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This is being posted in full since it appeared originally on FB. The
author "chegitz guevara" is a rather ubiquitous figure on the Internet
left who might have even been on Marxmail or the Marxism list that
preceded it. I honestly can't remember. He attributes the collapse of
Kasama to the decision made to turn it into a cadre organization.
Surprise, surprise. He also takes issue with my article
(https://louisproyect.org/2016/06/19/notes-on-the-demise-of-the-kasama-project/)
that questions the use of the word communist, a point made eloquently by
Michael Lebowitz. In fact, the Kasama Project was too consumed by the
Marxist-Leninist regalia of hammers and sickles to ever emerge out of
the cocoon.
Whither Kasama?
KASAMA PROJECT·WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2017
by chegitz guevara
(The Kasama Project ceased functioning over a year ago, without issuing
any formal statement. This note, by one of its original supporters,
represents his own viewpoint only, and is shared as a point of
information. The struggle continues.)
At Kasama’s peak, we were the target of an FBI raid and Glenn Beck’s
radio and TV ire. We had a million page hits a year on our blog. We had
comrades who were part of struggle in living history. We were sending
comrades to Nepal and Greece, the Jackson, MS, to investigate the
struggles there first hand. We brought together communist and anarchist
forces up and down the West Coast for the Everything for Everyone
festival. Our comrades played key roles in Occupy around the country
(including the Occupied Wall Street Journal). We were in discussions
with a number of different organizations for a merger of post Occupy
communist organizations. People who weren’t in Kasama, and who were even
opposed to our politics said we were the must read communist blog. And
then one day, Kasama went silent....
==
It’s been more than a year now since the demise of the Kasama Project.
It happened quietly, and to most of the members, unexpectedly and
without warning. One day we learned that much of our leadership had quit
over the previous months. A handful of us tried to keep going, tried to
keep the blog running, but it was only ever a handful of what was left.
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different story as to why things
went south. This is mine. If you’re looking for salacious details, for
dirt, for sectarian infighting, you’re going to be disappointed. Kasama
was the best organization I was ever in. I don’t regret it for a minute.
To understand why Kasama folded, you must understand what K was.
Depending on whom you asked, K was: a bunch of hard Maoists, soft
Maoists, social democrats, liberals, anarchists, Marxist Leninists,
Stalinists, Trotskyites, the RCP-lite, a cult, pigs, or the communist
plot behind Occupy (thank you Glenn Beck). None of that was completely
true, some of it was completely false, and some of it was a little true.
The truth is, few, if any, ever fully understood K, whether inside or
outside the group. Everyone tried to pigeon hole us, figure out what we
were. Hell, we didn’t even know what we were. We were an experiment. We
were riding the tiger trying to figure it out. If anyone who wasn’t in
Kasama tries to tell you what K was, they’re either lying or don’t know
what they’re talking about.
For me, the loss of Kasama was both expected, and a bitter blow. If you
weren’t around at the beginning, you may not understand today how so
many people felt about K, even today, after over a year of relative
silence, and years of decreasing activity.
==
When the Kasama Project began, or rather, when it fired it’s shot across
the bow of Bob Avakian and his cult, the Revolutionary Communist Party,
Facebook wasn’t a factor in people’s lives. The internet left was in
their own isolated email groups and on MySpace, on RevLeft.com. The
Socialism group on MySpace had 10,000 subscribers, and one day in
December of 2007, everyone started discussing Nine Letters to Our
Comrades, aka, The 9 Letters.
Unlike many other papers announcing breaks with a previous organization,
The Nine Letters didn’t announce a split, the formation of a new
organization. It didn’t dish dirt, but talked about systemic problems, a
slow degeneration, opportunities missed, mistakes made, and a failure to
sum up lessons learned.
The one comment I read again and again from people reading The Nine
Letters was, that sounds exactly like my organization. The 9L was a
general indictment of the whole of the left, dealing with the problems
of one particular organization. And the effect was like Luther nailing
his theses to his church door.
==
I’d personally known Comrade Mike Ely, under whose name The Nine Letters
were penned (though he was not the sole author). In Chicago, I’d been
part of the New World Resource Center collective, an
all-points-of-view-on-the-left bookstore. “Mike the Maoist,” as we all
knew him, would come in about once a week or so, and buy a copy of every
new communist and socialist paper, and often talk to the comrades in the
store. We all liked and respected him, even though we disagreed. He was
very respectful to everyone there.
