Editorial Notes:
When I first moved to Pittsburgh, I didn’t have a clue—about the state of politics, or just what I should do, but I knew my job was shitty, underpaid and over-stressed, I blamed myself, felt powerless, and daily was depressed. Then my friend invited me to study Chairman Mao, and I finally felt some hope in life, the same hope I feel now. But when I told my other friend, her view of me was marred. She said, 'I don’t want a single thing to do with the Red Guards!'
While rereading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for the fourth time I've been brainstorming this project a lot more than I should, during the hours I'm stuck at work. Struggle Sessions ceased publication just as I was taking the first steps towards making my own website, and for better and for worse I consider myself picking up where they left off. But not entirely. I did end up developing my own theoretical and philosophical interests. Of course, they're interests that solicit the good-natured concern of my fellow man. Not to mention, I became a writer of my own.
I'll be adding little updates to this webpage as I start to re-read every one of their articles that I find either on their old website or a different collection called the Struggle Sessions Preservation Project. I have my reading for the next month or two already picked out so I don't expect to get to it until late October. The updates will mostly serve the purpose of allowing me to write short summaries of their articles and poems that'll help me decide which are worth going through the effort of trying to preserve on my website, and which are worth leaving behind.
My general strategy for this project is to read their articles as quickly as possible so I can decide which I want to keep and pretty up a bit. Fixing and finding their citations is a lot of work. Then, after I have all the articles on my website selected and tidied up, I'll sit on them for a while and go back to my regular reading. After I've spent a bit of time away, probably with Libidinal Economy or Cyclonopedia or A Thousand Plateaus or whatever, I'll come back and start the actual writing portion. This'll be where I go all House of Leaves
on the material and start fucking with it, adding my own footnotes and my own paragraphs between the paragraphs or sentences of the text in an attempt to destabilize the reading process.
Note on Authorship: There's a website called Ex-Red Gaurds/CR-CPUSA Hub for Information and Recovery that asserts that Cathal and Kavga are the same author, both pseudonyms of Jared Roark, who also went by the name Ed Dalton. I decided to combine these names into Kavathal because I thought it sounded cool. I'm also highly likely to misattribute authorship of certain articles to my fictional characters to make the project more interesting. Hang on tight and spit on me.
A little after midnight I got home from work, ate a pizza, and now I'm trying to transfer over Maoism in the US from the Struggle Sessions Preservation Project to an HTML page on my website. I forgot just how long these articles can get sometimes. One of the most frustrating things to deal with is that their articles can be very inconsistent in how they cite their sources. Usually if they found an article on the web somewhere they never bother to provide a link to it. I'm trying to fix this in my own footnotes but if this book ever makes it to print that work won't matter too much.
There's a few bizarre editorial decisions I'm making that'll ensure that the reading experience isn't one-to-one with the original website. Some people might get mad at me for that. They're the same people that'd get mad at me for embarking on this project anyway, so it doesn't bother me. It's repetition with a little bit of difference, thrown in for flavor.
Woke up in the morning with a cold. Spent an hour finishing my quick transfer of Maoism in the US without really reading it. I have too many articles to get through to want to re-read them all before I finish transferring them over. The only ones I'll read are the ones I barely remember and didn't mark in italics in my notes. They must've not made a very big impression on me. The first of these articles is On Maoist Education by S. Mazur. I don't remember if this article was taken down or not. There's a few articles that I only read because after they had been removed from the Struggle Sessions website I managed to find them on the Internet Archive. Let's see how this compares to Althusser's masterful essay on ideology.
I finished reading the article and I was right, it was one of their worse articles. Unremarkable. I appreciate S. Mazur the economist and polemicist, but I loathe S. Mazur the pedagogue. There's likely much better books on the subject of class struggle and education, but I've yet to read them. In one paragraph he mentioned the film Breaking With Old Ideas and it's been long enough that I think I should rewatch it with someone. This entire article might've been better served as a film review.
