Club Jacobin

It’s been sad watching the Kasama website — sometimes one of the most interesting websites on the American Left — take a turn for the sectarian and away from serious politics in recent months. Sad, but not altogether surprising.

Kasama is originally the brainchild of Mike Ely, a longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and one of the last relatively sane people left in that organization. (That is, until he left the RCP two or three years ago.)

Kasama now exists as both a website and a political organization named the Kasama Project. In the two years or so that they’ve been online, they have regularly published interesting articles (usually reprints but some original material) and developed a base of followers and commenters, whose discussion is also interesting though uneven. They just passed two and a half million pageviews since they set up shop, which is no mean feat.

As a site for interesting discussions there’s not much bad stuff to say about Kasama. (Although their heavy-handed moderation policies do tend to shut down interesting discussions that cut too close to home for Ely and other site moderators.) But the political organization side of the whole endeavoring has always been more baffling, and more disappointing.

The name actually does a good job summing up the problems with the organization. “Kasama” is a name that will not immediately have any meaning for the large majority of Americans, including the advanced among them. Kasama is (more or less) the Tagalog word for “comrade.” I hesitate to say that the name is pure appropriation (I imagine they would say that it is a statement of internationalism) — though, to judge by their writings, no one involved in the project has much of a connection to struggles in the Philippines or in the Filipino diaspora. What it does do is convey the idea that whatever they are about comes from outside the experience of the American masses and needs translation to be intelligible by the masses in America.

The other part of the name — “Project” — is equally revealing. You’ll notice that it’s not a “Party” (a fact which does at least put them in a better place than most American Left sects). That’s part of what the site and the project are all about. “Reconceive as we regroup” is the slogan of the whole effort; the idea is to abandon the parts of Communist theory and practice that are exhausted (to use the terminology of Badiou, for whom the Kasama members have an inexplicable and irrepressible hard-on) while making new theory to “chart the uncharted course.” (They like these strange unsourced quotes in quotation marks; I think it’s a vestigial trait from the RCP). In other words the goal is to develop theory capable of building a revolutionary movement in the United States.

That’s all well and good, of course. The revolutionary Left in this country badly needs to revisit old assumptions and create new theory. The problem is that after two years the Kasama site and the Kasama project don’t really have any new theory or ideas to show for their troubles. Indeed, they seem to be allergic to actually coming up with hypotheses that could be tested by revolutionary praxis. Pick any subject: the Black Panther Party; Queer liberation; Obama; Afghanistan; Nepal; Lady Gaga. Chances are the Kasama site posted some articles about it, sparked some interesting discussion in the blog comments about the topic, and then before coming to any kind of conclusions, dropped the subject to move on to the next article posted. When another article is later posted revisiting the original subject, the discussion begins again from square one.

But at some point, a political organization needs to make choices: adopt view A, and reject opposing view B. In must organize itself on particular views of how revolutionary change happens, on the appropriate political vehicles and methods in a given society, etc. At some point it’s necessary to decide: is a Party needed? Maybe a Front instead of a Party? Or a discussion network only? Of course no decision needs to be final — it might be (and should be) revised in light of practice and new experiences. But a serious political organization needs to stake out some claims and demonstrate their correctness through its practice. Kasama can’t remain simply a “project” forever.

It’s possible that more concrete work is taken place within the “project,” out of view of the blog. Even if that’s the case, so far they have not offered any theoretical views to the public, with very minor exceptions. Do they believe in a Leninist Party? Do they have a view on who the revolutionary agent or agents are in the United States? How about a program to deal with the financial crisis? Views on left refoundation or regroupment? Frankly, until they take some stands on issues like this, there isn’t much ground to consider them to be a revolutionary Left organization rather than a left-oriented online discussion circle.

You may be asking: what about their mass work and daily organizing? Surely that legitimates their claim to be a political organization. And it might, if they did any. But there is precious little. The closest they come seems to be a side-blog they run that posts information about Maoists in Nepal and India. That’s laudable and all but it isn’t mass work and it isn’t the kind of work in which theories of revolutionary organization and agitation can be tested and improved. As is often the case, it’s useful here to remember what the Chairman said:

Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone … Man’s knowledge makes another leap through the test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one. For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap in cognition, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no other way of testing truth.

The idea that a small organization, overwhelmingly made up of white men, can sit down and “reconceive” the correct revolutionary course for this incredibly complex nation of 300 million people is — well, “arrogant” would be the kindest thing that you can say about it.

