Chepe Martín: Take a hard left

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Monday, 29 April 2013 18:28

Written by Chepe Martín

What we needed was a new communism, and what we are getting is a new Keynesianism.

This piece first appeared on the blog of Chepe Martín, The Outside Agitator. The following is a draft. Expect an expanded piece soon.

It had been unduly hard to discern where the emerging and sexier trends in Marxism have placed themselves, veiled as they are in ultra-left aesthetics and memes. Sure, plenty of cues are present, but those might’ve been incidental and only indicative of a desire to suggest a broad selection of socialist thought.

The need to investigate has ended. The Jacobin have staked themselves as pink, when what we need is a nice maroon. Bhaskar Sunkara has written a piece  for In These Times that has planted his flag down for a revisionist stand for democratic socialism, a turf that seems to be populated by a lot of these groups and editorial boards, including as well The New Inquiry.

It isn’t that democratic socialism is altogether a sad derivation from Marxism. In fact, the energy these people are bringing to the table is welcome, and I, for one, hope their project of growing the democratic socialist left is successful, particularly if it finds a strong tendency toward feminism, ecology, and decolonizing politics. If anything, I would see their project stronger. The historicity of the contemporary moment in social programs that Sunkara lays out is finely laid out although severely incomplete, including its disregard for gender, questions of self-determination, and the significant impact of anarchism, and even more so autonomism, on today’s active radical left. He is right as well that progressive (re: liberal but social democratic) reform is a welcome alternative to the “things must get worse before they get better” strategic thinking that come out of the ultra-left and insurrectionary corners.

But what I will say is that Sunkara’s vision is not the best that Marxism can offer, and it is not the breath of fresh air I might’ve hoped to see. What we needed most was a Marxism that takes all of the lessons of the 20th Century, including decolonization and feminism and the recognition of the failures of the Soviet model, and what it appears we are getting is a retread of the revisionist politics that Lenin and Luxemburg were fighting against. It is a socialism that in the end didn’t challenge empire, held workers back from fighting for power, and devolved into what was termed economism- that is, the fight of socialists for immediate economic gains in lieu of a synthesis between economic struggle and the struggle for political and social power. It is a socialism that pulled back on the insurrections in 1919 in Europe or in France in 1968, rather than having faith in workers and students and oppressed groups to experiment with the seizure power for themselves. What we needed was a new communism, and what we are getting is a new Keynesianism.

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KOE: Ten years since our foundation

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Sunday, 10 March 2013 02:22

Written by Communist Organization of Greece (KOE)

The Communist Organization of Greece (ΚΟΕ) was founded 10 years ago, in the 1st Congress that took place in January 2003, after a long period of multiform preparation since the ’80s.

During this decade major social and political movements, national and international, but also popular revolts, have taken place all over the world. Huge political, economic and social changes occurred not only in the international matrix but also in our country itself. These changes altered the international balance of power and the political map of our country. The main focus of these changes has been the degree to which the Greek people have become a major factor of political change through a complex process of social struggle and political self-awareness.

All these years KOE’s approach has been to grasp the political undergoing and the underlying causes that shape the people’s movement, and at the same time to articulate a course of political action that unifies the people’s struggle under a common perspective.

• For our organization, this has been a decade of ideological and social fermentation through participating in all new forms of struggle and the major political mobilizations of our people:
• KOE became active in the Greek and European Social Forum, the anti-globalization movement and a multitude of international meetings.
• At the same time, our organization has forged strong relations with major international movements and parties in an effort, on the one hand to make known their original characteristics in our country, and on the other to advance internationalist solidarity.
• KOE has also taken part in many solidarity missions in Palestine and elsewhere. Its members were on the first ship that defied the Israeli blockade of Gaza in 2008.
• Since 2008 KOE organizes annually the internationalist Resistance Festival, a meeting place for the ideas and the struggles represented by movements, collectives and militants.
• Recently it has strengthened its ties with various movements of the Arab Spring and has worked to enhance its position within the European Left.

A significant benefit for KOE is that through this process allowed itself to be influenced into reaching political insight and experience.

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The Heavy Radicals: A history of the early RCP

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Thursday, 14 February 2013 20:45

Written by Doug Enaa

This new book may be of interest to our readers. Posting here is not an endorsement of its analysis.

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From the website of Aaron Leonard:

The Heavy Radicals: The Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980
Book to be published in early 2014

[The RU's] Bill Biggin and the Free Press are even more dangerous than the Panthers
— Philadelphia Police Commissioner, Frank Rizzo, 1970.

The Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party was the largest Maoist organization to arise in the United States in the tumultuous period of the late 1960s early 1970s. This is acknowledged not only by other Left political trends, but also by the Federal Government, which had it as subject of no less than four Congressional Hearings in its key years. Oddly though it largely stands outside established histories of the period; it is not taught in the academy, appears hardly at all in academic papers, and is passed over in the more popular books of SDS and sixties radicalism.

The reasons for this are manifold. The organization is victim of its own discipline that had little interest in promoting its history beyond whatever campaign or controversy it was involved in at the moment. Further those leaving the organization were circumspect in talking about their time there — either out of standing respect for the group’s discipline, a desire to move on with their lives, or the belief that a return to "the mainstream" necessarily involved disassociating themselves from their sixties revolutionary past, or some combination of each. 

There was also a penchant for the established media and other institutions to promote more sensational trends. Groups such as the Weathermen — while more marginal, were ideologically more amenable as emblematic of the ‘madness’ of extremes or despair of fighting for lost causes. It is also the case that the dominant culture in the United States has no interest promoting the concept of domestic revolutionaries embracing Maoism and undertaking the long term work of preparing for insurrection in a highly developed capitalist country.

Yet the fact remains that a significant Maoist formation did come about. In contrast to many who became radicalized quickly and nearly as quickly were in decline by the early 1970s, the RU/ RCP was ascendant in the same period. Indeed it attempted, not entirely unsuccessfully, to penetrate layers of the mainstream of U.S. society, including sections of the working class, and imbue it with a new radicalism. This stands as a counter-narrative to the dominant one of the sixties; that of activists rushing pell-mell back to accommodation with that mainstream as soon as the Vietnam war was over.

The death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the corresponding turn in China from a socialist to a market economy would bring all that to an end. From 1977 on the group would undergo first a major political schism, then a period of prolonged - but never final - disintegration. The reasons being not just the tectonic shifts in the global terrain, but the too often blind adherence to questionable (and worse) principles and methods the communist movement had brought forward historically.

Regardless, for a time this group cohered some of the most radical elements of the day. Indeed, to attempt to understand the upsurge of that period without understanding the role of the RU/RCP is to miss something important. For all its faults the RU / RCP was the most influential component of the New Communist Movement. Further, contained in the RU/RCP's story are hard garnered lessons and crucial experience essential to those who today dare to envision a radically better world. Whether one is curious, sympathetic, or detractor; this book will serve as a primer and surprising window into a heretofore overlooked critical player in a wild and insurrectionary time.

Responses to "Sing Our Own Song"

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Thursday, 31 January 2013 18:57

Written by Arturo, Gio, and Nat Winn

A debate is emerging sparked by a flier  in NYC being handed out to striking bus drivers. This discussion touches on larger questions about revolutionary consciousness and strategy. The following comments first appeared on the Fire Next Time network blog. Other parts of the debate on Kasama can be found here and here.

Proletariat ideology is not merely a matter of theoretical analysis. It is a weapon and armory with which we must arm and surround the American working class and particularly those who face the enormous tasks confronting us in the present period. —CLR James, Marxism for Our Times

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Unity-Struggle-Transformation: Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson on Cadre Development

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Sunday, 20 January 2013 19:21

Written by Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson

The following comes to Kasama from Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson, a prisoner and member of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter.