One thing I'll preserve here is a fragment from a poem by an activist that was published in this journal, but only the lines I think are worthwhile.
i was a cockroach inside
the prison walls of lurigancho
on june 19, 1986
i was small and ugly, crawling
from grey brick to grey brick,
careful not to be seen,
avoiding a death
impossible to avoid
i was a cockroach trapped
behind brick and mortar walls
where hundreds of prisoners
shared space and history and
old dark and violent dreams
It's a strange experience to be reading these essays again. That world is gone. At the time I discovered these I had given up on Anarcho-Communism and was seeking something a little heavier. We were all living in an apartment in ████. It was in the middle of the COVID era. I was delivering pizzas for Domino's and I was dating my first girlfriend, whose presence sometimes haunts my dreams. My reading of Struggle Sessions would continue, as we moved into our second rent house. I started to put pictures up on my wall to reflect my new interests. Sometimes when you order some of the Marxist classics they come with portraits of whoever wrote them, so I had Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong on my wall, along with a much lower quality portrait of Stalin. It didn't feel complete, so I a friend help me print out a big portrait of Hegel since I didn't have a printer.
Some of these articles hit me with the force of a bomb, others the force of a sparkler. They'd quickly fizzle out and die. This entire project is simply an attempt to drill deeper into the Cthonic depths of my past, to get a little closer to that burnt out Geotraumatic Cthelll-core. The next in the sequence is The Refuse of All Classes which I marked as being one of the good ones. Let's see if S. Mazur can redeem himself.
I finished reading his article while in bed and once again I was right, it's one of his better pieces. It goes a long way in explaining why I've never exactly trusted the lumpenproletariat, even after all the gangster movies I used to watch with my dad. More often than not, they're a tool of reactionary intrigue. There's a few clerical changes I'll make when I'm transferring it over, mostly for a better flow within its sentences. A rather strange decision I made in the organization of this project is that historically The Refuse of All Classes was written before Annihilation Zone but since S. Mazur and Kavga have such vastly different writing styles I think it'd be better to candy-cane them to show their contrast.
I went to a nightclub with a friend last night and reread my French copy of Story of the Eye, which I just realized is an interesting choice considering the article I'm trying to transfer over. Before I have more elaborate thoughts on the book I'll have to reread my English translation. That might be a good idea for a writing for Liber Mille Verborum. I'm supposed to be watching Jacob's Ladder so I can write a review of it for that collection, but I have a birthday party to go to later. I didn't get back to my friend's house until 7 in the morning. Slept until 2. Woke up incredibly groggy. Transferring over the rest of The Refuse of All Classes while half asleep and listening to a collection of Reptilian Club Boyz songs.
I finished transferring over The Refuse of All Classes and I think a better article could be written from its corpse. The only things that are really cited are Marx's 18th Brumaire and the Communist Manifesto. I wonder if the author's analysis makes the 18th Brumaire itself less interesting. I was talking to Paddy Agius, a fellow neocities user, on Discord and he mentioned in passing to me that the conservative Harold Bloom considered the 18th Brumaire to be Marx's singular work with the most literary value. Maybe now I just read Struggle Sessions as a bizarre literature.
The next article on the list is their ALL ANTI-COMMUNISTS ARE SWINE, which was originally rendered in all caps. They open the article with a quote from a CIA report entitled France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals which might be more interesting than the article itself. I don't remember it being one of their better ones.
Writing this after I got back home from a birthday party. It's almost 2 in the morning. I only had 5 or 6, maybe 7 drinks. During the party I got a really funny picture of my friend passed out on the floor. We somehow managed to finish a game of Mario Party on the Switch where everyone who lost one of the minigames had to take a shot. Somehow I won. A little after the game we went to a Denny's and got a late night dinner while our friend was passed out on the couch. When we got back we found out that one of my other friends was accidentally locked out of her apartment so she's spending the night at mine. Listening to more Reptilian Club Boyz. No one knows I'm working on this, and no one needs to know.
A little before 3 in the morning I finished re-reading ALL ANTI-COMMUNISTS ARE SWINE. I can't believe I had Greg Sadler read this with me. It's a complete mess. I get it, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Althusser, Badiou, Virilio, these are all swamps. It's easy for an aspiring philosopher or social theorist to get stuck in the mud. S. Hausner and Kavathal's article on post-modernism and post-structuralism is nothing more than their every synapse firing a hot, white eruption of bored paragraphs in traumatic response. I'd hate to see them try to read Libidinal Economy. Every one of the great French philosophers who gets lumped into the umbrella of French Theory
had a world class education at some of the best universities on the planet. Their careers spanned decades. Their works are the culminations of lifetimes in thought, crossreferenced to oblivion and back. Here in the States? Us sons and daughters of the proletariat can barely compete. Stop comparing ourselves to them. Read their works or don't. No one cares.
