Archive for the ‘Communist Party’ Category
Posted by kasama on May 18, 2012
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.
* * * * * * * * * * *
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, comintern, communism, Communist Party, Lars T. Lih, Lenin, Soviet history, theory, V.I. Lenin, vanguard party | 1 Comment »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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 kasama on November 4, 2011
“The rightist deviation; which dissolved the Peoples Liberation Army that has sacrificed itself for the peace and transformation, will be demised soon. Hundred thousands of new PLA soldiers will take birth from the ashes of the dissolved PLA. The land lords, puppets, imperialists and the expansionists; who are exchanging their happiness, will have no more time to feel their happiness because we are with people and their happiness.”
A momentous clash has broken out in Nepal.
The prime minister of Nepal and the historic chairman of the Maoist party (two men once prominent in the revolution ) have declared the dissolution of the Peoples Liberation Army.
In quick opposition, organized revolutionary forces within their own party and leadership declared a determination to preserve the people’s armed forces — by rebuilding the Peoples Liberation Army if necessary.
On November 2, the dissolution of the PLA was announced in the form of a new Seven Point Agreement which was reached between Bhattarai, Prachanda and the other parties that make up Nepal’s Constituent Assembly.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, Communist Party, Nepal, peoples war, revolution, UCP Nepal (Maoist) | 1 Comment »
Posted by Mike E on September 24, 2011
Yesterday we posted a series of theoretical documents from the journal Causa M-L – the product of communist revolutionaries in Chile from 1979-1981, when the PCR of Chile was playing an important role summarizing Chile’s experience with the Pinochet coup and China’s experiences with the 1976 capitalist restorationist coup.
We have now received information about a second archive of documents from the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile. The following documents are part of the preparations to regroup communists after the collapse of the worldwide Maoist movement (following the death of Mao). It involved a series of efforts to identify what was valuable and essential to being communists — at that time. It formed the basis of what ultimately became the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. And its experiences (pro and con) are potential valuable as communists internationally seek to regroup — in specific countries and internationally).
This helps in the construction of a history of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement — and the complex contributions and influences exercised by active players in different parts of the world (including this Chilean party, the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) and the RCP in the U.S.) The Chilean party, and its leading figure at that time, Jorge Palacios, was a particularly important force for a fresh and creative assessment of the communist politics inherited by Maoists worldwide.
Here are the documents:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, Chile, Communist Party, Kasama translations, Maoism, Marxist theory, theory | 6 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on September 23, 2011
Issue #28
Theoretical work of Chile’s Revolutionary Communist Party is now available — as they summed up their experiences in the Allende years, the Pinochet coup, and the international communist movement.
This work is available here, on Kasama, in Spanish — as a series of pdfs. These essays are from the period of the late 1970s to 1981 — when the RCP of Chile was seeking to help regroup the international communist movement, and thinking through the implications of events in China after the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping and his pro-capitalist politics.
(One of the articles deals with Pinochet going on a state visit to China.)
RCP Chile: Open Letter to the Communist Party of China (English)
We would like to thank those who did the work of making this material available and Rosa Blanc.
The journal Causa M-L is in Spanish. We would welcome English translations of key articles.
Background:
The great radical upsurge of Chile’s people in the early 1970s, included a number of revolutionary currents that grew, even as the electoral-socialist Allende government came to power.
Among them was the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile — which was formed as a Maoist party in 1966 and played an important role in the events that followed, including the resistance to the 1973 U.S.-backed fascist coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, Chile, communism, Communist Party, Maoism, Marxist theory | 3 Comments »
Posted by kasama on September 6, 2011
Kasama has received this position paper from the One Struggle collective in Florida — issued in September 2011. This initiative is highly welcome — because of the importance of pressing ahead with forms of revolutionary movement and organization — and debating what those forms should be. One Struggle is organized on the basis of this concept of “intermediate level.”
Kasama is eager to host such an ongoing discussion of forms of organization, and urges everyone to dig in.
Toward an Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Imperialist Mass Movement:
Organizing at the Intermediate Level
by One Struggle
Mass movements can not be conjured from thin air or willed into being, no matter how correct our ideas or determined our hearts. They arise in response to intolerable social problems, congeal through collective practice and theoretical work, and harden through continuous, escalating struggle.
