The "Kasama Project"

September 21 2008

Kasama is a social-democratic project that claims to have broken away from the "Revolutionary Communist Party." Included in Kasama ranks are people who worked with Avakian for decades.

When Mike Ely's "9 Letters" first came out,(1) I read them and found them substance-less relative to what was necessary to justify a new organization. The alleged split with Bob Avakian seemed so fake, it could at best be described as an artificially manufactured split created for political purposes. Not for a minute did I believe there was really any split from Avakian. In all likelihood, some minor hub-bub arose to cover for the Democratic Party reminiscent of what CIA writers said faction struggle was really about in China-- nothing real.

This week, the Avakianites released some more supposed admissions about what has happened(2) in addition to 36 pages of substance replying to Kasama.(3) Now the claim is that Avakian launched a Cultural Revolution inside the party five years ago and recently the struggle came to a head where a majority of the party ended up purged. Oddly enough, this is exactly what we recommended to RCP=U$A, that they purge people and "send them off to their Committees of Correspondence futures." Sure enough, that's exactly what it looks like.

On a veiled basis, more recent documents imply who the Kasama leaders are and also contest who is responsible for threats against MIM.

People familiar with anti-revisionism since the 1960s know that a slogan like "drive out the Bush regime" still upheld by Avakian is a very recent sell-out to Democrats. Yet, Avakianites are claiming they are not pro-Democrat.

What it is is an enthusiastic less veiled bunch of social-democrats breaking from more veiled social-democrats. It has happened many times before in history, but we could expect nothing less when RCP=u$a promoted pursuit of the 51% majority and "elasticity" latching the bourgeoisie onto the back of the proletariat.

Also as of today, Mike Ely says the "RCP" has just now abandoned Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to stress Avakian's contributions and the "new stage of communism" with all the old revolutions dead and no socialist states being around.(4)

The participants at Kasama excel in gutting struggle and coming up with self-contradicting lines. They latch themselves together with massive doses of opportunism which can only serve the Democratic Party, not Marxism.

Kasama opposes harsh struggle, and the reason is that both Kasama and "RCP" believe in "in your face" hand-holding. As MIM spells out in its critique of the PLP, such an approach does not work in a predominantly petty-bourgeois population not escaping monarchism. By definition, the vanguard is people who can operate independently and struggle hard. The MIM line should be scientific and available, because we do not rely on spontaneity, but that is not the same thing as saying people who need confronting all the time are vanguard material. MIM has more of a "seduce away" and "make-'em-chew" approach, not a "get in there in an organization and compete" approach. Our last thoughts on organization pointed toward separate cells, no hand-holding allowed. Advances in the Internet and anonymous reasoning have made this approach to vanguard-building possible.

MIM would say people who want to sell out should sell out. The people at Kasama have their reasons, but they should not claim to be Marxist anymore. That is all. Do the proletarian revolution thing or do the bourgeois politics thing, but not both at the same time. "Embrace and not replace" as Avakian says does not apply to embracing bourgeois politics simultaneously with proletarian politics.

The Kasama project has taken up individual aspects of MIM line--MIM's decades old stance against persynality cults and gay-bashing for example. What Kasama lacks is really any cardinal principles to form a coherent organization.

As we discuss in another document:

Certain lines of attack are obvious for leading to the Democratic Party.
1. Gotta have 51% in the united $tates. Says who? The Democrats.
2. Gun control is a good thing. Says who? Inner-city Democrats.
3. "Trotskyite" is just a Stalinist insult crushing "dissent." Says who? Democrats who don't care about the substance of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
4. People who support the war on Afghanistan are proletariat, good people. Says who? Democrats.

In this last case the entire war on Afghanistan is a matter of "tactics" for pragmatists calling themselves Maoist. Where one stands on the war on Afghanistan or wimmin and Iran does not matter that much to these people, because their goal is a strategy to support Democrats while calling it something else in order to broaden the appeal of the Democratic Party using as many rubrics as possible, including secret rubrics.

Easy-going unity can only lead to the Democrats. The rest of us have to fight an uphill battle toward communism.

Notes:
1. http://mikeely.wordpress.com/9-letters/
2. "Communism, the beginning of a new stage: A manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA" September, 2008 www.rwor.org
3. http://revcom.us/a/polemics/NineLettersResponse.pdf
4. http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/new-constitution-of-the-rcp-stamped-by-avakians-synthesis/