New Pamphlet: Shaping the Kasama Project
Posted by Mike E on May 27, 2009
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Download the new Kasama Pamphlet:
Shaping the Kasama Project:
Contributing to Revolution’s Long March
This pamphlet is based on a discussion document presented to a recent Kasama conference by Enzo Rhyner, J.B. Connors, John Steele, Kobayashi Maru, Mike Ely, Rita Stephan and Rosa Harris.
This essay was also posted online (in HTML format) in the Kasama discussions:
- Contributing to Revolution’s Long March Part 1:
Grabbing Pitchfork or Theoretical Knife - Contributing to Revolution’s Long March Part 2:
Revolutionary Work and the Pull of the Sect
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Excerpts:
One way to understand the Kasama Project is to sketch two other alternatives:
- We could rush off again, like peasants to war, disperse ourselves deeply among the people and “just do it” — wielding the political understandings we have at this moment, take up urgent struggles and expect to develop new strategy and theory from that process.
- Or we could rush to encapsulate ourselves as a new little political sect — carve quick lines of demarcation, proclaim strategy and theory based on the political understandings we have at the moment, and rush out to proclaim it to the world.
These two alternatives both assume that we have, in our hands (”there for the taking”) sufficient summation to simply dig in and take off. If we could quickly determine (based on what we already know) where to make a few, quick “structural reforms” to our inherited theory… then we should make those changes, and throw ourselves back into practical work on that basis.
But a basic assessment of the Kasama project is that we have a need and an opportunity to do something very different. And that requires a break — both with Avakian’s claims, but also with a deeper component of existing Maoism.
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Our conception is to form a communist project that does not rush, prematurely, to mark lines of demarcation or to prematurely establish rigid structures. Instead the idea has been to initiate both practice and theoretical work with an aim of discovering and inventing a new revolutionary road for the U.S.
This assumes that the process of building a new revolutionary movement will have stages — and that our current Kasama Project has specific characteristics that flow from this early stage.
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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.
ramon said
“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.”
true. but i cant help wonder: why the commitment to maoism (“MLM”)at all?
it seems like all the marxist currents have basically been rendered obsolete by the passing of the very specific historical circumstances that made them relevant at any given time. most of the utility of, say, maoism, came from what it had produced in action. not only is that product now smashed, but your own commitment to activity (and apparently, i would argue that practically all “revolutionaries” these days) is on hold as well. so both the historical roots and the future-producing practical activity (which alone can change material conditions) that maoist theory might help elucidate are both absent. again, what use does maoism provide to a communist in the US in 2009?
Mike E said
Ramon writes:
I think this is one of the most important questions we can raise. And (speaking for myself) I would like to engage it in some depth over a period of time.
To answer it, we also need to struggle for a common language — so we even know what we are talking about.
I think several things:
There are rich insights and lessons concentrated in existing communist theory.
1) There is a methodology by which people strive to “learn things to change things.” To make a revolution you need a movement where people are trained to make analyses of reality, to understand complex events in motion, and to see underlying dynamics that frame both necessity and freedom. This is especially true when your movement starts without power, needs to be built from scratch (without high level institutional support) and is built of oppressed people (who often have little training making analyses, and leading complex processes.)
Marxism as an analytical system has major strengths in this regard, and (imho) Maoism in particular has much to teach. (Mao’s writings are heavily concentrated on how to think, often much more prominently than what to think.)
2) There is a rich body of experience in building revolutionary movements among the people (alliances called “united front”, methods of work, methods of leadership, the whole precious cluster of understandings called “the mass line,” understandings of collectivities, view antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradiction, the view of “combatting liberalism” among people (i.e. developing methods of candor, honesty, no old-boy networks, truth telling, etc.) and more.
There are communist movements that successfully built revolulutionary movements (and armies) of millions, and then build revolutionary states, and went on to transform whole societies — and concentrated in their experiences (and in their theories) are rich lessons and methods that need to be critically assimilated (parts of them apply generally, parts only apply to particular areas of the world, parts need to be discarded.)
3) There is a rich experience with socialism in the twentieth century, which Mao more than anyone summed up in a highly concentrated way — Mao started a very important and deepgoing critique of the Soviet approach to socialism. And developed his own approach in both theory and practice. Summing up this experience is crucial for any new socialist projects. And here too it is important to assimilate what Mao did and thought critically.
In all of these points it is a matter of sum up critically, assimilate carefully, develop indepentently.
But it is important to understand we are not “starting from scratch” — we are a century and a half into the communist-socialist project. The situations we are dealing with (example: USA 2009) are obviously very different than those of the past (example: Mao in the Chingkang mountain region of rural china). That there are differences is no secret — what precisely are the differences, and how they affect revolutionary theory, that is part of the work we have to do.
Here is what we write in this new pamphlet:
It is a side point, but related: Personally, I think it was a mistake to name communist theory Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It is too linear and narrow a conception — it downplays the real world “bushiness” and complexities of Marxism’s emergence, it tends to deny the need to draw from other thinkers and experiences, and it promotes mistaken and somewhat mythic view of how theory develops.
So I think (as I say above) that there is a lot to draw from in MLM, but I think we should take a wider view, and forge our new communist theoretical structures from a wider base of sources. (I think it is worth revisiting Nando’s piece on “Badiou and Nepal: Battlegrounds of Communist Reconception” for an elaboration of some of this.