UNITY—STRUGGLE—TRANSFORMATION: LEADERSHIP & CADRE DEVELOPMENT (Right On! #27, Spring 2012)

Introduction

The object of a revolutionary organization is to unite (and unite with), mobilize, organize, and lead masses of oppressed people to achieve fundamental economic, political and social change and collective security. Founded in 2005, the New Afrikan Black Panther Party Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) arose within the most oppressed strata of U.S. society, the imprisoned masses, to take up the banner of revolutionary struggle on behalf of New Afrikans and all oppressed and exploited people. We aspire to become, but are not yet, a functional vanguard party of the oppressed.

We will be formally constituted once we transition to the outside, build bases in the oppressed communities, hold a founding convention and elect a free world central committee and an executive committee (politburo). We will be functionally constituted only when the oppressed urban masses embrace us as their revolutionary leadership.

Even while we remain a primarily prison-based organization, we have an important revolutionary role to play which is to transform the slave pens of oppression into schools of liberation. This is the first phase of our Party's strategy, along with transforming the oppressed communities into base areas of cultural, social and political revolution in the context of building a worldwide united front against capitalist-imperialism. The two aspects of our strategy are dialectically related and will advance the overall strategy of advancing the World Proletarian Socialist Revolution.

At this point, comrades are learning and struggling for ideological and political clarity on how to build and consolidate the Party's structure and a mass anti-racist, anti-imperialist and revolutionary movement around it. There are issues we need to work out relating to organizing on both the inside and outside. There are issues, some of them long-standing, that have been raised by our supporters and detractors we need to address. Some of these people do not understand, or refuse to accept, the need for revolutionary leadership, discipline and organization. There is also the question of who should be in leadership positions and how to achieve a balance between democracy and centralism.

On Organization and Security

The term “organizing” is often used loosely on the Left, especially by those who oppose forming, joining or subordinating themselves to any sort of disciplined political organization. Although they may exhort the virtues of “solidarity,” they actually practice extreme individualism, which runs counter to building a movement for collective social change.

Obviously, one cannot be a political organizer and not be part of a political organization. One implies the other. An organization is a body of people—not one person acting alone—who share common purpose and goals and have an organizational structure. The members must perform certain functions assigned to them that advance the purpose of the organization. This calls for leadership and a degree of discipline or everyone will be acting individually without accountability or responsibility, which is the definition of disorganization, and this leads to the opposite of “solidarity.”

Joining and remaining in an organization involves important considerations, such as whether one trusts, believes in, agrees with, and understands the organization's purpose and goals. To the more mature and committed members, these are issues of special concern and determine whether they will whole-heartedly commit themselves on a long-term basis to the organization and its goals and purpose. Transparency is therefore important so people know, understand and trust the organization and what it is about. Without this, the organization cannot have even the foundations for 'security.'

Comrade Safiya Bukhari, a former BPP and BLA cadre explains:

“By definition, security means freedom from danger, fear and anxiety. Individual and organizational safety and well-being begin with the knowledge of what you're about, what the organization is about, your limitations, your strengths and the organization's strengths. Knowledge is the key to security. History has shown that the best security depends on the internal strength of the organization and the internal principles of the people who make up the organization.”¹As an example of solid organizational and individual principles, she points to the creed of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), which states, “I will steal nothing from a brother or sister, cheat no brother or sister, misuse no brother or sister, inform on no brother or sister and spread no gossip.”

These principles, she observed, express...

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Coming Soon: Kasama 2

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Friday, 07 December 2012 12:55

Written by eric ribellarsi

Two tigers are better than one.

Kasama began as a simple blog in December 2007, publishing Nine Letters to Our Comrades, and initiating a conversation over how to overcome two great absences: the absence of a revolutionary movement and organization, and the absence of a revolutionary strategy.

Five years and 5.6 million unique page views later, Kasama has developed an organizational network separate from this website, along with projects and collectives of many kinds and unities throughout the country.

Just after our five year anniversary, we will be launching a new, completely re-vamped site. Kasama has long out-grown the simple blog format, and it is time to experiment with something new.

It will launch as a beta, and some things will still be a work in progress. The old Kasama site will continueto live on archive.kasamaproject.org. The new Kasama site will revolve around three distinct spheres, aimed at contributing to the reconception of communist theory and strategy, and the regroupment of revolutionaries into future serious revolutionary organization:

1. Kasama Main: A radically redesigned magazine style communist publication that will both be more fun to read, and will aim at featuring higher levels of discussion and debate.

2. Kasama Threads: An open blogging platform aiming to allow participants on the Kasama site to do their own blogging and participation, while at the same time fostering the culture of principled and comradely struggle that has come to characterize Kasama.

3. Kasama Social: An independent revolutionary social network built into all aspects of the site, aiming to allow networking, parallel communication, real-time chat, a platform for study groups and organizing, and a lot more. It’s like communist facebook. We’ll also be looking at ways to have integration with existing social networks in ways the protect security.

To make all of this happen, we’ll need a new layer of moderators, authors, participants, contributors, and donors (shit is seriously expensive, total costs were about $8,000 plus $2,000 a year for our server). Hit us up and volunteer. Hit that donate button in the top right corner.

In the meantime, the current Kasama site will be slowing down as we prepare for launch.

Here we go! Lal salaam.

B1: All-round communist work or bringing light into struggles?

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Wednesday, 24 October 2012 12:27

Written by Mike Ely

By Mike Ely

Intro (October 2012)

We need a communist beginning — including both new regroupment among communists and a process of fusion with a potentially partisan section of the people.

And for that, we need the kinds of discussions that have been going on: of where to begin and what to do when we get there.

What is communist political work? What does it look like? How is it different from other familiar forms of trade unionist or left activism?

Whenever such moments have arisen, in the history of modern politics, there has been a view that we go to the workers, and assist them in the struggles they are already waging, and that out of that we would help sum up the lessons of that struggle (which, presumably, will lead to revolutionary conclusions). The arguments for this are often unarticulated and assumed. But when they come out there are often common themes:

• That struggle at the point of production inherently and naturally raises questions about exploitation and surplus value,
• That communist ideas are inherently present (in embryo) whenever people rise in struggle,
• That people themselves can spontaneously develop the ideas they need for self-liberation, or that they will relatively easily recognize those ideas when offered them in an accessible popular format.

And in contrast to this, is a set of contrary ideas:

• That political struggle (over social power, racism, equality, war, macro-policy in society) is a better arena for the development of revolutionary consciousness than the economic struggle of workers in the workplace.
• That there are a significant body of ideas that must be made available to oppressed people “from without” — i.e. from outside their own experiences and struggles, meaning: from the study of history, politics, military affairs, economics, and from the world experience of communist movements.
• That economic struggle is often an important and necessary arena of working class class struggle. And that  upsurges (like the 1960s farmworkers, or the 1970s coalminers, or the more recent breakouts of immigrant meatpackers) are an important site for communist work and solidarity. But that economic struggle is not automatically the arena best suited for developing class consciousness (i.e. the consciousness of the need for a new society and the potential working class role in that). In great upsurges of the past (say 1905 in Russia), the political struggle (over power) has often given rise to political consciousness, while mass economic struggle around collective self-interest has often been a way of drawing in the unawakened and intermediate sections of the workers.
• That there needs to be all-round communist work, which is not limited to organizing existing struggles or making such struggles larger and more militant. That all-round work includes participating in key struggles of the people, but also leading — by putting forward specific programmatic (and tactical) approaches based on a revolutionary perspective. And it involves the work of developing historical summations, lively media projects, news analysis from revolutionary point of view, art, theoretical explorations, schools of cadre, durable structures of revolutionary organization, cores of trained accountable leaders  and much more.

