New joint-publication ‘KITES’ launched by R.I. and O.C.R

Revolutionary Initiative is pleased to announce a new theoretical collaboration it is involved with, kites: a journal of communist theory and strategy — a project jointly undertaken with comrades of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) based out of the US and the kites Editorial Committee.

For more information about this collaboration, visit the ‘About us’ section over at the publication’s new website, www.Kites-Journal.org.

Speaking for ourselves, Revolutionary Initiative sees in project a bold step in the direction of intensifying its theoretical exchange, collaboration, and unity-struggle-transformation with other committed communist and proletarian revolutionaries elements, networks, collectives, and organizations across North America who can be unified towards the common ends of destroying capitalism-imperialism and organizing socialist revolution. You can read the mandate we have taken up in the editorial introduction penned by Amil K. for the Editorial Committee, “The Contraband of Revolutionary Theory.”

Leading the founding issue is the republication of Part I of The Spectre that Still Haunts series by Kenny Lake — “The Proletariat: What it is, what it ain’t” — a series that comrades in both RI and OCR have been studying for a number of years as we continue to grapple with how to understand and organize the proletariat in the 21st century. This series was only partially published in the last two issues of RI’s theoretical journal Uprising (the entire series can be found at RI’s website). However, with the emergence of kites, the entire series will now be published from the start on the wider and more appropriate, cross-organizational platform that kites will constitute.  For the time being, Uprising is discontinued, but RI’s website will remain fully active and functional as a place for any future articles, interventions, and summations of RI work (many of which will be published with and printed in kites).

Also leading the issue is the polemical but still analytical take from Kenny Lake on the ‘debate’ on the universality of the PPW that played out across 2019 between adherents of ‘MLM/principally Maoism‘ and ‘MLM-Gonzalo Thought‘ on the one hand, and Jose Maria Sison (Founding Chairperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines) and Andy Bellisario of the national democratic movement of the Philippines. In “On Infantile Internet Disorders and Real Questions of Revolutionary Strategy: A Response to the “Debate” over the Universality of Protracted People’s War,” Kenny Lake enters the fray with a polemic that not only treats the question at hand but also serves as the third in a trio of analyses he’s done in recent years about Sendero Luminoso strategy and Chairman Gonzalo (the previous ones, available on RI’s website, being “Gramsci & Gonzalo: Considerations on Conquering Combat Positions within the Inner Wall of Hegemony” [which is also available in French by from an external source] and Part III of the Spectre Series, “When We Ride On Our Enemies“). Time will tell, but it might be fair to call this one of the most substantial polemics published to date against the trend of Gonzaloism — and this from a communist who done a considerable amount of work in analyzing and summing up the experiences of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) and developed a nuanced appreciation for strategic innovations and achievements of the PCP under Chairman Gonzalo’s leadership. We in RI have found these analyses immensely more instructive in our attempts to cultivate revolutionary strategy today than the “church of PPW universalism” that has taken to the internet in recent years.

If the previous piece didn’t invite enough controversy, in the last contribution to kites #1 comrades associated with OCR have undertaken a significant summation of RCP-USA-led mass work in the late 1990s around police brutality. For whatever reasons the RCP-USA tripped-off into a dogmatic, off-putting Bob Avakian cult in the 2000s, “From the Masses, To the Masses: A Summation of the October 22 Coalition’s Resistance to Police Brutality in the Late 1990s” by comrades Kilmore and John Albert is an earnest attempt to extract lessons for communist revolutionaries today from a time when the RCP-USA was involved in organizing and leading a significant mass movement in the US. We in RI wholeheartedly embrace any and all attempts to make balanced assessments of the past efforts of genuinely revolutionary communist forces that precede us.

Moving forward, Revolutionary Initiative will republish any and all contributions to kites that come out of our own organization, that are collaboratively produced with comrades in the kites network, and that we simply wish to highlight.

For more information about kites or to support and engage with this initiative in some capacity — as an individual, collective, or organization — kites can be contacted through the means indicated on their  website or you can contact Revolutionary Initiative directly at revintcan[at]gmail.com and we will answer what we can.

-R.I.