The Terai is a crucial agricultural region in southern Nepal, bordering directly on India. It is a relatively low-land “bread basket” of Nepal, a place with nationality particularities, and a place where a developed feudal landlord class exists. It is also a place where a significant movement for autonomy has developed — with some forces threatening to withdraw the Terai from Nepal, and violently opposing the Maoist revolution and serving as a possible pawn for Indian military intervention. Agitations and conflict climaxed in a recent strike led by the United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF) that quickly produced ominous food shortages across Nepal. Now comes news of an agreement in this strategic region.
Somecomments noted that these developments may have crucial impact on the scheduled elections for the Constituent Elections (which are coming soon), and wonders out loud what those implications might be. (As readers uncover revealing coverage and background pieces on these events and, please post them here for others to read.)
In 1979, the U.S. government finally freed the Puerto Rican prisoner Lolita Lebron from Alderson’s Federal Women Prison in West Virginia. As news of her impending release reached us, revolutionaries across that state piled into our cars. As the dawn broke we found a open spot along that lonely country road where she would be driven as she left the high gray prison walls. We held high our brilliant red flags and held out our small children to greet this sister as she rolled past. It was a beautiful morning.
Kasama is publishing discussions on the need and nature of revolutionary organization. These postings do not endorsement — we are at the beginning of a presumptuous work.
The belief that huge movements will congeal around prefabricated vehicles is no minor or recent problem: The RCP itself has been conceived as such a “vehicle.”
The RCP originally emerged from a political upsurge where revolutionary forces had real, if primitive roots among the people. But those roots shriveled as that upsurge died. In the 1980s, the party correctly stressed its need to have tens of thousands of “organized ties” in each city and established political base areas in order to be able to make an approach to power.
However as those goals were not accomplished, the party seems to have fallen back, more and more, on a mythology – where at some future point the masses of people will come to “the rescue of a few scores” of revolutionaries. Lenin’s poetic phrase is often taken too literally, as if a small stubborn agitation-based organization can have its correctness and leadership suddenly discovered by awakening millions and can then catapult to power “in a telescoped way.”
“Ray Lotta once urged me (as we were working on a polemic together) to ‘Struggle harder to understand the material basis for incorrect ideas.’ And I found that startling at the time — since it was so different from my previous method, which was to assume that people with incorrect ideas ‘must be’ simply ignoring the ‘basic facts’ of any situation.”
A two-day national agrarian strike against a pending Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States ended on Wednesday February 20th, leaving four farmers dead after President Alan Garcia declared a state of emergency and ordered a violent crackdown. Farmers are demanding financial support from the government in the face of a predicted increase in the importation of highly subsidized U.S. crops with the passage of the trade deal. 700 farmers were detained, a number of whom face terrorism charges.
The strike, called by the Peruvian Farmers Confederation (Confederación Campesina del Peru, CCP) and other organizations began on Monday February 18th and ended once the government agreed to talks. The strike was in protest of what the CCP called “government indifference that has descended into the total abandonment of our nation’s farms.”
Over the last week teachers, doctors, and residents also struck, angry at a series of neoliberal policies advanced by the Garcia administration.
From March 13-16th, U.S. veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will testify to what is really happening day in and day out, on the ground in these occupations.
To provide a preview, we’ve created this short film. The film features three members who will be testifying at Winter Soldier and includes videos and photographs of Iraq from their deployments. This video contains graphic content. We need your support to help make Winter Soldier a success.
Here are important statements about the oppression and liberation of women from major communist writers of the last two centuries.
We believe that the liberation of women is posed today in unprecedented ways unanticipated in past periods. Ending the suppressed and exploited status of the female half of humanity now stands at the center of world events, with a promise and a force that has only started to be felt.
Write us at Kasama with statements, poems, analyses that you think capture that urgency, and that will help deepen our understanding of the connection between the liberation of women and the global struggle for ending all oppression and classes.
For many years, the RCP,USA has raised the slogan: “Break the Chains! Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution!”
This slogan was later adopted by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, and for a while by some other Maoist forces around the world.
The slogan has some obvious strengths: It denounces the ancient patriarchal “chains” of women’s oppression (echoing the words of the Internationale “No more tradition’s chains shall bind us.) And it situates that struggle against women’s oppression as a powerful component of the great revolutionary process that is needed across the globe.
I have always heard three major objections raised to this slogan (by quite a few women at various times) and have never heard any real discussion of such issues from the RCP. So I would like to pose those questions here:
Let Us Celebrate Our Fighting Unity on International Women’s Day
by March 8 Women’s Organization (of Iran and Afghanistan), 2008
We women from Iran will march on the streets of Europe on March 8 in order to let the world know we, who are facing one of the deadliest woman hating regimes on Earth (the Islamic Republic), will go on rebelling against everything reactionary until we achieve emancipation of women and the whole of humanity.
We will reaffirm that never ever in history have slaves been liberated by the slave owners. Therefore we denounce and reject George Bush’s outrageous declarations about wanting to liberate us.
