english (pdf):

espanol (pdf):

Jaroslav wrote:

I’ve uploaded mp3s for special May Day edition of Revolution Radio. Three hours in equal length parts:

http://boxstr.com/files/1926774_j2bui/RR20080501a.mp3
http://boxstr.com/files/1927471_ss3uz/RR20080501b.mp3
http://boxstr.com/files/1928210_fe8hc/RR20080501c.mp3

Includes 11 versions of “L’Internationale”, ranging from traditional Thai music to Estonian punk rock. Full track listing at RR website, click on my name at top of this comment to get there.

Any suggestions of videos which are not just the musician(s) playing their instruments to the camera would be appreciated.

Solidarity has published an article called: “Marxist Blogs, Part One: Radical Blogging Is The Main Trend In Our World Today.” It’s a survey piece discussing a large number of radical blogs.

The author Brad Duncan writes:

“I was late to understanding much about the Maoist/M-L interpretation of Marxism. I came to left politics via anarchism and Trotskyism and didn’t really look closely at the Maoist-influenced tradition until I had been in the movement for some time. Over the last couple of years I’ve started to investigate this framework and its contemporary practice. Through this search I have stumbled across one of the most vibrant corners of net.”

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The Kasama Project announces a new online presence: “Revolution in South Asia” This RevSA site will be developed, as rapidly as possible, as an extensive, lively and interesting resource of information around the Maoist revolutions of South Asia — including breaking news, documents, analysis, and key controversies.

Please joining us in making this happen. Contact us if you are willing to join in this effort, and if you have materials that should be posted on this emerging RevSA site.

* * * *

Supporters of the 9 Letters and this Kasama site gathered in New York City in April to consolidate their common new communist project. The days of meetings pressed press forward on a number of practical political plans. We will be describing the discussions and decisions reached in more detail shortly.

However today we want to announce that Kasama has initiated work aimed at building broad knowledge, support and controversy around the Maoist revolutions in South Asia — especially India and Nepal. This work has a special urgency — here and now — because of the rapidly unfolding events in Nepal, because of the role of the U.S. in orchestrating counterrevolution there, and because of the intolerable silence here in the U.S. surrounding the South Asian Maoists.

In a world where communism has been declared dead and buried — these living movements of millions, under Maoist banners, give the very question of communist revolution an exhilarating “dignity of immediate actuality” — in a way that can help awaken many more people to the possibility of real, revolutionary, liberating change.

Join us in this internationalist informational effort!

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A reader of Kasama, who is also a radical midweste.rn farmer, suggested we run this piece. It originally appeared on counterpunch April 24, 2008.

An Alternative Agriculture is Possible: The Politics of Food is Politics

By De Clarke and Stan Goff,

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

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Sean Bell was killed in a barrage of 50 police bullets on the night before his marriage. Now the murdering police have been acquitted of all charges. The judge said that the police version had more “credibility.”

What does this verdict say about what a Black person’s life is worth in this country?
What does it say about what does the chance of meaningful justice — without revolutionary change?

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Our many new participants have often not seen the early posts of Kasama, during its first four months from January to april 2008. One problem with our current blog format is that the older stuff gets buried and hard-to-find, even though the posts and the discussions are worth checking out. So here are a few of our early pieces.

Mike E is AFK (away from keyboard) most of this week, so it is a good time to repost and revisit some of our earlier stuff.

when Kasama first appeared it had one thing on it….. the 9 letters:

9 Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian’s Synthesis

Polemics over the RCP & forging new revolutionary trend

• The Party’s Over by Mike Ely
• RCP: The Flight of the Worker Bees by JB Connors
• It’s like the Sun is Out, by Iris
• Linc and Me: On the Material Basis of Incorrect Ideas by Mike Ely
  
• Can we Imitate the Finland Station? by Mike Ely
• Sitting Thru Avakian’s Synthesis, and Getting Beyond It by DMC Ulises
• Official Notes: RCP’s “Political Truth” about Synthesis Event
• RCP: On Farragos, May Day 1980 and the Echoes Today
• RCP responses to 9 Letters ver. 3.0 : Still dodging substance
• Kasama coverage of RCP,USA list)

Forging a New Revolutionary Trend

• Outline of Our Theoretical Project by John Steel
  
• Letter 9: Traveling Light, Coming from Within by Mike Ely
  
• Communist Orthodoxy: A Good Idea?
• Taking up Internationalist Work around Revolutions in South Asia

Debate over Internationalism and Maoist Revolution in Nepal and India

• On Nepal: What should we say and do?
• Revolutions can’t be copied, only created fresh
• On tactics and creative Marxism
• Nepal’s Maoists on criticism by the RCP
• Reporting on the Maoist revolution in India
• nah

Other features of Kasama

• Obama: What Does An Illusion Look Like by Mike Ely
  
• Alain Badiou: Another Take on Revolutionary Strategy by John Steele
  
• Badiou, Mexico, and How People Stir by Linda D
• Nothing but each other — a story from our lives by Rosa Harris
• Videos
• Journalistic writings of Mike Ely
• Articles from A World to Win News Service

Immigration News Briefs: April 20, 2008

1. Over 300 Arrested in Poultry Plant Raids
2. 56 Arrests in Restaurant Raids
3. Houston Donut Plant Raided
4. Mississippi Restaurant Raided
5. Iowa Clothing Company Raided
6. Deport Flight to Philippines, Indonesia
7. TPS Extended for Somalis

