Archive for the ‘Mike Ely’ Category
Posted by Mike E on May 15, 2012
Hiller Armament Company is selling these paper targets for training ranges.
An avalanche of smug racism has embraced the claims that Zimmerman had cuts and a broken nose.
So what? Zimmerman hunted a young Black man, like Trayvon Martin was an animal.
If Trayvon landed a punch, before Zimmerman murdered him, well, good for Trayvon.
There is a lot of talk about “let the system do its work.” Well, we have no choice — this system will do its thing.
This system did its thing when the racist Zimmerman was allowed to organize a racist “community watch.” It was doing its thing when Trayvon Martin was pursued, confronted and shot. It was doing its thing when the local police chief and other brass showed up over Travon’s body, to help protect Zimmerman the judge’s son, to accept his story, to let him go home unarrested.
The system was doing its thing when Trayvon was targeted in the media — portrayed as a drug user, wannabe gangster, a threat. When it was said in a thousand ways that Zimmerman had reason to be concerned, to be alert, and suspicious.
They think there are places where young Black men should simply not be allowed. They think that they have a right to patrol and control the movement of young Black men.
They think that is reasonable, natural and needed — and they have thought this since slavery times, since paddyrollers, since the Black codes, since the systematic racist profiling of Black people became integral to “modern policing.”
Now we will see who this system punishes, who they protect, who they let walk free.
And we will see how much the wrath, horror and sorrow of Black people matters in their decisions.
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Posted in anti-racist action, Mike Ely, police | 7 Comments »
Posted by kasama on May 13, 2012
Several people have asked for a written text of this talk. We have added below the notes from which Mike spoke. It is not a transcript of the talk… it is the prepared text, and so is somewhat different from the spoken talk itself.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, Kasama, mass line, Mike Ely, New Com. Movement, Occupy Wall Street | 16 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on May 13, 2012
The 9 letters to Our Comrades was an opening shot of Kasama’s project. These essays sketch a fundamental critique of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s turn toward cultism.
In another sense, it also represent a critique of a more general set of problems within the organized left. It is a critique of failure to deeply engage reality, and a corrupting sense of grandiosity.
Now these 9 essays are available in both main e-book formats.
Click here for the new e-book versions
Previously available forms:
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Posted in >> analysis of news, 9 Letters, Kasama, Kasama videos, Maoism, mass line, methodology, Mike Ely, New Com. Movement, podcasts, RCPUSA, theory, truth and class truth | 1 Comment »
Posted by Mike E on May 3, 2012
“I often imagine in my mind, a one year old child pulling herself up on chubby unsure legs, waddling a few steps and falling again. And then hearing some tired voice say: ‘See, walking failed. There she is, on her belly again. All that effort came to nothing. Nothing else is possible. She should just get used to crawling.’”
By Mike Ely
When I spoke at the recent Platypus conference in Chicago, I included the following as the heart of my remarks:
“Oppressed people do not want to be oppressed.
“Women do not want to be sold. Slaves do not want to be whipped. Workers do not want their lives crushed.
“And yet here we are at a new beginning – where we need to re[imagine liberation, and start over. So be it.
“In our modern era there were three great arcs that rose and fell – through which people fought for their freedom, and a future marked by equality, empowerment and an end to grinding poverty.
Out of the European struggle against medievalism, there arose a great popular and secular movement for communism, embodied in the 19th century by the most radical and insurrectionary edge of European workers movement.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, Cultural Revolution, methodology, Mike Ely, Socialism, Soviet history | 9 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on April 24, 2012
“Recently, when I spoke in Atlanta, I mentioned the importance of a political economy of modern capitalism. And one brother said to me later ‘I really appreciated your point about the need to study political economy.’
“And I suddenly realized that I had not made my point clearly. I’m not arguing that we have to study more political economy — I’m arguing that we have to create one. We have no communist political economy (from the whole last century!) to just go study.”
“Some of the current theoretical fashions among communists today (of focusing on studying Capital) are both extremely positive (every communist should take theory seriously, and everyone should study Capital once or twice in their lives! And such study is a valuable place to begin preparations for political economic analysis. But it is also associated with some misguided assumptions — in those cases where the notion is that the analysis we need today simply requires somehow erasing what Marxists have done since Marx — as if the true answers are in the “basic texts” and have merely been obscured since.
