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Wind in the tower heralds storm from the mountains.




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Archive for April, 2008

Kasama on May First: Revolution in Nepal!

Posted by Mike E on April 30, 2008

english (pdf):

espanol (pdf):

Posted in >> analysis of news | 6 Comments »

Revolution Radio: May First MP3s

Posted by Mike E on April 30, 2008

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.

Posted in >> analysis of news | 3 Comments »

Kasama Reviewed: “Angry, Growing, and Blogging”

Posted by Mike E on April 28, 2008

SolidaritySolidarity 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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 4 Comments »

Kasama’s New Effort: Spread the Word About the Maoist Revolutions of South Asia

Posted by Mike E on April 27, 2008

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!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 1 Comment »

Clarke and Goff: Alternative Agriculture is Possible

Posted by Mike E on April 26, 2008

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 61 Comments »

Outrage! Justice for Sean Bell!

Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2008

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 9 Comments »

Revisiting Early Kasama (Jan-April 2008)

Posted by Mike E on April 25, 2008

9 Letters to Our Comrades

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

India

Forging a New Revolutionary Trend

Debate over Internationalism and Maoist Revolution in Nepal and India

Other features of Kasama

Posted in >> analysis of news | Comments Off on Revisiting Early Kasama (Jan-April 2008)

On Telling Each Other “How to Fuck”

Posted by Mike E on April 23, 2008

by Mike Ely

A valuable thread has unfolded on the communist approach to sexuality.

In that thread, Ulises says:

“If I had to make a basic division in sexual matters, one that I think can be the basis for a more liberating sexuality, it would be between human kindness, love and intimacy, and a sexuality of domination, humiliation and cruelty.”

RedFlags writes:

“As a good friend of mine said, paraphrasing Wilhelm Reich, “if you can tell people how to fuck, you can make them do anything.” I think that pretty much sums up the RCP’s line on sex. It is something uncontrollable, and in the erotic is human force that can’t help breaking laws.”

Whether fairly or not, I have always seen these two views as different — and somewhat profoundly opposed — on matters of sexuality and intimacy. And by generalizing here, I hope I am not putting words into the mouths of either Ulises or RedFlags.  And if so, we can correct that through commentary below.

* * * * *

One view (expressed by Ulises) sees that different forms and manifestations of intimacy are different in their social content and nature.

Now in reality, in the real spectrum of human relations, these differences don’t sort out neatly where “Some forms of sexuality are simply more progressive and the rest are simply reactionary.” In all intimate human relations there is struggle — and those of us who are revolutionary have (or should have) a sense of how complex it is to develop intimate relations that truly and consistently correspond to our larger social goals and values.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in communism, homosexuality, Marxist theory, Mike Ely, rape, sex trade, women | 126 Comments »

Immigration: More Raids, Hundreds Arrested

Posted by Mike E on April 22, 2008

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]
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 4 Comments »

Richard Levins: Living the 11th Thesis

Posted by Mike E on April 22, 2008

drosophilaby 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 3 Comments »

Nepal’s Maoists May Be Removed from U.S. Terrorist List

Posted by Mike E on April 21, 2008

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.

Posted in >> analysis of news | 1 Comment »

IVAW: Winter Soldier Testimony

Posted by Mike E on April 21, 2008

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

Posted in >> analysis of news | Leave a Comment »

Nepali Maoists on Homosexuality

Posted by Mike E on April 21, 2008

This article originally appeared on Counterpunch, April 23, 2007

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), leading what many have considered the most advanced Maoist movement in the world for the last decade, has recently been accused of attacks on gay people and of indulging in anti-gay rhetoric. Unfortunately the reports seem valid. In January a senior party leader, Dev Gurung, now Minister of Local Development in Nepal’s transitional government, was quoted in the press as stating: “Under Soviet rule and when China was still very much a communist state, there were no homosexuals in the Soviet Union or China. Now [that] they are moving towards capitalism, homosexuals may have arisen there as well. So homosexuality is a product of capitalism. Under socialism this kind of problem does not exist.”

The statement seems quite un-Maoist in its description of any twentieth-century socialist experiment as truly “communist.” Mao broke from Stalin in emphasizing the long-term nature and fragility of the construction of socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and the classless society of communism theoretically posited for the human future. And it seems oblivious to historical reality in denying the existence of homosexuality anywhere, anytime in human history. Dangerously foolish (if I can assume that it was indeed said), it was made in the context of reported abuses of gay men and lesbians by Maoists in areas under their control.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Maoism, Nepal, peoples war, UCP Nepal (Maoist), UCP Nepal (Maoist) | 51 Comments »

Nepal: A Map of Revolutionary Support

Posted by Mike E on April 21, 2008

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.


