Kasama Discussion Paper: Contributing to Revolution’s Long March Part 2
Posted by Mike E on May 4, 2009
The following is the second half of a discussion of the communist Kasama Project — its politics and development. It was written in February 2009. Part 1 is already posted.
The text has been re-edited for public publication. This is a discussion of the Kasama Project (not just of the more visible Kasama website) — but the network of communist revolutionaries that has started to pull together.
Contributing to Revolution’s Long March
Part 2: Revolutionary Work and the Pull of the Sect
By Enzo Rhyner, J.B. Connors, John Steele, Kobayashi Maru, Mike Ely, Rita Stephan, and Rosa Harris
Revolutionary Practice and Experiment
What is the relationship of theory and practice in our current moment?
Kasama has been formed out of an impatience to develop real roots for the revolutionary movement among the people. We need (as the 9 letters said) a culture of organizing. Reconception is not a call for some new encapsulated bubble.
We need to develop communist practical work, now, among the people. It is one of the challenges that confront us in our second year.
Leading up to this conference a number of new suggestions have been raised. In some quarters such ideas would quickly be dismissed as social democratic or social work– including among people trained by the RCP in a negative summation of the Panthers “Serve the People” programs.
Or, another example: There has been a movement to form workers centers of diverse kinds — often centered on organizing undocumented immigrant workers. Some people have simply dismissed that work as economist — without even bothering to learn from the different strategies at play.
Our Kasama approach needs to be an openness to experimentation and fresh thinking. We should look again a forms of developing contact, politicization and alternative institutions among the people — and think afresh about ways such activities can contribute to revolutionary movement.
Quick, knee-jerk dismissal runs against what we need to be doing. It runs against the need to do deep investigation It runs against the need for a new generation of revolutionaries to learn from their own experience (as well as from summations of previous experience).
The Kasama Project will pursue a relatively small number of specific work areas. But we also need to leave the door open for local and personal projects, for experimentation, for new ideas, for welcoming people with other priorities — and for learning from a wide range of radical efforts.
Regroupment needs to takes place in the context of reconception. But these priorities could change quickly: Crucial events and struggles may suddenly demand our attentions.
We may find “our Mississippi.” (The Mississippi Freedom Summer attracted the most courageous early activists of a generation, radicalized them, and shook the country.) By “find our Mississippi” we don’t mean just becoming activists in the next mass movement to arise. We are talking about being alert to an event or stormcenter that could suddenly start galvanizing a generation and shape how this ugly society is perceived and challenged.
If such a moment comes (this year, next, or whenever) it must not find us groggy or scholastic. We need to make sure we are flexible enough to change plans.
Our work of reconception needs to help develop the mental flexibility to perceive and participate in creative new processes happening around us. We need the ability to be transformed without abandoning our defining communist nature and analysis. We need to be “Traveling Light and Coming From Within.”
The Pull of the Sect
There is a well-worn path that we need to avoid (and it won’t be easy).
Here is the method: You gather like-minded people. You document the things you already agree on. You adopt your agreements as a basis of unity. And your new grouping rushes out into the world to proclaim your politics and put them into practice. Drawing lines of demarcation is key — and that is done on the basis of the politics you walked in with.
For people trained in revolutionary communist politics, we could complete all of this in one or two afternoons of relatively easy work — declaring our loyalty to well-known ideas associated with communism (democratic centralism, dictatorship of the proletariat, vanguard party, materialist dialectics, and so on). We could demarcate our view from others — and assign them the label revisionist. We could then rush out into the world to proclaim our politics.
Kasama has opposed forming itself as such a new little sect — but the temptation keeps popping up because of training and concerns that pull on us all:
- We have often been taught to assume some of those things we should now problematize.
- The suffering of the people and the press of events gives us all a powerful sense of urgency. And around the RCP, a deliberate training has hyped that sense of urgency — in moralist and anti-theoretical ways.
- It is sometimes said that perhaps doing anything is better than “doing nothing.” And the creative work of reconception can be portrayed as “doing nothing.”
- There is an assumption that the theory we need can emerge from the summation of our own direct political practice — and so the initiation of practice (almost any practice) is the prerequisite for sound theoretical work.
- Sometimes the very idea of creating a new theoretical framework and then a political program is alien territory. If your training is in the narrow routines of mass work, then our “presumptuous work” requires a real break (including personal transformation).
- There is a dogmatic legacy that says the problems of revolution have been solved by existing MLM. The logic says that solutions arise from deeper grasp of orthodoxies and from the repeated criticism of any departures from orthodoxy. The very idea of creative reconception sometimes triggers fear of sliding into an abyss.
- It is not easy to fully confront the implications of the two absences — special theoretical and practical tasks that fall on communists when they don’t have a party.
- There is often not an understanding that there is both major line struggle raging among the world’s communists and major gaps in communist understanding — all of which needs attention and resolution by appropriate methods.
We should not form a little group that play-acts as the seed of a future party. The process we foresee will be far more contradictory than that. Most initiating projects sprout several trends (or none at all).
We will not arrive on the scene like some magical galvanizing thunderburst to tell everyone else what to think and do. Let’s have some scientific non-messianic modesty and not perpetuate previous grandiosity. We will strain to make real contributions. There may be contributions that only we can make. And that matters. But we expect much from many other people.
Forming a new sect would be not breaking with the errors that brought us here. The theoretical knife has to cut deeper.