“It would be nice if such fundamentalist logic were true, but unfortunately it is not.”
“The political economy of the twentieth century did (of necessity) require both negation and affirmation of Karl Marx’s analysis. His great work Capital is the analysis of capitalism (and its essential contradictions) that is (inevitably) rooted in a particular stage and manifestation of the capital relations. A number of things changed with the emergence of colonialism and monopoly, and then with the domination of the whole world by capital (and the subsequent shrinking of semi-feudal relations and the reversal of socialist relations).”
* * * * * * * *
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Posted in >> analysis of news, capitalism, communism, Karl Marx, Lenin, Marxist theory, Mike Ely, revolution, Socialism, theory | 118 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on April 24, 2012
The existence of mountain topping is tied to capitalist production and capitalist logic and capitalist decisions. Production (its form, its impact, even its physical engineering) is deeply marked by the class society it emerges within.
“The forms of modern production (and consumption) are themselves deeply marked by the class nature of the societies that produced them. It is not just that the surplus of production is alienated from the exploited (by the owners of capital). The whole process of production (its forms, its inputs, its purpose, its outputs, its environmental impacts, its physical engineering, its social contstructs of hierarchy and punishments) are all marked by the class society within which they emerged.
“And this is important for understanding how socialist sustainability will need to revolutionize (i.e. criticize, overthrow, and replace) those inherited patterns of production and consumption.”
“Communists have often written that we can’t just “lay our hands” on the existing state, and use it to our purposes.
“The same is true about production — we can’t simply “lay our hands” on this society’s productive apparatus and use it for our purposes. The production process itself needs to be radically changed — not just how it is owned, not merely where its surplus goes, but also what it produces, how it is produced, what it serves in the largest senses.
“It seems inevitable to me that a non-imperialist North America will have radically different consumption patterns.
“Rudolf Bahro once said (I’m paraphrasing) “Schiller only went to Rome once in his lifetime, but it was memorable. Why does every manager in Germany need to go to Sri Lankan or North African beaches every winter?”
“Similarly, the fact that American people can buy orchids (or cocaine) plane-delivered from Colombia in every neighborhood or that fruits are flown in (regardless of their local growing season) is all tied to the current structures and priorities of imperialism.
“There is nothing morally wrong with eating a banana every day — but there is a problem with a structure of world relations that delivers a banana to every grocery store in the U.S. every day and that makes such distant tropical produce non-exotic. And the problem is the inevitable by-products (social and environmental) of that structure.
“I don’t know the details of what a socialist North America would look like (what BTU levels would be possible without ripping off the world, what fruits and diet would look like once we shifted to bio-regionalism, what a reduced “carbon footprint” does to the price of beef and its level of comsumption). But I can’t imagine that revolution will not mean major changes — and not just because revolution is temporarily disruptive of highly complex circuits of trade.
“And it is related to the question “what do Guatemala and Puerto Rico look like if they are not dominated by the U.S. — and its cheap mechanized grain, and its decisions from the heights of finance and capital?”
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Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, ecology, fracking, Mike Ely, Nuclear power, revolution, Socialism | 12 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on April 23, 2012
Several years ago I wrote “The Origins of May First: Haymarket 1886 and the Troublesome Element.” That essay uncovers the origins of revolutionary May Day in the dreams and desperate acts of immigrant workers in Chicago.
This year I was asked by Occupy Wall Street Journal (OWSJ) to write a version that could fit into their much shorter format. (From 6200 words to 400 words! Grrrrr!) All kinds of detail and texture gets removed. Verdicts become hyper-terse.
I still recommend reading the full original piece.
But here is the sound-bite version I have shared with readers of OWSJ.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Birth of Revolutionary May Day:
That Troublesome Element in Haymarket Square
By Mike Ely
A circular passed hand-to-hand, calling for militant action in the U.S. on May 1, 1886:
“One day of revolt – not rest! A day not ordained by the bragging spokesmen of institutions holding the world of labor in bondage. A day on which labor makes its own laws and has the power to execute them!”
