Order pre-printed pamphlets for mail delivery: Kasama Press is now available. Order Kasama writings online — and have the high quality printed pamphlets delivered to you by mail. 15 different Kasama essays are now available for order.

Or download them and print them yourself: The following pamphlets and  flyers are available here in PDF form — to read , print and circulate on lit tables.
* * * * * *

Where’s Our Mississippi?
Memories of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964

By John Steele

(Available here in web format)

In the summer of 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. They are known to the world as Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. But back then, in the days before they died, I knew them as Andy, JE, and Mickey.

I want to share with you my memories of the time we drove south together to join the Mississippi Freedom Summer project. I want to tell a bit of the story of that summer, and tell it for a purpose. I believe it has implications for today.

* * * * * *

Revolution in India – Lalgarh’s Hopeful Spark

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.

* * * * * * *

click for the printable pamphlet

This first-hand account of communist work in the coalfields available as a printable pamphlet:

Ambush at Keystone No. 1:
Inside the Coalminers’ Great Gas Protest of 1974

[available in web version here]

by Mike Ely

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.

* * * * * * *

The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

[Available in a web version on Kasama.]

by Chris Day

* * * * * * *

Click for the pamphlet

Kasama Articles: On the Maobadi and the Crisis in Nepal

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.

* * * * * * *

Open Letter to the Communist Party of Nepal (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…”

Click for the pdf pamphlet

* * * * * *

Shaping the Kasama Project: Contributing to Revolution’s Long March

A Discussion Paper by Enzo Rhyner, J.B. Connors, John Steele, Kobayashi Maru, Mike Ely, Rita Stephan, and Rosa Harris

includes the previous web docs:t 1: Grabbing Pitchfork or Theoretical Knife, 2: Revolutionary Work and the Pull of the Sect

Excerpt:

We are trying to build something new and very revolutionary from scratch — based on the “9 Letters” call for a radically different kind of communist politics, and based on the work we have done together since that call….

We will not arrive on the scene like some magical galvanizing thunderburst to tell everyone else what to think and do. Let’s have some scientific non-messianic modesty and not perpetuate Avakian-style grandiosity. We will strain to make real contributions. There may be contributions that only we can make. And that matters. But we expect much from many other people.

Forming a new sect would be not breaking with the errors that brought us here. The theoretical knife has to cut deeper.

* * * * * *

This Kasama leaflet in color and black-and-white.

They told us communism is dead & capitalism is forever…. THINK AGAIN

THEY TELL US: You have to give the banks trillions because “We can’t live without this financial system.” Sure we can! We don’t need these mountains of debts and mortgages, or these parasites robbing the whole world. We don’t need a system where nothing moves unless some monstrous corporation can get fat off of it. Their profit and survival is not our concern. Let them fall! We have dreams of something better, where human beings not dollars rule. Let’s take over the banks, and the corporations, and control them ourselves, or take them apart when their only function is exploitation. Let’s have a socialist revolution where debts are canceled, and human beings are not measured by money, where all the crimes of this system are uprooted. And where we concern ourselves with a whole world of humanity, not with their bottom lines and profit margins.

* * * * * *

Click to read

Two Lines Over Maoist Revolution in Nepal

Five Letters from the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

from the Letter of the CPN (Maoist):

“The past ten years have not been years of smooth sailing for us. We have gone through twists and turns, ups and downs, and rights and lefts. Every revolution does so. When we applied our line in revolutionary practice, it not only developed People’s War in leaps but also started generating new ideas so as to enrich the philosophical arsenal of MLM. It is known to your Party that the experiences and the set of new ideas that we gathered from the revolutionary practice of the initial five years had already been synthesized as Prachanda Path in 2001. It is heading towards a higher level of another synthesis.

“From the time when we established our proletarian internationalist relations with your Party…  we have not found your Party satisfied with our political line and tactics at different historical turning points. Even now, your Party, RCP, USA, is looking at our Party mainly with the same eyes with which it used to see 15 years before. Frankly, RCP never correctly understood our Party, its political line and the tactics we adopted at times. The traditional way of thinking and the dogmatic understanding of MLM that the RCP is suffering from has made your Party unable to understand ours at every turning point of history….  It is because your way of thinking is subjective and does not follow the mass line. The present letter is a proof of that. However, it is our firm belief that with the correct grasp of MLM and its creative application in our particularity we will be able to establish a new democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat, possibly soon in our country, which will objectively prove your disagreement, serious criticism and indirect accusation of revisionism raised in the letter to be utterly subjective and wrong.

* * * * * *

Avakian’s Assessment of Thomas Jefferson:
A Critical Reading

By Pavel Andreyev

Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the RCPand other Maoist organizations.

The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an “unsparing critique of the history…of American society” and is promoting it with the same urgency it devoted to the author’s Away With All Gods!earlier this year… What follows is a contribution to a critique, addressing approximately the first quarter of the work (dealing with Jefferson, his life and thought) rather than a review of the entirety. I’ll raise some questions about how we should relate to historical facts, the issue of “progress” or “directionality” in history, and the evaluation of individuals in historical periods far removed from us. In AWAG!Avakian remarks provocatively that if Jesus were alive today we wouldn’t and shouldn’t like him very much (mainly because he accepted slavery).  Similarly he would like us to dislike Thomas Jefferson, whom he depicts as a cynical, demagogic, slave-owning oppressor. But his depiction of the individual (whatever its own merits) is less the issue than the use of this depiction to broadly characterize and explain over two centuries of “Jeffersonian democracy.”