Tell No Lies said
I’m glad to see this piece and the first part out there for public discussion. They help people see Kasama beyond just the website.
I’d like to particulalrly support the critical stance towards the blanket condemnations of certain kinds of work as “economist.” I’d appreciate an overview, and perhaps some critical reflections on, the RCP’s critique of the Panther’s “Serve the People” programs. I’ve certainly seen these programs upheld in a way that is economistic. But it seems to me that part of what gave the Panthers their dynamism was precisely their use of these programs to reach out broady and help bring into existence “a revolutionary people.”
When the EZLN was initiated in the early 1980s it occurred in the context of a repudiation by a big section of the mass movement among the Indian communities of the “economism” promoted by a Maoist organization, Linea Proletaria. This took the form of an emphasis on building producers cooperatives and a credit union at the expense of waging land struggles. There is no question in my mind that the charge of “economism” was a correct one in this case. But it also needs to be acknowledged that a lot of the “economist” projects pursued by Linea Proletaria were critical in the process of bringing people together and building up a material base on which the subsequent work of the EZLN, which really did give rise to a revolutionary people, was built.
The point of this observation is that these things are inherently contradictory and interpenetrating. Any work that really puts us into close and regualr contact with the broad masses at a time when they aren’t yet moving in a revolutionary direction is likely to involve the dangers of economism and reformism. Using this as an excuse not to engage in such work rather than as a challenge to figure out how to bring revolutionary politics into it, is I think the hallmark of a sectarian approach. There are no guarantees in this line of work that we won’t fall prey to these dangers, only our own vigilance.
Mike E said
There is quite a bit to say about the Panther experience and their “serve the people” programs. It isn’t a simple matter — it was a thing in motion and a thing in a particular context.
They started their “serve the people” programs after having taken a very strong (even extreme!) “out there” position with their armed patrols of the cops. And so the programs were in that context.
Then there was a real shift later, after Huey got out of jail, in which these same programs were in a different political context (i.e. in the context of Huey’s rightward retreat to “survival pending revolution”). They were now called survival programs — and they were in the context of NOT expecting revolution and NOT building revolutionary expectations.
So they changed.
Another aspect: the Panthers are portrayed in a very non-revolutionary way in many accounts, and the “serve the people” programs are portrayed in a way intended to misrepresent the Panthers (and make them respectable) — and to act as if it is a lie that they advocated violent revolution and practice armed self-defense. Bobby Seale’s book “Seize the Time” is a very tendencious “after the fact” rewriting of the history (even while it includes a great deal of fascinating material and lively agitation and truth). It is a rewrite of panther history (and the serve the people programs) from the vantage point of the Panther’s later (quite reformist and corrupted) politics in the 1970s.
I was involved in the Panther Serve the People programs at the time — during the period when they were connected to revolutionary politics. And I was also part of a post-SDS collective that developed a combination of revolutionary agitation and ‘serve the people” programs of our own (following the lead of the Panthers in a very poor largely-white workingclass city). We built food coops, developed an underground railroad for abortions for teenagers, provided sex education, organized political study of the Red Book and other communist theory among high school youth, did draft counseling (in a town where the draft took many of the boys), and organized radical kids to take the streets in militant for revolutionary politics and for the Black Panthers on trial. And that too had a trajectory — and there too, the ‘serve the people” programs (especially the food coop) survived the revolutionary politics (and became a very successful alternative institution that became more and more depoliticized).
Much to sum up.
land said
Would be interested in hearing more about the Serve the People programs when they were connected to revolutionary politics.
And also more on the collectives who developed an underground railroad for abortions for teenagers.
Where I was (abortion was illegal) if you went into the General Hospital between 2 and 4 in the morning doctors would do abortions no questions asked.
I talked to a doctor once. He said originally he started doing abortions because he felt as a doctor he felt it necessary to give what medical care was needed whether it was legal or not. He was serving the people.
As time went on he understood more the reality of why women did need to have the right to choose.
He would have been one of the doctors on the underground railroad.
I think we need to popularize some of these stories. It is not “going back to relive the 60′s” but there were some things we did then that shouldn’t be forgotten so we can relive them if we need to.
Alastair Reith said
I second Land’s suggestion of telling these stories. Particularly to a young communist, part of a new generation of young revolutionaries grappling with how we build a movement of oppressed working people that can radically transform society, these stories offer a lot of useful advice and some very valuable lessons – both positive and negative. My attitude towards our movements past, everything from Stalin to the BPP, has always been “learn from the mistakes, build on the successes”. So a critical evaluation of the concrete, practical work done by communists in the 60s to build centres of aid, shelter, advice and resistance for oppressed people would be invaluable.
This would be particularly invaluable for young communists like me who have never (yet!) lived through a period when great numbers of people are reaching out to revolutionary ideas. Or even in a period where there is even the most reformist mass movement, in New Zealand where I live political activity is just an alien concept to most people. I don’t want to arrive in such a situation, when the class struggle really heats up and people start fundamentally questioning the system, and not know the lessons of the past.
So I think it’d be fantastic to get some accounts from the mouths of older revolutionaries whose opinions I respect and trust about what was attempted in the 60s, where and how these attempts succeeded and failed, and what they think are the most important lessons to be learned.
Using this as ammunition, I can go into the coming wave of struggle with guns loaded.