After 3 Years of Kasama: Walking a Revolutionary Road Together
Posted by Mike E on December 29, 2010
What symbol should Kasama adopt -- radical, simple, fresh, evocative -- got ideas?
“We need to carry out a great work that places creative reconception above rigid routine continuity.”
“Let’s cunningly choose ideas, methods and political battlegrounds with which to initiate a new struggle for the overthrow of this system.”
“Kasama means those who walk the road together. We would like to extend our invitation again: Come walk the revolutionary road with us. For those of you who feel a close support — consider joining our project and helping our organized work escape its current primitiveness.”
“Comment on our Kasama site and our fragile Kasama project. Thoughts? Suggestions?”
By Mike Ely
Three years ago, at the end of 2007, we started this Kasama site — with the publication of our 9 Letters to Our Comrades. It was a declaration — a call for a project that could combine shockingly revolutionary politics with the actual people living in our times.
It is a bit of a surprise that this particular site has continued to grow over those three years. Hundreds of regular readers come every day — making this a platform where revolutionaries school and provoke each other.
This is (as you know) a somewhat difficult time to attempt a new revolutionary movement and upsurge:
- The most revolutionary forces are quite scattered (and sometimes barely on speaking terms),
- Restless forces among the oppressed are rarely connected with consciously radical currents,
- Because of the Obama presidency, pro-government sentiments and fantasies are startlingly influential among progressive people,
- Communism itself needs a fresh presentation to gain a hearing, and
- We revolutionaries do not have (yet) any common strategic vision of how liberation might be carried through in North America.
But despite those difficulties – perhaps because of those difficulties — Kasama has been a way of engaging for all of you reading these words.
Kasama’s existence has made one fact apparent:
There are circles of radical people who are discontent with the formations and theories of the current left. Some share a common sense that our inherited left is stuck in exhausted assumptions, outdated divisions and profoundly lowered sights. Some are frustrated with deadening routine and encapsulated scenes. There is a general desire to see principled engagement across old divides.
The 9 Letters critique (which discussed one small party’s descent into irrelevance) has (apparently) spoken to others who hope that (even in difficult times) we could do much better — and who wish to prepare a political culture, framework and strategy that can identify openings for a new revolutionary movement.
We need….
We need to carry through ruthless, mutual, civil re-examination.
We need to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into engagement with our rapidly morphing present (its issues, its technologies, its globalism, its quirky emerging features).
We need to carry out a great work that places creative reconception above rigid routine continuity.
We need to gather ourselves around startling ideas and approaches that make people sit up with a jolt — above all a stark Communist Idea that can speak to the horrors and hopelessness of our world. It is not hard to miss that much of the left is far from radical, shocking, inspiring, fresh or attractive.
At this moment, any conservative or nostalgic contentment with inherited ideas, icons, habits, and forms of struggle is (quite simply) a deathwish for communist dreams.
If our movement is not born anew — in content and presentation — then we will just become a footnote from the previous century.
On the contrary: We need a restless political culture that radiates a serious (even ecstatic) creativity, heartfelt solidarity, real freedom and a vivid sense of the present. And we need a protracted process of mutual transformation — where all of us change and learn.
As a central part of that: we need to be proclaiming the need for new theory, and then moving to pull its pieces together — a theory that stands on the shoulders of communist and revolutionary thinkers, that embraces the insights of science, philosophy and the whole larger world culture, and a theory that in the most relentless way sets its sights on a new world without classes, oppression, and ecocide.
The Whole, Not the Part
The model of communist today cannot be a variation of the American activist — with focus on identities, issues and immediate surroundings.
Our aspiration (as communists) needs to include becoming iconoclastic thinkers, militant organizers (organizing communists as communists, those advanced attracted to radical change and, whenever possible, sections of the people in struggle), all with a focus on humanity as a whole and its future.
We can already list the kinds of things that means (to mention just a few):
- Identifying how communist cores should organize (in stages) — so that they can take partisan root (over time) among the advanced and within an ecosystem of radical forces — and do not form a landscape of tired and isolated sects.