In the U.S., as in many parts of the world, the 1960s saw the birth of a radical mass movement with revolutionary currents running through it. It didn’t burst onto the scene fully formed, but developed through twists and turns, suffering painful lessons, betrayals, mistakes and defeats on the way. It also celebrated victories which, like waves pushed by storm winds, grew ever larger and more powerful until the idea of revolution rose in the public consciousness as a tangible possibility.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, Communist Party, One Struggle collective, organizing, vanguard party | 19 Comments »
Posted by kasama on September 6, 2011
Intro by Mike Ely
Several people asked to have this 1969 Red Papers call for communist collectives posted from – so its ideas (and our own ideas!) can be discussed in their own thread.
This was a rather ground-breaking 1969 document — that shaped (in many ways) the formation of the previous communist movement.
It set important terms for an emerging communist movement — and strongly influenced even the radicals who went on to form other, opposing communist trends. And of course it became the basis on which the Bay Area Revolutionary Union grew into the national Revolutionary Union.
The document gives a sense of how that generation of communists’ “basis of unity” was being developed — and how communist collectives started formed.
We will excerpt the section on forming collectives, then follow that with the full document.
The power of a call
But first a few introductory comments….
I want to mention (again) the kind of impact a document like this can have. Lots of people were at that moment (1969) coming out of more liberal or at least less consolidated radical organizations — and were looking for a way to move forward. Red Papers 1 dropped at the same moment that SDS fell apart.
When I received (from afar) a copy of Red Papers 1, I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I read it over and over until the print started to fade — and until the many strange and difficult concepts were burned into my brain. It left me as a fierce partisan of its proposals. And I worked to circulate Red Papers 1 and 2 with everyone I met.
A year later (under the influence of this approach) I was in a revolutionary collective off campus (with people of quite diverse radical views), and working in a shoe factory. Our main work was organizing white working class youth to fight the system in ways inspired by the Black Panther Party, and to build a revolutionary anti-racist movement among them.
A year after that, I was in the Midwest, working with the Panthers there, and working in a steel forge.
And a year after that, I was (barely 20, but with a bit more experience) starting a protracted project with other communist organizers in the West Virginia coalfields.
These Red Papers and the line of march that they sketched took many of us in a common communist direction. It inspired us to understand the importance of a particular kind of urgent experimentation. It suggested a form of organization. It situated our work within the international communist movement of that time and within the history of previous revolutionary attempts.
We may not today write the same words. We have learned many things in the intervening year. And our conditions are quite different. But we want to aspire to the same impact, clarity and symbolic power.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Communist Party, Mike Ely, New Com. Movement, vanguard party | 1 Comment »
Posted by kasama on August 2, 2011
May 4th Movement - revolutionary past, sanitized depiction
Celticfire pointed out the following review on The Fuckin’ Loudest Asians blog. Yesterday we published a film review of this same film by our correspondent in south China.
Film Review of “The Beginning of the Great Revival”
by Ah Ching
Synopsis: The Beginning of the Great Revival portrays the period in China’s history starting with the Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and ending with the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, attended by Mao Zedong and 11 other delegates. In contrast with The Founding of a Republic, which chronicled the years leading up to the 1949 declaration of the People’s Republic of China, this movie depicts a time when monarchists and warlords hold sway over the country and revolutionaries are only beginning to contend for power. The movie outlines Mao’s youth as a soldier, student, and burgeoning political leader. It shows the intellectual debates in the universities between contending schools of thought: Confucianism, philosophical pragmatism, and Marxism (the latter represented by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao). The movie climaxes with the May 4th Movement, when patriotic Chinese students, women, and workers mobilize in mass demonstrations in Beijing against imperialism and feudalism.
* * * * * * * * *
“The Founding of the Party”, otherwise known as “The Beginning of the Great Revival” internationally, was produced to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.
However, the international name glorifies pre-Maoist China and its present-day status as a supposed nation of wealth and power – not its socialist era.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, China, communism, Communist Party, film, film review, Internationale, Mao Zedong | Leave a Comment »
Posted by kasama on August 1, 2011
The film “The Beginning of the Great Revival” is a huge event in China (and therefore the world). The Chinese government is seeking to preserve the legitimacy of its party and state by revisiting the formative liberation struggle emerging out of the global shocks of World War 1.
This film both describes stirring moments of courage and class struggle — while it legitimizes one of the earth’s leading oppressive governments.
It is the celebration of a brutal ruling party — carried out by vividly describing the world-changing birth of a truly revolutionary party.
Clearly this film’s arrival is a cultural event with the kind of complexity that dialectics was invented to describe.
