This article was made available by BannedThought.netand originally appeared in the Red Star March 16-31, 2009 edition. The Red Star is an English newspaper sympathetic to the Maoists of Nepal.
It is, as you can see, a critique of the “dogmato-sectarianism” of the RCP which has denounced the Nepali Maoists as “revisionist” — and it lays out the tasks that face the UCPN(M) as it encounters the difficult tasks of carrying through the revolutionary seizure of power.
“…the Nepalese oppressed class has now arrived at a very glorious but more challenging juncture of seizing central power through a process of people’s rebellion of the Nepalese specificity under the leadership of our party the Unified CPN (Maoist).”
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Nepalese Revolution and its International Significance
By Basanta (Indra Mohan Sigdel)
Proletariat is an international class. In this sense, the communist movement of a certain country is in essence an inseparable part of the international communist movement. Needless to say, a communist party of a certain country, analysing the entire positive and negative experiences the communist parties of other countries acquire and synthesising them apply creatively the positive aspects in the specificity of their own, and in this course, the international communist movement gets enriched ideologically. Apparently, the synthesis of Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution of the world, had been the ideological foundation for the Great October Revolution in Russia. Likewise, the synthesis of the experiences of the Great October Revolution and those in the course of socialist construction in Russia had been the ideological base for the New Democratic Revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. In the course of these great revolutions, the international proletariat has developed Marxism to Marxism-Leninism and then to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a science of social revolution and demands application. However, in the course of applying this science of revolution mainly three kinds of wrong trends have come up in the history of the international communist movement and the Nepalese communist movement as well. They are: right centre and dogmato-sectarian trends. When struggling ideologically against wrong trends, the international proletarian class has been acquiring new experiences and synthesis of those experiences has been enriching and sharpening Marxism.
As the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market falls apart, the question of an alternative must be re-opened
Bernard Keenan
Let’s get one thing out of the way to begin with: history is back in fashion. A generation on from Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the “end of history”, the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market fell apart in spectacular style during a few short months last autumn. As jobs disappear and anger rises, the bare bones of ideology that prop up the present system are exposed.
The speedy panic with which our governments agreed to throw billions of pounds away to restore “confidence” suggests that the dream is over and we are awakening to a strange new socialism, in which an increasingly authoritarian government has taken public control of financial capitalism in order to save it from itself. We read today that equal pay reviews no longer matter. Migrants are left to starve on the streets as the government heads off the far right by pandering to it. And so it’s precisely now that the question of an alternative must be re-opened.
Against this backdrop, Birkbeck College this weekend hosted a symposium on the idea of communism. Originally planned as a meeting of philosophers and those who enjoy hearing their debates, the unexpected material circumstances of history instead gave the event a genuine sense of urgency. Even the BBC came to hear Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, and others speaking on the possibilities and challenges of reinventing the communist ideal today. Read the rest of this entry »
In June 2006, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) wrote a letter to RCP responding to criticisms. In the last week, attention has been given on this site to critiquing the dogmatic method of those RCP criticisms.
But we really need to focus a bit on what the Nepali Maoists are actually saying (and doing) — which in many ways is much more interesting than dissecting (yet again) the complaints of dogmatists. Our look at the Maobadi needs to be a thoughtful and critical one, not naïve cheerleading or wishful thinking. We need a clear idea of what they represent — in order that we can build broad understanding of this important revolution, and also so we can ourselves learn from the positive and negative of this experience as it unfolds.
Fresh Eyes on a Burning Issue
The CPN(M) (aka Maobadi) takes some pains to make clear what problem they are working on: how to lay the basis in the way they come to power for continuing the revolution while they are in power. They do not want to enter power with a narrow base. This is part of a larger strategy to prevent the corrosion and reversal of the revolution.
The CPN(M) writes:
“History is a witness that the proletarian class had succeeded in establishing its power in almost one-third of the globe, with the breath-taking sacrifice of millions in the twentieth century…. But questions have come up as to why those proletarian powers turned into their opposites without any bloodshed, right after the demise or capture of the main leadership? Why did Comrade Stalin fail to control the emergence of revisionists from within the Party he had led, despite that he did his best, including forceful suppression against them? Why did the CPC under Mao’s leadership, despite that it launched the Cultural Revolution, fail to stop revisionist Deng and his clique from grabbing power after his demise?…. These and alike are the questions for which we are trying to find correct answers. Only cursing the revisionists does not solve the problem.”
