.PNG)
The following pamphlet was originally written as a discussion document by the Kasama Project. We are reprinting it here for the value of its approach toward the "pull of the sect" and its insistence on reconception. It is also available as a PDF.
Contributing to Revolution’s Long March
By Enzo Rhyner, J.B. Connors, John Steele, Kobayashi Maru, Mike Ely, Rita Stephan, and Rosa Harris
Overcoming Two Absences
Life on earth is wracked by contradiction. Each moment, especially in our era, throws up new and particular contradictions starkly.
In just the first year of Kasama, we’ve seen the rise of Obama — with all it has meant, including in the thinking of progressive people. And we are standing amid the early shockwaves of a wrenching, global economic crisis that has awakened and alarmed hundreds of millions of people, and re-injected the word “socialism” into public discourse.
And meanwhile, there really is not yet any sense of a revolutionary or communist alternatives on the political radar screen. The intermediate are alarmed and panicky, while many of the most consciously progressive are (in a way never seen in our lifetime) loosely gathered around the new U.S. government.
In future moments, millions of people will organize themselves into upsurges and seek new ways to think, to live and to die. And at such moments, there may be much demanded of communists. To make revolution, large forces need to be united around programs and common visions for an alternative future — and they need to be materialist plans that have an actual hope of achieving liberation.
This world calls out for fearless actions, and the disciplined sacrifice to carry them out. Urgently. Always urgently. Answers will be needed in the midst of major social conjunctures. Lines of demarcation will need to be drawn at each point along the way.
And yet, there it is: At this moment, it is not clear what revolution in the U.S. would look like, or how determined revolutionaries can help advance the conditions for revolution. And there is, at this moment, no existing revolutionary organization with prospects of developing significant roots among oppressed people and their potential allies.
These two absences — of revolutionary strategy and organization in the U.S. — have existed for a long time (despite deception and self-deception). The whole point of forming our Kasama Project is to make a common contribution to filling those voids.
Read more...