Throughout the early existence of the United States, slavery was legal. It was honored in the highest offices, in the nation’s pulpits, the courts, and the press. It was defended by troops, police, posses and informants — using extreme violence. And long before there were hopes that it might be ended by a civil war — there were slaves who rose up to rebel and escape. And standing with them was a radical and widely denounced movement of abolitionists who helped prepare the political ground for revolution and emancipation. This political preparation operated on several levels: The slaves, isolated on the broad southern belt of forced labor camps, fought. In the North, the abolitionists waged a fierce campaign of public agitation — denouncing slavery in pamphlets and speeches, often at great risk to their lives. And sections of this movement organized themselves to help the slaves escape — creating the Underground Railroad.
How did this armed resistance movement, and the public political defense of its illegal acts help prepare for the actual revolutionary war that abolished slavery? How does resistance give rise to revolution? What is the role of militant action and outlaw organization — in the process of preparing revolution? And how do we answer such questions today — as we seek ways to uphold our criminalized brothers and sisters among the immigrants or among black youth, or the deserters from the army, or the members of other despised and persecuted sections of society. What can we learn from the Santuary movement of the 1980s? Or the draft resistance movement of the 1960s? Or the illegal strike movements of the coalfields? Or the many other places where the desperate lives and bold actions of people defied the way things are — even before their understanding imagined another way things could be.
These drafts need to be read by politically conscious Farsi speakers who can compare the new Farsi text with the English-language originals. We ask Kasama’s Farsi-speakers to read, confirm and if necessary refine these translations. Help us make the Farsi version correctly reflect the meaning of the original — and help make sure that the Farsi usage is clear and widely understandable.
Please contact us by email to help: kasamasite (at) yahoo.com
Important note: These drafts are not yet final. Please do not re-publish them or repost them before we post the final versions here on Kasama. Please do not circulate them without the Preface.
thanks to Ka Frank for passing this article on. It was originally published on PhilippineRevolution.netunder the title “OBL2 is a failure in Quezon.”
The AFP’s claims at the end of 2007 that Oplan Bantay Laya 2 (OBL2) had destroyed all guerrilla fronts in Quezon is a big lie. The truth is that it is OBL2 that has been defeated in Quezon. The revolutionary forces in the province quickly adjusted to the intensified enemy aggression that came with OBL2. In the main, the New People’s Army (NPA) not only succeeded in preserving itself, but in advancing its revolutionary tasks.
Rectifying mistakes and dealing with OBL2. The Party and the leadership of the NPA first had to rectify tendencies towards military conservatism in facing OBL2. In some guerrilla fronts, Red fighters at first hesitated to launch tactical offensives, fearing that the enemy would exact revenge on the masses. This notion was later proven wrong as the enemy nonetheless savaged the masses despite the absence of tactical offensives.
The reality is that without the people’s army to launch tactical offensives and drive the soldiers out, the enemy was free to inflict unrelenting cruelty on the masses. It was this realization that invigorated the Red guerrillas into intensifying tactical offensives aimed at defending civilians, weakening and meting punishment on the enemy for their brutal abuse of the people, and defeating OBL2 altogether. Read the rest of this entry »
In this piece, Prachanda suggests that if reactionary parties undermine the current Nepali government (which he heads) the result will be a massive uprising of the people that will carry through the revolution by creating a Peoples Democratic Republic.
He argues that it is impossible to understand Nepal’s current progress toward radical change without understanding the role of the Maoist peoples war, and he adds that further advance is not possible unless the people prepare themselves for new storms of struggle.
This article was published in the Red Star. Many thanks to BannedThought.Net for making it available.
by Prachanda, leader of the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
When we were in People’s War for the political and social transformation, the enemies of the people had thought to assassinate us and end the process of social transformation at that time. However, Nepalese people, the justice loving people, did not support their plot and plan to be unimplemented. People’s War, rather, developed into its leap, one after another, and advanced forward to smash the hundreds of years of feudal reign.
Joe R. wrote to Kasama suggesting we could post an article (below) that describes a controversy within Israel over the origins of Jewish people.
The article (posted below after my comments) describes a controversial bestseller “When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?” by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand. It describes the anger that erupts if anyone questions the historic linkages between modern Jews and ancient Hebrews — and (by those means) questions the right of European Zionists to seize Palestinian land.
For progressive people and historical materialists it does not much matter who, exactly, inhabited Palestine millenia ago, and who today is their descendants.
The “right to land” (and the right to Palestine) is a social and political question. It is not something fixed by god or ancient history. The rights of living peoples is a question of living linkages, and the living impact of land robbery in the not-so-distant past.
However (as we all know) the robbery of Palestinian land is justified (mystically and often cynically) by saying this land “belongs” to the people who lived there in Old Testament times, because (supposedly) their god gave the land to them (and presumably denies it to others). For years, evidence has been piling up that this justification is not only historically and morally unjustified, but is no even rooted in real descent.