The workers who struck on May 1st faced police bullets. Their leaders were executed. Outraged, an international gathering of revolutionary workers declared that May First would become a worldwide day of resistance and revolution.
May First is our day and this is its story:
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Posted in >> analysis of news, anarchism, communism, labor history, May First, Mike Ely | 1 Comment »
Posted by Mike E on April 22, 2012
Ian Tattersall, PhD is a curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he co-curates the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins.
Intro by Mike Ely
I am halfway through Ian Tattersall’s new book, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins– and I find myself slowing down, to enjoy the new information and insight shared on almost every page.
This is not a work written with those breathtakingly encyclopaedic interconnections of a Stephen Jay Gould. It is a focused, almost workman-like overview of what we know of human evolution.
But that is a fascinating story told by someone with expert knowledge and razor-edged opinions.
There are many times when you sense that Ian is laboring hard to keep his sharp tongue in its sheath (or perhaps his editors were helping him do that) — but that obvious restraint only serves to highlight (for the careful reader) the sharp polemical frontlines of evolutionary debate, taking place over small mounds of teeth, bone fragments, and a few wonderful almost-complete skeletons.
Tattersall is a partisan of the bushiness of human evolution. He points out that for most of the history of this science, the practitioners were experts in human anatomy, with little training in identifying diverse species of human existing at the same time. In fact, the idea that there were several human (or proto-human) species existing for almost all of our emergence is an idea that was stubbornly resisted by many, for a long time, even as the evidence itself made it harder and harder to turn away.
Tattersall is also a partisan of human specialness. He zooms in on that remarkable uniqueness of the human mind (with its symbolic thinking, special self-consciousness and speech), and asks how that emerged from the world of interconnected species (especially apes and early hominids) that could think, communicate, and create tools but who (somehow) lacked those particular faculties that made humans so dominant and powerful on this planet. This is not the nineteenth century view of the “ascent” or perfecting of humanity, or of some Bible based view right to human “dominion” over the planet. But there is a drama here of the evolutionary process taking a “prey” species (of juicy, slowmoving, weak, upright-walking apes in Africa) and make them capable of building cities and inventing art. It is a story of continuity (i.e. of descent) and major ruptures — including some happening rather late (rather recently) in the history of our own specific species (modern Homo sapiens) itself.
And so, Tattersall, a scientist trained in the riotously diverse species world of lemurs, bring an edgy sensibility to the last decades of debate.
Quietly, in my own mind, Tattersall has emerged (over several years and several books) as “my guy” on human evolution — I respect his candor and insight, I enjoy his partisan engagement in the great debates of his field, and I have felt there is much for us all to learn from how evolutionary science (and especially human evolution) is being constantly reimagined as practice deepens and inherited assumptions become exhausted. (His chapter on the errors of Ernest Mayr, and the negative impact of the Great Synthesis assumptions of the inter-war period, is fascinating — especially since we all understand well the tremendous creative leap involved in that fusion of evolutionary theory and new genetic breakthroughs. That chapter alone….)
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Posted in >> analysis of news, biology, evolution, Mike Ely | 1 Comment »
Posted by Mike E on April 20, 2012
John Coltrane
“We need to train ourselves (and promote among others) a “self-determinist spirit” — one that is militantly anti-racist, internationalist, and open to the concepts and decisions of African American people themselves.
“The discussion of oppressed nationalities (their present, their future, the modes of liberation, how socialism will contribute to ending their oppression) takes place in a way that embodies a respectful understanding of agency and self-emancipation. In some ways, it is African American people themselves who will decide if integration or separation best serves their needs and liberation — and (inevitably) many forms of solution will be presented on the terrain of actual politics (community control and autonomy, radical assertions of representation in political and economic centers of decision, consideration of proposals for independence and more).”
by Mike Ely
There has been a detailed and extensive discussion here of whether African American people form a nation within the U.S. I have very strong views on this matter that I would like to put forward.
I think it is clear (from history) that kidnapped African slaves were constituted as a distinctive community of people in a specific territory — both through the process of enslavement, but then through the betrayal of Reconstruction, their exclusion from integration within the U.S. and the century of Jim Crow.