 The model of a communist cannot be confined to the organizer-activist “fanning the flames” of struggle. Nor simply the Promethean image of the bringer of light– extrapolating “lessons” from struggles spontaneously initiated by the oppressed themselves.

The following essay was written in the summer of 207 — before there was a Kasama Project, as we were circulating an early draft of the “9 Letters to Our Comrades.”

It deals with the recurring historical question of how to connect with active sections of the people (and the working class).

It discusses how this question was raised among early Bolsheviks, and in the early New Communist Movement of the 1970s, and how it has come up more recently.

What triggered this essay originally: In 2007, a circle of communists, named Single Spark, said the following as Point 14 of their “What We Believe” statement:

“The basic approach we promote toward the masses of people is to join up with them in their existing struggles for their own collective interests and, in the course of that, to bring the light of revolution to them. As an important part of this, in all our work we try to promote the mass line, the leadership method of ‘from the masses, to the masses.’”

The following essay is a critique of that  approach — and an early suggestion of what else communist work should include.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Strategic Problems of “Bringing the Light into Existing Struggles”

By Mike Ely, 2007 (minor edits for clarity)

B1: Lenin’s first response to working class strike wave

This  idea of “bringing the light of revolution into existing struggles” repeats a formulation communists once called “B1.”

In the fall of 1972, as we were living out of sight, waiting to move down to West Virginia, my  partner Gina and I were instructed (by our organization, the Revolutionary Union) to study the notes on B1, from Lenin’s 1895 outline notes for a early Russian Social-Democratic Party program . At that time those notes concentrated how sections of the communists of the early Revolutionary Union imagined we should develop communist work among working people.

V.I. Lenin (central leader of the underground Russian communists) wrote from prison:

“The Party’s activity must consist in promoting the workers’ class struggle. The Party’s task is not to concoct some fashionable means of helping the workers, but to join up with the workers’ movement, to bring light into it, to assist the workers in the struggle they themselves have already begun to wage. The Party’s task is to uphold the interests of the workers and to represent those of the entire working class movement…The program says that this assistance must consist, firstly, in developing the workers’ class-consciousness. We have already spoken of how the workers’ struggle against the employers becomes the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie…The workers’ class-consciousness means the workers’ understanding that the only way to improve their conditions and to achieve their emancipation is to conduct a struggle against the capitalist and factory-owner class created by the big factories.

“Further, the workers’ class-consciousness means their understanding that the interests of all the workers of any particular country are identical, that they all constitute one class, separate from all the other classes in society. Finally, the class-consciousness of the workers means the workers’ understanding that to achieve their aims they have to work to influence affairs of state, just as the landlords and the capitalists did, and are continuing to do now.

“Every strike concentrates all the attention and all the efforts of the workers on some particular aspect of the conditions under which the working class lives. Every strike gives rise to discussions about these conditions, helps the workers to appraise them, to understand what capitalist oppression consists in the particular case, and what means can be employed to combat this oppression. Every strike enriches the experience of the entire working class. If the strike is successful it shows them what a strong force working-class unity is, and impels others to make use of their comrades’ success. If it is not successful, it gives rise to discussions about the causes of the failure and to the search for better methods of struggle. This transition of the workers to the steadfast struggle for their vital needs, the fight for concessions, for improved living conditions, wages and working hours, now begun all over Russia, means that the Russian workers are making tremendous progress, and that is why the attention of the Social-Democratic Party and all class-conscious workers should be concentrated mainly on this struggle, on its promotion.”

Though this was written by Lenin (the early 1895 Lenin), what stands out about it (to me now) is that it is sharply opposed to the views Lenin put forward just a few years later in his major workWhat is to be Done? – on the nature of communist work and the nature of class consciousness.

The problem with B1′s notes

It is no surprise by now that I have number of differences both with the Point 14 formulation and with that B1 we once took as guidance.

Here are a few:

1)    I think that to lead a revolution you have to be leading people all along… you can’t just have struggles (that they spontaneously initiate) and a communist work (that involves “bringing the light”). How does a revolutionary movement develop the muscles for revolution without leading? And leading in the course of struggle, in complex relationship with other programs and forces (and not just “working with them in a friendly way”).

2)    I think the formulation “join up with the masses of people in their existing struggles for their own collective interests” is double restrictive: It posits as a “basic approach” focusing on “existing struggles” (as opposed to possibly initiating struggles no one else has thought about before) and focusing on specifically THOSE “existing struggles” that are around their “own collective interests.”

3)    Why would we confine ourselves to joining with the masses in “their existing struggles”? Historically the assumptions have been:

1. That is where the advanced are
2. In those situations (and within those movements) people are most open to “talking socialism”
3. By participating we can prove our motives and our worth, and so make people more open to our larger ideas.

In other words, the assumption is that in struggles over “their own collective interests,” people are most open to communist ideas. This is sometimes true, and often  not. But as a schema (as a “basic approach”) it falls far short.

4)    I don’t think that struggles we might initiate and lead (as communists) are inherently sterile, stillborn or sectarian.

And I don’t think that any basic approach should be adopted that rules out initiating struggles over key faultlines and contradictions. I think there are times when we need to consciously initiate struggle, and then win over sections of the masses to participate. The national movement against police brutality was initiated that way – and the experience shows the potential to create, lead, shape and wage struggles of this kind.

5)    And if we do that correctly, there can be on a basis and framework that attracts the more politically advanced – and help forge them as a leading and active core (the existence and maturation of which is a prerequisite for any hope of revolution). And such initiative can creates a political context and struggle that is particularly amenable to leaps in consciousness (including among the masses broadly).

6)    It may make sense for the revolutionary communists outside the RCP to focus on initiating a campaign to popularize and support  revolutionary movements internationally (which may  take important leaps, and which could potentially also be an excellent framework for attracting and regrouping communists). I am not proposing this, nor am I secretly convinced this is the course to take. But I am against a formulation for a “basic approach” that essentially RULES OUT the possibility of focusing on such a project (outside “existing struggles”).

7)    I think some of the important focus of struggle should be precisely not around people’s “own collective interest” – but around the suffering and resistance of others.

When Black youth were shot down in NYC, it would have been important to mobilize enlightened, progressive and revolutionary white people (including of course poor and working people) to take up fierce and public resistance to this (in a multinational way). Such action would be especially powerful exactly because it would not be struggle around their “own collective interest” in any narrow sense. I think that the interests of others often motivates the more advanced –in fact, I think a defining feature of the relatively advanced is that they are less concerned with self, and more with others. (This is opposed to the more economist view that the advanced are those more willing to “fight,” militantly – often from a politically complex stand of “collective self.”)

8)    I think we should look at the larger political faultlines in society (when deciding where to dig in) rather than deliberately confining ourselves to what some (relatively small) sections of the masses see as important and are willing to struggle over at any given point. Rising fascism and police state, police brutality, the criminalization of immigrant workers, the intense discontent over U.S. aggressions and occupations – these are important, whether or not there is “existing struggle” around them.

9)    Not all “existing struggles” are the same.

When I make a list of “existing struggles” among the masses, these are movements that are rather diverse  – and vary in their value and political potential. Black nationalists (including revolutionaries) have maintained a low-level “existing struggle” over reparations. Many people are engaged in existing struggle over their right to bear arms. Ranchers are fighting for their “own collective interests” by upholding property rights against “tree huggers.” Immigrant workers are engaging in an existing struggle for legalization. The “existing struggle” over the war in Iraq continues to be heavily subsumed and channeled into the electoral arena.