* * * * * *

Avakian’s Away With all Gods!:
Critiquing Religion Without Understanding It

By Pavel Andreyev

Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the
Revolutionary Communist Party and other Maoist organizations.

It would be wrong to suppose that Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (Chicago, Insight Press, 2008 ) is just a book.

It’s in fact a campaign by some highly motivated people to promote atheism, and a certain critique of religion (including “Christian Fascism”) in American life.

Authored by the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, it has been advertised for months with great fanfare…

Even the most significant and original contributions to religious studies are seldom publicized with this sort of (dare I say religious?) excitement. Party expectations are obviously high….

Committed to atheism and historical materialism, I myself am in principle totally sympathetic to the project. If I thought it was done well and effectively I would applaud it.

* * * * * *

9 Letters to Our Comrades:
Getting Beyond Avakian’s New Synthesis

by Mike Ely

How do we make revolution in a world that seems to conspire against liberation? With apparent singlemindedness, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) has been insisting that its leader, Bob Avakian, has the answers for humanity.

His new theoretical synthesis (this party says) is a major rupture with, and leap beyond, even the best of previous communism, including Marx, Lenin and Mao. And (this party says) this New Synthesis represents the best and even only hope for the future.

The Nine Letters unfold a detailed Maoist critique of Avakian’s synthesis. It engages and criticizes Avakian’s claims and methods.

The main author is Mike Ely, a former editor of the RCP’s Revolution newspaper. These Nine Letters”excavate the RCP’s inability to establish any mass base or revolutionary movement over more than thirty-five years.

They dissect the RCP’s escalating cult of personality around Avakian – with special focus on the cult’s theoretical assumptions, denial of practice, and implications for revolutionary strategy.

In a beginning way, these Nine Letters point to a different road for communists and call on others to join in a very presumptuous work of re-conception and new revolutionary practice.
* * * * * *

At a Fork in the Road:
A Debriefing of the RCP

by Bill Martin

The main orientation of many of my posts will be to continue what I’m going to call “a debriefment of Maoism,” with the aim of generating some terms for the next phase.

Here and there I hope to show how Alain Badiou helps us move beyond a revolutionary sequence that has become “saturated,” to use his terminology. Ultimately I hope to combine all the posts into a little book, something that would constitute a kind of “workbook” of “post-Maoism.”

I am interested in “getting there from here,” where “here” is the Maoist current in communism. But this is not only a complicated question (as I hope to demonstrate in these posts, including the present one), it may even be that there are pathways that certain currents of Maoism have taken that are effectively precluded from getting “there” (that is, revolution).

It may even be that we simply have to accept a fundamental disconnect between “here” and “there,” that seems to be one upshot of Badiou’s theory of truth-events.

* * * * * *

Cost of Empire:
“Time Bombs,” Anarchy, Guns and the New Depression

by Eddy Laing

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”
(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

Among its other qualities, capitalist production is governed by an incessant chase to realize exchange-value.

The circuit of capital is only concluded by selling the commodity, whatever it is, and converting the surplus-labor concretized in it into money (which can then be re-activated in the next circuit).

While every commodity must meet a social use-value in order for it to find a buyer, there is no over-all conceptualization of the extent of the social need that any set of commodities might fulfill.

There are quite typically many more commodities produced than can be circulated (at a profit) by capitalist markets. This applies to bushels of corn as well as clothing as well as sport utility vehicles.

* * * * * *

Slipping Into Darkness:
The Last Revolutionary Years of the Communist Party (1929-35)

by Mike Ely

This analysis examines the period considered by some the “good years” (i.e. the revolutionary period from 1928-1935) of the Communist Party of the U.S. The piece was originally written in 1980 right after I had left the coalfi elds.

It was based on research into this history but also our own experience of trying to develop revolutionary organization among workers using a left-economist approach. As I re-read this piece, after so many years, there were inevitably new questions that came to mind — but I won’t get into them here. I just want to off er it online because it think it raises important questions about how does revolutionary consciousness develop among the oppressed and because it speaks to issues around trade union organizing that have re-emerged among a new generation of revolutionaries.

I look forward to correspondence and discussion with any of you who would like to explore these historical and political questions together.

* * * * * * *

Eyes on the Maobadi:
4 Reasons Nepal’s Revolution Matters

by Mike Ely

Something remarkable is happening. A whole generation of people has never seen a radical, secular, revolutionary movement rise with popular support. And yet here it is – in Nepal today.

This movement has overthrown Nepal’s hated King Gyanendra and abolished the medieval monarchy. It has created a revolutionary army that now squares off with the old King’s army.

It has built parallel political power in remote rural areas over a decade of guerrilla war – undermining feudal traditions like the caste system.

It has gathered broad popular support and emerged as the leading force of an unprecedented Constituent Assembly (CA).

And it has done all this under the radical banner of Maoist communism — advocating a fresh attempt at socialism and a classless society around the world.

People in Nepal call these revolutionaries the Maobadi.

* * * * * * *

Kasama: Walk the Revolutionary Road with Us

[Printable flyer]

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. At the same time, we will not shrink from what we do know: the solutions cannot be found within an imperialist 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.We need a movement that can listen, as well as speak.