This is not how most nations are constituted. But then, there is not some “typical” historical way that nations are constituted. Society does not (actually) have “classic” forms (though some people think it does). Many nations are forged through the process of emerging markets under capitalism (often through the increasing linkages of previous groupings emerging from feudalism). But if you look at the world: The forging of India or Kenya also involved artificial, enforced and compressed processes (and in each of their cases, there is very specific investigation to be made into how nationality and culture relate to official borders and governments inherited from colonialism.)
The process by which kidnapped Africans became a single nation was artificial, enforced, extremely brutal and compressed (in time). But it also involved the creative development of new bonds and the incredible inventiveness of a new culture born in suffering.I.e. saying that they were “constituted” does not mean, one-sidedly, that it is just something that someone else did externally to the people. The emergence of a Black nation is a process where the African-descended people had a powerful role of creating community, language and common culture under horrific conditions.
And then (in actual historical fact) the growth of industrial capitalism, the labor shortages of world wars, the mechanization of semifeudal agriculture in the South, and the courageous decisions of Black people themselves, then all conspired together to cause a Great Migration during the twentieth century (by which African American people became geographically dispersed, urbanized and overwhelmingly working class). This was a huge, historic change in their existence as a people — with profound implications both for how people are oppressed, and also how that oppression of Black people will finally be ended.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, African American, anti-racist action, Black History, communism, Mike Ely, racism, theory | 4 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on April 16, 2012
An authentic workingclass rural girl at the mike -- in a world run by vicious, decadent cliques of ruling class Klub Kids.
by Mike Ely
I went to see Hunger Games this weekend.
I experienced it as a welcome and heartfelt rejection of synthetic spectacle – today’s whole revolting TV culture of celebrity, gossip, and artifice. It skewers the commodified objectification and cynical careerism that is so central to America’s cultural machinery.
In this film, American Idol is reinvented as a future gladiator game — where the victorious state demands young combatants who fight to the death.
This is an ugly and utterly amoral spectacle of murder and mutual deception (like “Survivor” with real knives). And yet, the contestants are told over and over, there is a chance of victory, riches, and “glory for your District.”
That chance is described as “hope.” You may, in the end, be the one who goes home. Death or Glory — on the terms of a corrupt and rigged system.
The cultural framework is interesting here:
The capital city is run by cliques that appear to be Lady Gaga’s (or perhaps Paris Hilton’s) world of upper class Klub Kids — who in this world have the armed power of the central state. This ruling culture creates a world of decadent, vain, oblivious, and narcissistic elitists. (Note: I’m not “taking a swipe” at Lady Gaga here…. but the film apparently is.)
Every momentary fashion and pleasure in their world is a major matter to be savored. Every background groan of the oppressed goes utterly ignored. Raw entitlement is worn proudly along with the caked-on glitter.
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Posted in film, film review, Mike Ely, movies, science fiction | 19 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on March 24, 2012
Walk the revolutionary road. Ride the tiger in great crisis.
This continues a discussion of symbolic language and rituals of transition that we have engaged in two threads:
by Mike Ely
Let me start here:
This whole primitive, initial discussion of symbols, rituals and belonging is not in opposition to having programmatic unity, written beliefs, a basis of unity etc. No one thinks that in these threads.
No one is arguing for a movement that is not articulate, verbal and rational.
I’m merely saying it can’t be on just a “head trip.” Our communist movement needs to be accessible and inclusive — and for that it also needs potent symbolism and visual language that is current and in some important ways universal (i.e. not confined to specific cultural/historical references or identity).
A movement for liberation can’t be one-sidedly intellectualized and seemingly “bloodless” (and culturally alien or somehow unrooted from its audiences and base).
Or (we can learn from many experiences) it will only attract those cadre inclined toward the world of position papers, while it excludes the many people who read politics at the level of symbols. (And here we are talking about symbols literally — as in movement logos — but also symbolic language of dress, culture, subculture, tone, rhetorical style, openness to debate, treatment of opponents, forms of solidarity within the movement, etc.)
Someone close to me once did a reading level study for me of our Revolutionary Worker newspaper in the 1980s. Most articles (she explained) were at a college level, and many were at a graduate school level.