The Nepali communists are posing questions that all communists face — the questions handed us by the last century. What laid the basis for the reversal of the revolutions in Russia and China? How can the popular basis for socialism be more firm, more popular, more conscious, more sustained, more engaged? How do we struggle against capitalist restoration without producing a repressive atmosphere that downpresses the revolutionary people and weakens the emergence of successors?
The following obituary appeared in todays SF Chronicle. Thanks to Scott for pointing it out.
Steve was a prominent activist in the generation that emerged from Berkely an early leading figure in the Revolutionary Union, a central organizer of the communist pilot project in Richmond California and one of the first Maoist organizers to go into the plants to connect communist politics with broaders sections of working people. He was also a gay man forced into the closet within the communist movement. He left the RU in the struggles over black nationalism in the early 1970s — helping to form first the Bay Area Communist Union and then the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee.
Anti-war activist Steve Hamilton dies
Seth Rosenfeld, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, March 30, 2009
A memorial service is planned for May 16 for Steve Hamilton, a prominent Bay Area anti-war activist and member of the Oakland 7 who was acquitted in a notorious conspiracy trial.
Mr. Hamilton, 64, died Feb. 1 after a heart attack.
He was part of a group of anti-war activists known as the Oakland 7, which was charged with conspiracy for organizing huge demonstrations at the Oakland Army Induction Center in 1967 as part of nationwide protest called Stop the Draft Week.
This fact sheet was produced by the International League of People’s Struggle (Bay Area Grassroots Organizing Committee). Thanks to Ka Frank and Doug for sharing this.
Fact Sheet
The War in Afghanistan and Pakistan:
A Brutal War for Empire—
not a “Good War”
Are the wars of the past six years finally behind us? Consider these recent developments in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq:
• In February, President Obama ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, in addition to the 38,000 U.S. soldiers and marines already there.
• There are 22,000 NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. Adding 5,000 armed “civilian” contractors like Blackwater, there are over 80,000 US-NATO forces in Afghanistan now, with more to come.
• The Afghan war is now a regional war, having expanding into Pakistan. In the past year, there have been 3 dozen missile attacks by unmanned CIA Predator and Reaper (as in “Grim Reaper”) drones based in northwest Pakistan, resulting in numerous civilian casualties—most recently 11 civilians were killed this week, as the Obama administration continues the Bush regime practice. Protests across Pakistan have become very broad and rebellious.
• Since 2005, thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by US-NATO forces, mostly by air strikes.
• On August 22, 2008 in the village of Azizabad, 91 civilians were killed in a 6-hour air and ground assault by US forces, including 61 children and 15 women. Read the rest of this entry »
Kasama has been posting reports and videos from the conference, titled “On the Idea of Communism,” which took place from March 13th-15th at the Birkbeck, University of London to discuss communism as a philosophical concept. It featured presentations by many notable European intellectual figures.
This was originally posted on the Kafila blog. As always, posting material does not imply agreement.
Re-booting Communism Or Slavoj Zizek and the End of Philosophy – I
Today, 13 March, a whole galaxy of philosophers and theorists got together for a three-day conference “On The Idea of Communism” under the auspices of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London University. The Conference opened to a jam-packed hall where all tickets had sold out (no jokes, this was a ticketed show where the likes of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Luc-Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Terry Eagleton and many many others are to perform on the ‘idea of communism’). The huge Logan hall with a capacity of about 800-900 was so packed that the organizers had made arrangements for video streaming in another neighbouring hall – and that too was half full! Very encouraging in these bleak days.
The conference began in the afternoon with brief opening remarks by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Badiou made his general point (see below) about the continuing relevance of the ‘communist hypothesis’. Staid and philosopherly. And then, Zizek. Clearly, in the five brief minutes he spoke, he was the star – a rock star playing to the gallery and the gallery responding to him as it would to Michael Jackson (who, one of the organizers said was being given a run for his money by the communist conference, or so the Guardian said!). As a matter of fact Zizek and his audience seemed already tied in a bond of performing for each other. This once post-marxist but now relapsed marxist philosopher-theorist thundered, gesticulating with eavery word he spoke: “We must resist the temptation to act. We must refuse being told that children are dying of hunger in Africa or in the slums of India, for this is the philosophy of the present times. They don’t want us to think.” And he went on, amidst cheers from a hysterical audience, “We must do, you must do what Lenin did in 1915, after the war broke out, after th failure of the Social Democratic parties. He went to the library and started to read Hegel’s Logic. And this conference should be our moment of reading Hegel’s Logic. How much polemic is compressed in this one statement was of course evident only to Zizek followers, for he was not just making the simple point about reading and thinking as opposed to mindless ‘doing’ that is the mantra of our times; he was also polemiciizing against all kinds of anti-Hegelians: Althusserians, postmarxists like Laclau and Mouffe, poststructuralists, Deleuzians and so on.
Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the RCP and other Maoist organizations.
The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society” and is promoting it with the same urgency it devoted to the author’s Away With All Gods! earlier this year… What follows is a contribution to a critique, addressing approximately the first quarter of the work (dealing with Jefferson, his life and thought) rather than a review of the entirety.
I’ll raise some questions about how we should relate to historical facts, the issue of “progress” or “directionality” in history, and the evaluation of individuals in historical periods far removed from us. In AWAG! Avakian remarks provocatively that if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t and shouldn’t like him very much (mainly because he accepted slavery). Similarly he would like us to dislike Thomas Jefferson, whom he depicts as a cynical, demagogic, slave-owning oppressor. But his depiction of the individual (whatever its own merits) is less the issue than the useof this depiction to broadly characterize and explain over two centuries of “Jeffersonian democracy.”
Recently, Bill Moyers sat down with Mike Davis to talk about the current economic crisis on his show Bill Moyers Journal. The video can be found here. We’ve posted the transcript below. Bill Moyers has emerged as a voice of critical journalism in the U.S. Mike is a long-time International Socialist activist and author of books including City of Quartz (analyzing LA) and Planet of Slums (review).
BILL MOYERS: You know, Mike, there’s so much talk from that side of the spectrum raising the specter of Socialism. And I thought I might as well talk to a real Socialist about what the term means. I mean, I cannot find anyone in this country advocating the abolition of private markets and the wage systems or nationalizing all the major industries, I mean, no one’s arguing for supplanting capitalism, are they?
MIKE DAVIS: I am.
Facing Historical Vertigo?
March 20, 2009
BILL MOYERS: For all the talk on the cable channels and in the blogosphere, you would think Washington has been invaded and conquered. Remember that scary movie from the 1950’s, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS? MALE VOICE: Everyone! They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!
BILL MOYERS: Many film scholars believe the movie is a paranoid parable, warning of a Communist takeover of America. But today, the body snatchers are you ready for this? Socialists! That’s right. Socialists, reportedly swarming over the city and making off with the means of production, namely the Federal budget. I’m not making this up. Newsweek was the first to spot the aliens a month ago and it was us. Here’s the headline of a recent article on Salon.com. Newt Gingrich, reincarnated once again as himself, sounds as if Obama ate his Contract with America for lunch and coughed it up as “European Socialism.”
NEWT GINGRICH: I think it is the boldest effort to create a European Socialism model that we have seen.
Kasama has been posting reports and videos from the conference, titled “On the Idea of Communism.” The conference took place from March 13th-15th at the Birkbeck, University of London to discuss communism as a philosophical concept. It featured presentations by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Michael Hardt among others.
This post is from The Pinocchio Theory. Kasama does not necessarily endorse this reading of events but feels it makes points worth considering.
For some background on this event, and some of our previous posts see here , here and here.
* * * * * “Zizek opened the conference by saying that the time for guilt was over, that in the 21st century we needed to reclaim the name of “communism” from the ill repute into which it has sunk. And I think this is entirely right…”
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I don’t have the presence of mind to summarize all of the presentations at the Birkbeck Communism conference, the way I did with Michael Hardt’s talk in my last post. But I can make some generalizations. Part of the appeal of events such as these is simply to see the academic superstars in action. From this point of view, the conference did not disappoint. Slavoj Zizek was in fine form, manic and excited, and so full of a kind of outward-directed energy that I didn’t really mind his overbearingness. Gianni Vattimo, whom I had never seen before (and of whose works I have only read a little) was quite a charmer, in a humorously self-deprecating way. Terry Eagleton reveled in the role of the British common-sense empiricist in a room otherwise full of dialecticians. Toni Negri was warm and animated, jacques Ranciere admirably meditative. Alain Badiou was… well, Badiou (more of which later).
Maoist women fighters with their weapons. Click for full picture
Ben Petersen, a friend of the Kasama site, who traveled from Australia to Nepal to report directly about the revolutionary events there. He has made a special point of interviewing a wide range of people — to give a real sense of the impact of the Maoist revolution, and also the intense contradictions at this particular moment.
Ben’s pieces will appear on Kasama’s South Asian Revolution site, and also on his ownblog Lal Salam. (Earlier reports: first impressions and interview with gay activist.)
