We in Kasama, and many others, have been engaged for several years now in trying to imagine new ways to fuse revolutionary ideas with the popular discontent of the people. It is part of what drew our Winter’s End reporting team to Greece and what draws us now to discuss the Communist Organization of Greece (known as the KOE, and pronounced ‘Koy’).
All around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea there has been an eruption of massive anti-government movements. Many people in the U.S. know about the “Arab Spring” that swept North Africa – starting in Tunisia, then Egypt, and Libya – and erupting in nearby Yemen and Syria. Meanwhile, similar mass movements also filled the city squares on the European, northern side of the Mediterranean – though these movements in Greece and Spain have been much less well known than eruptions on the southern, North African side.
Among the common features of these “movements of the squares” is that they have drawn large numbers of youth into political life – often with a sweeping sense of rejecting previous politics (both existing governments and the oppositional parties). There is a sense that everything “before” is corrupt, complicit and exhausted, and everything “after” must now make a break. And while there are obviously deep concerns and frustrations that drew people into the squares, it also stands out that the politics of these eruptions were extremely unformed: People have had only a vague sense of what they wanted to put in the place of current politics.
Kasama has been running a series of reports by the “Winter has its end” journalist team — starting with their reports from Greece. Here is a video that gives another view of the upsurge in Greece against the government and bank-imposed austerity.
The following video features Tom Burke of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Fight Back). He talks about intimidation and harassment tactics by the FBI directed at him, his family, and other activists.
The following was posted at the Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity website on July 27, 2011: The Short Corridor Collective, representatives of the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike leaders, released a statement explaining their reasoning behind accepting the CDCR’s offer and ending the hunger strike:
Declaring a Victory & Ongoing Struggle
Written Statement by Short Corridor Collective (a small representative of the Hunger Strike Leaders at Pelican Bay)
To Supporters:
On July 1, 2011, a collective group of PBSP-SHU inmates composed of all races began an indefinite hunger strike as a means of peacefully protesting 20-40 years of human rights violations. The offenses against us rose to the level of both physical and mental torture—for example, the coercing of SHU inmates into becoming known informants for the state and thereby placing those prisoners, and possibly their families outside of prison, at serious risk of danger in response to being known to have informed on and caused harm to other inmates via informing on them.
The decision to strike was not made on a whim. It came about in response to years of subjection to progressively more primitive conditions and decades of isolation, sensory deprivation and total lack of normal human contact, with no end in sight.
This reality, coupled with our prior ineffective collective filing of thousands of inmate grievances and hundreds of court actions to challenge such blatantly illegal policies and practices (as more fully detailed and supported by case law, in our formal complaint available online here) led to our conclusion that a peaceful protest via hunger strike was our only available avenue to expose what’s really been going on here in CDCR-SHU prisons and to force meaningful change.
One of the most bizarre rightwing myths is that immigrant workers “don’t pay taxes.”Or that they live off of taxes. Or that they are a drain on the wealthy in the U.S.
Apparently the rightwing doesn’t realize that many immigrants work for employers who deduct everything (social security, income tax). Or that undocumented workers can’t apply for most of the benefits their taxes fund. Or that the cruelly low wages of immigrants prop up whole industries (and keep the lifestyles of the wealthy rolling along — by gardening, picking food, bussing tables, cleaning hotel rooms, cooking, washing dishes and more).
For people who choose not to understand basic things, we can keep it simple, and speak very slowly.\
Here is a piece by tradeunioinist Mike Elk (who has, by the way, been confused with Mike Ely before.) It originally appeared on the Think Progress blog.
Undocumented Immigrants Paid $11.2 Billion In Taxes
While GE Paid Nothing
by Mike Elk
This past month, there was much outrage over the fact that General Electric, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010. General Electric actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion from American taxpayers.
At the same time that General Electric was not paying taxes, many undocumented immigrants, who are typically accused of taking advantage of the system while not contributing to it by many on the right, paid $11.2 billion in taxes. A new study by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy shows that undocumented immigrants paid $8.4 billion in sales taxes, $1.6 billion in property taxes, and $1.2 billion in personal income taxes last year. The study also estimates that nearly half of all undocumented immigrants pay income taxes.
