New Pamphlet: Arundhati Roy’s “Walking With the Comrades”
Posted by Mike E on March 26, 2010
We need to come together to take advantage of this remarkable event: that a writer of this skill and stature has dared (and truly risked) to speak the truth about the revolutionary people of remote rural India. Help her. Help them.
We urge all our readers to share and download this new pamphlet. It makes it much easier for people to study this important work by Arundhati Roy describing the revolutionary fighters and people of India’s Maoist political base areas. This pamphlet includes many of Roy’s remarkable photographs from her trip that bring the text to life.
Download “Walking with the Comrades”
This is a brilliantly written and subtle journalist’s description of this living revolutionary movement, its activists and their hopes.
Who needs to see this? Where should this be posted?
Email this pdf to friends. Share it on e-lists. Post it on significant related discussions.
This piece is also available here on Kasama in web format.
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zerohour said
H/T to Hegemonik. Arundhati Roy talks to Laura Flanders on GRITtv about the time she spent with the Maoists.
http://www.grittv.org/2010/03/27/arundhati-roy-becoming-internal-security-threats-2/
G said
“We must all become internal security threats.” –Arundhati Roy.
Radical-Eyes said
The critical debate around Roy’s essay is raging. Among other places, here: http://kafila.org/2010/03/22/response-to-arundhati-roy-jairus-banaji/
The discussion is quite subsantial and wide-ranging. It might be good for Kasama readers to read up on and post in this Kafila blog.
Also, of less interest perhaps, Ray Lotta from the RCP posted a polemical “challenge” to Roy on their website here: http://www.revcom.us/a/197/Lotta_Roy-en.html
The latter does not engage Roy’s essay as such, but rather uses her recent humanizing of maoists as an opportunity to push her to reconsider her own previous statements about Mao and Maoism (as well as Democracy). And there is no discussion blog to participate in either. :0
Mike E said
I read the essay by Ray on the RCP site. I found it so remarkably shallow and misguided. And quite a few people express real dismay to me about the recent hackneyed turn in Ray’s once promising work. It is like someone once respected is paraded in front of us all as a diminished, house-broken ventriloquist’s puppet.
The “one size fits all” method here is the exactly same as crude hatchet jobs offered on Alan Badiou or the Nepali Maoists or the 9 Letters to Our Comrades. A check list is made of textual differences between Target X and Bob Avakian. The operative (and permanently unproven) assumption is that if you differ with Avakian you are wrong, and are therefore on a long inevitable slide toward capitulation to capitalism.
There is a stark, mechanical (and delusional) inevitabilism at play here — you are with me, or you will certainly capitulate to oppression.
Really?
Ray Lotta focuses on A. Roy’s Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (as if she had nothing to say that was worth contending with) and actually writes:
Really? — all while this daring sister is walking the forest paths with armed guerrillas and daring to face the wrath of that Indian “dictatorship of the exploiters”?!
This sister had raised her voice in a feverish anti-Maoist hysteria in India to defend peoples power in Red Corridor — but such things are glossed over by the RCP because (after all) she doesn’t have germanic appreciation of the rare, special, unique, and irreplaceable qualities of Avakian and his body of work.
More to the point here:
Not only is the logic here profoundly sectarian, but the timing is shameful. It a shame tied closely to the RCP’s rather militant REFUSAL to lift a finger (or a voice) to popularize the ongoing revolutions in South Asia (or anywhere else on the planet).
Here Arundhati has stepped out — at great personal risk to herself. This is, after all, a government that systematically assassinates many Maoist that fall into their hands. Arundhati Roy has personally forced a whirlwind of a debate that is over whether honest progressive people should support the Maoists and oppose the government’s genocidal Operation Green Hunt. She is like a daring resister throwing her body in front of the advancing Indian army — and putting all of her life’s work on the line.
It has all brought her here — to this moment and this stand.
Is there some special importance to pore over her works right now at this very moment to find ideological differences that we should bring to the fore and “challenge” her to debate?!
I mean, WTF?
* * * * * *
I flashed on this:
Edgar Snow has just come back from Yenan in 1936 with the material for his remarkable book “Red Star over China.” For the first time the then-unknown Chinese communist revolution and personalities are reaching a world wide audience.
What would have been the correct approach from communists then?
To go over Snow’s previous political writings (with a magnifying glass) to identify where he had this-or-that incorrect line, and (while mentioning Red Star over China in passing) launch some “big debate” over the ways we think Snow falls short of a full and correct communist position?
Snow was never a communist. And the fearless Arundhati may never become a communist either. I am sure each of us can find passages in her earlier (or current) works that we don’t agree with. But why should that really be a big focus for communists right now?
* * * * * *
There is obviously a perverse and highly jealous narcissism at play…. someone else is getting the publicity, some other revolution is taking off, someone else is speaking for communism, and so all Avakian can do (commanding Ray to be his proxy) is make shrill complaints from his crumbling little hall of mirrors:
Who but us even notices? Sad and more than a little pathetic.
land said
There is a major outdoor Free Library Exhibit here this weekend.
(Philly)
I am going to make copies of the Roy article and the Jed Letter and take them down.
If you are in the area come on down.
Mike E said
After the RCP’s shameful approach was exposed here… they decided to backstep and posted a link to Arundhati Roy’s essay on their website.
So first they post an attack on the finer points of Arundhati Roy’s political beliefs (on democracy and socialist history). Then (as a forced afterthought) they finally allow themselves a public mention of her brave and important work. Can you spell CYA?
Also let’s note: they did this without any comment or support for the Maoist revolution in India. They did not urge their readers to circulate it. They did not say this is an important struggle by communists. They simply posted a link without comment or leaning.
rohit said
this easy is the reality to which the people like me is well awared.and it is for those also who realy want no this situation.but not for those who want avoid.but yesterday will be too let to wake up.it is a great work by arundhati roy.this country
only needs a revolution.