- Identifying forms of revolutionary work that both help organize oppressed people in struggle, while help more and more people see the nature of capitalism and the need for something radically different.
- Assembling a fresh analytical understanding of our times and our world — how capital has restructured itself, how new societies might emerge and survive in an imperialist world, how crisis erupts and how it draws new forces into danger (and perhaps movement).
- A summation of the first wave of socialist revolutions (in the twentieth century) — and an accounting of what we can learn from its achievements and failures.
- A serious engagement with the impact of ecological destruction on the forms of future human life — and what a socialist sustainability offers humanity.
- A renewed theoretical engagement with the problems of class, empire and political agency — to uncover the roots of capitalist restoration, and (more importantly) the roads to lasting liberation, understanding the contradiction between universally-addressed values and the fierce desire to finally end specific oppressions.
- Creating a theory of conjuncture and structure — that enables the consciously revolutionary to both see and join moments of great potential.
- An envisioning of the stages of revolutionary movement — by engaging the controversies of leading cores, preparation in non-revolutionary times, deployment of forces in crisis, forms of dynamic coalition, realistic conceptions of overthrow, details and forms of social transformation — including questions of democracy, dictatorship, rule of law, mass line and red terror.
And as we take steps in those directions, the possibility of a new practice also appear — to find both traction and alliances along deep social fault lines, to inspire a new generation of critically-thinking leaders, to fuse a new communism with a partisan base of serious and conscious people, and start to form (in embryo and test mode at first) those determined cores and grand coalitions that could take revolutionary advantage of great future eruptions within the empire.
Just a word of warning: Human life is riddled with unintended consequences. We often go out intending to accomplish this or that — but end up somewhere completely different. Part of the point of science, summation, planning and theory is to connect human intention with consequences. This is true for our political work. Many of us have spent decades hoping to ignite radical change, but in fact engaged in work that petered out or never took hold. One of the lessons from the left’s past-and-presentt is the need to discard self-delusion — we need to avoid fantasizing we are players while (in reality) allowing ourselves to become instruments of the status quo.
From Many Places and Minds
The moment we start to sketch these urgent needs and desires — it becomes clear that such a work requires the convergence and cooperation of a great many diverse forces — working in a great many places and modes.
As we warned ourselves in Shaping the Kasama Project:
“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 thunder burst 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.”
With those perspectives, a primitive, organized Kasama project has started to form as a communist network.
We have adopted an organization form that combines new collectives with online workteams. We have decided to work together to publicize (and learn from) two of the most radical movements in the world — the Maoists of India and Nepal — who (in addition to their creative differences) have both succeeded in their own ways of combining a sweeping revolutionary vision with real movements of oppressed people. And we have, in a number of places, continued to expand ongoing political practice as individuals and small groups.
Year 3 is gone. Year 4 is Here.
For many reasons, we need to sort our options out — and start to make the actual choices. (And here we mean both Kasama, but also everyone else reading these words).
We need to make collective decisions knowing that each major choice involves a question of road — Where are we going? What are we really about? What are we hoping to do? Where does humanity itself need to go?
These are not decisions already made (by a few leaders, or by past generations of communists). These are living problems to be solved by a future generation of communists — which has only barely started to emerge.
The name Kasama means those who walk the road together. We would like to extend our invitation again: Come walk the revolutionary road with us. For those of you who feel a close support — consider joining our project and helping our organized work escape its current primitiveness. For the hundreds of lurkers, consider adding your voice to our discussions, and consider other ways to contribute to this forum.
Let’s cunningly choose ideas, methods and political battlegrounds with which to initiate a new struggle for the overthrow of this system.