One day at the bookstore, Mike asked me one day what I knew about the
Chinese revolution. Now, as a Trotskyist (at the time), I had a
position: that it was a anti-colonial, national bourgeois revolution,
socialist in name only, blah blah blah. I opened my mouth to say just
that, and I realized this was a teaching moment. I had an opportunity to
learn something. Instead I said, “Nothing really. What can you tell me
about it?”
That was not the answer Mike was expecting and it caught him up short.
Then he got this twinkle in his eye like the Coca Cola Kris Kringle and
said “wait here.” He went through the bookstore (my bookstore!) finding
various books for me to read. That’s the kind of person he is. When he’s
talking to you, he’s giving you his full attention. He gives you the
kind of respect that you don’t often see from anyone these days. And
people respond to that.
Mike encouraged and challenged comrades. When I wrote about the events
leading up to the Haymarket Massacre on an email list, he mentioned it a
few months later, and said what he liked about it, and then offhandedly
mentioned it made him think about something that the article wasn’t
about, how natural disasters often give birth to revolutionary struggle.
That’s the kind of comrade he was and is. It’s no secret Mike was the
heart of Kasama, and probably the driving force.
==
When The Nine Letters came out, I reached out on the blog, talked about
what I felt it represented. I engaged on the blog, and there was a very
different kind of discussion. On most forums where different tendencies
of socialists engaged, then, like on Facebook now, the discussion was
typical of the internet. At best, people were talking past each other,
cherry picking points to “score” against your “opponent,” engaging in
all the worst habits.
On the Kasama blog it was different. People considered each other’s
arguments, wrote to each other respectfully, disagreed as comrades. That
wasn’t accidental. There was heavy moderation, and the worst excesses
were removed, people were gently reminded to engage better.
That manner of discourse began to spread out from Kasama. As I wrote
internally at the time, if K only lasts a few years, if we did nothing
but change the way communists speak to each other, then it served to
advance the struggle. And comrades around the world oriented to that
kind of discussion. When the blog went down for renovation, people who
did not agree with us, kept asking us when it would be restored. For its
first four years, the K blog was averaging a million page hits a year. K
mattered.
==
One other important thing Kasama did was to help bring back the word
communist. While so much of the left was shamefacedly referring to
itself as “revolutionary socialists,” K was openly and proudly
communist. Something that Louis Proyect, in his recent obit on K
considers an error, a problem, that we need to abandon the term
permanently.
Decades ago, after I had split from a tiny Trotskyist sect called The
Spark, a comrade I knew from my time in the group told me about her
experience at work lunch, where she and the other women would talk about
current events. She didn’t call herself a communist, but she expressed a
communist point of view.
Eventually one of the other woman at the table said, “You’re a
communist!” and got up and left the table. The other women were like,
“All that stuff you were talking was communism? You’re a communist?” She
said, “Yeah, I’m a communist.” They said, “Tell us more.”
People aren’t stupid. They’ll figure you out. If you’re a communist, but
won’t own the word, then you’re ashamed of it, and people will see that
too. And I’m not ashamed. I’m proud to be a communist. And Kasama was
proudly communist.
That was our politics: communism. Not Maoist communism, not left
communism, not Trotskyist communism, but communism. We had ex
anarchists, ex Trotskyists, Maoists, left communists. There was no
ideological litmus test, no tendency to which we had to swear
allegiance. We were communists. We were for the revolutionary overthrow
of capitalism. We took the “scientific” in scientific socialism
seriously. We understood the place that making mistakes and being wrong
has in getting to better answers, to a deeper understanding.
We were more interested in figuring out the questions that needed to be
asked, than coming up with a set of ready answers. And that, and
communism, were the golden threads running through the blog. It wasn’t
just politics. It wasn’t just politics we agreed with. We often posted
stuff we disagreed with, in order to engage with it and understand it,
and our own thoughts better. People always asked why we let a
“reactionary” like Carl Davidson post, but they never saw that people
like Carl and others served to help us develop and clarify a
revolutionary communist politics, in distinction to reformist politics.
And not just politics, but music, art, discussions of movies, scientific
advances.
