Banned Thought has gathered an archive of the Maoist international journal A World To Win (that appeared from 1985-2006).
There are a number of substantive articles there with lasting value. Kasama will be publishing some of them over a period of time — to make them available more widely and to stimulate discussion over key political controversies.
As always, posting pieces here does not necessarily imply agreement with their arguments and verdicts.
In April 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon in Vietnam, an army of ragged, thin and very young peasant men and women defeated the US-backed government in neighbouring Cambodia. In January 1979, some 44 months later, this new regime was swept from power and scattered by invading Vietnamese soldiers.
The briefness of this period is part of what makes it hard to understand. Further, there are no sweeping eye-witness accounts, and even some of the basic facts are in dispute among those who study Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it is called in the country’s Khmer language). A major difficulty is that the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) led by Pol Pot made a secret of its policies and goals and even its existence for most of its time in power, and since then none of its leaders have come forward to defend its line. Yet the main source of confusion about this period is that a reactionary consensus has been imposed, both because it has been drummed into people’s heads by the media, and because there have been so few dissenting voices.
“I think that our overall strategic purpose is two-fold:
First assemble a broad social movement that can hammer through a social transformation (with core forces, long-term allies, vacillating and neutralized forces — all together seeking to isolate diehard forces defending empire and oppression.)
Second, we want to assemble such a movement in ways that can form the basis for a new social order (and a new relatively stable new political power). It is not enough to have the force to “bring down” the old order, it is necessary to have connections and unities solid enough to proceed to construct (piecemeal in real time) the basis for a new ongoing post-revolutionary process of transformation.”
“The alliances that lead to the overthrow of capitalism need to be able to morph into alliances that can support a new revolutionary power, and proceed to carry through various transformations (at many levels — social, economic, ideological, international, ecological, on and on) that, in their complexity and sequence, will mark a period of communist transition (a deepening of a socialist revolution into a transition of a communist kind).”
“I would like to propose a strategic approach that involves both ends and means:
“First, it involves identifying and proceeding from our necessary goals — which are to carry through a communist transition from capitalism and class society toward classless society in which exploitation and all forms of oppression have been overthrown. This process which we have called the “overthrow of the 4 alls.” This protracted truly-epochal world change has to move (I believe) strategically through socialist revolutions — where the heights of power and economy are seized by a movement centered among the oppressed, and a protracted period of ongoing transformation is initiated.
“Second, our practical plan (based on those goals) should be the one encapsulated by Mao:
“Unite all who can be united against the real enemy.”
This involves (as Keith touched on above) a strategic analysis of who are friends and who are enemies. (Meaning at our stage: Who are potential friends in the future when we have a movement, and who are diehard enemies who we believe will never be won over and will need, one way or another, to be isolated and defeated.”
Countries are different — and reaction takes different faces. In the U.S., anti-Islamic bigotry often takes the form of Christian xenophobia. In France, where rationalism is much more the social norm, racism often takes the form of a secular intolerance and a familiar European assumption of cultural superiority.
He targets the rise of a militant fascistic right in many places across Europe — starting with the growing vote for the rightwinger Marine Le Pen in France. Exploiting the desperations of an intense crisis, fanning the endemic flames of racism and fear, similar forces have cropped up — from the mass murder of Norway to the Golden Dawn growth in Greece.
Countries are different, of course, as we said above. And yet there is much here, in this essay, worth considering as the crisis here too in the U.S. drives millions to desperation and produces radicalizations both the left and the right.
This essay by communist philosopher Alan Badiou first appeared in Le Monde, the flagship newspaper of French bourgeois society.We thank Guavapuree for the translation.
The Racism of Intellectuals
By Alain Badiou
The extent of the vote for Marianne Le Pen is surprising and overwhelming; we look for explanations–The political class comes out with a handy sociology: the France of the lower classes, the misled provincials, the workers, the under-educated, frightened by globalization, the decline in purchasing power, the disintegration of their districts, and foreign strangers present at their doors, wants to retreat into nationalism and xenophobia.
Besides, these are already those French “stragglers” who were accused of having voted “No” in the referendum on the draft European Constitution– One opposes them to the educated, urban modern middle classes who are the social salt of our well-tempered democracy.
This essay first appeared as a comment within a longer discussion of a document “Some Points on Mass Line“ — circulated by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Althusser urges us to make two reads: first is an initial (rather naive) read, where we let a document wash over us and interact with our own existing thoughts. The second is a much more patient reading in depth, where we notice voids in the text, where we read it in relation to other ideas, in context… and so on.