And, meanwhile, we invite you to comment on our Kasama site and our fragile Kasama project. Thoughts? Suggestions?
lycophidion said
If you really hope to overcome the political/ideological parameters that reduce us to (or are symptomatic of) sects, one thing we can do is go beyond fetishizing “two of the most radical movements in the world — the Maoists of India and Nepal,” and recognize that there are other revolutionary movements in the world that have achieved a measure of success and are worth “publicizing earning from,” for example the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela and the revolutionaries in power in Cuba, not to mention mass movements such as the MST in Brazil. Maoist groups are far from the only forces involved in revolutionary movements. However, ANY of these movements must be seen critically, not for criticism’s sake, but in terms of their applicability to our concrete conditions.
The most important question you raise, for revolutionaries in the U.S., is how to (re-)engage organizationally with working people. How do we strike the balance between program and living movement that Lenin promoted? How do we use that balance to build a mass social movement?
We’re living through a profoundly reactionary period of U.S. (and world) history. We’ve been through four decades of “one-sided class warfare,” as former UAW president Douglas Frasier put it, early on, when the assault had only recently begun. Of course Frasier and his ilk were among the reasons for the success of that “one-sided class warfare.” Four decades of shift in the base of the domestic economy, with its downsizing of the industrial working class, accompanied by the destruction of labor organizations. Four decades of counteroffensive against the social movements of the post-war boom period and the gains made. Four decades of reconstitution of ruling class hegemony.
In some ways, this period in the U.S. is more reminiscent of the devastating crisis and reaction in late 18th century-early 19th century England, described by E.P. Thompson in “The Making of the English Working Class,” than the Great Depression. The Depression and WWII period was characterized by an insurgent labor movement and gestating social movements. The period described by Thompson was characterized by economic crisis accompanied by the utter crushing of workers’ movements and organizations (such as they were: artisans and “mechanics”) and an ideological backlash that spawned all kinds of millenarian sects and individualistic and idealist nostrums. But, Thompson also described how labor rebuilt its forces through a molecular process, often through religious venues (the lesson being, it’s necessary to appraise things in a non-sectarian manner), until a new labor movement was formed, reconstituted on the new social relations of industrial capitalism.
Perhaps the student movements (always the youth) in Europe represent the expression of the beginnings of such a shift in class forces?
Here, though, we face, overall, the atomization, demoralization, “individualistic solutions” of a society that continues to be beaten by the ruler’s neo-liberal assault. Not that there are no struggles — the most oppressed sectors, such as undocumented immigrants — have indeed fought battles. How, then, to return to my original questions, do we engage with working people and help them move forward?
On the other hand, I think history has shown that vital mass social movements, the masses in motion, have provided the impulse for varying revolutionary forces to unite, provided these are engaged with the movement. One might argue that social movement is a condition for the regroupment you seem to be seeking.
celticfire said
Lycophidion,
I get the feeling from reading your comment that you missed some of the important points raised. Mike has repeatedly raised the point of revolutionary conjecture and the profoundly ideological aspect in preparing for such a moment, and for communist re-conception itself. I think, again repeatedly Kasama has advocated specifically for not rushing to fine-tune a program and “take it to the masses,” specifically for the reasons I mentioned above, but also because that practice has proven ineffective.
The points raised in the post above are protracted ones, and things that can’t be quickly reconciled — like your point about Cuba and the MST, or around what constitutes a faultline in our society that poses revolutionary potential, or the past experiences of socialism in USSR, China and other projects like Vietnam, Cuba?
That said, I very much unite with your point about moving beyond sect thinking, we are in a lot of agreement there.
