By Kenny Lake

Picking up where kites #1–8 left off, Going Against the Tide is a new journal charting a path for communist revolution in the US. The first print issue will be available in the coming months; for now, check out its website, goingagianstthetide.org

The purpose of Going Against the Tide is to train people how to think and act like communists. Towards that end, it will feature training manuals from the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries that will get you thinking strategically and explain the methods of communist political work. It will provide summations of such political work, from the present and from the past. It will analyze the events and processes shaping the world we are seeking to radically transform, as well as the history behind our contemporary conditions. It will feature social investigation and class analysis that keeps our hearts and our minds on the lives of the masses, what they are thinking, and how we can organize them for revolution. It will polemicize against the capitulationist politics of the Left and postmodernism. And it will do all that and more with style, featuring the revolutionary artwork of Ruby Lois and an occasional revolutionary song.

Going Against the Tide will be the platform that publishes statements and documents from the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) in the US. While the overall politics of this journal will be informed by the ideology, politics, and strategic direction of the OCR, not every article should be taken as the official political line of the OCR, and there will be some room for individual comrades, inside and outside the OCR, to develop their views, analysis, and expertise on particular questions of importance in the pages of this journal. Going Against the Tide is open to submissions, even some with substantial differences with its politics, so long as those submissions meet its standards and advance its revolutionary objectives. We welcome correspondence and critical feedback, and we especially want to hear from those with a desire to join up with others dedicating their lives to revolution.

Visit goingagianstthetide.org.

May 31, 2024

kites began in 2020 through the collaboration of the late Revolutionary Initiative in Canada and the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) in the US. Since then, we’ve published eight issues that have been crucial to training up a new generation of communist cadre, addressing the strategic challenges of making revolution, and planting a red flag in opposition to postmodernism, the Left, and opportunism of all stripes. The organizations behind kites have also changed in that time period, with Revolutionary Initiative no longer in existence but with comrades from it joining with others in forming the (New) Communist Party of Canada ((N)CPC). With those developments, there is now a need for separate journals that address the particular challenges of making revolution in Canada and the US, two countries with many similarities but also many differences. Furthermore, while both the (N)CPC and the OCR are united in the goal of communist revolution, there are substantial differences between them in how they conceptualize achieving that goal. Interested readers can study the (N)CPC’s Political Program and the OCR’s Manifesto to understand those differences.

Readers of kites can expect the content it is known for to continue in two new journals, one from the US and one from Canada. We will be posting announcements of those two new journals on kites-journal.org as soon as they are up and running. For the time being, kites readers should look to the websites of the (N)CPC (ncpc-npcc.ca) and OCR (ocrev.org) for more information or statements from those organizations.

Our intention is to see the kites website remain online for some time to come, so our readers do not need to worry about losing access to kites online content. And readers can expect many of the articles on kites-journal.org that have not yet been published in print to be made available in the new journals. Other than the announcements of these two journals, no new content will be posted on kites-journal.org. As for the hard-copy editions, while we cannot speak to the availability of the print edition in the future, for now kites readers can still acquire hard-copies from online booksellers like Burning Books out of Buffalo, New York or Kersplebedeb in Montreal, Quebec.

In bidding this project farewell, let us agree with Mao that “everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent,” while adding that it’s only ever through the subjective factor of communist revolutionaries that we can make the most of such a situation. That’s part of the function that kites played, and that’s what the new journals spinning off from it will seek to continue to do.

-Amil K., Kenny Lake, and the kites editorial committee

kites-journal.org

1 April 2024

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 presidential election. Democracy: We Can’t Do Better Than That promises to rationalize why preventing Trump from taking office must be the strategic priority of communists in the US, even as under the Biden administration life has arguably gotten worse for the masses of people in the US, the CDC started inventing total nonsense in relation to COVID-19 (such as the five-day rule), and the US funded and supported a genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

