investigation by the Ohio attorney general. Read the rest of this entry »
In the Feb 3 issue of Revolution newspaper, the RCP’s leader Bob Avakian makes a sharp criticism of writer Naomi Klein’s recent book The Shock Doctrine. Avakian writes “…there are some valuable insights and analysis in this book, although its main thesis is ultimately not a fundamentally correct explanation of the reality it is examining…” That main thesis of Shock Doctrine is captured here in a lively youtube video). However Avakian doesn’t elaborate on these overall criticisms because his main target here is an anticommunist remark Klein makes in regard to Mao Zedong.
Fair enough, it is common and very tiresome that even radical writers like Naomi Klein speak in this way about communists. And there is value in struggling against such remarks and the underlying assumptions in a sharp-but-friendly way.
However….
In the process of making this criticism, Avakian essentially upholds some very particular metaphors Read the rest of this entry »
Suharto, who was the brutal U.S.-backed military dictator of Indonesia from 1965 to 1998, is now dead. Here is the story of his bloody road to power — excerpted from a detailed analysis by the MLMRSG, called “The Destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 and the Road Not Taken.” When the full text of this document is available online, we will announce it here on Kasama. In the meanwhile, pdfs of MLMRSG analyses can be obtained by emailing: mlm (dot) rsg (at) gmail (dot) com.
One of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was committed in Indonesia. On October 8, 1965, right-wing mobs ransacked the offices of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and its mass organizations in Jakarta, the capital city. Ten days later, in densely populated Central Java, army paracommandos under the direction of pro-American General Suharto led the attack on the PKI. Tens of thousands of PKI cadre and supporters were rounded up at night, detained, and executed. Anti-communist youth groups were supplied with weapons by the army and sent out to murder PKI members and supporters in thousands of towns and villages. In one area of Central Java known as a stronghold of the party, one-third of the population died in the massacre. Read the rest of this entry »
This snarky piece of anti-communism appeared in the Boston Globe opinion pages (Jan. 27, 2008).
Intent: Publicly finger and ridicule progressive academics and artists for speaking out against the chilling of radical thought.
Free Bob Avakian!
Oh, he’s already free? Never mind.
By Mark Oppenheimer
IT WAS HARD to miss, splashed recently across a full page of The New York Review of Books: an advertisement featuring the boldface words, “Dangerous times demand courageous voices. Bob Avakian is such a voice.”
Wrapped around those words, Talmud-page-style, were, to the left, a short essay about the importance of Avakian’s “compelling approach to Marxism” and, to the right, a list of dozens of signatories, including academic superstars like Cornel West, performers like Rickie Lee Jones and Chuck D., and activists like Cindy Sheehan.
Some of the signatories were regulars on left-wing petitions, but even for people often associated with radical causes, signing a pro-Avakian ad seemed bizarre. Did they not know what he stands for – or did they just not care?
Avakian is the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a tiny Maoist organization whose most visible activity is running several branches of a store called Revolution Books. (There’s a branch on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge.) Through the bookstores, the party’s website and newspaper, and his prolific pamphleteering, Avakian has advanced his views: Mao Zedong’s China was “wondrous,” according to Avakian’s autobiography, and, despite the show trials, mass purges, and other acts of tyranny that Avakian acknowledges, Joseph Stalin had “an overall positive historical role.”
Many of the men and women who signed the ad are respectable scholars – the list also includes Harvard’s Brad Epps and Timothy Patrick McCarthy – and I knew it was not possible that they were all actually devoted to Avakian. In fact the ad is lukewarm, at best, on the man’s actual politics: Read the rest of this entry »
This document written by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has just been made available online. It was originally published as one chapter within a larger party manual. (Props to the Mass Line website.)
Banner for promoting Kasama’s debate and the 9 Letters
by Red Heretic
Red Heretic is active around one of the RCP’s Revolution Clubs and in online discussions. He engages here what he perceives to be the “key line” of the 9 Letters. (Props to Red Flags where this originally appeared.)
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Ely’s pamphlet is long and complex, and I don’t think that blogs are really the place to post a thorough critique. Nevertheless, I want to criticize what I view as the key line in Ely’s pamphlet.
“A painful place to start: The RCP has not developed, ever, a mass partisan political base for revolutionary communist politics anywhere, among any section of the people.”
Well, more than a “painful” place to start, it is a classical economist place to start. Read the rest of this entry »
What the Maoists term as the Dandakaranya Special Zone is the vast forest area situated between the borders of four states – Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharastra and Orissa. The Maoists have five organizational divisions – the south, west and north Bastar divisions, the Maad and Gadchiroli divisions – covering the entire area.