lycophidion said
@Celticfire:
Don’t read into what I said. I said nothing about fine-tuning and taking it to the masses. And I find the microsects, with their holy grail programs whose purity must be maintained at any cost (even from the masses) abhorrent. I do think that revolutionaries should be guided by program. However, at this point, I think the most important thing we can do is help build a mass social movement against the ruling class juggernaut. And we should have the explicit goal of learning from that experience (rather, say, than boosting paper sales). Developing and applying a program only makes sense in that context, because program can only have meaning when it is organically connected to living movement as a dialogue. Frankly, as revolutionaries, we need to know when to shut up and listen. Moreover, only in that context does it make sense to talk about building or consolidating or regrouping a revolutionary party. Because, if you have no connection to your social base, then all the “ideological preparation” in the world is just metaphysical and idealist claptrap.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
I wonder about your parenthetical definition of the militant organizer to which you say we should aspire:
This seems to be saying that organizing communists as communists is primary, which reverses Mao’s dictum that “practice alone is the criterion of truth.” Perhaps you intended this, in keeping with your rejection of “any conservative or nostalgic contentment with inherited ideas, icons, habits, and forms of struggle.” But it seems more likely that you did not mean to say this in the way I have characterized it.
Nevertheless, I think that any conception of revolutionary organization that focuses first on “organizing communists as communists,” and relates to sections of the people in struggle only “whenever possible,” is the primary ingredient in any recipe for doctrinaire, talk-shop sectarianism. We can’t just focus on organizing communists to get theoretical clarity, first of all because there are too few of us to make any difference in the first place, but also because so many of the people who are “ideologically advanced” in a subjective sense — that is, from the point of view that they consciously want revolution — are by turns isolated from the masses, inexperienced, or downright kooky. This does not mean that they are not nice people. But if a revolutionary collective sets itself a goal of getting together — or picking off individually — all the ideologically committed Marxist-Leninists, anarchists, Trotskyites, and unaffiliated readers of Monthly Review, all the better to get some sort of theoretical clarity, then it is looking at a doomed strategy based on a false unity.
The only way that could have some potential is if those same people are located in the same general geographic area and involved in the same struggle or series of struggles. Otherwise, the best you can hope for is a few hundred people around the country with formal ideological agreement, but no real, organic unity, and with theory that is not based on living practice in the mass movement.
A collective needs to participate in mass activity — or in some cases initiate mass activity — with a goal toward recruiting the more capable mass leaders to the collective and developing them into revolutionaries, all in a process that also enriches the collective itself by learning from the experience of these mass leaders. And by “mass leaders” I do not refer only to people who are theoretically-advanced and/or tactically militant from the get-go. Often you can have people among the masses who are ideologically militant but do not lead others, and are perceived as “loudmouths.” These people should not be ignored, and they can often make great contributions, but a revolutionary collective cannot impose leaders on the people; it cannot create leaders out of people who do not, in fact, lead others. Instead, a revolutionary collective needs to focus on recruiting and ideologically developing — and most of all learning from — people who are real mass leaders in living struggles.
Of course, there are not enough living mass struggles at the moment, but where they exist — or where revolutionaries can help initiate them — then this process of promoting the ideological development of already-existing leaders among the people is the only way to organize for communism. Of course there are going to be opportunists among these mass leaders, and I think this may be what you’re getting at when you say that we do not want “a variation of the American activist — with focus on identities, issues and immediate surroundings.” But abstracting too far from actually-existing issues and “immediate surroundings” in favor of taking a purely revolutionary line is not helpful, and in many ways is a variant on the seventh type of liberalism (“To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being”). The natural leaders of mass struggles will be attracted to opportunist ideas precisely because there is no Marxist-Leninist ideological presence in these mass struggles that is relevant to the mass struggles themselves.
In the final analysis, a revolutionary collective has no other choice. You can’t take someone who is an ideologically-committed Marxist-Leninist, but simply not a leader, and make that person into a leader. But you can practice unity-struggle-unity with a leader and make that person into a Marxist-Leninist. That is what we all need to do. The Edgar Jopsons of the world are the people who need to be won over to the camp of revolution.
gila monster said
Congratulations to Kasama on your anniversary! Creating a revolutionary left organization and sustaining it for three years in these times and in this society is a difficult achievement. That you seem to continue to grow both organizationally and politically is a very hopeful sign.
Since you asked for feedback about the site and project, I’ll offer a link to a post that I wrote laying out some of my thoughts about Kasama. It is a fairly negative piece, I’m afraid, but I hope that you’ll take it in the spirit of comradely engagement in which it was written. (tl;dr version: good start — now connect your theoretical development to some mass organizing.)