But more than just explaining the RevCom’s current strategy of imagining a revolutionary crisis occurring around the 2024 elections and hinging all their political work around that prediction, Democracy: We Can’t Do Better Than That will justify Avakian’s reversal of correct verdicts on the history of the international communist movement. Chapter 2 of the book will rehabilitate the Comintern’s united front against fascism of the late 1930s, arguing that the defense of bourgeois-democracy against fascism supersedes the need for proletarian revolution. Chapter 3 will refashion some of Earl Browder’s ideas for the 21^st century and explain the spiral-like development of Avakian’s “new communism” as a re-synthesis of the old communism of the late-1930s CP (but without the mass following) that Avakian previously insisted must be discarded. Chapter 4 will explain why proposed policies in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America that Avakian authored sound more like bourgeois-democratic parliamentary procedures than the practices of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in socialist China. In the conclusion of Democracy: We Can’t Do Better Than That, Avakian will rationalize how tailing the liberal petty-bourgeoisie and flattening all political work into the fight against Trumpian fascism can serve revolutionary objectives.

Followers of Avakian had mixed reactions to the announcement of his forthcoming book. Some were glad that he was actually sitting down to write a book instead of just doing another lengthy talk that is subsequently transcribed and published. Others wondered if they could stomach the possibility that, after decades of dedicating their lives to revolution, Avakian might once again tell them to vote for Biden in order to stop Trumpian fascism. Most, however, were unfortunately too brain dead after years of doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result each time to think critically or question a capitulationist political line. A standout among Avakian’s followers was Andy Zee, who was ecstatic about the upcoming release of Avakian’s Democracy: We Can’t Do Better Than That. On the Revolution Nothing Less YouTube show, Zee explained that “I’ve gotten pretty good over the last couple decades at being a sycophant, arguing for whatever Avakian’s latest ideas are even if it meant a 180-degree flip from what I was saying a week ago. That is, after all, why I was made the host of this show.”

kites-journal.org

1 April 2024

21^st-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 Vineyard, which kites received an advance copy of, promises to solve this problem. In it, Davis explains how, with her success on the college lecture circuit, she was able to afford a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard, and also received many invites to stay there at the homes of her closest supporters and friends. While meditating on the beach to the soothing sounds of gentle waves and the calm sea breeze, Davis realized that given the idealist logic underlying her abolitionist philosophy, achieving abolition through putting her mind over matter during meditation made perfect sense, writing “anything but the armed overthrow of the ruling class has defined my conception of revolution from my time in the CP down to today.”

Asked for comment on Davis’s new book, Geo Maher, author of A World Without Police, expressed consternation: “Publishing houses have been keen to publish abolitionist scholarship, no matter the quality, so I decided to get in on the action a couple years ago. I’m worried that, given Davis’s celebrity status, the publication of Achieving Abolition through Meditation on Martha’s Vineyard could crowd my book out of the market.”

Angela Davis’s new book will be released in Fall 2024, at which point she will be hitting the college lecture circuit to promote it. Until then, Davis fans can enjoy a free mp3 download of Davis reading chapter 3 of the book, titled “Self-serving acts are revolutionary,” over new age music.

By Cuervo Jones, kites tech reporter

kites-journal.org

1 April 2024

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 in this struggle: ChatMLM.

ChatMLM draws on the language and style of all the most dogmatic-sounding statements in the history of the international communist movement to automatically generate statements on whatever topic you need, provided it doesn’t require concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Text generated by ChatMLM always ends in a litany of slogans that its users would never do anything to make good on, such as “People’s war until communism!” And ChatMLM has a built-in meme-generating feature, which makes for convenient easy uploads to Instagram, the center of Maoist debate in the imperialist countries today.

ChatMLM will be available to the public on May 1^st, 2024, but a prototype version was made available to the International Communist League (ICL). To see its impressive results, just check out the ICL’s statements, which were entirely generated by the ChatMLM app.

kites-journal.org

1 April 2024

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 the defense of Palestinian students or any students or faculty protesting Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza when they were doxxed, threatened, smeared with racist diatribes, and suppressed by college administrations. In fact, most DEI offices have decided to shift their focus, in the Spring 2024 semester, to combating antisemitism on campus, by which they mean any criticism of Israel.

