It's spring break, we've got a new revolutionary collective, let's hang out together and celebrate!

We'll be having a social for everyone to get to know each other, and for people who are interested in connecting with us to have a place to come and meet. Agora (1712 Westheimer) @ 7 P.M.

Compiled by Eric Ribellarsi and Toni Kim

” Women being not only oppressed among all the oppressed groups, but also the last group to be liberated are the most reliable, stable, and basic force which needs to be tapped not only in winning the revolution but also in waging continuous revolution.”

” Being left behind in history by no fault of their own, they need to be given space to make mistakes and to learn from them.” -Parvati

In 2006, the Nepali Maoist leader Hisila Yami (Comrade Parvati) published a new work, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal. This work discusses the experience of the Nepalese revolution and the new approach to women’s liberation that this revolution has developed. Sadly, very few in the West have had access to this work.

We would like to make available a few excerpts from this work which underscore the creativity and new approach being developed by Parvati and the Nepali comrades, as well as some the problems and questions that they are still grappling with in order to move forward in the revolutionary process.

This work has several theses which we have found helpful and interesting, including:

• The oppression of women rose with class society itself, and can only go out of existence with the abolition of class society. The oppression of women is a fundamental contradiction, as fundamental as the class struggle itself.
• Parvati believes that women’s struggle for liberation is fundamental to continuing the revolutionary struggle under socialism. Whereas, in China, emphasis was placed on the existence of equality between men and women with slogans like “women hold up half the sky” and “times have changed, men and women are the same,” Parvati places emphasis on the view that these goals can only be achieved in a communist future. She believes that the women’s struggle is central to carrying forward revolutionary struggle under socialism.
• Much time has been spent in her work to deal with the problems of the lack women’s leadership in revolutionary struggles. She argues that given thousands of years of class society and the way that women have been locked out of theory–not by any fault of their own–it is no surprise that many female comrades have not yet been able to develop as much theoretically. She argues that male comrades need to consciously create a space in the revolutionary struggle for female comrades to be able to step in and do theoretical work.
• Parvati believes that the legacy of Stalin and viewing things as singularities or monoliths (instead of viewing things as unities of opposites) continues to stand in the way of developing women’s leadership in the revolutionary struggle. She argues that many comrades have a tendency to prevent women from becoming leaders for fear that they will make mistakes. Certainly mistakes will be made, but this is part of the contradictory process of developing communist leadership, and not something we should be afraid of.
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props to fafblog! for the following

We know that Barack Obama, in his heart of hearts, truly wants Real Change. We can tell this by examining the furrows of his brow as he squints meaningfully into the middle distance, by carefully measuring the sincerity-per-pixel count of his campaign posters, by reflecting on the inspirational Martin Luther King quotes he delicately intones before carpet-bombing an Afghan village. But we also know that despite his best efforts, Barack Obama can't achieve Real Change, confounded as he is by such institutional barriers as Congress and the Pentagon and Barack Obama. We know, for example, that Barack Obama wants nothing less than a sweeping overhaul of America's health care system, but has been hopelessly blocked at every turn by conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama. And we know that Barack Obama did everything he could to oppose a trillion-dollar no-strings-attached bailout of a corrupt finance industry, but was helpless to stop it, boosted as it was by notorious corporate whore Barack Obama. And we know that Nobel Laureate Barack Obama is a devout lover of peace, but has been powerless to prevent the American military's rampant bloodletting throughout the Muslim world, as the nation's armed forces remain in the hands of that bloodthirsty warmonger Barack Obama.

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How can there be revolution in a world where so many of our comrades have suffered from lowered sights or settled for isolation and orthodoxy? How should our generation understand this society we are a part of, and what future possibilities lie within it? How can radical people chart our still-uncharted course, and learn to act in ways that are both deeply radical, but shockingly undogmatic at the same time?

Study Group Flyer

We will be discussing Part 1, "It's Ideology, stupid!," of Slavoj Zizek's "First as Tragedy, Then Farce." Get in touch with us if you need a copy.

March 09, 2010 At 07:00 PM, Dirk's Coffee 4005 Montrose Blvd.

Special thanks to Ernesto Aguilar for designing these new flyers for the study group!

Download PDF

This week, Glenn Beck ran a red-baiting smear attack against Jed Brandt, a communist from the Kasama Project for advocating revolution. Jed Brandt is right on, we do need a revolution!

The following originally appeared on the Kasama site. It is being reposted here for study

by Mike Ely

I wrote:

“Revolutionary rumblings [in the 1960s] didn’t take the form of “class against class” in the U.S. — and never will.

Bryan writes:

“Revolutionary rumblings will take the form of “class against class,” in this country and around the world….You don’t claim to be Marxists still, do you?”

There is a great transition happening in human society — breaking out of the sharp contradiction between social production and private appropriation. But to think that takes the form of workers gathering over here, and capitalists gathering over there — and then a rumble…. well that is non-materialist and non-Marxist (if you will).

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It's difficult to watch this video and not have a myriad of emotions flow over you. For me the feelings of; sadness, anger, depression, and then finally a bit of indignant laughter. There's so much wrong in this video it can be a bit difficult to digest.

So after watching the clip, a question comes up:

How will the message come through to people that no matter how painful a truth might be, it's still true? This specific truth in particular being that there are no sky daddies up there watching their every move and further, that there most certainly is no doubt that the myths they have been taught through their Bible are just that... myths. Oh! and that evolution... errr... eviloution is indeed fact!

After all, doesn't understanding the way things actually are matter if we intend to change things for the better?