Kasama has already posted the trailer for this film. Here is our first review by a reader, coming from our correspondent in South China. (It is the latest of the reports by our Kasama reporter in China.)
The Beginning of the Great Revival
by Kasama correspondent in south China
You can tell me a movie is engaging the audience in China when people quit answering their cell phones. On the afternoon I saw The Beginning of the Great Revival, this point
occurred as the rebellious students of the May 4th Movement poured into Tiananmen Square to denounce the Versailles treaty that ended WWI. Like many points in the movie it was well crafted and powerfully evocative.
A young woman silently confronts a line of soldiers by holding a banner written in her own blood. Students appeal to soldiers guarding government ministers and win them over as they pour into the compound and roughly confront those in authority and then set fire to the building. Finally, the government brutally strikes back.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Communist Party, film, film review, Maoism | 5 Comments »
Posted by kasama on August 1, 2011
Radical eyes suggested that we post the following essay from New Left Review. Radical Eyes writes:
“It’s a call for a frank assessment of the Communist movement, from someone who was a member of the Communist Party of Italy [PCI in Italy], (and purged for starting Il Manifesto). Also it contains a pretty sharp conjunctural take on contemporary capitalism.”
Radical Eyes cites the following quote from this piece:
“In the space of a few years [since the "fall of Communism"], the scene has changed profoundly.
“Inequalities in income, power, quality of life, both among and within the various regions of the world, are re-emerging and continue to deepen. The new functioning of the economic system is demonstrably incompatible with the preservation of long-standing social gains: universal welfare, full and stable employment, participatory democracy in the most advanced societies; the right to national independence and some protection from armed intervention, in the case of underdeveloped regions and smaller nations.
“New problems are looming: the accelerating degradation of the natural environment; a moral decay in which individualism and consumerism, rather than filling the vacuum of values created by the crisis of millennial institutions, instead deepen it into a dichotomy between dissipation and neo-clericalism; an advancing crisis of the political system,rendered powerless by the decline of nation-states, and replaced by institutions insulated from popular suffrage—itself hollowed out by mediatic manipulations of consensus and the transformation of parties into electoral machines geared to reproducing a governing caste.
“Even in the realm of production, growth rates are currently declining and economic equilibria appear unstable, a set of conditions that seem to be more than conjunctural. Financialization generates unearned income, with the frantic pursuit of immediate profits as its twin; it therefore deprives the market itself of criteria by which to gauge its own efficiency, or to judge what it should produce.
“Finally, and as a consequence of all this, we are witnessing a decline of hegemony, ever-multiplying conflicts, and a crisis of the world order. The natural response has been the deployment of force, even the resort to war, which has in turn exacerbated rather than resolved the existing problems.”
* * * * * * * *
Here is the piece itself. The Italian Communist Party it discusses in several places has not been a revolutionary or a communist party in many decades.
Posting this piece here does not, of course, imply agreement with its analysis.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Communist Party | 2 Comments »
Posted by onehundredflowers on June 3, 2011
“Without a true peoples army, the people had nothing — despite the justice of their demands, despite the passion of their voices and the power of their numbers.
“It is a bitter moment we will never forget.”
By Mike Ely
June 4, 1989 – the regime in China suppressed a powerful movement of rebellion, using the Peoples Liberation Army against the students and workers gathered in the heart of Beijing. It revealed, in shocking ways, how different this government of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng were from the revolutionary days of Mao’s China. This army, born in revolution, had become an instrument against people. This party, born as a vanguard of liberation, had become a Confucian clique of new oppressors. This society, which had once been a beacon of revolution, was now a magnet for foreign capital.
Singing the Internationale as their own anthem of defiance, demanding the right to recall entrenched government leaders, speaking in passionate tones of rebellion, the rebels of Tiananmen faced a pitiless government unable to hear or respond. Many paid with their lives under the treads of the government’s tanks — as the occupation of the square was broken up by force in the depth of the night. Many were killed, the numbers are unknown. Many were imprisoned, the numbers are unknown. Many had careers ruined, the numbers are unknown. And millions felt their voices and hopes silenced — temporarily, for a mere blink of history’s eye, for a passage that will inevitably pass.
Without a true peoples army, the people had nothing — despite the justice of their demands, despite the passion of their voices and the power of their numbers. It is a bitter moment we will never forget.