Most recently, Ben went to one of the so-called “cantonments” — bases where the Peoples Liberation Army fighters are gathered. Ben recently wrote:
“I just spent a week with the PLA… i can guarantee you that … they are still very much the political force they were a few years ago. I can say from the experience of being there that there was no sell out.”
Here is Ben’s report:
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Pictures & Thoughts From the PLA
By Ben Peterson
For the last week I have been with the Jana Mukti Sena, the Peoples Liberation Army. Mostly with the 3rd Division, Kalyan/Anish Memorial brigade.
click for full picture
This is the Peoples/Military hospital. Set up by the peoples army, it now serves both them and the public. It has many facilities, including a pharmacy, operating room for minor surgeries, a pre and post natal care facility and a female ward. It was built by the PLA, and runs at next to no cost for the people of the area. ( i also fell ill at the camp, and it cost me 10 rupees, about 20 Australian cents, which included my medication)
From March 13th-15th, there was a remarkable conference at the Birkbeck, University of London to discuss communism as a philosophical concept. The conference, titled “On the Idea of Communism,” featured presentations by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Michael Hardt among others. Kasama will be posting reports and videos from this conference.
For some background on this event, and some of our previous posts see here , here and here.
In the video below, Alain Badiou appears to be answering a question about what we can do in the present period.
We cannot live today outside capitalism. It’s nonsense. There is no place outside capitalism itself. So is it possible to create something recuperative [?]…by analysis of contermporary capitalism? I think this analysis is a necessity but we cannot go from this analysis to politics. It’s economism in some classical sense. We can create political places outside or at a distance from the state. It is possible. And so the question of the political determination is first the question of the state and not the question of capitalism. So we must go from politics to economy and never from economy to politics.
From March 13th-15th, there was a remarkable conference at the Birkbeck, University of London to discuss communism as a philosophical concept. The conference, titled “On the Idea of Communism,” featured presentations by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Michael Hardt among others. Kasama will be posting reports and videos from this conference.
For some background on this event, which took place in London, see our previous posts here and here.
These are notes from the first day of the conference. The original post can be found on the infinite thought blog.
On the Idea of Communism, Birkbeck 13-15th March, 2009
Costas Douzinas: Welcome
Hello friends and comrades. George Birkbeck believed that everyone should study philosophy, theology and Latin. Birkbeck is primary institution for adult education and for re-establishing the role of the public intellectual. We did not predict severity of crisis. Premises of neo-liberalism have become denaturalized. Communism is not just a regulative idea, but is immanent within our social relations.
Alain Badiou: Opening Remarks
Five very simple remarks. The conference on ‘Communism’ means that we have a precise goals, to discuss the precise significations of the word ‘Communisms’ and to see whether this dead word must become the new positive word in philosophy and politics. Conference is not about the generality of political thinking or different ways of revolutionary politics but about the different significations and possible use of the word communism. All the speakers at the conference must have the conviction that is really a positive use of the word communism today. Not repetition of the classical critiques of the word. Sometimes we agree with these critiques, in fact. Wed don’t say that communism is not a criminal word. What we need is a renewal of the word. There is a common point here which is to propose a positive signification of the word ‘communism’. Is a philosophical conference. The idea of it started with discussion between AB and SZ. SZ often criticises AB, but this is a true sign of friendship. Nobody represents a party at the conference, everyone is representing his or herself. No party/power. No Kim Jong-Il, no Fidel Castro. There is a collective search for new use of the word communism after terrible experiences of the last century. Collection of phil/pol singularities – we are on the side of novelty, creativity. We are on the side of communism in its newness.
More than 400,000 people a year are detained by immigration officials in the United States – including undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants who run afoul of the law and asylum seekers who come fleeing persecution – but according to a report released today by Amnesty International, conditions are often deplorable and detainees are routinely denied due process.
It’s the second major human rights report in a week to indict the nation’s immigration detention system. The system is attracting increased attention in part because the number of people in detention has grown exponentially in recent years and in part because of dozens of in-custody deaths and a lawsuit over the treatment of children.
This is a first-hand report from the recent conference “On the Idea of Communism.” It was originally posted on frieze.com. For some background on this event, which took place in London, see our previous post here.
