Club Jacobin Critique: Kasama Turning to the Sectarian?
Posted by Mike E on January 2, 2011
Club Jacobin comparing Kasama to Jacobites?
The following is a critique of the Kasama Project written by “Gila Monster” on the blog, Club Jacobin. GM writes:
“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.”
In that spirit of engagement, we are sharing Club Jacobin’s criticisms. We will shortly post a response from a supporter of the Kasama Project.
We hope this will give us all a chance to dig more deeply into the question it raises: what are the main strategic tasks presently facing revolutionaries and communists in the U.S.
The following piece contains some inaccuracies and misunderstandings; but we expect that such things can be addressed in the discussion.
* * * * * * * *
Maoist Jacobite Watch
by Club Jacobin
It’s been sad watching the Kasama website — sometimes one of the most interesting websites on the American Left — take a turn for the sectarian and away from serious politics in recent months. Sad, but not altogether surprising.
Kasama is originally the brainchild of Mike Ely, a longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and one of the last relatively sane people left in that organization. (That is, until he left the RCP two or three years ago.)
Kasama now exists as both a website and a political organization named the Kasama Project. In the two years or so that they’ve been online, they have regularly published interesting articles (usually reprints but some original material) and developed a base of followers and commenters, whose discussion is also interesting though uneven. They just passed two and a half million pageviews since they set up shop, which is no mean feat.
As a site for interesting discussions there’s not much bad stuff to say about Kasama. (Although their heavy-handed moderation policies do tend to shut down interesting discussions that cut too close to home for Ely and other site moderators.) But the political organization side of the whole endeavoring has always been more baffling, and more disappointing.
Is Kasama's name theft-by-appropriation and unintelligible?
The name actually does a good job summing up the problems with the organization. “Kasama” is a name that will not immediately have any meaning for the large majority of Americans, including the advanced among them. Kasama is (more or less) the Tagalog word for “comrade.” I hesitate to say that the name is pure appropriation (I imagine they would say that it is a statement of internationalism) — though, to judge by their writings, no one involved in the project has much of a connection to struggles in the Philippines or in the Filipino diaspora. What it does do is convey the idea that whatever they are about comes from outside the experience of the American masses and needs translation to be intelligible by the masses in America.
The other part of the name — “Project” — is equally revealing. You’ll notice that it’s not a “Party” (a fact which does at least put them in a better place than most American Left sects). That’s part of what the site and the project are all about. “Reconceive as we regroup” is the slogan of the whole effort; the idea is to abandon the parts of Communist theory and practice that are exhausted (to use the terminology of Badiou, for whom the Kasama members have an inexplicable and irrepressible hard-on) while making new theory to “chart the uncharted course.” (They like these strange unsourced quotes in quotation marks; I think it’s a vestigial trait from the RCP). In other words the goal is to develop theory capable of building a revolutionary movement in the United States.
That’s all well and good, of course. The revolutionary Left in this country badly needs to revisit old assumptions and create new theory. The problem is that after two years the Kasama site and the Kasama project don’t really have any new theory or ideas to show for their troubles. Indeed, they seem to be allergic to actually coming up with hypotheses that could be tested by revolutionary praxis. Pick any subject: the Black Panther Party; Queer liberation; Obama; Afghanistan; Nepal; Lady Gaga. Chances are the Kasama site posted some articles about it, sparked some interesting discussion in the blog comments about the topic, and then before coming to any kind of conclusions, dropped the subject to move on to the next article posted. When another article is later posted revisiting the original subject, the discussion begins again from square one.
But at some point, a political organization needs to make choices: adopt view A, and reject opposing view B. In must organize itself on particular views of how revolutionary change happens, on the appropriate political vehicles and methods in a given society, etc. At some point it’s necessary to decide: is a Party needed? Maybe a Front instead of a Party? Or a discussion network only? Of course no decision needs to be final — it might be (and should be) revised in light of practice and new experiences. But a serious political organization needs to stake out some claims and demonstrate their correctness through its practice. Kasama can’t remain simply a “project” forever.