Extremely primitive economy
The adivasi (tribal people) economy here consisted of mainly two parts, agriculture and collection of minor forest produce. The mode of adivasi agriculture in all these divisions was primitive, with little variations here and there. One need not say that it was entirely monsoon dependent (till today there is are no irrigation projects, except the small ones built by the Maoists). The Dandakaranya is a vast area with a deep forest cover and dotted by steep hills. Though the annual rainfall is not uniform in all the areas, normally it will be above normal. This area has abundant perennial water resources like rivers and streams, with water flowing almost throughout the year. As no government, either of the British colonialists or of their comprador successors, ever built any water conservancy projects either major or minor most of the rainwater gets wasted. Irrigating the fields through wells and small ponds by even well to do peasants is a rare phenomenon. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the peasants do not even know about irrigation wells. They are still centuries away from the man who learned to draw water from wells through such implements as the water wheel and who constructed dams and canals to irrigate the fields thousands of years ago. In one word, the adivasi peasants here lacked the experiences of the men who fought against all odds for achieving a stable income and for a fundamental change in their life by growing from the stage of food collection to that of a food producer, introducing many innovative changes in the methods of agriculture.Read the rest of this entry »
“Have You Forgotten?” a country song by Darryl Worley captures pretty closely all the confusions generated by the government’s lies: it is presented as an argument for the Iraq war, but does so in the name of the “two towers.” It is an emotion-and-tear-soaked worldview that starts the tape abruptly on September 11 — one that doesn’t know (or care) what was before (or underneath) those events.
And it shows nothing of those killed by the U.S. efforts, the countries occupied, the destruction, or the larger geo-strategic goals pursued in the name of this “war on terror” (can you spell O-I-L?)
My mind keeps spinning, making a list of all the things Darryl Worley has “forgotten” (or perhaps never bothered to learn): including about how the U.S. has mercilessly dominated and bullied the people of the world and unleashed Shock-And-Awe on Iraq in crudely unprovoked aggression based on lies. The list starts there and extends around a battered and angry world.
I have this bitter-funny picture in my head of a scholarly circles painstakingly counting the distinct and proven lies of the Bush government. “One hundred and forty one, one hundred and forty two…. hey, does this count as one lie or two?…. one hundred and forty three…”
Study: Bush, Other Officials Issued Hundreds of False Statements Before Iraq Invasion
By Douglass K. Daniel The Associated Press
Tuesday 22 January 2008 A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
January 21, 2008. A World to Win News Service. P. Govindan Kutty, editor of the Indian Maoist monthly magazine People’s March, was transferred from jail to hospital 9 January. He had been on hunger strike since 20 December, when he was remanded to prison following his arrest the day before. On 18 January, before the Kerala High Court, the state government opposed the third and latest effort to obtain his freedom on bail. Once again adjusting the charges against him, the authorities have now made the political nature of this case perfectly clear. According to The Hindu (21 January), “In a statement filed in response to his bail petition, the police said there was a possibility of the accused indulging in anti-national activities if he was released on bail. The police said he had been propagating the CPI (Maoist) ideologies and programme and publishing the CPI (Maoist) mouthpiece People’s March.”There has been no further news about Kutty’s health and the conditions of his imprisonment. His age is variously given as between 60-68.
A group of five Indian human rights activists was able to meet with the journalist in prison 8 January. They told a press conference that after his arrest, Kutty had been permitted to talk to a lawyer only with the authorities present. Acting on “orders from higher authorities,” they said, his jailers were force-feeding him glucose after tying his hands and legs. They characterized his treatment as “torture”. The next day, the authorities announced that he has been transferred from Viyyur prison to a hospital following what they called the “deterioration” of his state of health. Read the rest of this entry »
We need to document revealing quotes from the contenders for this system’s presidency.
Huckabee upholding states’ rights and the symbol of slavery
Here is Huckabee’s quote defending the waving of slavery’s Confederate Battle Flag (always a hotbutton issue for rallying the most reactionary forces in South Carolina):
Gov. Mike Huckabee (currently the main candidate of the Religious Right)
“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you
what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and
told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ‘em what to do with the
pole; that’s what we’d do.”
The suggestion of anal pole-insertion has its distinct echoes in the reactionary codewords and Huckabee’s anti-gay politics.
During the war in Vietnam, thousands of people in the Vietnamese province of CuChi lived in an elaborate system of underground tunnels. …
Originally built in the time of the French, the tunnels were enlarged during the American presence. When the Americans began bombing the villages of CuChi, the survivors went underground where they remained for the duration of the war. The secret tunnels, which joined village to village and often passes beneath American bases, were not only fortifications for Viet Cong guerillas, but were also the center of community life. Hidden beneath the destroyed villages were schools and public spaces were hospitals where children were born and surgery was performed on casualties of war: underground were schools and public spaces where couples were married and private places where lovers met. There were even theaters where performers entertained with song and dance and traditional stories.