*1. OVER 300 ARRESTED IN POULTRY PLANT RAIDS

Early on Apr. 16, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents
carried out coordinated raids on poultry processing plants owned by
the Pilgrim’s Pride company in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas and
West Virginia. A total of 311 workers were arrested, according to
figures supplied by ICE in an Apr. 17 news release. At least 91
workers were charged with criminal violations, including false use of
a Social Security number and document fraud, and have been turned over
to the custody of the US Marshals Service. The other workers arrested
are being processed for removal on administrative immigration
violations. Of the total number of workers arrested, 58 were released
under supervision for humanitarian reasons such as childcare or
medical issues. [ICE News Release 4/17/08] Some of the workers were
arrested at the plants; others were picked up at their homes. [CBS/AP
4/17/08] All the workers arrested in the operation appear to be from
Latin America. In a fact sheet about the raids, ICE said 130 of the
arrested workers were from Mexico, 112 from Guatemala, 59 from
Honduras, four from El Salvador and one from Colombia; the nationality
of five others was listed as unknown. [ICE Fact Sheet 4/17/08]
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by Richard Levins (from Monthly Review)

Richard Levins is the head of the human ecology program at the Harvard School of Public Health and most recently coauthor, with Richard Lewontin, of Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (Monthly Review Press, 2007) from which this essay is excerpted. The author is grateful to Rosario Morales for her assistance in conceptualizing and editing this essay.

* * * * * *

Philosophers have sought to understand the world. The point, however, is to change it.
—Karl Marx, 11th thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach

When I was a boy I always assumed that I would grow up to be both a scientist and a Red. Rather than face a problem of combining activism and scholarship, I would have had a very difficult time trying to separate them.

Before I could read, my grandfather read to me from Bad Bishop Brown’s Science and History for Girls and Boys.1 My grandfather believed that at a minimum every socialist worker should be familiar with cosmology, evolution, and history. I never separated history, in which we are active participants, from science, the finding out how things are. My family had broken with organized religion five generations back, but my father sat me down for Bible study every Friday evening because it was an important part of the surrounding culture and important to many people, a fascinating account of how ideas develop in changing conditions, and because every atheist should know it as well as believers do.

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U.S. expected to remove CPN-M from terrorist watch list

KATHMANDU, April 21 (Xinhua) — The United States is expected to remove the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN-M) from its terrorist watch list with just a few “technicalities” remaining for doing so, local leading news website Nepalnews.com quoted U.S. ambassador to Nepal Nancy J. Powell on Monday.

The move, although not confirmed by the U.S. government, comes at a time when the CPN-M prepares to head the new government after its victory in the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections held on April 10, the report said.

At a meeting with Nepali Interim Parliament speaker Subash Nemwang in Nepali capital Kathmandu on Sunday, Ambassador Powell also said that the United States would extend the same kind of assistance and support to the new government to be formed under the leadership of the CPN-M as it had been providing to the previous governments.

At the meeting, the two sides discussed the ongoing peace process, constitution drafting process and the latest political situation in Nepal.

Testimony from soldiers about U.S. actions in Iraq (gathered by the Iraq Veterans Against the War)

• Breakdown of the Military (5)
• Civilian Testimony: The Cost of War in Iraq and Afghanistan (12)
• Corporate Pillaging and Military Contractors (5)
• Divide To Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military (10)
• IVAW’s response to Department of Defense statement on Winter Soldier (1)
• Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy: Part 1 (8 )
• Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy: Part 2 (10)
• Rules of Engagement: Part 1 (6)
• Rules of Engagement: Part 2 (8 )
• The aims of the Global War on Terror: the Political, Legal, and Economic Context of Iraq and Afghanistan (2)
• The Cost of the War at Home (1)
• The Crisis in Veterans’ Healthcare (6)
• The Future of GI Resistance (5)
• Winter Soldier and the Legacy of GI Resistance (5

This map shows the results of the April 10 vote for the new constitutional congress (called “constituent assembly” in Nepal) — that is scheduled to abolish the monarchy and decide how Nepal is governed in the future.

The 1984 founding Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement says:

“In these countries the revolution will pass through two stages: a first, new democratic revolution which leads directly to the second, socialist revolution. The character, target and tasks of the first stage of the revolution enables and requires the proletariat to form a broad united front of all classes and strata that can be won to support the new democratic programme. It must do so, however, on the basis of developing and strengthening the independent forces of the proletariat, including in the appropriate conditions its own armed forces and establishing the hegemony of the proletariat among the other sections of the revolutionary masses, especially the poor peasants. The cornerstone of this alliance is the worker-peasant alliance and the carrying out of the agrarian revolution (i.e. the struggle against semi-feudal exploitation in the countryside and/or the fulfillment of the slogan “land to the tiller”) occupies a central part of the new democratic programme.”

The following is an excerpt from the RIM’s 1984 founding Declaration:

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Mao Zedong developed the theory of New Democracy as a road to socialist and communist revolution in countries defined by semi-feudal, semi-colonial relations. He wrote:

“Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes.”

Here are excerpts from Mao’s work: “On New Democracy”

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