Asked to define antisemitism, A. Tolken, director of Harvard University’s DEI office, explained that “definitions are colonial logic.” Uncle Tom, who works as a highly-paid consultant for university DEI initiatives, said that many DEI offices have now decided to include Israelis among those who deserve the label “BIPOC.” Asked how Israelis fit into the “I” in “BIPOC,” Uncle Tom revealed that “the word BIPOC was created to appeal to woke liberal whites for donations and clout, so it makes perfect sense to stretch its definition to appeal to whomever we can get funding from. The fixity of definitions is a colonial construct anyway.” Asked how Israelis who grew up in US suburbs and then, as adults, moved into the house of a forcibly displaced Palestinian family in the West Bank could be considered Indigenous, Uncle Tom responded: “The great Indigenous scholar and activist MissM8tri@rch has theorized that where you’re from is a matter of what you feel.”

Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi issued a joint statement on the future of college DEI initiatives, saying “the kind of diversity we’ve been fighting for on college campuses and in corporate boardrooms has always been about strengthening, not undermining, US imperialism. So it makes perfect sense that the DEI office directors who have read our books and attended our training sessions wouldn’t lift a finger in support of student protests for Palestine but find ways to support Israel.”

kites-journal.org

1 April 2024

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 his new book. Kendi explained that “firing much of the staff at my Center for Antiracist Research—an action that the growing labor movement among university faculty and graduate students did not protest—allowed me to divert funds towards this important theoretical work.”

Kendi’s theory of woke white supremacy draws on 19^th-century eugenics to argue that white supremacy is the natural state of human existence, with anti-blackness having been around since the dawn of time. Yet unlike 19^th-century racists, antiracist Kendi’s essentialism is not a work of pseudo-science falsely claiming biological evidence, but a work of pseudo-philosophy grounded in postmodernist theory while shitting on the Black radical tradition. It centers the question of white supremacist bias as an immutable characteristic of human existence, inherent even in most Black people, that cannot be changed through changing the material conditions of society, but can be forgiven by changing the material conditions of Kendi’s existence. As an example of the latter, Kendi explained that billionaire Jack Dorsey, who donated $10 million to the Center for Antiracist Research, “has done more to work on his internal bias and anti-blackness than any other white person in human history. John Brown ain’t got nothing on Jack Dorsey.”

In her foreword to Woke White Supremacy, Robin DiAngelo summarizes Kendi’s theory: “So basically, all white people are racist and there’s nothing we can do about it, which is a relief,” apparently unaware that comedian Ricky Gervais said the exact same thing, but sarcastically, in his most recent Netflix special. Asked whether DiAngelo’s book royalties and speaker fees at corporate antiracism workshops constitute wages of whiteness, whiteness studies scholar David Roediger clarified that “my theory of wages of whiteness was really about insisting that it is impossible for the white working class to join with Black proletarians in making revolution and ending all exploitation and oppression. I have no problem with members of the white petty-bourgeoisie making lots of money off of antiracism. Shit, where do think my money comes from?”

J Sakai, a strong critic of Kendi and DiAngelo, worried that radicals might start to notice theoretical and political convergences between his book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern and Kendi’s Woke White Supremacy. “On the other hand,” Sakai mused, “the reason my readers, who are almost all settlers themselves according to the logic of my book, like my book so much is that it gives them a rationale for not interacting with oppressed people and not waging the necessary (armed) struggle to end all oppression. So I doubt they’ll think too much about the matter. It might not have been my original intention to rationalize capitulation, but since Settlers is selling so well with settlers, I really can’t complain.”

kites reached out to the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University to ask them if they feel shame for giving Kendi a PhD while denying Muhammad Ahmad (known as Max Stanford when he was a leader of Revolutionary Action Movement) a permanent faculty position after his years of dedication to Black liberation, but received no response.

Ibram X Kendi’s Woke White Supremacy is slated for publication on August 1^st, 2024. Due to an avalanche of corporate sponsorship, free copies of the book will given out at college freshman orientations all across the US in the Fall of 2024. Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay will be traveling the country leading required seminars on Woke White Supremacy at all Ivy League schools.