The trial of Moroccan political prisoner Ilham Hasnouni starts on August 2. (Her name is sometimes also given as Ilham Elhasnouni.)
Efforts are being made to have her story known around the world.
In the sharp struggles that follow North Africa’s “Arab Spring” — the suppression of political activity in pro-U.S. countries is often made invisible in the U.S. media. And Morocco, under King Mohammed VI is treated as an enlightened, modernizing corner of the region.
Here, in the following piece, arrested student activist Ilham gives her own description of Moroccan realities — as she tells the story of her arrest, interrogation and imprisonment.
* * * * * * * * * * *
by jZineb El Rhazoui
It was midweek, on October 12, 2010, that a well-dressed young man, about 20 years old, rang the doorbell on the Hasnouni family home.
“Ilham, there’s a guy here to see you,” her brother said, thinking that the young man on their doorstep was some fellow student from Ilham’s college. After waiting just out of sight, five men suddenly rushed the open door, threw Ilham’s brother to the ground, as their mother let out a desperate cry. A black vehicle was waiting just a few steps a way.
“I was shaken,” Ilham now says in written testimony from Marrakech’s Boulmharez prison,
“I quickly realized it was the dogs of the Makzen [the Moroccan regime]. That black car was the last thing I saw before they blindfolded me. During the ride I was beaten and subjected to verbal abuse of many kinds.”
The young university student was arrested, without warrant or warning, in the wake of an intense period of political clashes at Cadi Ayyad University. The student rallies and demands were answered by a police invasion on May 14, 2008.
The reporting team of Winter Has Its End is now starting work in Nepal. This is the first report from Kathmandu.
By Jim Weill and Eric Ribellarsi
We have arrived in Nepal, the center of a radical Maoist revolution. We stood here last year, when half a million Nepalis declared their hope and determination to make a revolution. There has been a double stalemate since then, both in the constituional assembly and within the Maoist party. Every aspect of political life is marked by the need to break out, push aside roadblocks, and take a leap.
This time, our journey begins during the heart of the monsoon rains. Every night, dark clouds roll in and shower the city, mopping up Kathmandu’s thick, throat-burning pollution. When the morning comes, the clouds are gone just as quickly as they came. These rains muddy the streets and green the sharply rising hills that surround the city.
The monsoon season is also a time when tourist traffic is low in Nepal. Life generally grinds to a halt. Because the roads are muddy, travel throughout the country is very difficult.
The following appeal came with a note pointing out that this communist student activist, Ilham Hasnouni, is the youngest political prisoner in Morocco. This has been her first arrest and yet she has already been in prison for ten months, without trial or sentence — and subjected to intense physical and psychological torture.
Ilham’s father has appealed to the world, “”Don’t forget Ilham.” And added that the first time he saw her after the arrest, the mistreatment had been so extreme that he had difficulty recognizing his own daughter.
Note: Ilham Hasnouni’s trial date is currently set for August 2. The note accompanying this article suggests adopting her picture (see right) as a Facebook profile image from now until August 2, in solidarity with this unbroken and imprisoned fighter.
Ilham’s name is sometimes also written as Elhasnouni in some reports.
There are (in addition to Ilham) three other Moroccan communist militants still held in prison — Mourad Echaouini, Youssef Elhamdiya and Abdelhak Etalhaoui.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Twenty-one year old Ilham Hasnouni is a Maoist militant from Marrakech University in the North African country of Morocco. She has been active with two organizations, the Basist Democratic Road organization (BDR) and the Union National of Student of Morocco (UNSM). She was always firmly in the front ranks of the struggles there with her comrades — against the reactionaries, against the privatization of Morocco’s universities, against injustice, and for the liberation of the Moroccan people.
On May 15, 2008, the UNSM initiated a major campaign for the demands of the students — leading to a historic revolt of students at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech.
The immediate response of the reactionary government was harsh repression. One fighter was assassinated. Eighteen comrades and two groups were rounded up and arrested. Of those arrested seven activists were sentenced to a year in prison. A second group of eleven comrades were also sentenced. Among them was Mourad Echaouini who was condemned to four years in prison. He is still behind bars. Another militant got a three year sentence. The rest were condemned to two years each.
Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) at Louisiana State University has asked that reports of their actions be circulated. The following article appeared on Jase Short’s tumblir. Its original title: ALEC’s treachery breeds protest.
By posting this piece, Kasama is not endorsing its strategies — but sharing something of interest.
“Students involved with SLAP are calling for the first steps towards founding a new party that puts the interests of the working-people first, a party whose base lies in working people, working-class communities and working-class organizations. They recognize—as many, many Democrats are starting to see for the first time—that the Democrats and Republicans, whatever their differences, represent two factions of the business elite who run our society rather than two ideological factions that split across society in general.
“In this, they ought to be supported in whatever way possible among those who care for a brighter future. They understand that such an effort can only be forged in struggle, hence the struggle against ALEC.”
Over the past year or so, we have seen a sudden acceleration of hard right legislation pouring out of the offices of state legislators, legislation that would have been considered laughable just a few short years ago—not to mention un-passable. Most Americans with any kind of political awareness at all tend to focus on the activities of the federal government, especially in those states with a small base of activism, unions, etc. with which to plug into state politics. The fact of the matter is that local and state governments have an enormous amount of influence on the lives of every single resident in United States and yet the spotlight is almost entirely off of them. As newspapers and other local media make cost-cutting measures just to stay afloat, they tend to jettison their coverage of state and local government first.
Before coming to Greece, I’d heard about Exarchia. It is fabled as a strong-hold of anarchists, so much that the police are often afraid to enter it. It has been a strategic center for launching militant political movements throughout the city. It was also a very important place during the 2008 uprisings that shook the country, for it was hear that 15 year old Aleksandros was murdered, sparking the uprisings. This I knew, but what I saw went even beyond all of that.
Walking through Exarchia for the first time, I immediately saw that the graffiti here was the most densely concentrated I have seen in my life (sorry Detroit). And the art is radical as fuck. The walls were lined with red stars, circle-a’s, images of rebels with gas masks, portraits of the murdered young radical, Aleksandros. Political posters were on every wall, on top of other politics posters. One popular image seems to be Felix the cat (a symbol of anarchist syndicalism) emblazoned on a red star.
The new rich in China -- tied by a thousand threads to the ruling party
Our correspondent in South China starts the latest letter saying that the BBC is reporting a new outbreak of popular anger is in Guizhou province (site of the famous Tsunyi conference during the Long March). There was fighting with police after a street vendor was killed. We have published a number of previous reports from this correspondent (who half-jokingly adopts the title of Kasama South China Bureau) — those previous reports touched on prostitution and anti-government sentiments.
A Party of a Different Type
by Kasama reporter in South China
There is very little of what passes for traffic control in China until an official convoy of government/party officials rolls through. The one I witnessed featured a scramble of cops pushing, shoving, and beating on cars to rudely directing them onto side streets and in directions they did not want to travel.
After all that officialdom cruises by in air conditioned isolation from the masses, safe from the rippling hatred that passed through the crowd without a word being spoken or a gesture being made. It is a certain intense look, and feel, of disgust and anger all around you for just a flash, and then it is gone.
Monica Shay in the early 1980s -- photo: Clayton Patterson
The following remembrance of our much-loved comrade Monica Shay appeared in the Workers World newspaper.
By Stephen Millies
New York ,Published Jul 18, 2011 8:58 PM
Monica Shay was a revolutionary who spent four decades fighting for poor people. She was known as “Kathryn” to her neighbors and other activists, including members of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.
Monica Shay died on July 7 after being shot five days earlier, along with four other family members in Montgomery County, Pa. Her comrade and partner, Paul Shay, was severely wounded. His nephew, Joseph Shay, was killed. Two-year-old Gregory Erdman was killed, and his mother, Kathryn Erdman, was wounded. They were all shot in the head by a gunman who was later killed in an alleged shootout with police.
Many people were horrified by this bloodshed. Activists gathered at two vigils on New York City’s Lower East Side to remember Monica Shay and the other massacre victims.
On July 5 people came to the Shays’ home on East 10th Street. Among those who took part was Juanita Young, whose son, Malcolm Ferguson, was killed by a police officer on March 1, 2000. Five days before his death, Ferguson had been arrested for protesting the shocking acquittal of four cops who had shot immigrant worker Amadou Diallo 41 times.
