The Specter That Still Haunts: Locating a Revolutionary Class within Contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism
By Kenny Lake Preface Part 1: What It Is, What It Ain’t Part 2: Things Done Changed Part 3: When We Ride On Our Enemies Part 4: Picking the Ripest Fruit for Harvesting a Revolutionary People Discussion Questions Now Available!
From the Masses to the Masses: A Summation of the October 22nd Coalition’s Resistance to Police Brutality in the Late 1990s
Kilmore and John Albert [This article was first published in kites #1 (2020).] Dedicated in remembrance of Nicholas Heyward, Sr., a fierce fighter in the struggle against police violence. A familiar story gains traction Eric Garner, 43, in Staten Island, NY, 2014. Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, MO, 2014. Laquan McDonald, 17, in Chicago, IL,…
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, October 2019 [This article was first published in kites #1 (2020).] For nearly three decades, people calling themselves Maoists in Europe and North America have been arguing that Mao’s military doctrine of protracted people’s war (PPW), which guided the Chinese revolution to victory and has been adopted and adapted in Vietnam, the Philippines,…
Nothing is hard in this world if you dare to scale the heights
A series of outrages and the protests and rebellions that followed them have laid bare to a new generation, to white people willing to listen, and to the whole world a cold but potentially liberating truth: White supremacy and the oppression of Black people are fundamental to the foundations and functioning of the United States,…
Defund, abolish…but what about overthrow?
kites editorial committee, US section, July 2020 [This article was first published in kites #2 (2020).] Following the protests and rebellions ignited by the police murder of George Floyd, calls to “defund” and “abolish” the police have grown in popularity, mostly among the activist/Leftist crowd and the progressive petty-bourgeoisie. Some elected officials have given their…
Kick ‘Em While They’re Down
kites editorial committee, December 2020 [This article was first published in kites #3 (2021).] In the future, hopefully 2020 will go down in history as the year of squandered possibilities for revolutionary advance in the US. We say hopefully because the other possibility—2020 as the year when all the signs of impending catastrophe were present,…
Malcolm X Didn’t Dish Out Free Bean Pies: Distinguishing Charity and Social Work from Revolutionary Strategy
Kenny Lake [This article was first published in kites #3 (2021). It is included in Revolution Has Vanished, a reprint published in 2024 by Going Against the Tide, which features two essays by Kenny Lake on questions of revolutionary strategy and state power.] In the 1990s, aside from militant protests and a willingness to go…
A call for communist social investigation a year after the summer of rebellion
kites editorial committee, April 2021 [This article was first published in kites #4 (2021).] Opportunities missed, claimed, and coming Over the past year and change, a rapid succession of crises have gripped North America. The pandemic has brought premature death to over half a million people and the agonizing pain of losing loved ones to…
Exceptionally Serious Responsibility: Some notes on the history of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and prospects for unity in the international communist movement today
Hinton Alvarez [This article was first published in kites #4 (2021). It is included in The Legacy of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, a collection published in 2024 by Going Against the Tide.] …the Marxist-Leninst movement is confronted with the exceptionally serious responsibility to further unify and prepare its ranks for the tremendous challenges and momentous…
Against the Tide of Counterrevolution: An Interview with Comrade Kiran (Mohan Baidya), General Secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal (Revolutionary Maoist)
[This interview was conducted by the kites editorial committee in January 2021 and published in kites #4 (2021). It is included in The Legacy of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, a collection published in 2024 by Going Against the Tide.] Editorial Introduction In the 1990s, when the ruling classes were proclaiming the permanent victory of capitalism-imperialism…
Chairman Gonzalo’s Legacy of Steadfast Revolutionary Principle and Strategic Innovations
An obituary by the kites editorial committee, September 2021 [This article was first published in kites #5/6 (2022). It is included in The Legacy of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, a collection published in 2024 by Going Against the Tide.] On 11 September 2021, the international proletariat and oppressed people of the world lost one of…
Abolish Grifterism
kites editorial committee, October 2021 [This article was first published in kites #5/6 (2022).] The title of this intervention is doubly ironic. First, because “abolitionism” is so often itself a grift, with the creation of an abolition-industrial-complex consisting of Angela Davis speaking gigs, academics writing abolitionist books, activists securing Ford Foundation funding and partnerships with…
Everything’s changed/nothing’s changed: Minneapolis a year after the rebellion
[This article was first published in kites #5/6 (2022).] kites received the following submission from a group of readers who undertook a social investigation project in summer 2021 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This report is drawn from those conversations and interviews, which took place in the time period following the murder of Daunte Wright in the…
Revolution Has Vanished, Replaced with Fantasies of Dual Power, Counterpower, “Base Areas,” Abolition, and Other “Bottom-Up” Bourgeois-Democratic Illusions
Kenny Lake [This article was first published in kites #5/6 (2022). It is included in Revolution Has Vanished, a reprint published in 2024 by Going Against the Tide, which features two essays by Kenny Lake on questions of revolutionary strategy and state power.] For all their aversion to collective discipline and democratic centralism, for all…
The Psychosis of Imperialism
kites editorial committee, July 2022 [This article was first published in kites #7 (2022).] As the crisis of the world capitalist-imperialist system deepens and the bourgeoisie has no resolution, and in the absence of an international communist movement posing a revolutionary alternative, not just individuals but whole classes are losing their damn minds. The COVID-19…