It’s possible that more concrete work is taken place within the “project,” out of view of the blog. Even if that’s the case, so far they have not offered any theoretical views to the public, with very minor exceptions. Do they believe in a Leninist Party? Do they have a view on who the revolutionary agent or agents are in the United States? How about a program to deal with the financial crisis? Views on left refoundation or regroupment? Frankly, until they take some stands on issues like this, there isn’t much ground to consider them to be a revolutionary Left organization rather than a left-oriented online discussion circle.
Support for the revolutions of Nepal and India "isn't mass work"
You may be asking: what about their mass work and daily organizing? Surely that legitimates their claim to be a political organization. And it might, if they did any. But there is precious little. The closest they come seems to be a side-blog they run that posts information about Maoists in Nepal and India. That’s laudable and all but it isn’t mass work and it isn’t the kind of work in which theories of revolutionary organization and agitation can be tested and improved. As is often the case, it’s useful here to remember what the Chairman said:
Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone … Man’s knowledge makes another leap through the test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one. For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in cognition, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no other way of testing truth.
The idea that a small organization, overwhelmingly made up of white men, can sit down and “reconceive” the correct revolutionary course for this incredibly complex nation of 300 million people is — well, “arrogant” would be the kindest thing that you can say about it.
For that reason I’ve started to think of the Kasamaites as Maoist Jacobites. That’s Jacobites as in the loyalists of the Stuart monarchs in Britain, who kept the idea of the true king somewhere over the seas alive decades past any real possibility of a Stuart restoration. The connotation is a political movement that believes in victory through virtuous fidelity to an ideal, rather than effective political organizing.
Similarly, the guiding principle of Kasama seems to be that any real mass work leads to economism or tailing the Democratic Party, NGOism or whatever other synonym you can think of for losing your revolutionary spirit and politics. Of course those are real dangers which have afflicted many revolutionaries in America. But it’s pure idealism to think that revolutionary theory will do better from sterile reconception by a small group who have no mechanism to test or transform their ideas.
To be clear: I’m all for revolutionary-minded folks getting together to theorize and organize (and white men no less than any others). And small groups do indeed sometimes grow into huge parties — we all know about the Chinese Communist Party, the SACP, etc. But in order to develop the correct line that lets such growth take place, there need to be persistent attempts made to put the current theories into practice, and a fearless willingness to revise theoretical assumptions, organizational methods and even personal standing that we’ve long held dear.
I haven’t publicly voiced my concerns about the direction of the Kasama project before because I know that it takes time to sort out the lessons of a long and complex experience like that which the Kasama folks had with the RCP, and after that it takes more time still to formulate some ideas and figure out how to start implementing them. For a project cohered online, where people may live hundreds of miles away from each other and therefore have less opportunity for joint mass work in any offline milieu, the challenges are even more daunting. They deserve real credit for trying to do these things, and for having their much of their discussions in a public forum. Thanks to that, we can begin to see glimmers of the possibilities that 21st century technologies offer for revolutionary organizing.
But it is necessary to speak out when things appear to take a turn to the wrong direction. That’s what seems to be happening at Kasama. Recent discussions about electoral projects began to take a sharply sectarian edge. Revolutionary left groups and individuals who suggested some kind of political organizing within the Democratic were attacked and derided in terms that normally get a person banned from the site. This crescendoed with the cheerful article “They Expect Us To Eat Shit,” written by Mike Ely under one of his pseudonyms.
We all have our shibboleths, of course. But this behavior sets of big warning bells because the Kasama project does not, as far as I can tell, have an official position on electoral work or a theoretical view of the American political system. This combination suggests the worst possible state of affairs: an undeclared dogma. This is a familiar problem of small and insular political groups; the prejudices and inclinations of the founding individuals define the group, but because they aren’t declared or officially stated, there is no mechanism to challenge them when they need to be challenged. This is, as I said, a common thing for small groups, but it’s one that needs to be vigorously resisted if the group wants to avoid complete ossification.