Growing up in the 1960s, I would wander with friends through New York’s Greenwich Village.
Often we passed the plaque on an NYU office building that marks the site of the 1911 Triangle Fire. Then and now, it would not take much for us to imagine that narrow street piled with the smoldering bodies of women workers, or imagine their screams as they plunged down from above, trailing flames behind them.
Often, in those heady days, we would swarm out of Washington Square Park, flying our red and black flags high, and take the streets of the Lower East Side. And many among us would imagine that marching alongside us were those fearless sisters of the Ten Thousand whose dreams of revolution and socialism had echoed, like ours, through the narrow streets of Alphabetland.
And now, decades later, young women all over the world are relentlessly herded in unprecedented numbers into brutal sweatshops and the global sex trade — worked without mercy, threatened, underpaid, raped, beaten, and then discarded.
This story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is not a world of the past, it is the world of our present. The bitterness of this fact shatters claims of social progress over the last century. All the accumulated wealth and technology has brought us to this: we need a revolution.
One measure of this site is in the cold stats: 73,000 total page views over two months. 127 posts. 1230 comments from our readers. Each day, hundreds of people view well over a thousand pages (on average). The 9 Letters have been viewed and downloaded thousands of times. The site is international in impact, content and commentary.
But how are we really doing? Compared to our goals and the needs of the hour?
My personal feeling is impatience: We need to be moving faster. We need more focused and more substantive debate over how to “reconceive as we regroup.” More theoretical analysis of the burning questions posed by the world and the failure of the RCP (and other groups). More use of this site for revolutionary political engagement (starting, imho, with a creative approach to the elections and internationalist work around the revolutions of south Asia)
Where are you at? What are your criticisms and suggestions for Kasama (and the larger project that is unfolding)?
(Queens, N.Y.) On Feb. 25, community members and activists rallied on snowy sidewalks outside the Queens, N.Y., courthouse to demand justice for Sean Bell. Inside, family, friends and supporters packed the courtroom as three New York police detectives went on trial for killing the young Black man and wounding two others, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, on Nov. 25, 2006.
Bell and his friends were leaving his bachelor party when the cops unleashed a hail of 50 bullets. The three men were unarmed.
Bell’s fiancee, Nicole Paultre-Bell, gave tearful testimony inside the courtroom, noting that she last saw him “in the morgue” on what should have been their wedding day. Bell was also a father of two.
Detectives Gescard Isnora and Michael Oliver pleaded not guilty to manslaughter, and Mark Cooper pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment. The cops had tried to get a change of venue outside New York City, hoping that a mostly-white upstate jury would vindicate them–a tactic used successfully in previous police brutality cases.
“Critiquing Conspiracies” sent us the following comment:
I spend a good deal of my time online combatting the influence of conspiracism among progressives. The 911 ‘Truth’ Movement needs to be seen in the context of the historic Right narrative that attributes significant events to various secretive and powerful groups pursuing a ‘rule the world’ agenda: The Illuminati, International Bankers (usually Jewish, often, the Rothschilds or Rockefellers), Freemasons, The Vatican, elite institutions- such as the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers and/or a ‘Shadow Government’ comprised of intelligence agencies. Conspiracism is the best term to describe this sort of mythology.
Communists should be particularly sensitive to this issue, having been the target of one variant- ‘The International Communist Conspiracy’.
Yesterday Blackstone directed everyone to a post by E.G. Smith (whose blog is generally critical of the radical left). The specific essay said that the Bush impeachment group, World Can’t Wait, is placing heavy pressure on supporters to raises funds (including paying dues in order to become “official members”). Smith claimed that everything around WCW feels desperate, and that its funding approach seems to be lifted from the culture of cadre groups.
Within hours, someone naming themselves “Critical Criticisms?” responded sharply:
“So, what, you oppose fundraising on principal? There is little of substance criticizing WCW in that link, and none in your post. Is this website going to just be a repository for internet trash attacking anything the RCP is doing, or are you guys at least going to make some effort to be consistent and principled? It seems more and more like the former, despite the opposite tone set by the 9 Letters themselves.”
E. G. Smith’s comments were not (as CC claimed) without substance. There were details, arguments, criticisms, discussion of experiences and politics here. (Smith’s blog posting criticizing Revolution newspaper’s shrill new condescension makes some points — even if mixed with anti-communism.)
The implication from CC is that we (as moderators of Kasama site) should not allow our blog to be a “repository” for such “internet trash.” When CC asks if we are “at least going to make some effort to be consistent and principled” the implication is that being “principled” means NOT ALLOWING Smith’s comments to be posted by Blackstone.
So how will the socialist transition to communism look? What are the state forms and social institutions that correspond to a revolutionary overthrow of history’s oppressions?
“When encountering communists, people all over the world demand to know what we have learned from this exhilarating and painful process and what we would now do differently. Our answer must come in deep historical analysis and theoretical proposals — but also in our style, our methods, our program and our larger practice. “
Kasama 