Now, I believe that a communist movement must do serious analysis at a high level — just in order to understand the world and guide its work. (And in some ways our analyses then were rarely at a high enough level — there was a significant amount of dilettantism and superficial work).
But our future movement also needs a parallel popularization of that high level analysis (a popularization done in words, graphics, and other means — including genuinely artistic works).
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Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Kasama, Mike Ely | 14 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on March 23, 2012
Touched and moved by the murder of Trayvon Martin -- sorrow, anger, outrage, determination, solidarity. The demand for justice and an end (finally) to the killing of Black youth.
by Mike Ely
I appreciate Red Fly’s thoughtful comments on this question of anger among the oppressed. And have a few things to add.
I had written:
“Some people are willing to join movements that project a permanent state of anger, but few people would want to be governed by people defined by such anger. Militancy, yes. Relentless partisan opposition to oppression, yes. Indignant passion when people are mistreated, yes. But who wants a movement, a gang, a party, an army run by the Sonny Corleones of this world? Who thinks that this contains a sensibility that can encourage justice?”
Red Fly writes:
“We don’t have to be Sonny Corleones in order to represent and embody the righteous anger that oppressed people feel. The anger represented by the capitalist mafia in their relentless pursuit of profit is not at all the same as the anger of the oppressed rising to confront the criminals that run this world.”
Well, yes. In fact that is my point. Our movement should have an “indignant passion when people are mistreated.” But we should not some off like Sonny Corleone (in the Godfather) — someone driven by constant out-of-control desires for revenge.
I’m not arguing against anger. I’m arguing against being “defined” (as a movement) by the appearance of a “permanent state of anger” — in other words, that seems mainly motivated by revenge and payback, not a vision of a new world.
There is a difference between passionate and angry demands for justice — and a movement that seems to have revenge as its goal.
Our goal needs to be liberation and an end to oppression, not a historical period of “payback” against those complicit in the old order. We should not seem prepared to target the broad relatively-privileged strata of this society — we should mainly treat them as potential allies not as likely enemies.
We need to be, and appear, lofty. And we need to help train the oppressed to aim far higher than payback — and give encouragement to their higher aspirations. Which means winning people to a communist view: Not just end their direct oppression, but to carry through the fight against all oppression.
Obviously, we have in front of us the horrible example of Trayvon Martin — first his death, then the refusal of the authorities to arrest his murderer — and we experience (each in our hearts) real anguish, outrage, and yes anger over such injustice.
This is a discussion of how a movement presents itself. And the question is what (basically) defines us.
If it is the appearance of revenge – we will be misunderstood. If it is a lofty determination to end injustice through liberation — we will be succeeding in defining ourselves (publicly) in a way that conveys our goals and our view of solutions and our view toward people generally.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Kasama, Mike Ely, theory, white privilege theory | 11 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on March 22, 2012
“Our self-presentation (as a movement, and even as individual people) is part of the symbolism by which our cause is judged. Because people are wise enough not to judge political forces simply by what they say they are about!”
“We should act as if people can listen and transform, and as if we too have things to learn from the each other, and from the oppressed, but even from opponents). This should be like breathing for us.”
“No one minds protest movements stamped by anger — they are trying to pressure for change. But no one wants movements taking power that are governed by anger — because power requires vision and thought, it has to do more than just negate, it also has to construct.”
“In a American society that lives in a permanent infantile present, we should stand out in our long-sighted view — our sense of history and our focus on the future — our patient urging that people look at horizons for what is needed and arising.
“We should come across as intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable in a prepared kind of way — yet that should be marshaled toward shockingly militant and scathing criticism toward everything that surrounds (and oppresses) the people.”
by Mike Ely
Chegitz writes in our parallel discussion around “Communist foreshocks: Words, ritual and symbols“:
“I don’t think Mike is arguing for abandoning rationality, skepticism, the scientific method, but how do we avoid the extremes, and be three dimensional humans.”
Yes, I am making a distinction here between rationalism (which is a form of subjective idealism we should avoid) and rationality — which involves structures of logical thinking and deduction that we should embrace and develop in non-mechanistic ways.
The idea that politics is merely analysis, exposure and telling is a problem I have called “the fetish of the word.” (Some other left political currents have a problem with “the fetish of the movement” — but that is a separate story!)