In keeping with the rise in sectarian sentiment and the unwillingness to engage in patient mass work, Kasama has begun to focus on get-rich-quick schemes of becoming a mass political force overnight. This was first rolled out in Mike Ely’s proposal for a viral video about the exploitation of workers who assemble or make components for cell phones and other electronic projects.
That was followed up by Mike’s call for organized efforts to make his article on Thanksgiving to “go viral.” The logic is that this piece got around 5,000 views on the week of Thanksgiving; Mike “suspects” that the piece is viewed tens of thousands of times a year, so how hard could it be to get it viewed hundreds of thousands of times?
The fascination with “going viral” is symptomatic of a political approach which rejects patient mass organizing. If they weren’t suffering from lingering RCP-imposed myopia, the Kasama folks might wonder why the two dozen other revolutionary left organizations in the United States aren’t making videos and articles “go viral” in order to promote themselves.
It’s not because it never occurred to them that more exposure would be a positive thing, or that they could avail themselves of youtube and facebook. It has a lot more to do with the fact that making something “go viral” is hard work, requiring talent, time, and very specific skills; and that even with all of those it takes a lot of good luck. And on top of that, when you’ve invested time and resources into making your Communist viral video, what long-term political effects is it going to have?
Hopefully Kasama will snap out of the downward spiral that they seem to be entering into. My comradely advice to them is to worry less about polemics and less about rhetorical harangues of “Why don’t people try X? What would it mean if people did Y?” Focus instead on finding a revolutionary praxis which will allow their ideas to develop and to improve through connection to real-world struggles.
Do some real political work. If you want to focus on making viral videos, that’s fine. Don’t just talk about it: try to actually do it. I would recommend talking with folks in Students Against Sweatshops, who have been doing consumer political exposure for years and have some good ideas about what works and what doesn’t work. Lay out a plan to produce something and what response you anticipate. Then carry it out and adjust your analysis of current conditions and political possibilities accordingly. If you have trouble with resources, seek partners among existing Left organizations.
If Kasama means “companions who travel the road together” — to my friends in Kasama I say step off the couch and start walking down that road for real!
Tell No Lies said
Revolutionaries should always welcome criticism. Of course it would be wonderful if all of it was perfectly principled, substantive and correct as well. But even when its not, there are important things to be gained from engaging it. Even criticism that is problematic in many ways often contains important grains of truth. And the untruths are often important to address as well, if only for purposes of clarifying the real basis of differences and because they often reflect widespread misunderstandings.
This piece has the virtue at least of concentrating in a single essay many of the criticisms that have been directed at Kasama. While I think most of the criticisms here are basically wrong, I think its worth making a distinction between ones that reflect serious principled differences and others that are frankly less worthy. On balance I hope that we can focus on the serious issues here, in particular the complex relationship between mass work and the development of revolutionary communist theory and strategy.
Having said that I want to take issue with a passage that I find particularly troubling here:
It sure would be. It would be arrogant no matter what the make up of our small group was. But it also has precious little to do with what Kasama is doing. The Kasama Project is a small, and as we have been at considerable pains to underline, quite primitive formation. We do not imagine the task of reconceiving revolutionary theory and strategy something that we will or even could accomplish on our own. Rather we recognize precisely that this important work demands the creation of spaces in which lots of people can participate and hash things out without rushing to verdicts on genuinely vexing problems and we’ve focused our energies on the creation of several such spaces, mainly online.
Of course the very idea of doing anything at all with the proposition that it might contribute to making communist revolution in the U.S. might be called “arrogant.” Which is why this line of argument is essentially an argument against revolution or at least against any political project that conceives of itself primarily in terms of consciously advancing revolution. Because of course the objection begs the question: exactly what size group with what make-up would have the neccesary credentials to reconceive a strategy for revolution in a country as complex as the United States? And if it doesn’t exist yet, what can we do to bring it into existence and doesn’t that just bring us right back to the original problem?
2mv said
The idea that a small organization, overwhelmingly made up of white men, can sit down and “reconceive” the correct revolutionary course for this incredibly complex nation of 300 million people is — well, “arrogant” would be the kindest thing that you can say about it.