A Return to Communism?
by Mark Fisher
Towards the beginning of his paper at last weekend’s ‘On the Idea of Communism’ conference at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, self-described ‘anomalous sociologist’ Alberto Toscano cited the Observer’s recent review of The Meaning Of Sarkozy (2009) by Alain Badiou: ‘[W]hen he quotes Mao approvingly, and equivocates over the rights and wrongs of the Cultural Revolution,’ the review went, ‘it is hard not to feel a certain pride in workaday Anglo-Saxon empiricism, which inoculates us against the tyranny of pure political abstraction.’ Perhaps the inoculation isn’t as powerful as the reviewer hoped; the article goes on to admit that Badiou’s book is ‘strangely compelling’. In any case, it is an odd time to take a pride in ‘Anglo-Saxon empiricism’, since it is the unreflective, plain-speaking commonsense on which the British commentariat pride themselves that has led to the UK falling prey to the tyranny of another kind of abstraction, that of finance capital.
As you would expect, the current financial crisis was a subject that kept recurring at the three-day conference, and indeed may have partly accounted for the immense popularity of the event, which had to be changed to a larger venue because the level of interest was so high. But more than one speaker warned that it will take more than the crisis to undermine capitalism. As Slavoj Žižek rightly insisted, the dominant narrative of the crisis – whereby the excesses of particular capitalists are blamed, rather than the capitalist system itself – will only enable people to continue to sleep in the guise of waking up. Is it time for a return to communism? And, if so, to which idea of communism must we turn? Read the rest of this entry »
When we started this Kasama site, we got two pieces of negative advice:
First, it was said “You can’t create a successful communist blog, it’s been tried.”
And second “Revolutionaries can’t (or shouldn’t) expect to actually organize on the Internet.”
Well, we have had a good run so far, much better than I had expected: We just passed 1,000 posts and 10,000 comments — in little more than a year. Yesterday we reached our highest attendance ever — for the first time, crossing over 3,000 page views in a day. So the first negativity has proven premature.
Meanwhile, I have never understood the second claim. To me it was as odd as arguing “you can’t organize on the radio,” or “you can’t organize on telephones.”
The fact that chunks of the left are stuck in 19th century newspaper formats always struck me as very un-radical and conservative — as small thinking. (And meanwhile the right has been organizing on talk radio since Adolf Hitler’s election campaigns of 1932!)
How can you NOT be organizing on the internet? If someone wants to argue that you (also) need face-to-face meetings, or discussions that are not public, or real books and printed material… well, who’s arguing with that?
Sometimes people imply that the internet is somehow “petty bourgeois” — because the digital divide means that many oppressed people are not online. But the oppressed don’t have printing presses either, but we USE the printing press to get out the info where it needs to go. And I’ll argue that the current internet divide is probably no deeper than the pre-existing literacy divide.. The same people who have little access to the internet also had trouble reading sophisticated revolutionary newspapers and books. And the digital world now gives us the potential of creating and circulating video, audio, music, pictures to circumvent illiteracy in new ways.
But please, don’t be deterred by my remarks! If you are someone who has reluctance and suspicion of revolutionary work online — here (right here on this thread) is a good place to speak.
“I don’t want to contribute to a world where ‘if Mao or Lenin did it, it must be ok, if they didn’t do it, it must be wrong.’ However, i do need to note… that if the RCP’s method was applied to Mao, Mao too would be denounced.”
David then provided some statements from Mao Zedong which we have posted below — from the 1945 days when Mao was starting negotiations with the most powerful reactionary party in China, considering a coalition government, and maneuvering to launch the final seizure of power.
David writes:
“These quotes might be considered when viewing the RCP’s criticisms of the UCPN(M).”
“The organs of people’s power built up in the countryside of Nepal through the revolutionary war have been dissolved, the old police forces have been brought back, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), although never defeated on the battlefield, has been disarmed and confined to “cantonments” while the old reactionary army (formerly the Royal Nepal Army, now renamed the Nepal Army) which previously feared to travel outside its barracks, except in large heavily armed convoys, is now free to patrol the country—with the blessing of a CPN(M) Defense Minister.”
“Control over the security sector remains at the heart of the power struggle; the impasse over the question of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) integration and the broader issues are discussed in detail below. Many other aspects of the peace deal remain unresolved or unimplemented. Apart from a few exceptions, the Maoists have not fulfilled their repeated promises to return property seized during the conflict, nor have they fully dismantled parallel structures. Local government is yet to be re-established, although cross-party consensus on creating interim bodies appears close.” (p. 2)
One commentator has conducted extensive on the ground investigation, another has read diplomatic agreements as if they were exact representations of reality.
This fact sheet was produced by the International League of People’s Struggle (Bay Area Grassroots Organizing Committee). Thanks to Ka Frank and Doug for sharing this.
This is a first-hand report from the recent conference “On the Idea of Communism.” It was originally posted on 