For that reason I’ve started to think of the Kasamaites as Maoist Jacobites. That’s Jacobites as in the loyalists of the Stuart monarchs in Britain, who kept the idea of the true king somewhere over the seas alive decades past any real possibility of a Stuart restoration. The connotation is a political movement that believes in victory through virtuous fidelity to an ideal, rather than effective political organizing.

Similarly, the guiding principle of Kasama seems to be that any real mass work leads to economism or tailing the Democratic Party, NGOism or whatever other synonym you can think of for losing your revolutionary spirit and politics. Of course those are real dangers which have afflicted many revolutionaries in America. But it’s pure idealism to think that revolutionary theory will do better from sterile reconception by a small group who have no mechanism to test or transform their ideas.

To be clear: I’m all for revolutionary-minded folks getting together to theorize and organize (and white men no less than any others). And small groups do indeed sometimes grow into huge parties — we all know about the Chinese Communist Party, the SACP, etc. But in order to develop the correct line that lets such growth take place, there need to be persistent attempts made to put the current theories into practice, and a fearless willingness to revise theoretical assumptions, organizational methods and even personal standing that we’ve long held dear.

I haven’t publicly voiced my concerns about the direction of the Kasama project before because I know that it takes time to sort out the lessons of a long and complex experience like that which the Kasama folks had with the RCP, and after that it takes more time still to formulate some ideas and figure out how to start implementing them. For a project cohered online, where people may live hundreds of miles away from each other and therefore have less opportunity for joint mass work in any offline milieu, the challenges are even more daunting. They deserve real credit for trying to do these things, and for having their much of their discussions in a public forum. Thanks to that, we can begin to see glimmers of the possibilities that 21st century technologies offer for revolutionary organizing.

But it is necessary to speak out when things appear to take a turn to the wrong direction. That’s what seems to be happening at Kasama. Recent discussions about electoral projects began to take a sharply sectarian edge. Revolutionary left groups and individuals who suggested some kind of political organizing within the Democratic were attacked and derided in terms that normally get a person banned from the site. This crescendoed with the cheerful article “They Expect Us To Eat Shit,” written by Mike Ely under one of his pseudonyms.

We all have our shibboleths, of course. But this behavior sets of big warning bells because the Kasama project does not, as far as I can tell, have an official position on electoral work or a theoretical view of the American political system. This combination suggests the worst possible state of affairs: an undeclared dogma. This is a familiar problem of small and insular political groups; the prejudices and inclinations of the founding individuals define the group, but because they aren’t declared or officially stated, there is no mechanism to challenge them when they need to be challenged. This is, as I said, a common thing for small groups, but it’s one that needs to be vigorously resisted if the group wants to avoid complete ossification.

In keeping with the rise in sectarian sentiment and the unwillingness to engage in patient mass work, Kasama has begun to focus on get-rich-quick schemes of becoming a mass political force overnight. This was first rolled out in Mike Ely’s proposal for a viral video about the exploitation of workers who assemble or make components for cell phones and other electronic projects.

That was followed up by Mike’s call for organized efforts to make his article on Thanksgiving to “go viral.” The logic is that this piece got around 5,000 views on the week of Thanksgiving; Mike “suspects” that the piece is viewed tens of thousands of times a year, so how hard could it be to get it viewed hundreds of thousands of times?

The fascination with “going viral” is symptomatic of a political approach which rejects patient mass organizing. If they weren’t suffering from lingering RCP-imposed myopia, the Kasama folks might wonder why the two dozen other revolutionary left organizations in the United States aren’t making videos and articles “go viral” in order to promote themselves.

It’s not because it never occurred to them that more exposure would be a positive thing, or that they could avail themselves of youtube and facebook. It has a lot more to do with the fact that making something “go viral” is hard work, requiring talent, time, and very specific skills; and that even with all of those it takes a lot of good luck. And on top of that, when you’ve invested time and resources into making your Communist viral video, what long-term political effects is it going to have?

Hopefully Kasama will snap out of the downward spiral that they seem to be entering into. My comradely advice to them is to worry less about polemics and less about rhetorical harangues of “Why don’t people try X? What would it mean if people did Y?” Focus instead on finding a revolutionary praxis which will allow their ideas to develop and to improve through connection to real-world struggles.

Do some real political work. If you want to focus on making viral videos, that’s fine. Don’t just talk about it: try to actually do it. I would recommend talking with folks in Students Against Sweatshops, who have been doing consumer political exposure for years and have some good ideas about what works and what doesn’t work. Lay out a plan to produce something and what response you anticipate. Then carry it out and adjust your analysis of current conditions and political possibilities accordingly. If you have trouble with resources, seek partners among existing Left organizations.

If Kasama means “companions who travel the road together” — to my friends in Kasama I say step off the couch and start walking down that road for real!