Politics is not just a “head trip” — and it does not arrive in a linear way “from one to many.” At the same time (to be dialectical) all three parts mentioned here (analysis, exposure and telling) are quite important — we need them, and we need to do more of them. They form central activities of revolutionary work.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, 9 Letters, Kasama, mass line, Mike Ely | 6 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on March 18, 2012
"Temple to Perspective" by Tom Greenall and Jordan Hodgson. This is an artistic depiction of earth's history, and our place in it (in a pillar of layers) proposed as a visual monument. (Note the human at bottom for scale). A secular exploration of meaning, context and awe.
“Politics is symbolic as well as analytical….
“The audiences we need are gathered by cultural and social means, not just won over by words.
“As Lenin once noted the oppressed and awakening were demanding to know how to live and how to die (and not just what to believe).
“People need living inter-human expressions of world view and morality that are more than tracts on worldview and morality. Successful radical politics need words that are evocative and penetrating — not just precise.”
by Mike Ely:
I have always been frustrated by the assumption that we can draw people toward revolutionary politics mainly by “explaining” everything — as if people become conscious, militant, and determined in the fight for a new society largely by being told a series of exposures backed by elaborate structures of analysis. I have called this problem “the fetish of the word.” Its more formal name (if we need another label) could be rationalism.
And meanwhile we can see both in society and politics all around us, suggestions that “explanations,” however detailed and correct, are not enough — and people are often attracted to politics that are quite anti-rational through powerful symbolic means.
We can trace the rise and fall of Louis Farrakhan’s bizarre and fantastical politics that combines completely delusional mysticism with a gut level appeal for self-respect, self-advancement, pride and biting political alienation.
Or we can see large sections of people breaking into political life in during this Arab spring, being freed for from decades of repression and yet far too often grasping first for deep resonance of “Allahu Akbar!” and naive hope in the justices of Shariah law.
Where does that power come from?
Secular rationalism often assumes (sometimes with a stark singlemindedness) that “incorrect ideas” come from a mix of ignorance and the outside indoctrination by “alien” classes — and so assumes that the antidote is simply hammer the right ideas into the uninformed– a method I call “fire your ideas, hire mine.” It has an element of truth — we do need to be evangelical about communism. But it is often very onesided. In other words, this rationalism has views of people, ideas, culture, and change that are somewhat flat — and its failures confirm this.
I believe in spreading revolutionary exposure and ideas. I think revolutionary theory will play a powerful role in regrouping a new revolutionary movement. I’ve often resented as unfair the familiar stereotype of the communist militant “just peddling newspapers at the sidelines.” After all, I have written, designed, edited, sold, promoted, and nurtured radical newspapers all my life. And I think we should (now!) be develop biting, attractive, irresistible centers of news, opinion, analysis, satire, humor, and theory.
But… but… despite all that, I do think, at the same time, we should create and use our new revolutionary media without naively reproducing the assumptions and practice of previous rationalism.
Here is something that has often been missing: Politics is symbolic as well as analytical. Political attraction is also visceral and cultural. It involves a verbal “winning over.” It requires us to be fearless about representing our beliefs.
But, looked at all sidedly, the audiences we need will gathered by a number of cultural and social attractions, not just “won over” by words.
As Lenin once brilliantly described the oppressed and awakening were coming, demanding to know “how to live and how to die,” and not just what to believe. To be able to carry through a real process of base-building, we have to learn from our audience (i.e. “from the people”) as well, not just the other way around. That is the process Mao called the mass line.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, Black Panthers, communism, mass line, Mike Ely | 13 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on February 6, 2012
The following is the second part of a series on revolutionary strategy and this moment. Part 1 was called “Our line of march: Getting where we want to go.” This second piece is written as a response to our discussion of Asad Haider’s “The death & forbidden rebirth of the Oakland Commune.“
“The challenge is not to complain about the inarticulate state of others, but ourselves to articulate. If we can succeed in articulating strategic thoughts — that are revolutionary, creative, convincing and have a genuine organic element — we (speaking of communist revolutionaries here) can play a constructive (even unique) role.”
“A radical movement (with vitality and forward motion) will be more like a living ecosystem than a herd of cattle.”