==
Internally, at first, Kasama seemed a lot like a hospice for people
escaping the cult of Bob Avakian. Whatever those of us outside the
Revolutionary Communist Party thought of it pretty much from the 80s
onward, those inside were engaged in a serious struggle with capitalist
society. The rest of us might be trying to organize workers for better
wages and conditions, they were in streets of D.C. in a pitched battle
with the police … even in the hospital to which the injured of both
sides were taken. They were in one of Chicago’s worst projects, Cabrini
Green, organizing people against the evictions and destruction of their
homes. The Chicago Police labeled the RCP a criminal gang because of
this effort. However disconnected from reality those of outside the RCP
thought they were, they were serious. And they were even more serious in
the 70s. If people think the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, that
we were the RCP without Avakianism, well, that’s not really a bad thing
to be.
Being in an organization like the RCP does things to you. It was (is) a
cult, like much of the revolutionary left. You need time to come to
terms with your life, with how you were treated. For the first few years
of K’s existence, we didn’t rush to repeat that experience. Rather than
purposefully, the organization grew organically. We didn’t order the
creation of locals. When the FIRE Collective declared itself a Kasama
collective, it was a bit of a shock to me. In my mind, we were still in
the, let’s figure out what the fuck happened to communism phase. And
then Red Spark was created. And then One Struggle, which wasn’t a Kasama
collective, but we all read and discussed Kasama, and several had direct
relationships with Kasama. And so on. Each one different, each set of
comrades in and around Kasama, figuring out their own way.
I think that openness to experimentation, to allowing comrades to figure
out how to contribute to Kasama, to planting that communist flag, was
the best thing about K. But it never sat well with some comrades. Both
inside Kasama and outside it, there were those comrades who thought we
needed a more cadre style organization, and pushed for it. Two years
ago, that impulse got a full head of steam.
I wasn’t specifically opposed to it. But I always felt that impulse was
more ideologically driven, ‘this is what a communist organization should
be,’ rather than being driven by, ‘this is our analysis of the moment,
this is what we think the organization needs to be to respond to that
moment.’ As K geared up to have its first convention, I asked the
questions, ‘why this? why now?’ and never received an answer.
From the very beginning there was a problem with that plan. The size of
Kasama had been over estimated. The willingness of comrades who couldn’t
make the convention to switch to a cadre mode of organizing wasn’t that
great (the fact they couldn’t rearrange everything to come to a
conference should have been a clue). The new leadership and the
membership had two different realities. And as that dawned on the new
leaders, they began to drift away, one by one.
I’m not saying some of them weren’t engaged in difficult, and
emotionally draining work. They misjudged the organization’s membership,
as well as the political moment in the U.S.
==
I’ve shared this with others, and I’d like to add a bit about the push
for a more cadre organization, as has been explained to me. Hopefully
I’ll do it some justice. From what comrades who knew more than I, Kasama
was reaching the limits of what it could do organizationally, and was
beginning to slowly fade. Some people left, some of those who stayed
were either never that active or began to lose energy (we had not a few
grey heads). Even I noticed that.
What the hope was, was to change Kasama into more of an Iskra type
organization, with more investigation of struggle, using the blog to do
“revolutionary social investigation,” investigate the fault lines in
this society, and aid struggle there. But, we lacked the capacity to do
so. The people with the knowledge to do this didn’t have the time or
energy, and those with the time and energy didn’t know how to do this,
therefore, we needed more of a cadre type organization to build our
capacity.
Another, and much more serious issue also needed to be addressed, that
of male chauvinism and supremacy. Towards the end, there were a couple
serious cases that had to be investigated and dealt with. I wasn’t part
of the process, so I can’t tell you anything about it, but all of those
who were on the investigative committee resigned. They engaged in their
work with the seriousness and commitment such a task requires, and in
the end, it drained them.
With their resignations, we discovered that only two of the original
seven chosen at the convention to lead the organization were still in
the organization. More people drifted away, with only a handful
desperately scurrying to try and hold things together. But that was a
task beyond us.
==
You might ask, where was Mike in all of this. Part of the reason for the
convention and the election of new leadership was to give Mike a break
from running Kasama. Mike announced he was taking some time off running
the blog to write a book or two. This all happened in his absence. And
let’s face it, if we couldn’t manage to keep the organization going
without him, there wasn’t an organization even if he had been there.
I’m not putting the blame on the membership. And I’m not putting the
blame on the leadership for the failure of the organization (though
abandoning us when things got tough, I’m still upset about that).