Some of these “existing struggles” may be excellent arenas for communist work – some may not. You have to do a concrete analysis, and not naively assume that if the masses are into it, then it must be conducive.

10) I have mentioned that the active forces in “existing struggles” are not always the politically advanced forces. I gave the example of the coalfields (where discovering this was a shellshock revelation – and took years and sharp two line struggle to even see.) And there were other struggles that attracted the advanced (for example the resistance to the religious rights’ text book protest, and the work around the Deng demo of 1979).

11) I think we should be very wary about having a mechanical and stereotypical view of what a “struggle” is – a view that tends to assume “struggle” necessarily involves leaflets, rallies, picket lines and bigger demos. Artists often wage important resistance through their art and music. Scientists write books and polemics, and conduct sharply pointed research. There are alternative cultural movements of many kinds that respond to the outrages of this society. We don’t want to conceptually confine either the masses or the revolutionary movement to a treadmill of a few well-worn tactics.

The 1895 Lenin makes an argument against “fashionable” means of connecting with the people — but there should be a diversity of means, for a diversity of radical forces to make t heir contributions, and to connect with the oppressed. He was writing in the middle of an economic upsurge — and saying “let’s get into the thick of things.” Which is certainly justified. But certainly, when the level of economic struggle is low as it is now, it becomes important to develop well-considered and creative means of connecting.

We may see upsurges of economic struggle (I have always expected them among undocumented, lower-tier immigrant workers in a way that combines a civil rights struggle for equality with an  economic struggle over conditions   ) — and we should be deeply in the thick of that. But the question remains (even then) of what we, as communists, do there, and what we are building out of such moments for a revolutionary movement.

12) We should not assume that our approach is always to subsume our efforts within the existing organizational and coalition frameworks. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. It would be short-sighted to decide (on principle?) that our approach is always to “join” or “participate” in whatever the pre-existing framework of struggle is. This is the question of explicit communist presence with its own voice. Mao argued “not everything through the united front.” Communists need to maintain independence and initiative, even when in alliance (as we almost always will be). We need to develop an independent and partisan base of support. That will require having some form of independent voice as often as possible.

13) I think it is mistaken to believe/assume that “existing struggles” are somehow a thing “initiated” by the masses. Struggles launched spontaneously (by which I mean outside the influence of c’s) are rarely, simply “initiated” by “the masses.” There are other classes, class forces, other programs and views. If something is not waged on one program and line it is waged on another.

Let me give one recent example: The Mexican and Guatemalan workers in southeastern North Carolina broke into some powerful struggle on May Day 2006, when 30,000 stayed away from work, and 8,000 marched through the startled town of Lumberton demanding legalization.

That is certainly an “existing struggle” but like most large struggles it was hardly “initiated by the masses” in some simple way.  It was led by the local Catholic priest (whose Mother Church played a MAJOR role in initiating and then shaping this movement around the country). Organizers came from a local trade union workers center (whose leaders are very ambivalent about pressing hard for legalization – fearing that making this central might divides Latino workers from Black workers and from white people in surrounding communities). It was financed (believe it or not!) in part by the Smithfield pork processing corporation (the major imperialist employer) who funded the busses that transported the Latino workers that May Day. So you had this major (ground-pounding and important) May First event – where the workers were called into political life by the actions of the Bush regime and the counteractions of a complex of other class forces, and where they started to act (with energy, enthusiasm and some initiative) on the political stage IN THAT CONTEXT and still largely under those leaderships.

On one hand, this was and still is  an example of the masses of people acting (and coming into political life). It is an important flash of struggle to uphold and to connect with in some real and creative ways.

14) The whole schema of situating ourselves within “existing struggles” and then “bringing light” – negates the degree to which people learn from their larger political experience and from larger political events. It still rests on a mechanical and simplistic idea of “telling” that is not far from “preaching” – and that in reality assumes more simple receptivity than is the case.

15) In the 1970s, we often told ourselves in the RU that “taking ML to the working class is bringing it home.” However, in fact, that “home” is stocked with other ideologies, and often the workers are quite content with them (religion, bourgeois democracy, trade unionism, black nationalism, white racism, patriotism, and more etc.) And it is not true (as we later thought) that it is merely difficult among the more stable workers, and that bringing it to “lower and deeper” is actually where you bring it “home.”

It’s not like we get “situated” deeply among the masses, and then they just see our words and ideas as “light” illuminating their darkness. “Oh gee, thanks for bringing your light into my world.”

To put it sharply: Part of the problem of “bringing light” is that it can treat  us the sole active element (adopting the image of Prometheus), and it often treats the people as passive recipients.

But another part of it makes an opposite error that people easily develop (or adopt)  new and radical ideas — and that they spontaneously know, or recognize or develop the ideas and politics they desperately need.

Life just isn’t that simple or easy. It will be a protracted struggle to gain a foothold (and then an expanding partisan base) for revolutionary politics — even among those sections of people most desperate and discontent.

And that underscores the need for a politics that identifies those who are already especially inclined toward revolutionary politics, and help them organize themselves as a distinct, organized active force more broadly among the people.

[And the very use of the word "light" in this way has deep roots in simplistic European 19th century views of truth and progress -- in the very idea of revolution as "enlightenment." Among the Bolsheviks this became an acute struggle in the early 1900s, when a section of them turned this into a whole way of thinking -- which is on display, for example, in the language and politics of Maxim Gorky's Mother -- an early and wonderful communist novel written 1906.]

16) We should not view (or treat) people as a blank slate.

There is a material basis for the holding of INCORRECT ideas among the masses. And they hold wrong ideas for real reasons – based on real experiences and needs. (Marx’s insights into theexistence and grip of religion are relevant here – and are important in a criticism of Avakian’s view of this.)

17) Now, I believe our politics and ideology (at its best) truly are objectively and potentially “light” in a dark world – but even when we are deep among the masses, fighting shoulder to shoulder along side them over things some sections of them truly value, it is not like they casually or easily “fire their ideas and hire ours.”

Don’t be naïve – or you will reproduce the 1970s unnecessarily!

We attract those inclined toward revolution, internationalism, secularism, analysis, generous view toward humanity etc. (i.e. the advanced) – but the existence and growth of that “inclined” section” involves the macro-experiences of political life that “light the sky” and influence the collective thinking of millions (like the OJ trial, or the killing of antiwar students at Kent State, or the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or the LA rebellion, or the invasion of Iraq, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and whatever comes now in our future etc.)

Conjuncture

18) The leap from civil rights to Black liberation took place through an explosive interaction of macro-political events with subjective transformations in the minds of many people (Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle, the killing of MLK, the open manifestations of racism in the North, the failures of non-violence, the use of integrated organizations to impose liberal politics, the subjective study of revolutionary nationalist politics from around the world etc.)

It was not some cardboard scenario where “the people initiate struggle, and then someone brings them the truth that they accept.” [In other words, radicalization takes leaps in a conjuctural way  not linearly.]

19) For that reason, and because of the real impact of opposing programs and class forces (seeking to keep everything “under the wing of the bourgeoisie”) – the question of communists LEADING on (and within) various frontlines of anti-system struggle is very important (and is missing from the whole vibe around Single Spark). That means taking responsibility on several levels, actually seeking to identify correct frontlines, forms of struggle and even tactics – and that means identifying them (not from the self-contained logic of “this struggle,” but from the larger strategic goals of the revolutionary proletariat.) It means taking responsibility for the future within the present, but it also means thinking through (in the present) how to beat back the enemy and organize the people (in ways that serve our larger goals).

Winning, not merely fighting and talksing

20) Something omitted in Point 14: It is important to fight to win key struggles – and not mainly for the ideological reason that people are demoralized and dispersed by defeat.