A second-style read of this the FRSO document uncovers (for me) that the document gets the role and origins of consciousness basically wrong — in a way that affects the whole presentation here of mass line. It is a view of mass line that smuggles in a strategic view — that is often accepted without being openly articulated — a view that insists that revolutionary and socialist political consciousness emerges (relatively easily and automatically and sequentially ) from the growth and experience of large and progressive mass movements. In other words, that the main task of conscious people is to build “mass movements” — in the hope (or confidence) that the emergence of those movements will push people and society toward radical change.
I am under a time constraint right now, so forgive me if i am telegraphic.
Our common starting point is (or should be) that the people are the motive force in making world history.
What is capitalism? How is socialism actually different? How can we recognize when capitalist society comes at us in “socialist” disguise?
One focus of analysis and debate has always been the Soviet Union — where over seventy years there was close examination of the nature of the USSR, and where those debates had widespread implications politically.
The following article is one of the sharpest arguments made for the view that the Soviet Union came to be dominated by a class that was literally and fully capitalist. It takes the form of a polemic with two scholars (Al Szymanski and David Laibman) who strongly argued that the USSR remained socialist and could not possibly be capitalist.
Even today, a generation after the dissolution of the USSR — this debate remains extremely rich in lessons. The question remains sharply posed about what, after all, is the socialism we are aiming at, and whether to accept (and mythologize) oppressive societies that maintain a fiction of socialist state ownership.
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This article emerged as part of a larger communist theoretical project conducted by Maoists in the early 1980s. And that project still represents, in some important ways, a positive example for the communist theoretical projects that o urgently need to be taken up now.
This essay first appeared in Revolution magazine #52, Summer 1984. (Revolution is a now-defunct political and theoretical journal published by the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA from 1979 until 1994) Revolution #52 contained a number of analytical pieces on the nature of Soviet society.
Notes toward an analysis of the Soviet bourgeoisie
by Lenny Wolff and Aaron Davis
If the Soviet Union is capitalist, then where is the bourgeoisie? The defenders of the Soviet Union constantly return to this question, and use it to argue the nonexistence of any Soviet bourgeois class. Their line of argument proceeds along two interrelated tracks.
First, they claim that the “logic” of the socialist mode of production—by which they essentially mean state ownership of the means of production—rules out the generation within socialist society of either bourgeois relations or a bourgeoisie. Thus the restoration of capitalism is rendered logically impossible, short of an invasion by imperialists or a counterrevolution by dispossessed exploiters. Second, they list characteristics that are said to typify a capitalist class and then point to the alleged absence of any such phenomena in the Soviet Union to deduce the nonexistence of a Soviet bourgeoisie.
“I cannot believe the words I’ve been reading here….
“Why work hard, when it will be taken away and spread around to those that choose not to?
“Men and women need to live free, but under an organized social and moral law…. I agree that there needs to be some form of revolution; but communism has been an ultimate and bloody failure throughout history.”
Kasama doesn’t usually post essays by people opposed to communism. In fact we routinely remove almost all comments written from a conservative perspective (since they generally bring our discussions down).
But in this case, Roberto took the time to pose a series of questions to Kasama’s project from an anti-communist perspective — and he concentrates issues that many quite sincere people, especially in the middle classes, raise about our communist project.
He asks, for example, what the initiative would be to work hard in a society of redistributed wealth. He makes a familiar (and pointed) challenge from those who feel they have experienced real socialism already (in Cuba or eastern Europe).
He questions whether people making demands on the system (like the participants of Occupy) don’t really just want something for nothing — in a world where their own hard work would actually bring them what they need. And he sees the experience of his own family — their departure from Yugoslavia and their subsequent success in Canadian business — as proof of his own political views.
If you want, this thread might be a place to collectively discuss how we answer such questions in a popular way — and what our experiences have been with people who challenge our communist convictions from this pro-capitalist ideological and political place.
Lauren Wood/The Natchez Democrat, via Associated Press Police on Sunday surrounded a Natchez, Miss., prison for illegal immigrants.
Typical media one-liner: “There was no immediate word on what sparked the riot.”
But we all know the reasons: This is a prison for undocumented immigrants. Its very existence is unjust and intolerable. And the people trapped there suffered inhumane conditions, raw racism, hopelessness, and the courage to rebel.
What are we doing? What are we saying?… to amplify their voices, to support their struggle, to end such mistreatment?
Thanks to Greg A. for pointing this out in the Chicago Tribune. Anyone with more info, or voices of the prisoners themselves, please add links or news below in a comment.