Between Gilead and OnlyFans: Notes on the Oppression of Women in 21st-Century Capitalism-Imperialism
kites editorial committee [This article was written for the 2022 International Women’s Day, before the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and was first published in kites #7 (2022).] International Women’s Day on March 8th was initiated by the international communist movement over a century ago as a recognition of the centrality of…
Tin Man Maoism
A Summation of the MRP by Tyler and an Exchange with Kenny Lake [This article was first published in kites #7 (2022).] Editorial Introduction from kites In response to our call for summations,1 kites received a summation of the “Maoist Revolutionary Party” (MRP), a short-lived organization in Philadelphia in 2019–20, from Tyler. While this summation…
The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the crying need for a communist vanguard party today: A summation, by the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, of the communist movement in the United States
For anyone asking how we can make proletarian revolution in the present, how we can learn from our predecessors on that path, this volume offers rich lessons in revolutionary strategy and tactics—not pat answers, but ways to think through the challenges and avoid repeating past mistakes. It features lengthy summations of the rise and fall…
Some orientation to our readers on the continued struggle against police killings
kites editorial committee, February 2023 [First published on kites-journal.org.] 2023 opened with three high-profile murders by police across the US. In Los Angeles, Keenan Anderson was tasered six times and died of cardiac arrest due to the brutality of the police. In Atlanta, Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán was shot dead by police while taking part in…
kites April Fool’s Day Online Issue
Bob Avakian announces new forthcoming book titled Democracy: We Can’t Do Better Than That
After consulting a tarot card reader while on a sojourn to his old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, California for insight into the possible political scenarios that could manifest in the US in November 2024, Bob Avakian has set to work on a new book to be published in the run-up to the upcoming…
Book Review: Achieving Abolition through Meditation on Martha’s Vineyard by Angela Davis
21st-century abolitionists have long struggled to explain how they would achieve their primary political objective, at best offering some half-baked logic about shifting funding from police to “the community,” with the nonprofit organizations that abolitionists work at receiving that funding on behalf of the community. Angela Davis’s forthcoming book, Achieving Abolition through Meditation on Martha’s…
ChatMLM: the new way to write Maoist memes and statements
Perhaps the most daunting challenge of being a Maoist in imperialist countries today is the struggle to appear more revolutionary than other Leftists on social media. It’s an arduous task to develop slogans, memes, and overly lengthy statements that appear more provocative than everyone else’s. Fortunately, a new artificial intelligence app has arrived to aid…
College DEI offices shift focus to antisemitism on campus
kites conducted an extensive social investigation into the workings of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices at colleges and universities across the US and Canada to learn what they are doing to dismantle systematic racism in higher education. After interviewing dozens of DEI office directors, we found that not a single DEI office came to…
FRSO solves Biden’s age problem
During a recent central committee meeting, held via zoom, leaders of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) discussed how to build off of the great success of their letter-writing campaign thanking pro-Israel Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, for his belated support for a nonbinding city council ceasefire resolution passed after more than 25,000 Palestinians had been killed…
Ibram X Kendi announces his magnum opus, Woke White Supremacy
In what promises to be a stunning comeback from criticism over his handling of the millions of dollars in funding for his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, Ibram X Kendi announced that his years of antiracist scholarship have culminated in a brilliant theory called “woke white supremacy,” which will be the title of…
NYC for Abortion Rights organization agrees not to protest new abortion ban due to its inclusive language
At a press conference yesterday, Republican State Senator Chad Whitesmart said he felt confident that his bill before the Florida state legislature, the Protecting the Unborn Children of All Birthing People Act, would pass without much opposition. Whitesmart explained that “the genius of this total abortion ban is its use of inclusive language. It makes…
Report from the “Women, Nonbinary, and Trans Folx in the US for Forcible Hijabs in Iran!” International Women’s Day Celebration at the People’s Forum in New York
On March 8th, 2024 at the People’s Forum in New York City, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) held an International Women’s Day celebration titled “Women, Nonbinary, and Trans Folx in the US for Forcible Hijabs in Iran!” In his keynote address to the celebration, Brian Becker explained that “since the Islamic Republic of…
Report from the 2nd International Conference of Majumdarist Parties and Organizations
The 2nd International Conference of Majumdarist Parties and Organizations (ICMPO) was a glorious achievement for the international proletariat. The conference brought together comrades, mostly from Europe and North America, after much planning through encrypted chat that we think is completely safe from the eyes of the class enemy. The conference was held in a room…
Xi Jinping to publish a new great work of social investigation in 2027 titled Report on an Investigation of the Billionaire Movement in Shenzhen
In a centenary homage to Mao Zedong’s landmark 1927 essay Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, Xi Jinping announced he will be publishing his own essay updating Mao’s political thought for 21st-century China. Xi’s essay, titled Report on an Investigation of the Billionaire Movement in Shenzhen, is slated for publication in…
Going Against the Tide: A journal charting a path for communist revolution in the US 