Greece’s Communist Organization: Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather
- Details
- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Eric Ribellarsi
Two essays on the Communist Organization of Greece. — a creative revolutionary formation playing a leading role within Greece’s “movement of the squares.” It is now available for download in printable PDF format. And will soon be available in epubs format for e-readers.
Download the pdf pamphlet
The pamphlet features Eric Ribellarsi’s essay Greece’s Communist Organization: Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather.
The one thing in this experience that I have been most impressed with was the KOE’s creativity and willingness to shift when something unexpected happens, and at the same time holding on to a revolutionary strategy.
In addition this new pamphlet also contains the KOE’s own essay on their communist regroupment and subsequent development: “The influence of the Chinese Revolution on the Communist Movement of Greece May 2006.”
“Instead of a heavy and cumbersome organizational form with very insufficient content of internal discussion, what was necessary was a political operation that would arm the whole organization for the particular needs of an ideological, political and organizational strengthening.
“At the same time, measures should be taken
- against the creation of ‘independent kingdoms’ inside the organization in several Greek cities,
- against the strangling of the desire for study and research,
- against dogmatism and blind self-confidence,
- against the cultivation of several ‘mythologies’.”
May First: High Noon in Nepal
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- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Jed Brandt
Report from Kathmandu, April 2010. Available in web form on Kasama and on Jed’s own blog.
(b-&-w) (color)
Excerpt from opening:
APRIL 21 — There are moments when Kathmandu does not feel like a city on the edge of revolution. People go about all the normal business of life. Venders sell vegetables, nail-clippers and bootleg Bollywood from the dirt, cramping the already crowded streets. Uniformed kids tumble out of schools with neat ties in the hot weather. Municipal police loiter at the intersections while traffic ignores them, their armed counter-parts patrol in platoons through the city with wood-stocked rifles and dust-masks as they have for years. New slogans are painted over the old, almost all in Maoist red. Daily blackouts and dry-season water shortages are the normal daily of Nepal’s primitive infrastructure, not the sign of crisis. Revolutions don’t happen outside of life, like an asteroid from space – but from right up the middle, out of the people themselves.
Passing through Kathmandu’s Trichandra college campus after meeting with students in a nearby media program, I walked into the aftermath of bloody attack. Thugs allied with the Congress party student group had cut up leaders of a rival student group with khukuri knives leaving one in critical condition. Hundreds of technical students were clustered in the street when I arrived by chance. The conflict most often described through the positioning of political leaders is breaking out everywhere.
Indefinite bandhs are paralyzing large parts of the country after the arrest of Young Communist League (YCL) cadre in the isolated far west and Maoist student leaders in Pokhora, the central gateway to the Annapurna mountain range. The southern Terai is in chaos, with several power centers competing and basic security has broken down with banditry, extortion and kidnapping are now endemic. Government ministers cannot appear anywhere without Maoist pickets waving black flags and throwing rocks.
Into the Wild: Badiou, Actually-Existing Maoism, and the “Vital Mix” of Yesterday and Tomorrow
- Details
- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Bill Martin
From the opening:
Can we fashion an approach to the communist project that allows us to sift through certain experiences and ideas and evaluate them without becoming stuck in a backward-looking posture? Can we forge some new roads, or find these roads, or perhaps let these roads find us, without entirely forgetting some of the places where we have been? Can we truly go someplace new, “into the wild”?
For those of us who want to set out on this journey, and who see the necessity of it, it might help to have a “workbook” of sorts (or several of them). Our theoretical work in this phase cannot help but be a bit “raw,” which is not to say that we should not aim for as much refinement as we can attain along the way. But the point is that it is “theory” done “along the way,” in something closer to “real time,” what Edward Said called “traveling theory.”
Two somewhat rough-and-ready terms that I would like to introduce in what follows are “actually-existing Maoism” and the “vital mix.” I will also introduce the term “socialist hypothesis,” in contrast to Badiou’s term, the “communist hypothesis.” I hope that these terms will help our work and that they might gain some currency.
A Letter from Kathmandu
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- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Jed Brandt
We now have Jed’s first report from Nepal available in printable PDF pamphlet form. The is tabloid sized and folds into an illustrated pamphlet. The original first appeared in English on jedbrandt.net.
March 7, 2010 — I can’t leave home for a few weeks without everything going crazy.
It took a bit for my time to adjust, to see things as they are coming here and where they’re coming from. Not the instant back-and-forth rhythm of New York multi-tasking anxiety time. Most days the electricity is out in Kathmandu. You can hear chickens in the morning, children playing after school and quiet talk at night when the old women laugh and call across the rooftops. Blackouts make working a computer hard, but the pace of people living by hands and minds alone, without so much mediation, is not a place I’ve ever spent much time. And I do love it here. The city is dirty. The people are upright, direct and curious. I’ve made friends quickly, though I’ve gotten the impression its easier to get married than find a date…..
Did I mention there is a revolution going on?
We haven’t seen a revolution in our lifetime. Not a communist revolution anyway, with broad support and participation sustained, growing over such a short period of time.
The Maoists are unorthodox, to be sure. They have defied everyone’s expectations, friend and foe alike. To their credit, they haven’t let their enemies tell them who they are or been confined to some historical script handed down by the Comintern in 1930-whatever. After a 10-year People’s War, starting in 1996, they grew exponentially among the rural people who make up the heart and body of Nepal.
Walking with the Comrades
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- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Arundhati Roy
This is a brilliantly written and subtle journalist’s description of this living revolutionary movement, its activists and their hopes.
Who needs to see this? Where should this be posted?
Email this pdf to friends. Share it on e-lists. Post it on significant related discussions.
This piece is also available here on Kasama in web format.