Inmates riot in Mississippi prison, one guard killed
by Karen Brooks
(Reuters) -May 21 – Inmates seized control of a privately owned prison in Mississippi on Sunday after riots broke out, and a guard was killed in the chaos in the low security facility, authorities said.
Adams County Coroner James Lee said the 23-year-old guard died of blunt trauma to the head during the riot at the Adams County Correctional Center, a privately owned prison that houses mostly illegal immigrants for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The politics of austerity and the increased policing of everyday life reveal themselves in these instances to be inseparably linked. We can see the direct link between tuition hikes and the criminalization of assembly in Quebec, just as we can see Bloomberg’s management through “free speech zones” of political protest, the silencing of media, and the increased police aggression in suppressing the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thus, solidarity with Quebec students is also important work in defense of our right to demonstrate here and everywhere. When times of crisis provoke ramped up police power and allow desperate politicians to pass “emergency laws” that target unquiet sectors of the population, we are certain that the class balance of present society is threatened. But it is a cautious joy we should preach, along with the sober insight that without powerful international solidarity and coordination, as James Baldwin once wrote to Angela Davis, “if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
“We didn’t know it was impossible, so we did it!” The Quebec Student Strike celebrates its 100th day
Malav Kanuga
Origins of an unlimited general strike (“grève générale illimitée”)
Students in Quebec are marking their 100th day of an unlimited general strike on Tuesday, May 22nd, the culmination of the most stunning mass protest movements of recent months and North America’s largest student movement in years. In fact, the mobilizations in Quebec might just be Canada’s Arab Spring.
Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to raise tuition fees by 75% over five years (amended to 82% over seven years by the government at the end of April). Before the general strike began in February, protests, demos, trainings, letter writing campaigns and attempts to negotiate in good faith with the government were consistently met with obstinate silence from the Charest administration. For the students there has been a growing sense of urgency and a shared recognition that increased tuition means a heavier student debt burden, hundreds of more hours a year spent working instead of studying, less access for working class and lower class students, and a shift in university culture toward the market, the commodification of education, the financialization of student life, and the privatization of the university.
Immigrant workers in Lumberton, North Carolina — attending a Catholic Mass animated by demands for legality. Their political struggle for justice created forms of organization and a mood of impatience that gave rise to economic strikes in the area’s plants (not the other way around).
Nat Winn, one of Kasama’s moderators, takes up a key question of our moment: As many people discuss going from resistance to revolution to a new society, what forces in society will form the core force of such a future movement?
by Nat Winn
Revolutionary change calls for strategy. Who should we base a revolutionary movement among? Who are the intermediate allies who might support radical change? What are the necessary types of organization we need and the most effective forms of resistance?
The emergence of mass resistance all over the world since the Arab Spring has brought these questions to the fore for revolutionaries. Things are complicated by a society in great flux. Here in the United States sections of the oppressed have been distanced from production and forced into the illegal economy. Those still employed have had their lives destabilized by things such as the rust belt phenomenon and the pressure to accept lower wages and benefits. Sections of the middle classes (including even many middle level managers in corporations) have felt their lives taken over by workload and insecurity – even when they have not yet literally been pushed down among the oppressed. So who do we look to in the current situation; which forces are our potential revolutionary cores?
Supporters of the prisoners deliver their 10 Demands to the Virginia prison authorities. We urge more people to raise their voices to support the prisoners and expose their mistreatment.
Prisoners say:
“Regardless of sexual preference, gang affiliation, race and religion, there are only two classes at this prison: the oppressor and the oppressed. We the oppressed are coming together. We’re considered rival gang members, but now we’re coming together as revolutionaries. We’re tired of being treated like animals.”
After attempts to air their grievances through the internal processes of Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison were ignored, prisoners have begun a hunger strike to protest the deplorable conditions in the prison and ongoing abuses by prison staff.
The prisoners have laid out a set of demands which call for an end to indefinite segregation, clean living conditions, healthy, cooked meals, access to medical care, cleaning materials and personal hygiene products, and a clear and transparent process for complaints. They also demand that third-party observers be given access to document prison conditions and that prisoners be informed of the duration and reason for solitary detention.
10 Demands of the Red Onion State Prison hunger strikers
We (Prisoners at Red Onion State Prison) demand the right to an adequate standard of living while in the custody of the state!
1. We demand fully cooked food, and access to a better quality of fresh fruit and vegetables. In addition, we demand increased portions on our trays, which allows us to meet our basic nutritional needs as defined by VDOC regulations.
