Reading Clusters

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Category: Kasama

Created on Saturday, 01 January 2011 23:07

Written by Kasama

The following essays and threads were all posted before January 1, 2011. A new version of the reading clusters is coming soon.

Kasama Reader 1:
Cores, Coalitions & Strategies for Revolution

Prepare Minds and Organize Forces for Revolution

• Let’s Do Up Some Revolutionary Strategy (August 7, 2010)
• Much-Needed Revolutionary Strategy: How Does It Get on the Menu (October 26, 2010)
• John Steele: Where’s Our Mississippi? (February 3, 2009)
• Do We Really Have Nothing? How About Potential? (August 28, 2010)
• Crisis and Consciousness: Reflections and Lessons from March 4th (April 18, 2010)
• Identifying Strategic Roads: The Tactics of Occupation & the Charge of “Outsider” (April 15, 2010)
• Remembering George Jackson & Re-Thinking Revolutionary Strategy (August 23, 2009)
• V.I. Lenin: Seeking a Path Up the Unexplored Mountain (May 9, 2010)
• Anti-Imperialism: Who Are We Uniting? What Are We Fighting? (June 22, 2010)
• No Cheap Shots (August 12, 2010)
• Communists & Mosques: Why Lenin Defended the Old Believers (August 27, 2010)
• Readings for the Social Forum: The Counter-Insurgent Function of Non-Profits (June 24, 2010)
• Execute BP? Or Demand Obama Curb It? (May 24, 2010)
• Bring the Ruckus: Against Sectarian Smears & Anonymous Rumors (April 26, 2010)

Where to Start

• What a Communist Beginning Might Look Like (September 2, 2010)
• Sites of Beginning Part 1: Are Communist Openings Structural or Evental
• Sites of Beginning Part 2: Nodules of the Advanced
• Sites of Beginning Part 3: Creating a Revolutionary Subject
• No Plan Survives Contact with the Event (September 11, 2010)
• Cracks Radiating from Border: Reconceive, Dig In, Hasten & Await (March 26, 2010)
• Needed: Primordial Soup for Revolutionary Chemistry (September 10, 2010)
• On Radical Eyes’ Proposal: How Should Communists Appear?

Power, Class and Agency

• On Economic Struggle & Economism Among Revolutionaries
• Revolution’s Core Outlaw Force: What is Needed? What is Possible? (June 26, 2010)
• Conceiving the Working Class: Unitary or Contradictory? (June 28, 2010)
• Where’s the Proletariat in Mao’s Long March or Nepal’s Revolution? (February 3, 2009
• Class Revenge or Communist Revolution? (July 18, 2009)
• Love or Rage: Revolution’s Face to the World (May 5, 2010)
• Avatar: A Story of Transformation and Struggle

Mass Line

• Two Concepts of Mass Line, Two Different Roads (March 25, 2010)
• Mao Zedong on the Mass Line (March 25, 2010)
• On the Bus: Putting the Mass Line Into Practice (May 27, 2010)
• Archive for the Mass Line
• Class Against Class? Real World Alignments for Revolution (August 19, 2009)

Revolution and Elections

• Communist Electoral Tactics Part 1: Specific Contradictions in the U.S. (September 28, 2010)
• Communist Electoral Tactics Part 2: Re-invented According to Conditions (September 29, 2010)
• Tellnolies: Electoral Work as Part of Revolutionary Preparation (September 19, 2010)
• They Expect Us To Eat Shit (October 28, 2010)
• Reaching the Advanced: Breaking Out of Protest Only
• Into Election Mudslides or Revolutionary Pole At a Distance (October 29, 2010)
• Supporting White House in Name of Progressive Base Building — A Theory of Indirect Allies (April 9, 2010)
• Can Our Revolution Use Elections to Organize? (September 7, 2009)
• Communist Work: Getting Ready for Conjuncture
• After the Party: Conclusions of a Practical Worker (June 28, 2010)
• They Expect Us to Eat Shit

Violence and Respectability

• A Discussion with Lorenzo: Fusing Militancy with a Rising People (April 13, 2010)
• Violence & Street Fighting: Who Says It Alienates the People? (June 29, 2010)
• Is Militant Street Fighting Always Infantile & Wrong? (April 11, 2010)

Working Class Organizing

• Ambush at Keystone: Inside the Coalminers’ Gas Protest
• “Didn’t You see that Spirit Descend?” — Being Communist in the Bible Belt
• Lightning Lane’s Last Day
• Linc and Me: On the Material Basis of Incorrect ideas
• The View from Dunne’s Porch
• On Communist Work: That Feeling of Stage Diving in the Dark
• Rape of Nature and the Need for a New Communist Approach
• The Dead Miners in Sago: Dying for the Bottom Line
• Untold Stories of Quecreek’s Flood: Coal Miners, Water and Heartless Capitalism
• Letter 5: Particularities of Christians and Fascists