Posted in >> analysis of news | 4 Comments »

Zerohour on RCP Response: Both Ahead of Itself & Behind The Curve

Posted by Mike E on April 20, 2008

The complexity of realityThe following digs into the two line struggle between the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Kasama project. The main documents discussed here are Mike Ely’s 9 Letters to Our Comrades Getting Beyond Avakian’s Synthesis and the RCP’s response. (with the title “A Framework Trapped in the Bounds of “This Awful Capitalist Present” — Not a Radically Different World.”). Zerohour focuses on the section of the RCP’s response entitled, “On Philosophy and Epistemology — Awash in Pragmatism, Empiricism and Relativism.”

By Zerohour

The RCP’s writing team begins their section on philosophy with an ad hominem attack on Mike Ely as has been characteristic of their responses so far. They claim:

“For someone who presents himself as a veteran communist, capable of providing great and creative new insights into the communist project, Mike Ely. . . “

Here’s what Ely actually said:

“In the letters that follow, I will make some initial critiques — sometimes in detail, sometimes by indicating a line of thought. Many problems I unravel have been noted over years by others coming from their own diverse politics.

“These letters can’t (and won’t) offer a tidy counter-synthesis to Avakian’s synthesis. That is because we are at the beginning, not the end, of our ‘very presumptuous work.’ However woven into these letters will be thoughts about a different path that I believe serious revolutionaries need to take. ” [Letter 1]

There are no exaggerated claims of greatness here, nor any pretense that 9 Letters is anything more than the intial step. The argument being advanced here is not that it is wrong for someone to claim to be a great communist capable of laying down the line, it is that Ely is not that person. What they affirm is that line is formed by great leaders and not a collective process. RCP’s commitment to this viewpoint prevents them from even understanding the nature of the 9 Letters, much less take on its arguments in serious way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 9 Letters, Maoism, Marxist theory, methodology, RCPUSA, theory, Zerohour | 17 Comments »

Prachanda: Nepal’s Maoist Leader and His Work

Posted by Mike E on April 20, 2008

PrachandaPrachanda, the leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is now poised to become the president of Nepal. And he is emerging as the most prominent and influential Maoist leader in the world. However there has been, so far, little in depth study of his views (of the Marxist synthesis known as Prachanda Path). We would like to offer some of Prachanda’s essays and interviews, and analyses written by other Maoists leaders about Prachanda Path. (Thanks to the Learn from Nepal site for gathering these materials online.)

Prachanda from Problems and Prospects of Revolution in Nepal (2004)

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Posted in Maoism, Marxist theory, methodology, Nepal, Prachanda, UCP Nepal (Maoist), UCP Nepal (Maoist) | 24 Comments »

Video: John Bellamy Foster on Capitalism and Climate Change

Posted by Mike E on April 19, 2008

This courtesy of Links – International Journal of Socialist Renewal (who posted these videos) and Green Left Weekly who organized the Conference on “Capitalism and Climate Change”, Sydney, April 11, 2008. John Bellamy Foster is Marxist ecologist and editor of Monthly Review.

For the other four parts:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ecology, environment, global warming, John Bellamy Foster, video | 3 Comments »

Revolutionary Internationalist Movement on New Democracy

Posted by Mike E on April 19, 2008

new democracyThe 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:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 3 Comments »

Mao Zedong on New Democracy

Posted by Mike E on April 19, 2008

Peoples war in ChinaMao 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

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news | 3 Comments »

Nepal: Maoists are Not Terrorists!

Posted by Mike E on April 19, 2008

Kasama received the following note together with this article:

“I think it raises an important question in terms of our responsibilities to create pressure to have the terrorist designation lifted.”

‘Nepal Maoists in talks with US to remove terrorist tag’

Kathmandu (PTI): Nepal Maoists, who are named as a terrorist organisation by the
US government, are in talks with American officials to get Washington to remove
the “terrorist tag” from the former rebels, now tipped to head the next
government in the Himalayan state.

“We are trying to establish close links with the U.S…talks are going on in
several fronts in this regard,” said C P Gajurel, a central committee member of
the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist.

“We are requesting them (United States) to remove the terrorist tag that they
have maintained on our party…our doors are always open to all US officials if
they want to talk to us,” Gajurel, who is also chief of the international bureau
of the party, was quoted as saying by the Telegraph Nepal online on Saturday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Nepal, UCP Nepal (Maoist), UCP Nepal (Maoist) | 2 Comments »