Next, On the Maoist Principle of Great Leadership, by Cajemé Iniciador. It was unremarkbale. I've yet to find a writing that I believe both explicates and justifies the use of democratic centralism. Listening to Aruarian Dance from Nujabes, it's always a comfort while I write. My speakers are a blessing and I don't even know in which country they were put together, or by whose hands. On the side of the right speaker there's stickers of Van Gogh and Plato, gifts from my ex-girlfriend. I never tried to get her to read anything from Struggle Sessions with me, and I believe all the mental attention I gave to them kept me away from her. After we broke up the first time and later got back together she told me that she didn't think the website had a very good influence on me. Now she's with someone else, my friends live a city away, and I'm in a roach and fruit fly infested apartment with a single roommate. There's barely any food in the fridge. One time we left the cooking oil uncovered and a rat crawled into the bottle. I had to take it outside and tried to get them out by the dumpster. They survived and I pet their oil covered body. I don't know where they are.
Now we have The Abolition Myth: Prisons and People's War, an article that if I remember correctly is a slightly sanitized extension to their red hot Annihilation Zone. I finished reading it and although I marked it in italics in my original document I don't think it's aged well. Cajemé Iniciador isn't one of their best authors, his paragraphs are awkward and bulbous. It did remind me that I should make time for Prisoners of Liberation by Allyn and Adele Rickett. I've always been fascinated by books about prisons in previously socialist countries. I've always been fascinated by prisons. One of the last films I watched with my father was Blood In, Blood Out, a Mexican-American favorite. Another book I'd be interested in hunting down is The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement, since I think it'll help me understand how prisons became what they are now, an intensely racialized mirror-world of our own carceral society. Another similarly interesting book I'd like to read: 82189: Confessions of a Prison Bitch by Henry Bellows. I think I found it while trying to find more books from Peter Sotos.
A formula for Maoism: you either die a revolutionary or live long enough to become a revisionist.
The Black August Contradiction is another unremarkable article best left in the dumpster. I'm getting tired of that word, I'll have to find another. Prosaic. Insignificant. Workaday. Unexceptional. It did make me want to read the writings of George Jackson. The Black Guerilla Family is another prison gang I'm strangely interested in. I've always been curious about the degredation of political projects into street gangs, from the Black Guerilla Family to Comando Vermelho. What will Klassenkrieg Division devolve into?
After midnight. Yesterday I reread There is No Neutrality, I don't believe it was signed by any of their authors. There was one paragraph that I thought was decent but not enough to repeat it. It was an article that tried to reclaim the history of the Chicano Movement. In my opinion, unsuccessfully. Now I'm starting to read the article Abuse from an author of theirs who goes by the name Ira. All of them apply concepts as mechanically as Baumgarten, but the results aren't nearly as interesting. It's a boring, prodding prose that feels like someone putting together the argumentative equivalent of a Bionicle. I thought a lot about this project while I was at work, most of the ideas I've had have evaporated by now. One idea that I had that I don't know if I want to follow through on is to try to start with the articles that I have the least amount of problems with so I can introduce my commentary at first through the footnotes, then by inserting body paragraphs between theirs, and then finally getting to a point where most of the chapter
is my own writing. I'll have to spend some time learning typesetting software to get the results I want. Footnotes on footnotes. Grow a hellish rhizome.
Finished Abuse. It was mostly boring but there was some interesting discussion about organization. I don't think I'd read it again, but it was a good source for more URLs from various Red Guards and Serve the People groups. The next article I have to read is Popular Justice, another unsigned article. While I was checking the footnotes I found that there's an interesting looking dialogue with Michel Foucault titled On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists from a collection of his that dates mostly from the early to mid 70's. I finished it. It was boring too. Next is Without Power. Maybe Kavathal will come through again. I'm aware that as I read more and more of this website from the Struggle Sessions Preservation Project I'll eventually get to articles I never read or finished when I was reading this as it was contemporary. Maybe I'll find a few that I like from among that smoldering heap.