Notes on the demise of the Kasama Project
131/07/2016 by socialistfight
As a Trotskyist I valued the openness of Mike Ely and the Kasame Project and am sad to note its demise. He took Grover Furr sternly to task for his appalling defence of Stalin’s purges and ridiculous charges against Trotsky. I am currently doing a piece on Maoism or Trotskyism by Joshua Moufawad-Paul and referred to Mike Ely in passing because of this which is why I ended up here. Really don’t agree with dropping the term ‘communist’ in favopur of socialist but I could see you could call your project socialist in line with the Sanders surge. It has many similarities to the British Corby surge, a second wave has come in response to the second leadership election and thye prospect of a split in Labour. And I absolutely do not agree with joining the Greens; they are a capitalist party, albeit petty bourgeois and minor but definitely not a labour movement body. The call for a Party of Labor on the trade union bureaucracies is now the correct one in the USA to appeal to the disappointed followers of Sanders.
I had been suspecting for some time now that the Kasama Project was finished but finally got confirmation of that yesterday from a FB friend named Ben Stevens who I had contact with as Ben Seattle during the early days of Marxmail. The RCP alluded to below in Ben’s post is Bob Avakian’s cult (I use the word advisedly), the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Whatever happened to the Kasama Project?
The Kasama project emerged at a time when the internet was making it possible to bring together many scattered and isolated activists who had been around the RCP, but who had problems with the RCP’s cult-like nature. Kasama emerged boldly proclaiming that it would organize in a more open way, and be accountable to the movement.
But the apple did not fall far from the tree.
Now the project appears to have collapsed–with no accountability whatsoever to the movement concerning what…
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Socialist Fight 
The conventional wisdom – which may well be entirely wrong – is that a labor party will only emerge from a revitalized union movement. Perhaps it is actually the key to revitalizing the labor movement. Notably, none of the U.S. sects running candidates puts the labor party at the center (as did the Workers League of the 70s), and only one (Socialist Action) even calls for one.
[However, Trotsky didn’t conceive of the call for a labor party as a demand on the bureaucracy. This may be just a matter of language.]
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