This is a post-modern argument that has replaced many organization’s line on the national question un-noticed. Reduced from organizational questions around self-determination, secession, and anti-racism, the national question has become “You cannot possibly understand the Other’s viewpoint and therefore, Stop!” A conservative statement.
Tell No Lies said
The question of the composition of revolutionary organizations is an important and serious one. I believe that if we are unable to build organizations that reflect in their leadership as well as their membership the multi-racial and multi-national character of the US and of the US working class we can not succeed. But precisely because it is such an important question we need to oppose the conservative and, frankly, demagogic, way that it is used here.
Here I think we need to really insist on the dialectical relationship between politics and composition. In the long run what will lead to the construction of thoroughly multinational revolutionary organizations is a correct understanding of the indeed complex nature of racism and national oppression in the US and of the tasks that flow from that analysis. And no, Kasama is not in a position to roll out that analysis next week, and frankly none of the previous attempts of any other group is really anywhere near adequate either. This inherently protracted process of developing a praxis can not be leapfrogged. But it can be paralyzed by in effect insisting that anyone who hasn’t solved this central problem confronting revolutionary work in the US is therefore disqualified from trying to solve it. Kasama has created one space where revolutionary-minded folks can struggle over what the solution is. It is by no means the only space that we will need, nor is it magically free of the marks of this society, the inequalities and dynamics of domination and subordination that assert themselves so sharply precisely when we undertake the work of collective theorization. But no other space is either, or in fact will be anytime soon.
Mike E said
Forgive me if I don’t start on the high plane of two-line struggle.
But I do want to comment on three factual matters. I just wanna get them out of the way…
First, the Club Jacobin writes:
I appreciate being considered “relatively sane.” I was a long time member of that trend (going back to the days when the Revolutionary Union “went national” in 1970) and I was a founding member of the Party in 1975. For the last decade or more, I was on the editorial committee of the Revolutionary Worker and then Revolution newspaper — and part of a small circle of editors.
I was not, however, “a longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party.”
Second, CJ also writes:
This is said after a string of positive observations (which are appreciated). But I don’t think this comment is accurate. The moderation policies of Kasama are rather simple and transparent (and I have posted them again).
(1) Wide ranging substantive discussion is encouraged (including criticism of Kasama itself, obviously).
(2) But personalized flaming and trolling are not.
(Here’s the important point: You just can’t have (1) if you don’t enforce (2) consistently.)
Some ortho-commentators have a visceral hatred of Trotskyists, and really of anyone who disagrees with them — you know the tone. They have trouble with the transition. They may genuinely feel “censored” —
because that invective and personalization is sometimes integral in their worldview and analysis. But really, their views are welcome, the personalized attacks are just not.
Our response is anything but heavy-handed. People get repeated warnings. Sometimes we just snip the flaming and keep the substance (if possible). People who violate the rules are put “on moderation” temporarily (but not banned) — i.e. they are encouraged to post, but their comments are checked for insults.
Only open reactionaries (rightwingers, racists), spammers (those who post stuff unrelated to site topics) and those dedicated to hard-core trolling (for example who rotate IP addresses to circumvent moderation and rules) are actually banned. Those have been very few in number. Anyone is welcomed back if they agree to play well with others.
There are no cases where moderation is used to end “interesting discussions” or where people are banned for political disagreements (with me or anyone else).
Third: Cj writes:
It is true, as CJ writes, that I have written essays under a pen name “Nando Sims.”
I think it was obvious to many people — after all I made no effort to disguise my writing “voice” (with its idiosyncratic ways).
And I want to explain why:
I have had a problem that my own opinions are often identified with Kasama as a whole. so that if I put forward a controversial view, some people start saying “Kasama thinks this… or Kasama thinks that…” This has to do with a whole ML legacy of authority — where the statements certain people are taken as the ending of a discussion.
In fact, my goal is often to start a discussion (not end it!)
So when writing particularly controversial statements (like my “they want us to eat shit” article), I deliberately used my Nando handle — so it would not be seen as something speaking for Kasama as a whole. It was intended for distance, not deception.