An Excerpt:
I arrived at the Ma Danteshwari mandir well in time for my appointment (first day, first show). I had my camera, my small coconut and a powdery red tika on my forehead. I wondered if someone was watching me and having a laugh. Within minutes a young boy approached me. He had a cap and a backpack schoolbag. Chipped red nail-polish on his fingernails. No Hindi Outlook, no bananas. “Are you the one who’s going in?” he asked me. No Namashkar Guruji. I didn’t know what to say. He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said “Outlook nahi mila.” (Couldn’t find Outlook)
“And the bananas?”
“I ate them”, he said, “I got hungry.”
He really was a security threat.
His backpack said Charlie Brown — Not your ordinary blockhead. He said his name was Mangtu. I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.
The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project
- Details
- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by tellnolies
[Available in a web version on Kasama.]
[Also available in a smaller version suitable for saddle stapling.]
Chris Day’s essay “The Historical Failure of Anarchism” was written for a conference on anarchist strategy in 1996 — and quickly sparked a far ranging ideological struggle theLove and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. It was seen as a call for a break with inherited anarchism. But the importance of this essay is not just its critique of anarchism’s weaknesses and complacencies. It starts with a challenge to those who refuse to acknowledge or learn from their own failures… and who simply ascribe their own setbacks to the evil of others. But to advance the revolutionary project we need to learn from our own shortcomings and setbacks — and find fearless ways to transcend our own previous self-defeating assumptions. In that sense, this essay is not just about “the historic failure of anarchism” but precisely about “the future of the revolutionary project.”
Ambush at Keystone No. 1: Inside the Coalminers’ Great Gas Protest of 1974
- Details
- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Mike Ely
[available in web version here]
Coalminers in Appalachia waged a 10-year movement of illegal walkouts called wildcat strikes, starting in the late 1960s. Tens of thousands of miners repeatedly confronting the federal and state authorities, the courts, the police, the mine owners, the media, and their own top union officials. Most strikes involved individual mines and local grievances – and lasted a day or two. But especially after 1974, some strikes started to spread from mine to mine, county to county, state to state – challenging government policies and court repression. The hard fought strikes lasted for weeks. The leadership of these strikes was entirely at the grassroots, among the working miners and sometimes the local elected leaders at their mines. This was one of greatest upsurges of working class struggle in modern U.S. history. And yet it is virtually unknown.
This essay is a personal recollection of the first major strike that comrades of the Revolutionary Union participated in — shortly after we arrived in the coalfields. The strike erupted before we were widely known as communists and atheists. These were days when we were first learning the lay of the land and first meeting the main players in the rank-and-file struggle. In the raw experiences of this strike, new perceptions collided constantly with our own preconceptions.
Revolution in India – Lalgarh’s Hopeful Spark
- Details
- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Sam Shell
At this moment an incredible event is taking place in the West Midnapore district of West Bengal. Before the eruption, this sleepy area was little known except to its own inhabitants. Now, a people’s movement of unprecedented size to West Bengal has risen from the suffering of its adivasi (tribal) inhabitants, galvanizing the region, and shocking greater India. This movement has been popularly termed “the Lalgarh uprising.”
Although one could accurately say the point of eruption of this rebellion occurred early in November of 2008, it is necessary to step back further in order to appreciate the context within which these events have unfolded. Lalgarh is an incredibly impoverished area of West Bengal. It contains one well-developed road—built to accommodate police—that is of little use to its indigenous inhabitants to whom even a motorbike is a rarity. Neither clean water nor electricity is available. Police brutality was a regular occurrence where villagers were detained and tortured for little or no reason—some singled out for repeated horrific abuse. (Dec. 2008) For many years the State promised development in the area, yet little to none was seen.
Open Letter to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
- Details
- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by Communist Party of India (Maoist)
[also web version]
“…in the name of struggle against dogmatism, there have been serious deviations in the International Communist Movement (ICM), often going into an even greater, or at least equally dangerous, abyss of right deviation and revisionism. In the name of creative application of Marxism, communist parties have fallen into the trap of right opportunism, bourgeois pluralist Euro-Communism, rabid anti-Stalinism, anarchist post-modernism and outright revisionism…”
Kasama Articles: On the Maobadi and the Crisis in Nepal
- Details
- Category: Pamphlets
- Written by kasama
If you want a crash study in the controversies the revolution in Nepal….. read this. And share it with others.
Far too few people in the world know about the communist revolution in Nepal — the promise it holds and the danger it is in. And, remarkably, a sharp struggle has broken out among those who do know about it — among the communists and Maoists of the world. And that struggle (strangely enough, sadly enough) has focused on whether or not to denounce the Maoists of Nepal (for wandering too far and too creatively from certain cherished formulaic precepts).
In a previous pamphlet, we gave great space to arguments denouncing the Maobadi as “revisionist” — as we reprinted the exchange of letters between the RCP,USA and the UCPN(M).
By contrast, this new pamphlet is sharply about extending internationalist political support for the revolutionary people in Nepal — and opposing a sterile, influential dogmatism that has gotten in the way.
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Kasama is a communist project for the forcible overthrow and transformation of all existing social conditions. We are open to learning, unafraid to admit our own uncertainties. We will not shrink from what we do know: the solutions cannot be found within the current world order or the choices it provides. We are for revolution. We seek to find the forms of organization and action for the people most dispossessed by this system to free themselves and all humanity.
To take this road, we need a fearless, open-eyed debate, discussion and engagement. We need fresh analyses of the rapid changes shaping the world around us. We need to sum up a century of revolutionary strategies and attempts, victories and defeats – instead of the conventional wisdom and facile verdicts that paralyze our movements. We need to re-imagine a radical politics that can take life among people and move mountains.