Kasama Reader 2:
After Our First Century of Communist Revolution

• Socialist Democracy, Snowflakes & the Restoration of Capitalism (July 7, 2009)
• A Revolutionary People & the Problems at Its Periphery
• Cultural Revolution: Lessons for Our Regroupment? (January 4, 2009)
• The Historical Failure of Anarchism (September 25, 2008)
• Joshua Horn: The Mass Line in China’s Revolutionary Days (March 24, 2010)
• Nuclear Fallout in Maoist China: What Does That Reveal? (June 18, 2009)
• Vietnam: What Happened to the Revolution? (May 4, 2010)
• Mao Zedong: Should Reactionaries Have Free Speech? (July 14, 2009)
• Mao Zedong on Political Executions: Heads Are Not Leeks (July 13, 2009)
• Mao & the Dunce Caps: Real Contradictions of Real Socialism (July 15, 2009)

Soviet Controversies

• Investigate & Speak on the Soviet Union (August 10, 2010)
• On Socialist Methods and the Stalin-Era Purges (July 13, 2009)
• History’s Cruelty towards Trotskyism (January 5, 2009)
• Kronstadt: The Maturation & Dispersal of a Revolutionary Core (June 3, 2010)
• The Myth of Makhno and Its Price (May 30, 2010)
• Diverted from Lenin… to the Trotsky vs. Stalin Dispute (May 10, 2010)
• Historical Socialism (and Stalin) Need Better Defenders (November 5, 2010)
• On Socialist Methods and the Stalin-Era Purges (July 13, 2009)
• Shockwave: The Mixed Experience of Exporting Socialism (October 30, 2009)
• The Case of World War 2: Nukes, Scientists & the Tasks of a Revolutionary Core (June 15, 2010)
• Orthodoxies of Comintern Years: An Old Time Religion (July 20, 2010)
• Soviet Union 1956-1991: Socialist or Social Imperialist (December 10, 2010)
• A Counterpoint on Soviet Prisons: Take Me, Rehabilitate Me! (November 5, 2010)
• Socialism in East Germany? Is Obama Then Sorta Socialist Too? (October 29, 2009)
• From Archives: Describing the Soviet Prison System of the 1930s (November 5, 2010)
• J. Arch Getty: Creating Alternative New History of Soviet 30s (October 7, 2010)
• Lenin & Leftovers Part 1: Ingredients of Insurrection (August 3, 2010)
• Lenin & Leftovers Part 2: Getting Past Workerless Worker States (August 3, 2010)

60s, 70s: Lessons

• Youth Culture & Reefer: Subversive Lessons for Future Breaks (August 4, 2010)
• Woodstock & Revolution: Working on Correct Verdicts (August 18, 2009)
• A Critical History of New Communist Movement (July 24, 2010)
• Weather Underground: Revolutionary but Clueless(December 29, 2009)
• Woodstock and Revolution: Working on Correct Verdicts (Written on the 40th anniversary. August 2009)

Reconceiving the Next Wave

• New Forms of Democracy for a Future Socialist Mainstream (March 19, 2010)
• Future Socialist State Forms
• Conversation over Workers Control: Direct? Plebiscites? Continuing Revolution?
• Zizek: Contemporary China and “the party-state” (October 19, 2010)
• How Do People Rule and Criticize After the Revolution? (February 24, 2008)
• Socialism in One Country? How Precious? How Difficult?
• Art & Culture: Who Do We Learn From? Who Decides?
• The Communist Controversy over “Class Truth”
• Let’s Avoid Becoming Dogmatic Tyrants (September 21, 2009)
• David Harvey: Is Another Communism Possible?
• Iris Bright: What Communism Really Looks Like NOW?…In OUR World? (November 14, 2010)

Questions of Party State

• How Do People Rule and Criticize After the Revolution? (February 24, 2008)
• 2 Excerpts From Mao Zedong: On Dilemmas Within the Cultural Revolution (April 27, 2009)
• Antaeus Critiques Maoist Summation of Cultural Revolution (October 28, 2009)
• The Question of Building a New Type of State by Baburam Bhattarai (May 28, 2008)
• Badiou: The Cultural Revolution – The Last Revolution?
• In Defense of a Political Form: The One-Party State (February 21, 2010)
• Defense of the Party-State, Part 1: Avakian on Leninism as the Bridge
• Defense of the Party-State, Part 2: Avakian on Limitations of the Commune Form (October 3, 2010)
• Bhattarai’s “New Type of State” and the Maoist Re-envisioning of Communism by Rosa L. Blanc (July 2, 2009)