2. We demand that every prisoner at ROSP have unrestricted access to complaint and grievance forms and other paperwork we may request.
In a deep and deepening political crisis, how do revolutionary forces decide where to take their stand, and what slogans to seek to mobilize millions around. How does a Maoist mass line function when communist forces are suddenly speaking to and for whole sections of the people.
Throughout most of its political life, the KOE (Communist Organization of Greece) has militantly called for leaving the European Union and the Euro zone — transnational structures which were seen to serve the great powers and German imperialism in particular. Now, in the midst of great demands for a cruel austerity, the German chancellor Merkel has floated out that perhaps German imperialism wants to force Greece out of the Euro zone — and threatens that such an expulsion may serve as punishment for the people of Greece who are so militantly against the Troika demands.
In such a context, two things have happened: First, the KOE has not included their long-standing demands against Euro Zone in their current immediate demands. And second, the reactionary forces have launched a massive smear campaign — arguing that if the radical left SYRIZA coalition wants to be considered “responsible” it has to expel the KOE which is so closely associated with anti-Euro politics. So here we are in the real life politics of a system-wide political and economic crisis.
It is in that context that the following press release from KOE is particularly interesting: It is their response to an escalating smear campaign that seeks to divide the people’s movement by demanding that SYRIZA expel its most revolutionary forces.
(The following translation was done into English by Kasama . Any errors are ours alone.)
Communique by the Press Bureau of the KOE (Issued: Athens 5/21/2012)
A Different Greece in a Different Europe
1) the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE) currently finds itself at the epicenter of an organized attack. It is an attack intended to strike at SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, within which our organization has been such an integral part. These last days, the political centers of the system (including the main conservative party, New Democracy, and their instruments at the highest levels of the media) have been displaying old posters of the KOE all over the TV and print news. These posters opposed the European Union – and the reproducing of these posters in the media is declaring, like prosecutors of some monarchy, that it proves that our positions must be condemned by SYRIZA and we should be excluded from “the body politic.”
Our informal guess was over 10,000. I thought it had quite a radical vibe. There were common themes of opposing empire, war, and the oppressions of capitalism. Anyone watching would have seem many diverse voices and creative expressions — but many common thoughts and values. Including socialism.
The following photos are by Kasama’s JB Connors. Click to see them larger.
Once again young anarchist activists are portrayed as criminal terrorists. Once again there were police informants inside the group. Once again the arrests are used to manipulate public opinion against resistance movements. Last month Cleveland, now Chicago….
The following is a press release from the Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Thanks to Contarian for sharing it.
These are the first people to ever be charged with violating Illinois’ anti-terror statutes, which were enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The timing of these arrests seem intended to cast a frightening shadow over the protests themselves — intended to frighten the protesters to cow them, and to make the population fear something vaguely sinister gathering in their town.
Follow events here: #NATO3
National Lawyers Guild decries terrorism charges against Occupy activists protesting NATO summit
For Immediate Release: May 19, 2012 — Preemptive raids, terrorism and conspiracy charges are common characteristics of National Special Security Events
Chicago, IL — After holding NATO protesters for up to 48 hours, and releasing 6 out of 9 arrestees without any charges, the City of Chicago filed state charges last night against 3 Occupy activists from Florida, including possession of explosives or incendiary devices, material support for terrorism, and conspiracy. On Wednesday night at approximately 11:30pm, police raided a house in the Bridgeport neighborhood, detained several people in multiple apartments, and arrested 9 activists. Police broke down doors with guns drawn and searched residences without a warrant or consent.
In Greece, the helicopter has become a symbol of “Just get out!” It means people are demanding that their government and oppressors just get in a helicopter and flee the country.
The following is a May 15 press release from the Communist Organisation of Greece (KOE).
Greece is in such a sharp crisis, that revolutionary forces are operating under radically new conditions: Their task is not merely to refine and declare their program, or consolidate their own existence. They are now directly involved in bringing millions to a fighting front against the existing political establishment and the old social order. The question is not merely agitating — denoucing or exposing the power-that-be. There is a chance to actually overthrow them.
In this moment, the questions of how to speak to millions, and how to find a road from crisis toward a popular revolution are very very practically posed.
Kasama offers translations of KOE statements — even though we understand they (and their context) are often hard to understand from here. We urge you to study the background, and become fluent in the issues and context of this deep crisis. Because there is much to be learned about how a revolutionary crisis is different from ordinary times, and there is much to be learned when revolutoinaries in other parts of the world grapple seriously with carving a path to revolution (not just in their minds or desires, but in the actual wilderness of real political life).