Charu Mazumdar, leader of the armed Naxalbari uprising of peasants and founder of the modern Maoist movement
Charu Mazumdar was the communist leader of India’s 1967 uprising in the village of Naxalbari — an opening shot of a fierce revolutionary wave that raged for years. This daring act of revolt created the Naxalite movement — the heart of India’s modern revolutionary effort.
Charu Mazumdar became one of the most wanted men in India, and was captured by police in 1971. He died ten days later at 4 am on July 28, 1972 — in Lal Bazar lock-up – a prison notorious for torture. Today, July 28, we remember him and the many martyrs in India’s great historic struggle for liberation and communism.
In 2007, several of us were looking for a form to write our first Kasama manifesto. We wanted to use a style sharply different from Bob Avakian (whose rambling, self-indulgent style reflects key weaknesses of his method). We chose to study closely the “Eight Documents” of Charu Mazumdar (plus early pieces by Turkey’s Maoist Ibrahim Kaypakkaya). The result was the format we adopted — “9 Letters to Our Comrades.”
One of the demands of the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike is an end to prolonged solitary confinement. It’s long been argued that solitary confinement is the only way to deal with extremely violent prisoners. However, most prisoners in solitary are not there for violent behavior, but for punitive reasons such as breaching prison rules. Study after study has shown that it has no measurable benefits, but it does decimate one’s sense of identity and ability to re-integrate into society. In its intent and effects, it is effectively legalized torture.
Hellhole
by Atul Gawande
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.
He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.
This was originally written as a Facebook note, and is being re-posted here with the permission of the author.
What is clear is that the same problems that affect and preocupy the radical left in the Western world are being felt by the ideological right, and that their response will not always come packaged in the usual packages of State collusion, fringe parties and street hooliganism, but might take forms such as Breiviks, and perhaps even other forms of violence. It is too early to tell if this action will have a cooling effect in this particular ideological space … or if it will be a spark that lights a prairie fire.
Anders Behring Breivik is not a fundamentalist Christian, he is something worse
by SKS
The New York Times has repeated the lie that Anders Behring Breivik, the butcher of Oslo and is a fundamentalist Christian. He is not.
The New York Times‘ thesis is that he is somehow a mirror image of Al Qaeda, a disaffected Christian turning the tables on Islamic fundamentalism. He is not.
He is the vivid, brutal, expression of a bubbling right-wing political movement of the post 9/11 era, emerging not from fascism or neo-fascism or from “revolutionary nationalism”, but from the unholy marriage of Austrian School economics and paleo-conservative cultural identity Romanticism – think Goethe, Scifi/Fantasy novels, and von Mises spawn a child.
Thousands like Winehouse die every year, and they are not venerated, or even pitied. We will not educate ourselves about the disease, or reform drug laws that plunge addicts into a shadow-world of criminality and dependence on criminals. Winehouse got away with too much said one copper, after a tape of her using was released. Did she? Did she really? Winehouse walked barefoot through the streets because that is where the drugs were, and even as her bewildered face splatters across the front pages, drug support charities are closing, expendable in this era of thrift.
Amy Winehouse: Why is there so little understanding of addiction?
Tanya Gold
Amy Winehouse is dead and any useful understanding of the mental illness that killed her seems far away. Already the portrait is painted and flat-packed, smelted and ready to become myth.
There is tiny Amy with the swaying beehive hair and the frightened eyes, tormented by her talent and the chaos it brought, famous at 21, dead at 27, now a member of the repulsively named “27 Club” of musicians who were also addicts and died at 27 – Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain. All dead, all revered, as if it was their illness that made them interesting. The initial, rushed obituaries made much of Winehouse “making it” into the 27 Club. Would she make it to 28 and be shut out? No, she got in, with 54 days to spare.