I don’t agree that the point of connecting with struggles is mainly as an effective method of raising consciousness. There are many important struggles that we actually want to win, and need to win (because the future of the class struggle demands that the enemy be DRIVEN BACK, and our movement needs a tenacious, hardened, determined culture focused on winning).

When the rev movement rallied people to defend the Black Panthers facing prison or murder, this was not mainly done to create conditions for “bringing light” – but because if the Panthers were crushed the revolution would suffer a great setback. We are not just in a “battle of ideas” and the struggles of the people are not mainly or solely an “arena” for that battle of ideas. We aimed to “Free Huey” — actually win, and free him.

Communist base

21) Point 14 does not appreciate the dialectics of “prepare minds and organize forces for revolution.”

And, in general, the writings of Single Spark do not appreciate nearly enough the need to “organize forces for revolution” – actually organizing a REVOLUTIONARY movement, with its own banners, slogans, symbols, leaders, etc. Even the assumptions of “an anti-imperialist student movement” (in connection with today’s new SDS) is something I’d like to explore critically. What about a “revolutionary youth movement”?

22) I need to repeat my belief from the protracted experience of the 1970s: “B1” (carried out today as Point 14) would represent a left form of economism – where we would seek to inject “light” about revolution, socialism, communism as a veneer onto spontaneous struggles (that by their nature, program, forms, dynamics are inherently leading people under the wing of the bourgeoisie.)

This has been tried. One can sometimes “find the crown is in the gutter” (if you are very lucky, as we were in the coalfields) – i.e. clever organized forces can take tactical leadership of mass struggles, but that at the end of the day there remains a knotty and difficult problem of winning a section of the people to communist and revolutionary partisanship. (And it is a problem for which B1 is not a magical solution.)

Representing the future within the present

AAA writes:

“I think what’s important in the B-1 formulation is that it recognizes a connection between the revolution as a discrete event in the future and the masses who exist today. The link between the masses of today and the revolution of the future made by some large portion of those masses has to be forged. B-1 recognizes that masses are impelled by capitalism to ‘fight back’ in some form or another. We somehow need to channel/divert/enlighten those struggles into a process that leads to that future revolution.”

Well, it is important to make that connection between revolution (not just as a discrete event, but as a process that goes on from there) and the masses who exist today.

But part of the problem with Point 14 is its schematic simplicity.

It posits the wrong connection. Any “basic approach” to the masses of people needs to encompass many more things. And the relationship between spontaneous “fight back” and revolution is not that one gets diverted into the other. The process is considerably more complex, and involves a great many other contradictions that act on the people and society, and from which the ultimate revolution arises.

[Note from 2012: This is the problem with those who thought Occupy needed to "become" a revolutionary movement, or that Occupy needed to take on all the burdens and features of the revolutionary movement we need. Assuming that, and attempting that, underestimated both the actual potential of Occupy and the actual tasks of developing a revolutionary movement.]…

Sketch of what we need:

I think we need some combination of:

1. Connecting the revolutionary movement with the most important spontaneous outbreaks of resistance
2. Conducting communist “agitation and propaganda” [i.e. media projects] along a modernized version of WITBD-ism [i.e. What is to be Done-ism, or Iskra/Pravda projects]. Including: we need a quick means of communist commentary on burning events.
3. A serious and unapologetic defense of communism, and a dialectical upholding of the profound experiences of socialist revolution to date (from the Paris Commune to Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution).
4. Creatively focusing on leading (and possibly initiating) struggle around key faultlines in society in ways that bring growing numbers of people into organized conflict with this system and its crimes.
5. Perseverance around a carefully considered path, rather than succumb to the jerky pull of “get rich quick schemes.”
6. A less risk-averse approach to “lighting the sky” with our movement and its line (learn from the Panthers, early SDS, Abby Hoffman etc. at their best)
7.  Some real luck in having things roll our way (i.e. that while we hasten, the things we are “awaiting” finally arrive in ways we can use!)

We need to be part of a process (which may turn out to be long or hopefully relatively telescoped) through which large numbers of people rupture with old politics and create new loyalties and affiliations. And our involvement has to function on different levels, and be very clever, flexible, creative, attractive, and freshly rooted in THESE times (not in the dogmas and assumptions and cultural forms of past decades).

And it is worth thinking through what the impact would be of adopting it:

I believe it would be to waste precious time and energy on false promises of an easy solution. It would cause us to disperse our forces into struggles that are often most conducive to bourgeois politics – and lead us to refrain from initiating struggles where we could develop important breakthroughs. It would bring a deserved dismissal from veteran communist forces who know well where this formulation leads. It would be settling for an easy, schematic strawman, when we need to actually do some fresh, creative communist thinking on the basis of what has gone before.

Another direction…

I am wary of just whipping together some glib new formulation.

I really am trying to think outside the channels we have all been operating in. But I did gather some of my current thoughts here (if we can agree this is rough, very provisional, and written mainly to have something to bounce off of.) And I have to say, their affinity with the approaches embodied in the RCP’s draft programme are real. (And I think it is worth exploring how the RCP has taken distance from these approaches.)

Revolutionary communists seek to prepare minds and organize forces for revolution. This is a protracted process that involves bringing large numbers of people into more and more conscious opposition to this system, as the system commits great crimes and especially as it plunges toward possible crises of legitimacy. This involves training a growing core of people to be conscious partisans of revolutionary communist politics, and as communists.

Revolutionary communists need to support, to the extent possible, every justified outbreak of struggle and resistance among the masses. They need to find creative ways to connect with people awakening to political life, especially with lively communist agitation and propaganda exposing the crimes and nature of this system and the necessity of a new and liberated communist society. And we need to help working people see the potential among many different groupings and stata in society to be part of a powerful movement that sweeps this system away. And as an important component of this work, we need to energetically wield the truth about both history and class society — push back those poisonous anti-communist verdicts that now suppress so many people’s vision of what is possible.

At the same time, revolutionary communists also need to directly help lead in particularly important arenas of class struggle – especially those involving key faultlines of society that have a special potential for bringing large numbers of people into opposition to the criminal policies and workings of this system, helping bring growing numbers out from “under the wing of the bourgeoisie,” and bringing forward and training waves of politically awakened people who have the potential to become fighters consciously struggling for the final goal of communism.

And revolutionary communists need to lead in all this, with the perspective of being prepared both politically and organizationally, when the time is right, for the difficult transition of going over (with those forces painstakingly accumulated and the new raw forces gathering rapidly amid extreme crisis) to radically different forms of mass struggle.

Communist Organization of Greece: KKE as Tragedy

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Friday, 05 October 2012 11:30

Written by KOE

The people “who do not understand KKE’s line and must rectify their stand”

“This revolutionary verbalism is in reality only a pretext in order not to participate, not to contribute in the mass popular struggle for the ousting of Troika and its acolytes.

Instead, the leadership of KKE remains a passive observer of these “disorienting struggles” and organizes its separate, sterilized and harmless for the system parades. And once punished for this attitude, it prefers to give lessons to the Greek people “who do not understand KKE’s line and must rectify their stand”! Perhaps the leadership of KKE would prefer “to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one”? This pretentious underestimation of the Greek people comes after more than two years of popular struggles that have often surpassed the defensive tactics of the Left, targeting the whole corrupt bourgeois political system and the core of Troika’s policies, and accelerating their decay…

Whatever the strategic and tactical disagreements with SYRIZA are (KOE might also have disagreements with this or the other aspect of SYRIZA’s policy, as it happens in every coalition), the stand of KKE against SYRIZA is not owed to these disagreements…

We are aware that this change is not the overthrowing of capitalism. It paves the way, it is a precondition, but it is not the overthrowing of capitalism. This change means ruptures in an anticapitalist as well as anti-imperialist direction, but it is not yet the overthrowing of capitalism. This change is not even resulting to an immediate getting-out of the EU in the first place, but it is pushing on the direction of breaches with EU’s and Eurozone’s policies that dominate and deepen the crisis in a catastrophic way.”