In this press release (as in the revolutionary discussions of Greece generally) the term Troika is used as one description for the main target of the revolutionary forces. A troika is the name for a three-horse team pulling a sleigh or cart. And Troika (in the current Greek context) means the three forces most directly oppressing the people of Greece through extreme and crushing demands for austerity and debt repayment:
The European Union (an attempt to form a large unified market based on Europe’s major imperialist-capitalist powers)
The International Monetary Fund, which (on behalf of global capitalist forces imposes extreme austerity on struggling peoples and economies.
And the European Central Bank.
You’re discredited. Get out!
They are continuing their provocations against Greece. For them, the matter at hand is prolonging of the status quo.
The President has put an (unsigned) Memorandum into the public spotlight — It is attributed to Papademos, the Prime Minister of the Troika and it announces that public funds available to the Greek government have simply dried up. This reminds us of the declaration made two years ago by Papacostandinos, the then-Minister of the Economy, which compared the Greek economic situation to the Titanic. That declaration was what opened the door for the Troika.
We have received the following statement, origilnally appearing on bringtheruckus.org. Kasama’s previous discussion of Joel’s life and death appeared here.
On the Passing of Joel Olson
After the disbanding of Bring the Ruckus, we promised a document that would say more about our organizational decision to disband. That decision was a difficult one, fraught with emotion. It was nothing, however, compared to the news of the death of our comrade and Ruckus founding member Joel Olson near the end of March. In the wake of this, an organizational reflection hardly seems to matter at all. What follows is a short tribute to our beloved comrade. It does not seek to be an obituary, or an accounting of his interests or accomplishments.
We offer it here because this space still exists, at least for the time being. We offer it as a way to deal with the loss of a beloved comrade, which, despite the difficulty some of us had in the wake of our collective decision to disband, is 10,000 times harder — or more — to come to grips with.
Joel played an important role in the disbanding of an earlier organization, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, as he and others argued strongly for the centrality of white supremacy as a primary obstacle to building a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement in the United States. After the split of Love and Rage, he helped found Phoenix Ruckus, a study group, but also one that put theory into practice, with the founding of Phoenix Copwatch. Phoenix Ruckus is ultimately what led to the founding of Bring the Ruckus in 2002 as a national revolutionary cadre organization, with a founding meeting in January 2004.
The 1897 founding of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.
How should communists be organized? What are appropriate formation for action, debate and consolidation — in the inevitably different stages of a revolution’s life?
For some people even asking that question is heresy — since a very particular form of vanguard party is considered universal and a “settled question.”
This universalization of organizational questions is rooted in a particular reading of Russian and German history: It says Lenin separated off his Bolsheviks in a tight democratic centralist independent party early in the 1900s, and this allowed his forces the initiative and compactness they needed to contend for power in 1917. By contrast, it is said that Rosa Luxemburg and her Spartacist communists failed to break with German social democracy early enough — and so they were unable to consolidate or contend successfully, as communists, in the crisis of 1918-19.
This universalization has led small communist groupings to from small hostile sect-like groups — that declare themselves pre-party formations, or even parties — and that declare other parallel currents to be hopelessly corrupt.
We have discussed this reading (or rewriting) of Russian history before here on Kasama — particularly in the following posts and threads:
Posting this new piece is intended to continue engaging this once “settled” question — with a sharp eye on our needs today. Posting it is not intended as an endorsement by Kasama of historical claims or political conclusions made by the author.
This piece first appeared in the Weekly Worker (Britain) on May 17.
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How Lenin’s party became (Bolshevik)
By Lars T. Lih
From 1898 on, there existed a political party called the Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia (RSDRP), or Russian Social Democratic Worker Party. Rossiiskaia means “Russian” in the sense of citizens of the Russian state, as opposed to russkaia, which refers to ethnic Russians. Of course, the party title made no reference to either of its two later factions, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
Banned Thought has gathered an archive of the Maoist international journal A World To Win (that appeared from 1985-2006). 
Countries are different — and reaction takes different faces. In the U.S., anti-Islamic bigotry often takes the form of Christian xenophobia. In France, where rationalism is much more the social norm, racism often takes the form of a secular intolerance and a familiar European assumption of cultural superiority.
In a deep and deepening political crisis, how do revolutionary forces decide where to take their stand, and what slogans to seek to mobilize millions around. How does a Maoist mass line function when communist forces are suddenly speaking to and for whole sections of the people.