THE CUCHITUNNELS, a Mickey Grant film, is the story of life underground told by the people who lived the experience. It is a story told by a surgeon, an artist, and actress, an engineer, and the few survivors of the guerilla band who left the tunnels each night to fight against an enemy of vastly superior strength. Attached to the guerilla bands were Viet Cong documentary cameramen and camerawomen whose footage of the war from the Vietnamese point of view and of love, life and death in the tunnels has survived and is used in the film. This extremely rare footage povides a fascinating kind of echo; we see and hear an actress perform in the wartime tunnels and then hear her describe the experience nearly thirty years later.
Director Mickey Grant has 3 other films on Google Video which are CHINA RUN, DESTINATION DANANG,INJECTION, GENTLEMAN’S CHOICE PREVIEW, and HI.
The U.S. invasion and occupation has had many brutal impacts on Iraq’s people. Here is a report of “survival sex” and prostitution among young female refugees from Iraq. Clip from an NBC News report last year.
Dr. King was arrested during the 1956 Mongomery Bus Boycott. Twelve years later, after his assassination, someone scrawled a celebration of his death on this mugshot held by the Alabama police.
by Mike Ely Last year, on January 15, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., I was in Memphis for the first time and went with friends and comrades to the Lorraine Motel after a commemorative march through town. A long line of people stretched out of the building, now a museum to Dr. King and the historic struggle against Jim Crow segregation. It wound down the block and out into the parking lot — filled with families who had come together, groups of high school youth, and somber veterans of the civil rights days. The memories of loss, rage and hope from those days long ago, in 1968, are still vivid and passed on.
This article digs into the controversies and facts surrounding King’s assassination.
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On April 24, 1998, 30 years after the killing of Dr. King, the accused assassin James Earl Ray died in a prison hospital in Nashville. The official story is that Ray was a loner who shot King in Memphis on April 4, 1968 and escaped out of the country. And after Ray’s death the national media insisted, once again, that there is “no evidence” of any high-level conspiracy. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that Dr. King was killed by an organized conspiracy and that powerful forces within the ruling class were involved.
James Earl Ray was a small-time, white racist, stickup man. In April 1968 he had been on the run for a year, after escaping from a Missouri penitentiary. Yet the authorities claim that Ray stalked King methodically from one city to another and arranged to have plastic surgery in Los Angeles. They expect people to believe that Ray simply shot King at the Lorraine Motel, and then climbed in his distinctive white Mustang and drove out of Memphis–even though King was under close federal surveillance. Ray traveled from Memphis to Atlanta, to Canada, to England, to Portugal, back to England and then was arrested on June 8 on his way to the white racist African state of Rhodesia–traveling with two false Canadian passports, registered under different names. And yet people are told this was done without accomplices, financial help or a larger organization.
Facts from Memphis
Gerald Posner recently wrote a book, Killing the Dream, intended to debunk “conspiracy theories” around King’s death. However, this book is useful because of what it can’t deny: According to Posner 12 or 14 government agents were packed into a firehouse on the day King was shot at the Lorraine Motel–less than 150 feet away from both King and the assassin. FBI agents and military intelligence agents were watching every move of King’s group, and were assisted by Black Memphis cops who could identify figures of the local Black community. Two Black firemen were transferred from that firehouse–so they could not alert King about these secret government activities. Read the rest of this entry »
Sept. 15, 1963, a racist bombing killed Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson.
Four Little Girls and the Fight For Freedom
by Mike Ely
Originally written in 1998, posted here for Martin Luther King’s birthday January 15, 2008. I also urge you to view Spike Lee’s powerful film Four Little Girls.
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It was 1963. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery, Birmingham was still a stronghold of racism and Jim Crow segregation. The city was a modern industrial powerhouse of coal and steel. It was run on behalf of the largest monopoly corporations by a hateful, narrow-minded white-racist powerstructure. Thirty-eight percent of the population was Black–living under infuriating conditions of discrimination and poverty.In the downtown department stores, Black people were free to buy whatever their paychecks could afford–but they were forbidden to use the restrooms, or order a grilled cheese at the lunch counters, or get a job behind one of the cash registers. Signs everywhere said “Whites Only.”
In Birmingham, like in most of the South, many white people still insultingly called adult Black people by their first names–and Black men were often casually called “boy.” Schools were segregated –and the education for Black children was starkly inferior and underfunded.
By the 