The following polemic appeared on the international site of the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE). 

IT WOULD BE COMICAL, IF IT WASN’T A BIT TRAGIC

Comment by the International Relations Department of KOE

August 6, 2012

In certain circles of the Left, on European and international level, are often and easily reproduced some erroneous opinions about the situation in our country, and more specifically about the impressive success of the Coalition of Radical Left (SYRIZA) in the last two national elections. Those opinions originate, mostly, in statements and documents produced by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). We are of the opinion that these positions of KKE are suffering by extreme subjectivism, while they lack any essential self-criticism about the political line of KKE – which, by the way, was the main reason of its crushing electoral defeat on 17 June 2012, when it lost half of its electoral base. Thus, we would like to bring to the attention of certain circles that reproduce these positions (and feel free to even add on top their own insults and imaginative lies against SYRIZA) some basic truths about the Greek political reality…

1. “SYRIZA is a social democratic and/or opportunistic and/or pro-capitalist force”

SYRIZA is characterized by some of those circles as a “coalition of social democratic forces”, by others as an “alliance of opportunistic forces with PASOK”, or even as “the best alternative for the manipulation of the masses and the salvation of the capitalist system” (!) etc. One can hardly find more inaccurate definitions for SYRIZA than these. Such definitions of SYRIZA, if expressed inside Greece, would only make everyone laugh – no matter if he/she is a rightist or a leftist, or even a supporter of KKE. We understand, of course, that outside Greece it is easier to say whatever one likes to say…

In reality, SYRIZA is a political alliance composed of leftist parties and organizations, as well as of many non-party affiliated members (now under deep transformation, as thousands of new militants are “invading” SYRIZA, changing profoundly its social composition and pushing towards a further radicalization of its line – but maybe that’s… advanced mathematics for the critics of SYRIZA, so let’s forget it for now). The biggest component of SYRIZA is the party of Synaspismos, itself regrouping various tendencies: from the (minority) left social democrats, up to the “neo-bolsheviks” of the Left Current, as they often call themselves. Another component with national presence, but considerably smaller than Synaspismos in organizational terms, is KOE. Other components include AKOA (of left eurocommunist origins), DIKKI-Socialist Left (which came out of PASOK in 1995, and had formed a coalition with KKE before joining SYRIZA in 2007), DEA (trotskyite organization), etc.

During the months before the May 6 elections, SYRIZA formed an even broader coalition, namely SYRIZA-EKM (SYRIZA-United Social Front), along with various personalities and regroupings from a broad spectrum – starting in left social democrats who had already broken away from PASOK, and reaching the extra-parliamentarian anti-capitalist left. In the present Parliament the left social democrats (former PASOK members) make some 7 out of the 71 MPs of SYRIZA. We hope that this does not necessarily make SYRIZA a “coalition of social democratic forces”…

Aleka Papariga, Secretary General of the KKE

On the other side, KKE has on several occasions repeated that “KKE is not a party of the Left, but a communist party”, stating that “We have nothing to do with the Left” etc. Based on this strange, and rather unique on international level sectarian logic, which completely separates the communists from the broader Left, KKE calls everyone who does not belong to it not even a leftist or whatever similar, but a social democrat, a savior of capitalism (!) etc.

2. “SYRIZA is part of a bourgeois-led plan to save the system”

Some circles have the audacity to claim that what happened in Greece during the last two elections was mainly the implementation of a bourgeois plan for the “renovation of the bourgeois political scene”, with SYRIZA in the core of the plan for the “recomposition of social democracy”. Consequently, they claim that no “new correlation of forces between the people and the monopolies” has appeared. Of course, all this wishful thinking of KKE’s leadership has nothing to do with reality; but then again, who are we to expect that KKE must “always try to be as radical as reality itself”?

It is true that, after SYRIZA managed to take 17% in the first elections (May 6), the president of the industrialists proposed that SYRIZA should take part in a “national unity” government. The leadership of KKE used this piece of information alone, concealing all other relative information (for example saying nothing about SYRIZA‘s reaction to this “proposal“). The aim of KKE was to spread the rumor outside Greece (inside Greece it would sound very comical) that the ruling class wanted a renovation of the political scene with SYRIZA as its main tool. So –this is the clue– “SYRIZA is an alternative for the ruling class”. But… let’s talk about this major “argument” of KKE:

The truth is that, especially after the political earthquake of May 6 and up to the most critical elections of June 17, SYRIZA was directly and indirectly subjected to an unforeseen and generalized attack by: A) all political forces (including KKE, which openly declared SYRIZA as the main enemy…); B) all the mainstream Media (both national and international); C) the representatives of the EU institutions and of imperialist forces, including Merkel herself.

As far as the bourgeois forces are concerned, the common motto of their attack was that, should SYRIZA take up the government and implement what it promised (abrogation of the memoranda with the IMF-EU-ECB Troika etc.), this would be an immediate and total catastrophe for the Greek people. In the context of this violent attack against SYRIZA, should someone that knew nothing about Greece and its political reality watch the political debates in the Greek TV after May 6, he/she would form the opinion that SYRIZA is responsible for every evil thing that has happened the last decades in Greece, resulting to the actual crisis, the danger of getting back to an inflationary drachma, the misery of the people, and so on. Even the German Financial Times published an article in both German and Greek languages (!) a few days before the June 17 elections under the title “Resist against the demagogue Alexis Tsipras”, which was reproduced all over Greece and was calling the Greeks not to vote for SYRIZA, otherwise they shall face the destruction!

On the other hand, at the same time the bourgeois parties and even representatives of the EU kept pressing SYRIZA to participate in a “national unity” bourgeois government that would just continue the same policy, thus attempting to discredit SYRIZA and its radical program. So it was not just the president of the industrialists that wished this, but all bourgeois parties throughout the period from May 6 up to June 17. PASOK and Democratic Left, two of the three parties of the actual tripartite coalition government, still continue to openly “challenge” SYRIZA to take part in their catastrophic course…

What is the clue? The clue is that not only wasn’t SYRIZA the core of a bourgeois plan for the “renovation of the political scene” but, on the contrary, the ruling class and also ruling circles in the EU were panicked by the perspective of a “Greek Mutiny” inside EU. They were panicked by the perspective of a leftist, progressive, popular (and of course NOT “social democratic”) government that would say a historical for Europe “NO” to the destructive neoliberal policies. That’s exactly why they attacked all together and quite fiercely against SYRIZA. The leadership of KKE knows that very well, although it pretends not to notice this internationally orchestrated and unprecedented attack against SYRIZA.

Instead of explaining why the “social democratic” SYRIZA became the main enemy for the system and was the exclusive target of all its attacks, instead of explaining why SYRIZA was shamefully at the same time labeled by KKE as “the main enemy”, KKE only keeps spreading false claims.

3. What is the immediate goal of the radicalized popular movement?

Is the immediate overthrowing of capitalism what is at stake in Greece behind all the events of the last two years? That is what KKE claims – in words. But it is not what the Greek people think and say, and not what the reality and the dynamics of the situation show. Besides, even if overthrowing capitalism was the imminent thing to be done, KKE would be the last one who would contribute to this – if we judge by its inertia in deeds and its absolute separation from the new popular movement during these years of mass struggles and mobilizations of the Greek people.