So a controversy over the origins of Jewish people does not affect progressive opponents of the Zionist state of Israel. But it does affect the religious-mystical arguments raised by conservatives, who have announced that God himself justified Israeli expansion and dispersal of Palestine’s inhabitants.
The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
Officials say the 41-year old CIA officer, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.
The discovery of more than a dozen videotapes showing the CIA officer engaged in sex acts with other women has led the Justice Department to broaden its investigation to include at least one other Arab country, Egypt, where the CIA officer had been posted earlier in his career, according to law enforcement officials.
assessment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “World growth is forecast to fall to its lowest level since World War II, with financial markets remaining under stress and the global economy taking a sharp turn for the worse, sending both global output and trade plummeting.”
“We now expect the global economy to come to a virtual halt,” said IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard in prepared remarks for a press briefing.
As the world’s “movers and shakers from business, civil society and politics” – imperialist ruling-class figures all — gather in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos to discuss the world economic crisis, the International Labor Organization, a UN agency, predicted a loss of possibly 51 million jobs worldwide in 2009 (see the news story which follows).
The ILO report also said that in this last scenario some 200 million workers, mostly in developing economies, could be pushed into extreme poverty.
It’s worth underlining that. 200 million workers. Mostly in “the developing countries.” Pushed into extreme poverty. Extreme poverty — it’s what the World Bank defines as living on less than $1.25/day.
Clearly we are still only in the early stages of a crisis of great magnitude. It’s a crisis distinguished not only by its developing depth and magnitude, but by its very rapid development around the world — a consequence of the “era of (capitalist) globalization.”
Afghanistan: The occupiers’ new strategy – intensify the occupation
26 January 2009. A World to Win News Service. The occupiers of Afghanistan, led by the U.S., have announced that they will present their new strategy soon. While they may not reveal all the elements of their strategy, some aspects are apparent in what they are already doing.
For some time now the U.S. has exerted increasing pressure to compel its allies to send more troops, especially into the war zones. This pressure as well as the failure of the U.S. and Nato forces to gain the control of the country gave rise to opposition to the previous American strategy from European countries and in particular the British, who warned that simply increasing the number of invaders on the ground cannot stop the situation from deteriorating. The alternative they presented involves negotiating with the Taleban and other Islamic opposition forces, and strengthening the puppet government and its army. Making use of tribal leaders and their militias has been another important element of discussion among the occupiers for a long time.
At the same time, when General David Petraeus, the former commander in Iraq, became the head of all American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan at the end of October, this provoked speculation that the U.S. was going to try to duplicate the same strategy he implemented in Iraq, one that did achieve some success in limiting the initiative of the Islamic insurgents called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. However, General McKiernan, the U.S commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, stressed the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, and concluded that one word he would not use in regard to Afghanistan was ”surge”. ”What is required is a ‘sustained commitment’ to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.’ (Associated Press, 19 September 2008) Read the rest of this entry »
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, let’s start off by your response to President Obama’s statement and whether you think it represents a change.
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s approximately the Bush position. He began by saying that Israel, like any democracy, has a right to defend itself. That’s true, but there’s a gap in the reasoning. It has a right to defend itself. It doesn’t follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. So we might agree, say, that, you know, the British army in the United States in the colonies in 1776 had a right to defend itself from the terror of George Washington’s armies, which was quite real, but it didn’t follow they had a right to defend themselves by force, because they had no right to be here. So, yes, they had a right to defend themselves, and they had a way to do it—namely, leave.
Same with the Nazis defending themselves against the terror of the partisans. They have no right to do it by force.
In the case of Israel, it’s exactly the same. They have a right to defend themselves, and they can easily do it. One, in a narrow sense, they could have done it by accepting the ceasefire that Hamas proposed right before the invasion—I won’t go through the details—a ceasefire that had been in place and that Israel violated and broke.
We have draft Farsi translations of the “9 Letters to our comrades: Getting beyond Avakian’s Synthesis.” We are starting here with the first two letters. The third and fourth letters will soon to follow.
Farsi (Persian) is the language spoken in Iran, and also among people within Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
These drafts need to be read by politically conscious Farsi speakers who can compare the new Farsi text with the English-language originals. We ask Kasama’s Farsi-speakers to read, confirm and if necessary refine these translations. Help us make the Farsi version correctly reflect the meaning of the original — and help make sure that the Farsi usage is clear and widely understandable.
Please contact us by email to help: kasamasite (at) yahoo.com
Important note: These drafts are not yet final. Please do not re-publish them or repost them before we post the final versions here on Kasama. Please do not circulate them without the Preface.
This first appeared in Turbulence. As always, the posting of this article here does not mean an endorsement of this analysis by Kasama. But we thought this would be of interest to revolutionaries.
Network organisation for the 21st century
Will the upsurge in activity around climate change and the food crisis repeat the cycle of the movement of movements over the past decade – momentary visibility then dissolution? Harry Halpin and Kay Summer say ‘yes’, unless different models of organising are embraced.