One of the perverse features of modern politics is the attempt of western capitalists to present themselves as defenders of democracy and people’s rights, and their portrayal of revolutionary communists as dictators and oppressors. They have attempted to impose this narrative on the public view of the 1989 events — when, in fact, the very opposite is true…. when in fact the U.S. then supported the brutal government of Deng in every way that mattered. The U.S. claimed the rebellion, while they came waving dollars to exploit China’s people.
I first gathered these photographs online in 1999, and offer them again on this new anniversary.
Even today, the rulers of China try to suppress the memory of this great uprising and their own bloody crimes. They “harmonize” the Chinese internet to suppress mention of Four-Six-Eight-Nine. But in the world today silence cannot be imposed easily — humanity moves restlessly, and new generations step forward bravely.
Revolutionaries all over the world remember and honor the brave rebels of Tiananmen this day, and hold out great hope for the growing struggles of China’s brutally oppressed people.
It is right to rebel against reactionaries!
Photo gallery > Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, China, communism, Communist Party, Mao Zedong, Maoism, Mike Ely | Tagged: Deng Xiaoping, Tiananmen Square | 11 Comments »
Posted by onehundredflowers on May 31, 2011
What is the relationship between strategy and tactics? How should revolutionaries prepare for decisive struggles? What form of organization should they build? How do they build it?
Although written in 1901, these questions continue to challenge new generations of radicals. We’re posting it here as part of our ongoing discussion on revolutionary strategy.
This was originally on marxists.org.
Where to Begin?
V.I. Lenin
In recent years the question of “what is to be done” has confronted Russian Social-Democrats with particular insistence. It is not a question of what path we must choose (as was the case in the late eighties and early nineties), but of what practical steps we must take upon the known path and how they shall be taken. It is a question of a system and plan of practical work. And it must be admitted that we have not yet solved this question of the character and the methods of struggle, fundamental for a party of practical activity, that it still gives rise to serious differences of opinion which reveal a deplorable ideological instability and vacillation. On the one hand, the “Economist” trend, far from being dead, is endeavouring to clip and narrow the work of political organisation and agitation. On the other, unprincipled eclecticism is again rearing its head, aping every new “trend”, and is incapable of distinguishing immediate demands from the main tasks and permanent needs of the movement as a whole. This trend, as we know, has ensconced itself in Rabocheye Dyelo.[3] This journal’s latest statement of “programme”, a bombastic article under the bombastic title “A Historic Turn” (“Listok” Rabochevo Dyela, No. 6[4]), bears out with special emphasis the characterisation we have given. Only yesterday there was a flirtation with “Economism”, a fury over the resolute condemnation of Rabochaya Mysl,[5] and Plekhanov’s presentation of the question of the struggle against autocracy was being toned down. But today Liebknecht’s words are being quoted: “If the circumstances change within twenty-four hours, then tactics must be changed within twenty-four hours.” There is talk of a “strong fighting organisation for direct attack, for storming, the autocracy; of “broad revolutionary political agitation among the masses” (how energetic we are now—both revolutionary and political!); of “ceaseless calls for street protests”; of “street demonstrations of a pronounced [sic!] political character”; and so on, and so forth.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Communist Party, Lenin, revolution, Socialism, Soviet history, V.I. Lenin, vanguard party | 2 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on May 17, 2011
“Instead of membership organizations, Hal Draper called for the formation of political centers, which would focus on publishing socialist political literature.
“According to Draper,
‘A political center has an enormous advantage over the sect’s National Committee or Central Committee which issues directives, theses, disciplinary cases, etc. to its micro-empire of mini-branches. That is: the former’s relations with local clubs, socialist groups, trade-union groups, workers’ groups, and individual activists can be infinitely varied and flexible. But the latter’s relations are dichotomized into two types: with members, the relation rigidified by the by-laws; with non-members, a relation hampered by an organizational barrier.’
“In place of national membership organizations, Draper’s position was that socialists should form local circles, in their workplaces, schools, or cities.… Draper argued that these circles should establish loose national connections.
“…they should, make contact with a political center that makes sense from your own point of view, for help in literature, advice, and outside linkups, and work with it to whatever extent you find useful. But there is no reason against having this relationship with more than one political center, if they suit your own political views. Such a political center may even be a sect; but if you do not join it, it relates to you only as one political center among others. This relationship is a hang-loose relationship: if you do not have a vote in deciding its affairs, it is likewise true that it cannot tell you what to do by exerting its sect ‘discipline’ over your own judgment. You do not erect an organizational barrier between you as the adherent of one sect and someone else who cleaves to another sect or none. In your work, you use whatever literature you wish, whatever their source…
“If enough take this course to break up the sect system, that would be a good thing for the future potentialities of an American socialist movement.”