In fact, we could say that there is almost agreement among KOE, SYRIZA and KKE on the issue of which class forces are on this and the other side of the main contradiction. But disagreements appear when the issue comes to the question “what has to be done?”. Because of the shock “therapy” that was imposed upon Greece, because of the imminent catastrophe that threats the country and the people, because of the “occupation” of the country by the Troika, an immediate big political-economic-social change is needed in order to be able first of all to survive. Such a change is asked by the millions of the people that were mobilized the previous two years. It was this popular current demanding such a change that boosted SYRIZA to 27% in the June 17 elections.

We are aware that this change is not the overthrowing of capitalism. It paves the way, it is a precondition, but it is not the overthrowing of capitalism. This change means ruptures in an anticapitalist as well as anti-imperialist direction, but it is not yet the overthrowing of capitalism. This change is not even resulting to an immediate getting-out of the EU in the first place, but it is pushing on the direction of breaches with EU’s and Eurozone’s policies that dominate and deepen the crisis in a catastrophic way.

The political goal that can unite at the present time a big majority of the people in Greece, much more than the 27%, the target that can start and bring the first big change that is needed, can be described as: A) the rejection of the memoranda and of Troika’s asphyxiating domination over Greece; B) the beginning of the Greek economy’s productive reconstruction in the interest of the working people; C) the building of a genuinely democratic state that would put an end to the present corrupt anti-people political system. A transitional government imposed and controlled by a popular movement pushing forward these targets could create the conditions that would allow further, much more deep and radical changes in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective.

4. Big words are harmless

In fact, KKE in past party congresses, not many years ago, has recognized the probability of the necessity for such a transitional, broad, anti-monopolistic, anti-imperialist government to be formed. Now that this moment has come close, KKE discovers the necessity for the immediate overthrowing of capitalism right now – nothing else is worth fighting for! Thus, by supposedly pursuing the establishment of “people’s power”, KKE results to… nothing: This revolutionary verbalism is in reality only a pretext in order not to participate, not to contribute in the mass popular struggle for the ousting of Troika and its acolytes.

Instead, the leadership of KKE remains a passive observer of these “disorienting struggles” and organizes its separate, sterilized and harmless for the system parades. And once punished for this attitude, it prefers to give lessons to the Greek people “who do not understand KKE’s line and must rectify their stand”! Perhaps the leadership of KKE would prefer “to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one”? This pretentious underestimation of the Greek people comes after more than two years of popular struggles that have often surpassed the defensive tactics of the Left, targeting the whole corrupt bourgeois political system and the core of Troika’s policies, and accelerating their decay…

Whatever the strategic and tactical disagreements with SYRIZA are (KOE might also have disagreements with this or the other aspect of SYRIZA’s policy, as it happens in every coalition), the stand of KKE against SYRIZA is not owed to these disagreements. In fact, KKE consciously sabotages the political process that begun spontaneously two years ago by the people and its mobilizations, without the help of most of the parties of the Left, and now continues mainly through SYRIZA. It was so obvious for the broad masses of the people that KKE should in some way help and participate in this process, that it should answer affirmatively to SYRIZA’s proposal for a transitional progressive government (even with a critical stand), that the absolutely negative answer of KKE was completely incomprehensible. It was completely incomprehensible even among its supporters and thousands of members. And that’s exactly why KKE lost half of its voters and came down to its lowest point since it was legalized in 1974.

The leadership of KKE has, not once, shown that all it wants for KKE is to be a party in the corner of the political system, just a “protest” party, not to trouble and not to be troubled by the political system. It excels, however, in big harmless declarations. For example, when the uprising of the French suburbs took place in 2005, KKE strongly supported it, openly condemning the “systemic” attitude of the French Left. Three years later, in December 2008, when the Greek youth stood up all over Greece (and that was an uprising more political and with a leftist anti-government orientation – especially if compared to the “blind” uprising in France), KKE denounced it, hand in hand with all the bourgeois parties and media. More than that, in December 2008 as well, KKE joined the most reactionary voices condemning the “irresponsible line of SYRIZA, which caresses the young rioters”. The system has rewarded KKE, praising its “responsible” attitude, more than once since December 2008. The last episode so far is that the system keeps focused all its attacks against the… “opportunistic” SYRIZA, sparing the “revolutionary” KKE. That’s a fact that the leadership of KKE (and those outside Greece who shamelessly reproduce its lies) should try to explain. Because, indeed, all this unfounded accusations against SYRIZA would be comical – if they weren’t a bit tragical as well. #

Egypt: Website as an organizer #RevSoc

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Category: Communist Organization

Created on Friday, 14 September 2012 03:10

Written by Jadaliyya

Egypt: Website as an organizer #RevSoc

Posted by Mike E on September 14, 2012

Brick factory worker in Meit Ghamr has his mobile phonehanging from his turban during the work shift. Some falsely argue that online resources are inaccessible to the poor — but even in a country like Egypt online access has deeply penetrated. Photo by Mohamed Ali Eddin

“The lack of interest that comrades in the movement had in acting as correspondents for the site did not only reflect the fact that the site was badly-designed or difficult to browse, but it also had political roots, which can be summarized in the lack of political awareness of the political task that a website must play in a revolutionary movement—that of an organizer.“

The following appeared on Jadaliyya. Thanks to Enaa.

What is to be Done:

The Website as an Organizer #RevSoc

The Revolutionary Socialists Movement launched its new website on 7 August. The site represents a qualitative change in our propaganda work, but it also presents some major challenges to the membership of the movement as a whole and not only to the comrades in the media committee alone.

It is a necessity to provide content on an organized basis for publication, for comrades to continue to act as correspondents for the site, and to extend this correspondence with written reports, pictures, videos, and artistic works (cartoons, stencils, comics). Correspondence with the site is not a luxury or only the responsibility of the small number of comrades who run the site, but it should continue to be the task of the largest possible number of comrades in the movement, if not all of them.

The site is still in an experimental stage, and there are a number of technical problems and tasks which are not finished. The technical team is working on solving or completing them and developing the site to move to the next phase of the project, which includes the establishment of a special multimedia section and a discussion forum for members of the movement.

The transition to the next phase of the site may take several months, as the challenge before us is not just technical, but also political and organizational, as the site will not be able to raise its performance and take on the role it should play without reorganizing the ranks of the movement to serve this new approach to revolutionary work. To clarify this, let us go back a little and give some background on this issue.

A number of well-known comrades from the movement have ben present in the citizen-journalism (blogging) movement since 2005 and the youth of the Revolutionary Socialists (RS) have made increasing use of “alternative media” tools since 2008. However, they generally took individual initiatives and the movement did not have a general strategy for dealing with the internet and social networks which were spreading, although there was a degree of organizational coordination between the RS labor organizers and the movement’s bloggers over the Mahalla strike of September 2007, the Mahalla uprising of April 2008, and the tax-collectors’ sit-in in December 2007, a battle which led to their formation of the first independent union in Egypt since 1957.

The launch of the old site (www.e-socialists.net) on 6 April 2009, the first anniversary of the Mahalla uprising, was a step forward, because for the first time in the movement’s history, a committee was formed to manage the site and organize propaganda work on the internet. At the time, the site provided a good opportunity, to the extent available at the time, to spread our ideas on the internet, provide an archive of literature, win a number of young people to the movement and its ideas, and develop some initiatives and activities which were happening on an individual level and link them to the general orientation of the movement.