“The diversity of ideas and tactics in the current Occupy movement is both ‘immature’ and necessary.
“It is immature because (so often) people are newly awakening to political life — and so often ideas and plans are raised that have (previously) not worked out well. And in many ways, a new generation has to go through the learning for themselves, together. It is often not a particularly sophisticated process at the beginning — and (in all real and living movements) there is a lot of silliness and madness mixed in. (And so what?!)”
“And the development of strategic articulation is not something that we need to demand (in some mechanical “telling” of the unwilling). It will happen, it always happens, because people are trying to think through what they are doing (and, more, why they are doing it). And through that process, many people will move and grow — they will shift their assumptions.
“When I talk about communist work: I am talking about developing a strategic sense of what people (of many kinds) should be doing in the United States — and then how we (as revolutionaries and communists) bring together people with a significant diversity of ideas and purposes in an alignment to a front of struggle that actually confronts the system and minimizes cooptation (especially in an election year!).
“Alongside that, communist work contains strategy and planning (for communists themselves) to regroup the still scattered, to develop communism as its own branded organized force, and to refine (contemporize) both our communist ideas and our mode of presentation.”
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Posted in >> analysis of news, election, Fredrick Engels, Kasama, Mike Ely, Occupy Wall Street, police, V.I. Lenin, working class | 28 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on February 3, 2012
Invading Soviet tanks surrounded by Czech students, 1968
by Mike Ely
I received an email this morning from Scott (over at Banned Thought) who has scanned and republished an analysis I made (in 1984) of Soviet military doctrine. It lays out that Soviet military preparations in the 1980s were the calculations and preparations of a capitalist/imperialist power seeking to force a global redivision of the world (in rivalry with U.S. imperialism).
Since this old essay is now available, we will also share it here on Kasama.
I have mixed emotions about sharing it:
Because this is an important debate (over socialism) written in a long-ago now-obscure context. And because the analysis included both insights and errors.
Those errors are, in hindsight, pretty obvious — while the insights (which relate to the core arguments of class nature) retain some value for readers today.
A century of controversy over real, existing socialism
Few historical/theoretical questions have proven as controversial as the nature of the Soviet Union.
There has been sharp debate over many decades over whether it was ever socialist. And over when capitalism was restored there.
This essay is part of that debate. This is not about the revolutionary days of the Russian revolution or the great collectivization or the heroic defeat of the Nazis. This is about the heavy tread of Breznev’s military — as it pushed out into the world to contend with U.S. imperialism.
The essay examines the Soviet Union’s war preparations in the 1980s and what we can learn from a close look at them — and specifically at the military doctrine that shaped them (and its class nature). The essay was written based on research I did for a presentation to the New York conference” in 1983 where the question “Soviet Union: Socialist or Soviet-imperialist” was sharply (and rather deeply) engaged.
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Posted in Mike Ely, Socialism, Soviet history | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Mike E on January 30, 2012
The road is tortuous, the future is bright
“One of the inflexible tasks of any communist organization (and any communist leadership) is to help train everyone (both the communists at all levels, but also the supporters of the movement) to evaluate choices by these criteria: Where does it lead? Who does it serve?
“And one of the difficult tasks in moments of struggle is to apply those criteria consciously, in the midst of great pulls, demagoguery and confusion.”
by Mike Ely
Pham Binh writes in the nearby discussion of Unsettled questions:
“It’s not true that ‘line is key.’ Lines can change. Control from below and the ability to adapt are key. Unfortunately there is no vaccine against political/organization degeneration.”
This discussion reminds me that we have to work to develop a common language. The word “line” is being referenced here in some very different ways. To even engage possible differences (over what is “key”), we have to start by explaining what we each mean by the word “line.”
Here, if I am guessing correctly, Pham Binh is using the word “line,” as it is often used in many corners of the left: Line is a word used to describe political positions. As in: “What’s your line on the war?” or “What is their line on Puerto Rican independence?” And in that usage, it is reasonable to say that specific policies can come and go, and are therefore not decisive in preventing betrayal or defeat.