* * * * * * *
Kasama has received this piece from Dan Damage, an activist in Minneapolis who was a member of Socialist Alternative for many years. We are posting excerpts. The full essay will soon appear in Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of marxist theory and practice — within the mid-June special issue on Culture and Crisis.
Road maps, dead ends, & the search for fresh ground:
How can we build the socialist movement in the 21st century?
By Dan Damage
“It is easy for good to triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the Mafia.”
Kurt Vonnegut
I can’t shake the feeling that despite our best intentions, we are wasting resources by taking roads that lead to nowhere. It doesn’t help that the main form of organization – tiny, competing groups divided by marginal differences – is out of tune with the content of our aims – “the full material and spiritual liberation of the toilers.” I’ve come to feel that all the heroic effort in the world cannot invest inherently barren forms with meaning…
An outside observer might suppose this should be a historic time for the socialist movement. The global economic crisis has discredited capitalism in the minds of millions. … Unfortunately, this atmosphere has translated into few appreciable gains for the socialist movement. … The question is whether more can be done, or whether the weakness of the movement today is an inevitable outcome of the period we are in. …
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, communism, Communist Party, Marxist theory, Socialism, vanguard party | 78 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on March 27, 2011
Here is a second document connected to the new 5th Conference of CCOMPOSA. Last week we published the press statement that announced the event.
We would like to remind our readers, however, that we still do not have a number of crucial details — including which parties attended. This means that it is still unclear who these documents are speaking for. We will post more details as they become available.
(Thanks, once again, to banned thought).
Political resolution adopted by the 5th Conference of CCOMPOSA, March 2011
On the Current Situation and Tasks
Since the 4th Conference of the Co-ordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organisations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA) held in 2006, there have been significant developments in the world and in South Asia. These changes have given rise to both challenges and opportunities. Guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the unity among the constituents of CCOMPOSA and their joint activities will surely strengthen the revolutionary struggles and initiatives going on in the different countries of South Asia and be a catalyst in facing up to these challenges and seizing the opportunities. This has a significance going far beyond the boundaries of South Asia.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> analysis of news, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Communist Party, CPI(Maoist), India, Maoism, Naxalite, Nepal, Sri Lanka, UCP Nepal (Maoist) | 4 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on January 23, 2011
by Mike Ely
For obvious reasons, the FBI attacks of the Freedom Road forces in the Midwest, and the exposure of police infiltrators there, has produced some important discussion about the problems of police agents and entrapment.
We have discussed this from many sides here on Kasama (most recently in connection with the exposure of “Karen Sullivan” who infiltrated FRSO-FB in Minneapolis). We plan to continue to post materials that educate us all in the law, and in the evidence of police surveillance-infiltration-entrapment efforts.
I think there is value in stepping back and agreeing on some overall things:
1) The troubling expansion of political police powers (post-911) has recently produced infiltrations of secular leftist groups in the U.S. — that has the marking of a campaign.
Without hyping all this, I think we need to understand that the leap in domestic surveillance after 9/11 is major. And the creeping expansion of that surveillance (from Muslim communities to include the secular left) is a major change in that leap. And that the patterns of entrapment suggest that this is not surveillance. And finally, I think we should anticipate that campaigns like this can develop COINTELPRO like features (seeking to create divisions among the left, special targeting of left leaders, targeted attempts to weaken or destroy promising left centers, etc.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Communist Party, Mike Ely, police, repression, vanguard party | 14 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on December 2, 2010
“It is fine to declare a belief. But a declaration is not yet a plan or even an argument.”
by Mike Ely
Chicanofuturet writes in a longer comment:
“The question is how do we organize to take power? For communists and others this is the ultimate question.”
I think there are other “ultimate” questions, especially after the twentieth century.
Among them is:
* How do we avoid losing power once it has been “taken” — including to new oppressive forces and programs emerging within the revolutionary party ranks?
* What does the experience of capitalist restoration (in previous socialist countries) mean for the process of preparing revolution now – including in how our parties and movements are conceived, built and organized?
Second, you write:
“There can be no revolution without this type of organization. Anything else would lead to failure, anarchy and chaos.This is my opinion.”