“Then perhaps we would discover that ‘organisational miracles’ are always happening, and have always been happening.” Mario Tronti
How do we organise ourselves to achieve our political aims? It is an age-old question, with the answer often revolving around two poles of attraction, the centralised cadre versus the decentralised loose network. The centralised cadres are well-known: the classic political Party models from the Bolsheviks to the US neo-conservatives and even most trade unions are diverse in many respects but all have some organisational features in common: a tight core bound together by common ideology and a clear leadership structure.
In contrast the decentralised network is a looser cluster of individuals, often with no coherent agreement on politics, who gather together based on affinity to take some form of action. This form was exemplified by the shut-down of the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999, and the emergence of the movement behind it. Of course, most political organisations mix aspects of both the centralised and decentralised models of organisation, balancing the benefits and problems of these two broad forms of organising. But this is usually the lens through which our debates and subsequent actions are viewed.
It has to be asserted (and thought through) that the exploration of concepts developed outside the communist movement (including by thinkers who are not themselves communists) is not inherently a betrayal of Marxism, it is not inherently a turning away from Marxism. It is one of the ways that Marxism itself learns, and expands, and deepens. And (as Marx did with the Hegelian dialectic, and as Mao did with the dialectics of traditional chinese philosophy) such borrowing is a difficult process of transformation and critical assimilation.
One example of how communist have been able to learn from others: A great deal was learned from the works of Steven J. Gould (the radical evolutionary biologist). I can’t capsulize it all here…. but his work was characterized by several things I’ll note in passing: One was the ability to appreciate the value of wrong ideas (in a provocative and materialist way) including by uncovering what was correct within concepts that were (overall) wrong. Second Gould increasingly over his life went to war with determinism and teleology — and fought against inventing non-existing tendencies within nature (for example there is no tendency for life to go from simple to complex). His explorations (even though he personally went further away from materialism in his theory of “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” NOMA) helped propell the RCP to a deeper criticism of “inevitabilism” in Marxism — taking up the battle against remaining teleology in communist thought (a battle where Althusser and others have already made great contributions).”
Some people think that “if you give it a platform, you are promoting it. And if you are promoting it, you must agree with it.” So they assume that every idea we “give a platform to” on Kasama must be an idea we sympathize with.
And yet we post (and debate) many different ideas — sometimes different ideas on the same topic (like the Obama campaign, or Nepal, or the relationship between ecology and socialism).
And so that logic means that Kasama, as a project, appears (to those who have this view) deeply confused. As if we are “soft” on all kinds of notorious ideas.
Kasama is sometimes criticized using an argument that goes like this: While claiming to be a communist project, Kasama has hosted discussion that includes some well known social democrats and reformists. By “giving a platform” to such views, Kasama is “promoting” them. And by promoting them, Kasama reveals that it has sympathy with such views and is not (in fact) communist at all.
I am tempted to respond with a flippant remark, like…
“Uh, ‘debate.’ Not clear on the concept? Look into it.”
But flippant is not helpful, so let’s break it down more explicitly — so it becomes clear this is not confusion, or vagueness, but an attempt to regroup with a radical rupture.
The U.S. has a number of different strategic goals — as the world’s aspiring “sole superpower”: It has sought to secure for itself long-term military and political control over the world’s most strategic resources — especially oil and natural gas in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea region. And by controling those resources, it has sought to prevent the rise of a new rival bloc of states — similar to the Soviet bloc that challenged the U.S. through so much of the world in the 1980s.
at the same time, the U.S. wants to solve the problem it has with “failed states” — i.e. countries where the superpower can’t control events ‘on the ground” by threatening the government in power. there are countries where the central governments don’t exhist (Somalia) or don’t exercise effective control (Afghanistan, Congo, etc). And they have proven to provide fringe areas outside the world system where armed non-governmental forces can regroup to challenge governments (including the U.S.).
Afghanistan both has strategic value (as this article suggests) and also has been a “failed state” (which is why the energy corporations did not ultimatelyu pursue an expensive pipeline in partnership with the Afghan Taliban, and which is one reason why the U.S. has trouble relying on government forces in Afghanistan to identify and uproot anti-U.S. forces.)
These strategic concerns are, in a fundamental way, not the concerns of the people of the world. They are imperialist concerns. They are the politics of those who have empires and want to hold onto empires. And they are concerns and interests sharply opposed to the people of the world, whose hopes for a better world require the breakup of imperialist empires, and the economic and military control over humanity by a few.
The article we are posting here originally appeared under the title “Afghanistan: The Oil Behind the War” (Revolutionary Worker newspaper #1125) in November 2001. In other words it was a Maoist analysis of U.S. interests in Afghanistan — written just as the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan was starting.
Its points are all the more valid now that the new president Obama is planning rapid escalations of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan — and as quite a few people (unfortunately) have started to see Afghanistan as “the good war” (in contrast with the occupation of Iraq, which so many see as the “bad war” — meaning the unjustified war.) Read the rest of this entry »
In this piece, Prachanda suggests that if reactionary parties undermine the current Nepali government (which he heads) the result will be a massive uprising of the people that will carry through the revolution by creating a Peoples Democratic Republic. 
Kasama 