* * * * * *
The other thing I must mention even at the risk of repeating myself is the posting of an article here which names two alleged rape victims in connection with the Wikileaks/Julian Assange controversy. Though the post in question is misogynist and vile, it may be worth posting for discussion. However, to print the accusers’ names unredacted is the feminist equivalent of crossing a picket line. It is behavior deemed unacceptable even in most bourgeois media; it has been pointed out here before; and yet nothing has been done about it in this post even now, several weeks later.
[moderator note: these names have been removed from the article.]
There is an apparent disinterest — not just in responding to that specific issue (though it is actually quite important), but more generally in engaging with elementary feminist ideas and politics — which was revealed by the postings and discussions here around that situation. It is disappointing for me, and has certainly made me less interested in following or critically engaging with Kasama lately.
All of that said: I remain hopeful that Kasama will grow, transform, and make many positive interventions in the revolutionary movement and the struggles ahead.
NSPF said
Since the article asks for frank exchange of opinion, thoughts and suggestions I have this piece of frank but friendly suggestion:
Suspend the South Asia Revolution site until you come up with a firm editorial policy of how to handle news.
At the moment, and for some time now, it has truly become a source of misinformation if not outright disinformation. You have to do something about it. Otherwise, you should not blame people for coming to the conclusion that it is a deliberate editorial policy to misinform.
kazembe said
Hey, congrats on three years of stellar work.Like many, I check out Kasama everyday and find the articles and discussion to be top notch. I think in 2011 the focus has to be on collectives and cadre development. I also think there needs to be attention paid to the non-profit industrial complex and the ways its distorting revolutionary organizing.
Revolutionary greetings for the New Year!
Kazembe
jfsp said
The RCP takes a pretty good beating on this site, mostly it is deserved, however they do one thing right for sure, the Bookstores. A place to talk, meet and organize is important. It also has something a website will never have, human contact and personal interaction.
RW Harvey said
@ Gila Monster: your link did reveal a fairly negative essay. More to the point it revealed some other things as well.
First off, I don’t understand the charge of sectarianism towards the Kasama website. Seems to me that except for personal attacks (moderator snips), the discussion is quite wide-ranging, depthful more often than not, and fairly principled. How this amounts to sectarianism I cannot see. The debate over working within the Democratic Party was certainly spirited, but sectarian?
Second, I don’t get why you personalize your critique to Mike Ely; do you feel you need to topple someone?
Third, what is this fetish with slow patient mass work? If this is your touchstone of course you would have major disagreements with Kasama Project. Yes, I know, Mao said so that correct ideas emerge from practice, and have we (the generalized left in the US) not had decades of practice that demonstrates the pitfalls of slow patient mass work (SPMW)? No wonder you were so disturbed at the struggle over working with the Democrats and why this debate seemed so sectarian to you.
Fourth, you may well criticize that the Kasama Project need to go beyond being a “project,” but what, other than your subjective assessment, determines when this should occur? Two years, three years, yesterday? So many of the past movements have met with repression, been co-opted, spun off into sects, or sustain the illusion of building revolutionary organization by marking time with SPMW. And yet you would have Kasama (and any others as well) run off into the masses as if praxis will give us the equivalent of Dumbo’s feather and help us believe that we are actually flying towards revolution and taking the people with us.
Lastly, the debates on this site spend quite a bit of time analysing past practices in the US and internationally. They provide, in my estimation, an important ideological struggle in principled effort to learn from the past in order to not simply replicate the same old-same old when preparing for a revolutionary situation in the US.
celticfire said
NSPF said:
and
Thanks for your comment, NSPF. I am one of the moderators of the South Asia Revolution site. I am however a bit confused — what specifically do you find mis-informative? What would you change? We post a good number of press releases from the Nepalese, Indian, and Philippine comrades. So there is no “misinformation” or “disinformation” there, not on our part. If you are referring to the posts that source from the bourgeois press, we take great care to state that we “should not assume that reports from the hostile press are true.” And always (always!) urge caution from these sources.
