Kasama Project

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The Kasama Project is a United States-based network of people organized to support a communist project for the overthrow and transformation of all oppressive social conditions.

They recently explained their larger purpose in a statement on the Occupy Wall street:

"Above all: Let’s consciously go for the whole thing!
"The change we want is about taking the accumulated wealth, technology, hard work, science, and connections of a complex global civilization — and finally (finally!) putting it into the service of us all, including the very least and previously powerless among us. It is about the voiceless suddenly speaking, and the wealthy suddenly becoming silent.
"This is not about “budget financing” (!) but about power in the most fundamental sense. We don’t want to tax the zillionaires of finance capital — we need to rip their zombie hands from the throats of us all…. so we can breathe, perhaps for the first time in our lives. And so we can change the whole direction of the world.
"The “freedom” we want is not the individual license promoted by smug Republican ideologues (the freedom of “up with me, you suck”). Instead, we need to seek the freedom of people, together, to shape their common world — an ethos of mutual caring and solidarity That is the freedom (the ability and possibility) that comes when new power of the people wrenches everything from the very few.
"A revolution starts in ideas and mutual recognition. It then moves to the terrain of power."[1]

Kasama began as a website hosted by Mike Ely, an activist formerly with the Revolutionary Communist Party USA. Ely authored Nine Letters to Our Comrades[2], in which he critiqued the RCP, USA's "new synthesis" theory.

Since then, Kasama has attracted many people from many other radical trends to a program of "reconceiving while we regroup." Kasama believes there are "two absences" in the United States, both that of revolutionary theory, and that of revolutionary organization. In order to resolve these problems, Kasama wants to open up a process of reconception together with others outside of its organization and network to listen and learn with them in a common process of reconception.[3]

Kasama is affiliated with Khukuri, a website on Marxist theory, and Revolution in South Asia, which primarily covers struggles in India and Nepal. In addition, a Houston, Texas-based group, the FIRE Collective, has a close relationship with Kasama.

In the Tagalog language, Kasama is the word for traveling companions, in this context, it is intended to mean co-thinkers and fellow fighters walking a revolutionary road together.

Kasama Project statements and websites

Kasama Project affiliated websites

References

  1. ^ "It is five minutes to dawn and the wind smells like freedom". The Kasama Project. November 2007. http://kasamaproject.org/2011/10/14/suddenly-it-is-five-minutes-to-dawn-and-the-wind-smells-like-freedom/. 
  2. ^ "Nine Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian's New Synthesis". Kasama Pamphlets. The Kasama Project. November 2007. http://kasamaproject.org/pamphlets/9-letters/. 
  3. ^ "Kasama: Contributing to Revolution’s Long March". Kasama Pamphlets. The Kasama Project. May 2009. http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/kasama_pamphlet_shaping_the_kasama_project_pdf.pdf. 
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