It would be easy to denounce Breivik as a Norwegian exception, but this would be a mistake. While he is distinguishable by his actions, it is important to note that some of Breivik’s core concerns have also played a prominent role within Norwegian and European politics more generally. I spent four years interviewing far right activists, many of whom rejected political violence. Yet what became clear during this research was that there is, unquestionably, a culture of violence within the broader far rightwing subculture. Many of the ideas that were voiced during this research have also come to light over the past 48 hours: the perceived threat posed by Muslim communities, a belief that mainstream parties are incapable of dealing with this threat and strong emphasis on a “clash of civilizations” between members of the majority population and minority groups.
Norway attacks: We can no longer ignore the far-right threat
Matthew Goodwin
The tragedy in Norway this weekend may prove to be a watershed moment in terms of how we approach far right followers, groups and their ideology. Until now, European democracies and their security services had focused almost exclusively on the threat from al-Qaida -inspired terrorism. Rightwing extremist groups and their more violent affiliates were dismissed as a disorganised, fragmented and irrelevant movement.
This conventional wisdom, however, ignored wider evidence of a more violent and confrontational mood that was emerging within European far right circles. This shift may have been a response to the arrival of al-Qaida-inspired terrorism, or a sense that far right political parties in Europe (such as the Norwegian Progress party of which the attacker was once a member) were not having enough influence on issues such as immigration.
This opinion piece originally appeared in the Guardian. Though it presents some worn out anticommunist assumptions, it is notable that the revolutions in Nepal and India have gained international attention and caused concern in ruling circles.
Today Maoism speaks to the world’s poor more fluently than ever
Aside from the bland icon of the new China, there is a much more dangerous Mao, whose ideas retain their vitality
by Pankaj Mishra
In 2008 in Beijing I met the Chinese novelist Yu Hua shortly after he had returned from Nepal, where revolutionaries inspired by Mao Zedong had overthrown a monarchy. A young Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, Yu Hua, like many Chinese of his generation, has extremely complicated views on Mao. Still, he was astonished, he told me, to see Nepalese Maoists singing songs from his Maoist youth – sentiments he never expected to hear again in his lifetime.
In fact, the success of Nepalese Maoists is only one sign of the “return” of Mao. In central India armed groups proudly calling themselves Maoists control a broad swath of territory, fiercely resisting the Indian government’s attempts to make the region’s resource-rich forests safe for the mining operations that, according to a recent report in Foreign Policy magazine, “major global companies like Toyota and Coca-Cola” now rely on.
And – as though not to be outdone by Mao’s foreign admirers – some Chinese have begun to carefully deploy Mao’s still deeply ambiguous memory in China. Texting Mao’s sayings to mobile phones, broadcasting “Red” songs from state-owned radio and television, and sending college students to the countryside, Bo Xilai, the ambitious communist party chief of the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, is leading an unexpected Mao revival in China.
It was the “return” of Marx, rather than of Mao, that was much heralded in academic and journalistic circles after the financial crisis of 2008. And it is true that Marxist theorists, rather than Marx himself, clearly anticipated the problems of excessive capital accumulation, and saw how eager and opportunistic investors cause wildly uneven development across regions and nations, enriching a few and impoverishing many others. But Mao’s “Sinified” and practical Marxism, which includes a blueprint for armed rebellion, appears to speak more directly to many people in poor countries. Read the rest of this entry »
Appalachian activism, culture and values have had tremendous impacts on life in the United States. Union coal miners put their lives on the line, and sometimes lost them, for worker’s rights, and we have reaped the rewards of their legacy. The miners who fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor insurrection in United States history, laid the foundation for a national movement that eventually won the eight-hour day, weekends and minimum wage. Appalachians were pioneers of popular education, founding the Highlander Folk School and settlement schools, and were critical leaders and allies in the Civil Rights Movement.
I was presenting on a panel about resistance to strip mining in Appalachia at the 2010 Baltimore Radical Book Fair, and we’d made it to the question-and-answer session. Hands in the audience bolted up to ask about community-outsider activist relations, Obama’s policies on mountaintop removal and the efficacy of civil resistance in ending this destructive form of coal mining. Each question posed its own challenge, but none were particularly unexpected. That is, until one of the presenters called on an unassuming woman in the front row.
“I regularly read the comments section on the Beckley Register-Herald site,” she told us, “From these comments, I’ve learned that these people, they like what they’re doing, they like blowing up mountains.”
Kasama 