Kasama Reader 3:
Regrouping Around a New Revolutionary Pole

• Checking For Loopholes: From Conception to Reconception (October 10, 2010)
• Needed Fusion: Profoundly Non-Dogmatic & Starkly Revolutionary (Oct. 2009)
• Confronting Reality: Change is Inevitable, Liberation is Not. (Feb. 2009)
• The 4 Alls: A Capsule of Communist Goals (September 14, 2008)
• Badiou & Nepal: Battlegrounds Over Communist Reconception (April 5, 2009)
• Bill Martin’s Rubber & Glue 1: Recoiling Into a Dead End
• Heresy: On New Demarcations & Coherent Theory (October 24, 2009)
• Sexuality Among Communists: Muffled Voices or a Liberating Radicalism? (September 22, 2008)
• John Steele: Our relation to revolutionary tradition (Jan 1st, 2010)
• Does Our Optimism Require Belief in Communism’s Inevitability? (January 28, 2010)
• Confronting Our Role: Change is Inevitable, Liberation Is Not (February 6, 2009)
• The future of the communist hypothesis (September 30, 2009)
• Reply on Method: How Not to Evaluate Žižek (July 30, 2010)
• Sketches of Rural Exploitation: Capitalist, Feudal or Slave? (August 31, 2010)
• Our Planet, Our People Are Not Expendable! (August 25, 2010)
• Ecosystems of Revolution: Congealing Diverse Efforts (April 16, 2010)
• Samir Amin: The Feeble Rhetoric of Dominant Discourse (May 21, 2010)
• Radical Eyes: A Proposal for Action and Investigation (November 16, 2010)
• A Discussion with Lorenzo: Fusing Militancy with a Rising People (April 13, 2010)

Thinking About Theory

• Reconceiving Revolutionary Theory: What Can Be Seen From Among the Clouds? (September 28, 2009)
• Grasping the Theoretical Knife: A Response to Club Jacobin (January 3, 2011)
• On Real Limits and Real Value of Our Theory (October 19, 2009)
• Sniffing Out Pseudo-Science: Including Among Fellow Leftists
• Three Quick Examples of Leftist Pseudo-Science
• John Steele: Revolutionary Faithfulness and the Radically New (April 3, 2009)
• Letter from Marx: On Popularization & the Steep Paths of Theory (January 20, 2009)
• Heresy: On New Demarcations & Coherent Theory (October 24, 2009)
• On Real Limits and Real Value of Our Theory (October 19, 2009)
• Steele: A Rough Overview of Our Theoretical Project (August 27, 2008)
• Khukuri: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal al Hasan (June 18, 2010)
• J. Ramsey interviewing Bill Martin”What’s the Opposite of Bullshit?” (April 2009)
• Review: Žižek’s Living in the End Times (July 21, 2010)
• Sojourner Truth Organization: How to Think (July 11, 2010)
• Archive for Study Guides

Inherited Communism

• The Predicament of Inherited Maoism
• Communist Philosophy: One into Two? Two into One? Or Something Else?
• Focoism vs. Peoples War: Problems of Exaggerated Universality (October 14, 2009)
• Where’s the Proletariat in Mao’s Long March or Nepal’s Revolution? (February 3, 2009)
• What’s Normal for a Grain of Barley? On Negation of Negation (September 23, 2010)
• Orthodoxies of Comintern Years: An Old Time Religion (July 20, 2010)

Investigating Alan Badiou

• Alain Badiou: Another Take on Revolutionary Theory
• When Everything Seems to Change: Badiou and the Event
• A Taste of Alain Badiou
• Badiou & Nepal: Battlegrounds Over Communist Reconception (April 5, 2009)
• Badiou: The Communist Hypothesis

Into the Wild

• Into the Wild 1: The Debriefment of Maoism (April 27, 2010)
• Into the Wild 2: Willing to Reground(April 28, 2010)
• New Kasama Pamphlet: Bill Martin’s Into the Wild (April 14, 2010)

Kasama Reader 4:
Our Starting Point is the World

A World and A System

• Internationalism: Our Starting Point is the World
• Iran: They are Right to Rebel! And We Have Responsibilities. (June 17, 2009)
• A Question Over Iran: Can the People Make History or Not? (June 19, 2009)
• A Single Global Arch-Enemy or an Oppressive System? (August 7, 2010)

Learning from Nepal’s Maoist Revolution

• 101 Arguments Against Supporting Nepal’s Revolution
• Nepal: Learning From a Living Revolution
• Living Revolution or Sterile Orthodoxy: Questions Around Nepal (February 19, 2010)
• Nepal’s First Days of May: General Strike & Provocation
• Compare and Contrast on Nepal
• Nepal: Understanding Riptides of Transition
• Ben Peterson: Eyewitness Report from Maoist Army Camp
• J.B. Connors: Learning from the Maobadi
• New Pamphlet from New Zealand: Revolution in Nepal (March 17, 2010)
• Dissecting Some Easy Rejection of Nepal’s Revolution (February 1, 2009)
• Arundhati Roy: Walking with the Comrades
• Gramsci & National Democratic Revolution in the Philippines
• Is Marxism Eurocentric? A View from Latin America (December 4, 2009)
• Is Socialism Being Built in Bolivia? (April 9, 2010)
• A New Geometry of Power in Venezuela? (April 6, 2010)
• Leupp on Afghanistan War: Ignorance There…. and Here
• Iraq War Propaganda: Manufacturing Ignorance
• Gary Leupp: Grappling with what Happened in Haiti
• Gary Leupp: The Destabilization of Pakistan
• It’s Obama’s War Now