I appreciate that you took the time to address this NSPF, but please elaborate for us.
Stephanie McMillan said
Congratulations on three years of great work. This site is unique and valuable. I don’t know any other venue where such a dynamic, diverse, wide-ranging and serious discussion is going on about communism, revolution, and how to move forward in a difficult and demanding period. I find this project inspiring and challenging. It helps me clarify and test my own views, and I imagine it does the same for many others.
Uniting around questions instead of verdicts is an impressively creative way of approaching the task of building a movement. It goes against a lot of entrenched habits that we know haven’t worked and may not fit our current, rapidly changing circumstances. Whatever it ultimately accomplishes or doesn’t, Kasama has already contributed greatly to the culture of the left.
Adrienne said
Gila Monster wrote:
Normally I would agree with this opinion 100% (and I agree that particular post you referred to seemed pretty misogynist and vile to me too), but in this case constantly redacting their names seems kind of silly to me.
The names of Assange’s accusers have been known since August — and that has to do with the fact that the women themselves decided to contact the Swedish tabloid Expressen to publicly accuse Assange.
Due to Assange’s fame, Expressen naturally went digging for as much information as they could get, so they called the Swedish police and the prosecutor of the case and they subsequently leaked the first interview protocols with these women (a legally questionable action?).
In doing so, this is how Ardin and Wilen’s identities were uncovered. So, it seems to me that if these women had truly wanted to keep everything completely secret, they probably shouldn’t have run directly to the press.
David_D said
I agree with jfsp, bookstore operation and street agitation do serve as somewhat effective tools in the process of recruiting cadre. I think the latter is more important than the former though. People-to-people contact is very important for communists – it always has been and I think it always will. Distribution of many thousands of leaflets in paper form, however, should not be too expensive or consume too many labor hours.
I appreciate that fact that this site has raised many of the questions that it has. I have a different perspective on many questions than what appears to be a “consensus” of the posters here, but I feel there are many points of unity as well. At this juncture, I appreciate many contributions, provided they are principled and further investigation by progressive-minded people. The ideological level has been so low for so long, that even an only-partially successful attempt to break out of that is laudable.
NSPF said
Thanks, Celticfire, for enumerating the editorial policy in place at SAR. However, I find this grossly inadequate. Even if there are other aspects of that policy that you had forgotten to mention, or they are policies that do not belong to public domain, the problem, as I see it, remains as one of either inadequacy, non-adherence, or both.
As you probably know, I am not a new visitor to the pages of SAR site. Leaving aside the fact that last time I checked, the Philippines archipelago was still firmly anchored in south china sea and there was no sign of it heading toward Indian Ocean, it was always clear to me that SAR was from its inception about Nepal and RCP. Please don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against information about other places being disseminated on that site; it is necessary and good. I am simply stating a fact. For this reason, I will give a few recent examples that are almost exclusively related to Nepal:
On 21st of December 10, you posted the following headline:
“English Voice of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution: Red Star #17”
This headline is misinformation, intended or otherwise, on several levels. My first question is on what basis ONE of the publications associated with ucpnm is elevated to the status of being the “voice of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution”? Red Star itself does not make such a claim.
On 30th Dec. 10, you posted a piece of news article from Red Star site under the headline “UCPN(M) Reaches Unity after Meeting.”
Again, the Red Star itself is not making such a claim and its headline reads: “New document passes in UCPN-Maoist CC meeting.”
Why is there a need to paint a wrong picture when it is actually the case that there are two lines and three factions within the ucpnm? Isn’t this called misinformation? It is only the Machiavelian faction within that party who is desperately trying to coble up some sort of “fusion” between cheese and chalk for the sole purpose of self-preservation.