Obviously that didn’t work, in this case. CJ (who describes Kasama as Mike Ely’s “brainchild”) goes on to take my personal Nando piece as an expression of Kasama (as a whole) turning toward “sectarianism.”
(I don’t agree that CJ’s political assumption that it is somehow “sectarian” to take a sharp distance from establishment liberal (imperialist!) politics — but that is a separate matter).
In any case, it always been somewhat problematic to use two handles. And I imagine some people wondered why I did it. Now you know.
And after discussing it with friends, I’m just gonna put dear old Nando Sims to sleep. But I ask you to help in this way: Don’t assume that my posts represent the views of everyone in Kasama. Often (as I said) they are tentative, and are trying to kick open a discussion, not close it down definitively.
Many things we are doing seem counter-intuitive for those trained in ortho-ML (“one to many”) methods of thinking and work. But let’s just get used to it.
gila monster said
I’m glad to see this posted here, and I hope the debate (and the response, which I look forward to seeing) will be helpful for you all. I regret that overwhelming work and travel responsibilities this week will probably make it impossible for me to stay engaged in any discussion happening in the comments here during that time.
I’ll try to add just a bit of clarification on the issue I was trying to raise around the composition of the group. Along with my quote about “arrogance,” I also wrote the following: “To be clear: I’m all for revolutionary-minded folks getting together to theorize and organize (and white men no less than any others).”
Being myself a white man, I am certainly a big believer in the idea that white men can be consistent communists and should be welcomed as part of the communist movement. I also believe that national/gender/etc. composition is not the main yardstick by which to judge an organization; that remains politics above all.
It’s true of course that within our current screwed-up society, there are various realities and institutions which sometimes lead to revolutionary politics being adopted by individuals from various privileged backgrounds before they are adopted by the broader masses. I believe that is something that revolutionaries need to figure out how to try and confront (and that some groups are doing a relatively better job at that), because our success depends on fusing the revolutionary project with the (potential) revolutionary subject.
But having failed to overcome that material reality is not something that any group, especially a new one, should be judged too harshly on. That’s why this was a relatively minor area of my critique.
Maybe the deeper question I was trying to address was: how does Kasama see its role in the larger revolutionary ecosystem? (If I may borrow that interesting concept that’s been used here.)
I have tried to understand this point from the posts that have been published here but haven’t been able to get a real handle on it. That matters because one has different expectations for a vanguard or a nucleus of a revolutionary vanguard, as opposed to an organization with a particular sectoral/methodological base (e.g.: internet organizing, solidarity work around South Asian revolutionary movements, or whatever it may be.)
TNL’s statement in comment 1 that Kasama does not see itself as the sole force which will develop the revolutionary line and strategy for the United States is reassuring to me. Personally I’d like to see some more discussion to clarify how the project sees itself fitting into that ecosystem.
Must hop on a plane now. I look forward to following this discussion when I can.
Tell No Lies said
Another problem with this piece is its characterization of the “They Expect Us to Eat Shit” piece and its implications for Kasama.
It is no secret that most people involved in Kasama are strongly opposed to “working inside the Democratic Party” and this piece, which I characterized at the time as a rant, reflected that view.
JC calls this an example of an “undeclared dogma.” But this is really unfair.
The piece in question actually sparked a quite lively discussion which was in fact one of many that we have had around participation in electoral politics, the Democratic Party and Obama.
What attracted me to Kasama even though my views on this particularly important question are decidedly in the minority has been precisely the determination to seriously engage the issues. Kasama is actually one of the very few places on the internet where I would argue that an undeclared dogma on the question of the Democratic Party does NOT effectively shut down substantive discussions of the real and vexing problems it poses for revolutionaries.
Indeed I can’t think of any other left-wing site where I have seen an ongoing substantive and largely civil debate where people have been able to advocate a range of views (abstentionist, third party, work within the Dems) with the expectation of serious response from their opponents. I would be delighted to be directed to any other such sites should they exist.