Kasama Reader 5:
Birth Pangs and Polemics

Polemics over the RCP & forging new revolutionary trend

• 9 Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian’s Synthesis
• New Observation: RCP’s 9 Letters Polemic Was “Really Very Very Good” by Mike Ely
• On RCP Response: The Inventing of a Strawman by Sam S
• On RCP Response: Both Ahead of Itself and Behind the Curve by Zerohour
• The Communist Controversy over “Class Truth”
• Becoming Living Vanguard: Protracted Fusion or Last-Minute Telescoping
• Mike Ely’s ‘Flat Earth’ Approach to RevolutionThe Party’s Over by Mike Ely
• RCP: The Flight of the Worker Bees by JB Connors
• It’s like the Sun is Out by Iris
• Can we Imitate the Finland Station? by Mike Ely
• Sitting Thru Avakian’s Synthesis, and Getting Beyond It by DMC Ulises
• Official Notes: RCP’s “Political Truth” about Synthesis Event
• RCP: On Farragos, May Day 1980 and the Echoes Today
• RCP responses to 9 Letters ver. 3.0 : Still dodging substance
• Kasama coverage of RCP,USA list

On Religion

• Didn’t You See that Spirit Descend — Being Communist in the Bible Belt by Mike Ely
• Linc and Me: On the Material Basis of Incorrect Ideas by Mike Ely
• Avakian’s Away With all Gods: Critiquing Religion Without Understanding It (Part 1) by Pavel Andreyev
• Critiquing Religion Without Understanding It (Part 2) by Pavel Andreyev
• Debate Among Atheists #1: Mike Ely’s Letter 5 on Faith and the Black Church
• Debate Among Atheists #2: RCP on Faith and the Black Church
• Militant Materialism or Textual Literalism? More Communist Debate on Atheism

Kasama Reader 6: Essays on Black Oppression, Resistance & Visions

for a more full list

• John Steele: Where’s Our Mississippi? February 3, 2009 (pdf)
• Blacks and Jews — A Revolutionary View by Mike Ely, February 5, 2009
• Needed: Fresh Theoretical Look at Race and Nationality by Mike Ely March 18, 2008
• Toward a Communist Theory on Racism & Liberation by Mike Ely, August 9, 2009
• I’ll Fly Away, O Glory! — Outlaws of the Underground Railroad by Mike Ely
• Finally Got the News: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
• Ossie Davis: Eulogy for Malcolm X
• Kent & Jackson State 1970: A Firestorm They Could Not Contain
• When I Joined the Black Panther Party…. by Safiya Bukhari
• Black Like Mao: Red China & Black Revolution, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 By Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch
• Mao Zedong: On Martin Luther King & the Struggle of Black People January 18, 2010
• Watts 1965: Learning Among the Flames of Revolt by Mike Ely, August 29, 2009
• Mumia Abu-Jamal: Enemy of the State by Mike Ely, December 2, 2008
• French Translation: Mumia Abu-Jamal – Ennemi d’Etat
• Sept. 9, 1971: Attica Prison Uprising: 38 Years Later September 9, 2009
• The Slave Rebellion of General Nat Turner by Mike Ely, February 7, 2009
• Haiti: The Slave Army of Toussaint L’Ouverture by Mike Ely
• Birmingham Sept 15, 1963: The Racist Killing of 4 Little Girls by Mike Ely, September 16, 2009
• 150 Years Ago: Marx & Engels on the War Against Slavery
• Answer Old Racist Lies: This Was A Righteous War Over Slavery!
• Orthodoxies of Comintern Years: An Old Time Religion, by Mike Ely
• The Tulsa Massacre 1921: Mass Murder of a Black Community, by Mike Ely,  April 4, 2010
• Learning from Previous Wave of Communist Regroupment, by Mike Ely, September 26, 2010
• George Jackson: Eyes on Communist Revolution
• Serious About Revolution: An Interview With George Jackson
• Remembering George Jackson & Re-Thinking Revolutionary Strategy by Mike Ely. August 23, 2009
• Linc and Me: On the Material Basis of Incorrect ideas by Mike Ely

Kasama Reader 7:
Today: The Historic Era of Women’s Liberation