Problems

However, there were many problems and shortcomings in the work of the group, such as:

• The site was often an isolated island and the members of the site team had to “hunt down” comrades in order to get reports from them, which often appeared late or did not even make it onto the site.
• The old site was not able to highlight audiovisual content such as photos and videos.
• Despite the rich content of the site, it was difficult for the visitor to browse or find the desired material because of its complexity and the poor organization of its sections.
• The site suffered a number of technical problems because of its irregular maintenance and development, and it kept collapsing under the volume of visits.
• The focus was on the official website, and there was no clear plan for propaganda on the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Scribd, Diigo, and YouTube, despite the establishment of official accounts for the movement on them.

These problems also had a political nature:

• The design of the site with a single large photo in the center with no other visual content highlighted in the form of images, videos, and the design highlighted written content in the form of columns; this reflected the traditional political outlook on the nature of the site, which was that it was no more than an online companion for the content of the print edition of the Socialist newspaper, which at that time appeared monthly.
• The lack of interest that comrades in the movement had in acting as correspondents for the site did not only reflect the fact that the site was badly-designed or difficult to browse, but it also had political roots, which can be summarized in the lack of political awareness of the political task that a website must play in a revolutionary movement—that of an organizer.

Lenin’s book What is to be done? represents the theoretical basis for building Marxist organizations from the last century. In this book, Lenin tries to answer the question that was facing revolutionaries in Russia at the time, and that faces revolutionaries in Egypt today and at any time: how can we build our organization? How can we transform coordination between groups of geographically-dispersed revolutionaries? How can we ensure unity and centralism in reality, and at the same time, create channels of democratic debate between revolutionaries?

Lenin’s answer at the time was a revolutionary newspaper. Every member of the revolutionary organization was also a reporter for the revolutionary newspaper, and their job was to supply the newspaper with reports. But how were these reports produced? The revolutionary correspondent would get involved in any struggle or activity where he lived or worked, and follow these with reports sent to the newspaper, so that this experience would be generalized to all the comrades who read them in other sectors and areas, and the newspaper would create an opportunity for him to connect with this audience and to engage them in his issue.

When you read a report about a factory in an issue of The Socialist, it means that a comrade went to the factory, interacted with the workers and created links with them, and then returned with the report. The process of journalism is a process of organization. It is easy for anyone to sit in the office, browse the net, and write a news story about the factory, but this is not the kind of journalism we want. Sending a report to the paper means that you are engaged on the ground at the same time as you are connected to the rest of the members of the movement, and that you are engaged through the channel which is open between you and the editorial board of the newspaper.

The revolutionary correspondent is not “impartial” and does not pretend to be. The revolutionary correspondent is biased—in favor of the workers in their struggle with management and in favor of the masses in any battle with the authorities. But this does not mean biased in the sense of lies and exaggeration. That is the task of the bourgeois media, not the revolutionary. Sometimes, unfortunately, we see some activist journalists who exaggerate the size of demonstrations so that a demonstration of twenty workers suddenly becomes two thousand, or a defeat of workers in a strike is reported as a victory. The people who do this think mistakenly that they are helping the workers and that this will raise their spirits. But in reality, they are misinforming their audience and their exaggerations could be easily debunked, leading to a loss of credibility.

The organizing revolutionary newspaper, as Lenin explains, plays a role in unifying the stances of the members of the movement in different parts of the country. So a revolutionary socialist, in any place in Egypt, from Alexandria to Aswan, can see through the newspaper the official position of the movement on this issue or that.

But when Lenin wrote these words at the beginning of the twentieth century, news traveled from city to city by postmen on horseback. Even in 1917, when the Russian Revolution broke out, news of the revolution in Petrograd and Moscow could take weeks or sometimes months to reach the rest of the Russian empire.

The situation is different today. News travels at lightning speed, not only inside the country, but even between the five continents of the world. Over the internet and satellite channels it is possible to sit in Cairo and follow news of the Tunisian revolution minute by minute. You can be in Alexandria and connect with British clerical workers having a sit-in at their office in a small town in Scotland over Twitter and Facebook. You can be in Assuit and follow the demonstrations of the Spanish miners via live-streaming over the internet.

The development of the communications sector in Egypt is a glaring example of the “uneven and combined development” of capitalism that Trotsky talked about.

In a country that has a population of around ninety million, in which forty percent of them live below the poverty line, the number of mobile phone subscribers in Egypt has reached ninety-two million—saturation surpassing one-hundred percent of the population, according to the latest report from the Ministry of Communications this May.

According to the same report, the number of internet users has risen to roughly thirty-one million.

It is very interesting to observe the relative distribution of internet users, for we find that the lion’s share of them get online via mobile phones and USB modems, which are constantly falling in price.

The spread of this method of access is progressively enabling social classes beyond the bourgeoisie and the middle class to get online. It is this segment of users that is most likely to increase at a rate surpassing the other sectors.

The tempo of work in every revolutionary movement is set to a large extent by the central organizer. In the 1990s, the newspaper Revolutionary Socialism was the organizer for the movement, and it appeared monthly. This was appropriate to the low level of class struggle, and was also reflected in the small size of the Revolutionary Socialists movement. Today, if we consider the website as the organizer, it means that we must update this site minute by minute, and follow political events and activities that occur in Egypt before any traditional source of expertise. The arrival of reports and updates for the site around the clock translates organizationally into the presence of revolutionary correspondents on the ground getting involved with events and then sending a report to the “center,” which is the site editorial board that establishes, in turn, a faster rhythm of organizational work.

For example, if Al-Masry Al-Youm publishes a news story about a strike in a factory in Mansoura and this does not appear on our site, then we need to ask ourselves why not? If the Revolutionary Socialists have any presence there or connection with the factory, then why did they not send the news immediately to the site? It is just as critical for a worker (who is, in these circumstances, a revolutionary correspondent), to contact the site to spread the vital news of the strike as it is to build barricades to defend the sit-in. Contacting the site at this moment means that the revolutionary worker correspondent is included in a communication network, and the experience of what he does in Mansoura is disseminated immediately to the rest of the members of the movement, as well as all militants interested workers’ struggle. This means they are always ready to offer solidarity and coordinate what they are doing in their own areas with what their comrades are doing in Mansoura.

This once again gives a tremendous push to the acceleration of the rhythm of communication between the different sections of the movement. The presence of revolutionary correspondents on the ground in every province, tasked with supplying the site with constant reports, and accountable when we hear news from their areas via the traditional media rather than from them, means that there are activists on the ground, assigned at all times to throw themselves into events that are happening, and under constant pressure to expand the network of revolutionary correspondents in their provinces, which translates into gains for the membership of the movement.

Suppose a military coup took place today. Would revolutionary socialist cadres across Egypt wait for two or three weeks until the paper appeared to know our position? Or would the leadership of the movement phone and travel to meet each comrade to tell them the line? Here we return to the role of the site as organizer. It is obvious that the site will offer a quick way to connect and announce the official position to members of the movement in different provinces on this or that issue, which requires a rapid, unified reaction.

Newspaper journalists care about written content, but comrades who are correspondents for the site should pay special attention to audio-visual content alongside written reports about the events they are involved in. Photographs and videos are not a luxury, as it is the duty of every comrade involved in a event to make efforts to take photographs or film on a mobile phone. In general, the movement must pay special attention to passing on skills in photography and training in the secure use of email and social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to as much of the membership as possible.

The site will not be a substitute for the paper, and comrades must continue in the hard work of distributing the paper at events, to the network of members, and to sympathizers. Despite the increasing numbers of workers using the internet (whether via mobile, a link at home, or in cyber-cafés), the paper will continue to be an essential means to interact with them. We must do our best to ensure that it is published regularly, but the paper will be a complementary, rather than a central, organizing publication. It may be that the adoption of the website as an organizer is the first step towards the modern answer to the same question posed by Lenin in the last century: what is to be done?

[This article was originally published on 3arabawy.]