Kasama outlived, just barely, the political moment that gave birth to
it. It was an expression of what led to Occupy, a revolt, not just
against the system, but against the tired, stale, ossified, sects that
claimed to be communist, or, “revolutionary socialist.” Dozens of new
anti-capitalist collectives appeared just before and in the wake of
Occupy, and Kasama was the north star of that moment.
==
All of that is a sort of history of Kasama, tho. It doesn’t tell you
what we were about. Why were we so vital? And what was the real weakness
that lead to it’s demise.
An anarchist friend of mine describes the fall of the USSR as a blow
from which the world has yet to recover. He likens it to being hit by a
blow which knocks you senseless, in which you’re completely
disassociated with reality. You’re not even trying to get back up, yet,
you’re still unaware of what’s just happened.
In 1970, capitalism was on the ropes. One third of the world’s people
lived under socialist government, revolutions were winning around the
world. In the imperialist centers, there were massive antiimperialist
movements and struggles against the old order. It would be impossible to
conceive at that moment, the situation in which we are today, with the
world’s first workers’ revolution overthrown, with capitalism ruling in
China, Vietnam, and the United States victorious and straddling the
globe like a colossus.
Kasama set its primary task the question of, what happened? How did we
go from winning to total defeat in the span of a generation? What was
there to learn from twentieth century socialism, both positive and
negative? How can we build a twenty first century communist movement?
All the old ideas had failed, regardless of their theoretical and
explanatory power. Old dogmas needed to be shed. We needed to relook at
everything. Retest ideas we thought were solid. Look at old ideas once
rejected. Consider the context of everything. Examine what worked and
why, what failed and why, and what has changed.
Unlike every other communist organization, Kasama didn’t pretend to have
THE answers. We had questions. This was Kasama’s power, why it was so
appealing to so many.
==
Kasama’s power was also its weakness. An organization with answers can
organize people around those answers. It’s much harder to organize
around a question. A lot of people called Kasama a talk shop, and that’s
not completely unfair. Given the state of people recovering from the
Avakian cult, the fact that most of us didn’t live anywhere where Kasama
had more than a couple comrades, Kasama was often largely a virtual network.
Many of us were also stuck in our previous modes of organizing and
thinking. If Kasama didn’t pretend to have THE answers, many comrades in
Kasama still operated as if we already had the answers, answers we’d
learned in previous groups, when we needed radical new thinking. This is
a weakness we never overcame, and I think the change Kasama made was
rooted in this failure to overcome outmoded ideas. As time went on, it
became more and more difficult to make Kasama move. It was becoming
ossified in its own form of disorganization. Kasama needed to change,
but the change and the discussion were rushed in some ways, and rather
than being healthy, ultimately broke the network.
I think the change we made was a mistake. I think Kasama functioned best
as a network of comrades who participated in the struggle in their own
ways, as way of putting ideas and culture back into the communist left,
as an ideal to strive for. We needed to change, but we made change the
wrong way.
==
Everything has a birth, growth, decline, and end. Revolutionary
organizations are no different (and some of them need to realize that).
If an organization exists for more than a couple decades without
participating in a revolution, it’s ceased being an organization for
revolution, and has become an organization for self-perpetuation. It’s
become its own reason for existing. While I am sad Kasama is no more, I
am glad it ended well before it became its own purpose.
It’s said in show business you should end leaving your audience wanting
more. Kasama did that. We ended before we became a stale, ossified sect.
But we still need a Kasama. The tasks Kasama tried to carry out still
need to be carried out. The revolution waits for no one.
Lal salaam, comrades!
Post Script: I want to mention a last word here about organizational
security. In Louis Proyect’s laughable obit on Kasama (to which this is
a rather belated response), he calls us obsessed with paranoia and security.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, Kasama got raided by the FBI when the
Feds were going after the anarchists in the Northwest. In fact, K was
the first raided. Glenn Beck was regularly calling out the name of one
of our comrades on his program, as the mastermind behind Occupy and the
link with The Coming Insurrection. And that’s just the stuff I’m gonna
mention.
And not all the threats to K were from the state or the right. Some very
disturbed, left wing individuals made credible threats against the lives
of some of our members. A comrade’s mother was doxxed, by a “comrade.”
And that’s just the stuff from the left I’m gonna mention.
And two people very close to us were murdered (though not for political
reasons).
As Louis should remember well from his own life, revolutionary politics
is not a game, even if some so-called comrades don’t take it seriously.
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