The rule of undeclared dogmas on the left in the 2008 election was staggering.
Most anarchists and Trotskyists largely made it all the way to October before they even felt compelled to trot out the exact same arguments they had made against supporting the Dems in every previous election.
While at the same time left groups that supported Obama consistently exaggerated his progressive credentials. (“They Expect Us to Eat Shit” rightly noted the shamelessness with which some of those same forces were mobilizing fear of the Tea Party to compensate for the obvious failure of Obama to deliver on the promises they had made on his behalf.)
I seriously doubt that Kasama will be signing on to any Democratic Party primary challenges in 2012. But I do expect it to be a site where the question of the value of such efforts will be discussed seriously, which is not to say without passion, and more importantly with an eye towards larger questions of revolutionary strategy.
Bryan said
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7519263/
2mv said
That video is amazing. Did Red make it?
gila monster said
(This comment was written hastily during a layover, because Mike’s comment at #4 raised an issue around moderation that I did want to expand on. Apologies for the lack of editing.)
Let me be clear, first of all, to say that I think Kasama has done better than anyone else on the revolutionary left in the USA at bringing together internet discussions / blog style commenting with the development of revolutionary theory. Your advanced practice here is something everyone else should learn from. I criticize not to knock you or because I know how to do better, but only because I think the existing best practice is not good enough.
To flesh out my points around this a little bit more, there a few specific issues around your moderation that have caught my attention.
One is the issue of snark in comments, which I understand to be generally forbidden here. I get the thinking behind this prohibition. Snarky discussions can become personal rather than political, and it is hard to separate out real claims from hyperbole used for rhetorical effect. At the same time, I personally have great respect for the power of snark as a rhetorical medium through which some people may participate who would otherwise feel unable to take part in the discussions. I don’t have time to expand on this point much more but some relevant readings are online here and here. I think finding a way to allow snarky discussions while keeping the discussions as a whole healthy and on a high political level is one thing that’s important to expanding the reach of this site and this project.
The heavy-handed moderation I mentioned refers more to snips and deletion of comments rather than banning participants altogether.
Again I feel the need to be clear. I’m not against snips, comment deletion, or total bans for users. Anyone calling such tactics “censorship” would be simply ridiculous. In the first place, enforcing your own policies on a site that you have created has nothing in common with government suppression of political speech, which is what censorship does (or at least should) refer to. And in the second place, I firmly believe that doing all of those things is a good and necessary thing to moderate political discussions; every moderator or site runner should be doing all of them as the situation demands.
But that said, I do feel that some of the specific snips or comment deletions here have been heavy-handed. To give one particular example, there was a large amount of commentary removed during the site discussions/debates with Grover Furr and his supporters, including portions within comments and the removal of entire comments. As it happens, I personally sympathized entirely with Mike and the rest of the Kasama people, and thought that the Furr position was fairly ludicrous, as those comments supporting it revealed.
Nevertheless I felt that the overall amount of snipping/cutting served to limit the debate rather than enhance it. (It could also lead a casual observer who didn’t have time to follow the debate very closely to feel that the site was removing political arguments that it couldn’t rebut — clearly I don’t think that’s the case, but it is something that might be a cause of some concern. I think the general unwillingness to discuss moderation issues on the site, and the frequent refrain that comments should be taken to the rarely-read Kasama Threads site, may reenforce that view as well. But I’ll leave that point before I fall into concern trolling.)
Both of these areas involve tough judgement calls and can work only with correct policies, experience and an evolving increasingly correct practice. I think you all are generally at the forefront here; I hope my comments might spur you on to get even better.
—–
PS to Mike — I hope my crack about being “relatively sane” didn’t cut. As someone on TV once said — “anyone who says they’re completely sane is either lying, or they aren’t very bright.”
Mike E said
GM wrote:
Are you kidding? I’m glad to be considered relatively sane.
As for snark: Our experience is that if you allow any, it drives out substance and drives out those serious people who think internet flaming is infantile.
There is nothing heavy handed about it. You gotta draw the line somewhere, and we do.