On 31st Dec.10 you again wrote “Nepal: UCPN(M) Calls for Unification of Armies” as headline to a news article that only stated UCPN-Maoist standing committee member Barsaman Pun, A.K.A. Ananta says in case of foreign invasion, the two Armies should both, together, fight against it. Leaving aside the political intentions of Ananta and his factional alignment and his ideological/political line, how on earth does this translate into a “Call for Unification”? and even IF it did, how could this be called a Call by UCPNM, given there is a sharp two line struggle in that party on the road ahead? IF Kasama or you want to make a case for unification of Armies, then that should be argued for separately and not through such misleading headlines.
Or take the post on Dec. 13th under the headline “Indian RIM group Criticizes Avakian and Nepal Maoists.”
This needs a separate comment really. I ask you and others to go read it again carefully. Don’t you realise the whole post is misleading to the brink of dishonesty? Don’t you think it oozes hatred and sectarianism? Don’t you notice a certain kind of journalistic trickery rarely seen even in tabloid mainstream papers? Why?
Hatred of RCP, deserved or otherwise, does not justify any of these and when used as the sole compass, will certainly not lead to anything good.
Harsh Thakor said
I have not thoroughly read the debates and comments but on your third year of completion I wish to congragulate the Kasama project for so consistently standing as a pro-people,anti-imperialist and democratic voice and for it’s commitment in researching the salient featutes of the theories of Marx,Lenin and Mao.There is such a versatile range of topics that are projected in both practical and theoretical spheres and great avenues are also placed for debates on polemical and theoretical questions particularly on the light of the ideology of Maoism.I really admire the postings on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which brilliantly project the great achievements of the Socialist Period,something not seen in the history of mankind.It is interesting to also read the critiques of the New Left Like Alan Badiou,who are critiques of the vanguard role of the party and raed Maoism as a seperate trend from Leninism.The debates posted by writers like Rosa Harris and Bill Martin on Stalinism are also fascinating and give readers an insight into the complexity of polemics.Such posts make raeders analyse the teachings of Mao and Lenin with a sharper and more broad -based angle.I appreciate the efforts of Ksama to review the polemics so thouroughly nad encourage the participation of readesr worlwide.Infact such participations strengthens our theoretical grasp.I am also impressed with Kasama’s solidarity to movements worlwide and their defence of Maoism,be it Phillipines or Palestine.
However what Kasama needs to do is to find means of relating to sections not well versed with ideology and relate to them ,in their language.It also needs to strenghten it’s ideolgical grasp of the theories of Marx,Lenin nad Mao and come out in firm defence of te vanguard role of the Leninist party and the dictatorship of the Proletariat.I appreciate the range of views posted but there must be sharp essays refuting the new Left or Neo-trotskyite polemics ,otherwise we would be compromising with such deviations.To defend Socialism we have to point out the weakneses of the former Socialist societies ,like the supression of dissidence and debate under the Stalin era and the left sectarianism in the Cultural Revolution.
It would be interesting seeing Kasama also post some of the pro-Stalinist writings which defend his great achievements ,and the theorists who defended Stalin’s contribution.We have to analyse the sectarianism of the Socialist periods of U.S.S.R. and China ,but with a Marxist -Leninst approach.Perhaps leaders like Com Gonzalo of the Peruvian Communist Part,Jose Marie Sison of Phillipines or Indian ledaers like Charu Mazumdar or Knhai Chaterjee could be posted.I also wish some of the writings of the late Com.Harbhajan Singh Sohi of India could be posted particularly on his analysis of the Deng-Hua Clique in China and on Mao Tsde Tung Thought .
Another important theoretical question is on the mass line .I feel Kasama has to review it more thoroughly and defend Mao’s concept of Protracted Peoples War as agaisnt Che Guevera’s focoism.In India the Charu Mazumdar line was similar to that of Che Guevera.In the India section It would be useful to post the writings of Coms Tarimala Nagi Reddy and D.V Rao on the mass line in the early 1970′s s as against left adventurism.On Peru a study could be made on why the Sendero Luminoso received a setback .