By contrast the Maoist concept of line, answer the questions “where are we heading, what do we serve?” And the phrase “line is key” is an assertion that in complex struggle, the key question is to evaluate things in terms of where it leads, and what goals it will advance. And in that sense, I would suggest that vigilant attention to overall line (i.e. direction and goals) is key to preventing defeat, reversal, betrayal and getting lost.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Maoism, Marxist theory, mass line, Mike Ely | 125 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on January 25, 2012
by Mike Ely
Chegitz writes:
“…no form of organization is immune from degenerating into something awful.”
And he gives the example of the collapse of the Socialist Party (which he has been part of) — which was constructed along different (more loose and anarchic) lines than the mini-parties we have otherwise been discussing.
I think Chegitz’s point is true, and its implications are worth exploring.
And this includes forms like the commune or soviet forms of governance by representative mass democracy — which solve some problems, but exist in the context of dynamics that inevitably create new and ongoing problems. And it is true for the vanguard party, both in the forms we are familiar with, but also in future forms of core organization that we might imagine or build.
Pointing out the organizational problems with previous mini-parties (and their peculiar versions of democratic centralism) also does not mean there is are necessarily organizational solutions to those problems.
If you have evidence of a form of organization producing troubling dynamics — the solution may involve some other form of organization, but let’s not assume that changes of form provide some simple, definitive corrective.
There may be better forms (political procedures, habits, structures) — better for our purposes, better for our particular moment or our current stage of development — but the solution (to becoming exhausted, uncreative, marginalized, ossified, cultish, even corrupt) isn’t necessarily (or simply) to imagine some pre-figured and presumably immune alternative form(s).
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Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Maoism, mass line, Mike Ely, vanguard party | 14 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on January 24, 2012
The ideas of the rank-and-file are more than just raw material for leadership decision-making. Democracy involves elements of real power and ongoing accountability.
by Mike Ely
How should communists and revolutionaries be organized? Even asking that ruffles some feathers — since some communist currents have considered this a “settled question.”
Well, we should un-settle it — problematize it — for the simple reason that the idea of a single “universalized” model of revolutionary organization has been a bad idea.
Its flaws and illusions have been revealed over the last decades — including in the grandiosity and self-delusion of various small self-declared “parties” within the U.S.
There are a number of issues involved — which we are only starting to touch on. But for now, we are exploring the communist organizational concept of “democratic centralism” (DC) — both what it means and whether it should be embraced as a common approach.
We have discussed how it got “settled” in the discussions of the new-born Third Communist International (between 1921 and 1924) and how the form of democratic centralism was further modified — especially in the “Bolshevization” campaigns of the late 1920s.
Now, Let’s go beyond the historical question of how specific organizational structures and processes got codified (“settled”) — let’s explore some of the concepts that pass as “settled,” their justifications and lessons.
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Posted in >> analysis of news, comintern, communism, Communist Party, Mao Zedong, Maoism, Mike Ely, Soviet history, Stalin and Stalinism, vanguard party | 106 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on January 17, 2012
Our project is starting to produce its collections as e-books — in formats suitable for both Amazon’s Kindle and B&N’s Nook. (Thanks to Enzo for this great work of design and conversion.)
Here are our first two Kasama e-books. More to come.
In addition, volunteer to help expand these offerings:
- Help us test these files — where do they work? Where don’t they work?
- Help us by writing clear instructions for downloading. (Send them in, we will post them for readers on a new e-reader page)
- Help us get them posted on as many e-book resources as possible.
- Help get our many other writings and pamphlets converted to e-reader formats.
- Help us develop a list of online communist ebook resources (just post links in this thread).
Let us know if you volunteer for any of these tasks.
* * * * * *
Out of the Red Closet:
Gay and Lesbian Experiences in the Previous Communist Movement
by various authors
* * * * * * * *
Greece’s Communist Organization:
Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather
by Eric Rebellarsi
* * * * *
While we are discussing e-books, why don’t we share here (with each other) other available revolutionary ebook sources — starting with contributions made available by our comrades at the Marxist Internet Archives.
Posted in >> analysis of news, Communist Organization of Greece, Eric Ribellarsi, gay, Greece, homophobia, homosexuality, Kasama, Kasama pamphlets, lesbian, Mike Ely | 5 Comments »