The problem with the pseudo-science discussion is that we were (precisely) dealing with pseudo-materialist method of argument — where some people insist that anyone who disagrees with them is (somehow) counterevolutionary. So their tendency toward hostility and bitterness is built into their very method. The fact that one or two trolls whined about being “censored” (while fervently defending mass executions and imprisonment of communists and others for political differences) is a bit bizarre.
They don’t see the differences between saying a method is pseudo-scientific, and ranting that a particular person is stupid, or anticommunist, or counterrevolutionary.
There is a brown-red cult of ruthlessness that think bullets, bullying or bluster are the best way to answer political disagreement. Such people have trouble presenting their views in our forum. To them our methods of political debate are effete and liberal.
It’s kinda simple: Kasama is for substantive and civil debate among revolutionaries. If someone can’t handle that, the Internet is full of places where they can go rage.
Gary said
I think the video in post # 7 above deserves reposting for a separate thread. Rather like the Tina Fey imitation of Sarah Palin on SNL, which drew laughs by merely reproducing what Palin had said, the video accurately (at least based on my experience) replicates the spiel of an RCP salesperson. And it’s painfully hilarious.
Nelson H. said
TNL, I get what you’re saying about single pieces being held up to reflect the entire politics of a group, project, or other formation. But I’ve also gotta say, y’all need to get on a page about what the frakking metric is going to be. Not a week goes by that commentators here don’t hold up individual pieces written by authors associated with other groups, projects and formations as examples of full scale deviations on the part of whichever other group as a whole into social democracy, psuedo-science peddling cults, etc. In a nutshell, I think this is what GM was trying to critique when the word “sectarian” got used.
I also think a big part of what the original piece is pushing at just comes out all the clearer in TNL’s crying foul. To quote: “But at some point, a political organization needs to make choices: adopt view A, and reject opposing view B. In must organize itself on particular views of how revolutionary change happens, on the appropriate political vehicles and methods in a given society, etc.”
I for one am a strong believer that the left is greatly hindered by a view that we need to adopt answers on all questions and reject all others interpretations at the present moment. Generally I think one of our most pressing tasks is the narrowing in on which few questions constitute those around which principled unity is required for a deeper revolutionary praxis, what folks called “theoretical preconditions to communist unification” back in the day.
As an aside, by revolutionary praxis I mean the work we do with our party, or if we need them the parties or even the frente of parties, groups, projects and organizations. The fact such an instrument at present doesn’t yet exist is something which I hope we’re in agreement around. But I’m less clear if Kasama as a project even thinks such an instrument needs to exist. A deeper explanation around questions of organization would be area that I think the group does need to adopt a stand on, even a preliminary, rudimentary one, especially how it concerns this project’s interactions with other left “organisms” in non-predatory/sectarian ways.
If the response was meant to speak in a collective voice, then I think Eric R did a good job at laying out some of project’s views on another super important area: what does revolutionary work among the people look like? I’ll second Toddy’s earlier request that Kasama as a political project do better at communicating the lessons learned and general approach taken to this question given both it’s often-stated importance to the project’s work and Eric’s passing reference to most all of the project’s supporters engaging in mass work at the local level.
Ajagbe said
we’re in a difficult period in the US. since the collapse of the soviet bloc and china’s turn toward capitalism we’ve had to confront our actual irrelevance. it’s hard. consequently, we spend more time sniping at each other over perceived differences than building unity where unity is possible. that is, after all, much easier to do than anything else. given the political landscape, it should be REALLY EASY to find points of principled unity with other forces on the left. but we can’t, it seems. that said, in my view, electoral politics are a dead end. we’re not going to win fighting them on their terms. it’s ok to get more involved in special periods, like obama’s election, but, otherwise, it’s pointless for us. even if ti easier than organizing black kids in brownsville. well, that’s my rant.
Mike E said
Ajagbe writes:
I perceive the problem differently, and would assume other causes.
First, i think that a great deal of the “with us or against us” approach is inherited from the Comintern years and not a recent result of the disappearance of socialist countries.