This has been my opinion too for decades. But such an opinion can’t just be asserted (over and over) as if it is obvious. Nor is it clear what “this type of organization” is (without specifying it!), since many different models have proclaimed themselves as “this type of organization.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Communist Party, Mike Ely, vanguard party | 35 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on November 14, 2010
by Mike Ely
[13 meg pdf.] This analysis examines the period considered by some the “good years” (i.e. the revolutionary period) of the Communist Party of the U.S. The piece was originally written in 1980 right after I had left the coalfields. It was based on both detailed research into this history and our own experience of trying to develop revolutionary organization among workers using a left-economist approach. The article was originally published in Revolution, which was then the theoretical journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA.
As I re-read this piece, after so many years, there were inevitably new questions that came to mind — but I won’t get into them here. I just want to offer it online because it think it raises important questions about how does revolutionary consciousness develop among the oppressed and because it speaks to issues around trade union organizing that have re-emerged among a new generation of revolutionaries.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in communism, Communist Party, Marxist theory, Mike Ely, theory | Leave a Comment »
Posted by John Steele on October 19, 2010
This review of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor was originally published in the London Review of Books.
The notion of the Party-state cannot do justice to the complexities of 20th-century Communism: there is always a gap between Party and state, and the Party functions as the state’s shadowy double. Dissenters call for a new politics of distance from the state, but they don’t recognise that the Party is this distance: it embodies a fundamental distrust of the state, its organs and mechanisms, as if they needed to be controlled, kept in check, at all times.
Can you give my son a job?
Slavoj Žižek
Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s crimes was a political act from which, as his biographer William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he.’ Although it was plainly opportunistic, there was just as plainly more to it than that, a kind of reckless excess that cannot be accounted for in terms of political strategy. The speech so undermined the dogma of infallible leadership that the entire nomenklatura sank into temporary paralysis. A dozen or so delegates collapsed during the speech, and had to be carried out and given medical help; one of them, Boleslaw Bierut, the hardline general secretary of the Polish Communist Party, died of a heart attack. The model Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev actually shot himself a few days later. The point is not that they were ‘honest Communists’: most of them were brutal manipulators without any illusions about the Soviet regime. What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion, the figure of the ‘big Other’ as a background against which they could exert their ruthlessness and drive for power. They had displaced their belief onto this Other, which, as it were, believed on their behalf. Now their proxy had disintegrated.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in book review, China, Communist Party, Krushchev, Slavoj Žižek, vanguard party | 68 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on August 27, 2010
“[In stable times] the situation is generally unfavourable and the party’s work must take this into account. Though unable to intervene in the national political process, the party must still engage in practical political activity. The communist party may not be able to wield any mass influence, but it can prepare theoretically, ideologically and organisationally for the occasion when it could have such influence.”
“If the party is well prepared theoretically, i.e. has appropriated and developed marxist theory in relation to the analysis of the conjuncture, it will be able to detect antagonistic tendencies maturing in the socially stable period before they come to a head in an open crisis.”
We have discussed the matter of conjuncture — the eruption of special moments and crisis within the capitalist system. Here are some excerpts putting forward one view of what conjuncture is, and how it affects revolutionary possibilities.
This is taken from a little-known piece “The Distinguishing Features of Leninist Political Practice” published long-ago in the British journal Communist Formation (November 1977). It has recently been made available as part of the archives of Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online. (Much appreciation to those energetically creating this EROL.)
Posting this essay is not an endorsement of its arguments and verdicts — but an attempt to encourage investigation and debate over how communist prepare well (in non-revolutionary times) for the revolutionary opportunities provided by some special conjunctural moments.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in >> communist politics, communism, Communist Party, Marxist theory, revolution | 3 Comments »
Posted by Mike E on August 25, 2010
This following article attacks one of the world’s most important revolutionary movements — the Maoist insurgency in India.
It starts with an aggressive dismissal of Arundhati Roy and her passionate reporting from a Maoist liberated zone. This article moves on to dismiss the revolutionary movement’s accomplishments, its connection with the people, its goals of New democracy and its historical antecedents in the Naxalite uprising. The whole discussion radiates a gut-level dislike of revolutionary violence.
For all those reasons, Kasama was reluctant to make the article available here. After all, we don’t agree with the overall verdict, tone or method (to put it mildly).
However a growing revolutionary movement will have such detractors. There is value in knowing (and vetting) their arguments. This piece originally appeared as part of Platypus Review 26 (August 2010) on the website of the Platypus Affiliated Society.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Arundhati Roy, communism, Communist Party, CPI(Maoist), India, Maoism, Naxalite, peoples war, revolution, Shining Path | 217 Comments »