Second I don’t think “actual irrelevance” is nuanced enough. We are weak and often invisible, but our politics are potentially relevant (if we do things right). It is a long shot but it is real.
Third, i think there has been an objective slow-motion regroupment around real political differences. Many forces have found their ideologies to be less and less important. The younger cadre of some established formations are functionally uninformed about the ideologies and histories of the groups that recruited them.
So you are getting loose alignments of “people into Democratic party inside-outside,” and “people into social movement activism,” and “people into more radical politics” — in which a birds-of-a-feather functionality replaces faded ideological distinctions. If such forces aren’t actually merging it is because (i suspect) there is little to gain. If you are hiding your socialist character inside the Democratic party, why would a new, louder, more visible left formation help that?
As for regroupment or merger among more radical and revolutionary forces… all that remains to be seen, and it depends on our ability to identify strategies and ideas around which to unite. (I.e. I don’t believe future unity will be based on previous strategies and demarcations.)
Red Fly said
Hey Mike, off-topic here, but I’m just wondering if you’ve considered re-posting old posts to the top of the page. I feel that often times the discussions here peter out, not because the discussion has been exhausted, but simply because the new stuff pushes it off the front page. People who don’t notice the “latest comments” sidebar probably have no idea that you’ve just responded to a five-month old comment.
Just something for you and other folks here to consider.
mike e said
we do sometimes recycle discussions. We can’t simply repost the old ones since links (and google links) are lost.
But really the main way to recycle previous posts is for people to write new comments.
I often hear people say “I was gonna comment, but by then the discussion had moved on.”
This is a misunderstanding. We don’t have just one discussion — and you can revitalize an old discussion simply by commenting on it.
I wish people would just write their comments and post them when they got ready, and leave behind that assumption that “the discussion has moved on.” It has never moved on. We are not sitting in a room with an agenda — we are in a forum with hundreds of threaded discussions, all of which are eager to be brought back to attention.
On the contrary, people always notice when a new comment appears, and go check out the thread. And when someone comments (as I just did) on an old post, dozens of people go read that old thread within hours.
So that is the best way to keep important threads alive — you just need to write a comment. the road is made by walking.
* * * * * *
The other way we keep important discussions alive is by linking to them on our Clusters page. One of the best ways you can contribute to the richness of our discussion is to go to Clusters once a week, pick an important topic, and comment on it — to bring it back into view.
Thanks for raising this.
Red Fly said
Hmmm…well, speaking for myself, I’ve just recently noticed. Maybe I’m just dense, but I do worry that other people might be similarly unaware.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction though.
mike e said
We have some sense of this from site stats. It’s recorded in hard numbers.
When a new comment appears, it funnels a stream of traffic to that post (i.e. to that thread). When someone comments on a previous thread, that post gets new readers.
It is true that some people are unaware of how a site like this works — probably because they just haven’t given it a lot of thought.
There are posts, there are threaded comments, and there is a large audience. A number of people write (or suggest) posts. About a hundred people write comments. And (as is common on the internet) the number of lurkers is usually about ten times as large as the commentators (and often has different interests and politics).
I have a mantra “the thread is the locus” — by which I mean: The posts are important (of course) but the interest and the truth are often uncovered by the threaded commentary. Often we post things that we don’t agree with — with the confidence that the resulting thread will bring the issues to the surface in an all-around way.
And, for our audience, it is both the comments and the posts that are the attraction. People check to see the new posts, but they also check to see where the commentary is happening.
A back-and-forth in the commentary (especially one that is lively and pungent) causes people to come back to Kasama to see “what’s happening.” It not only boosts traffic to a post but to the site itself. And it does this even if the commentary is on older posts.
And again: don’t think discussion has closed on an older topic. It is there for you to bring back to life whenever you choose.
I would love to have one or two dozen people who commented in thoughtful new ways on important old posts. It would greatly increase the ability of our audience to find the most important threads and debates.
Go through the clusters page once a week, find an important topic (reconception, election controversies, questions of violence, history of the previous communist movement) and if you have thoughts write them as comments.