SonofRage
10th November 2005, 18:21
hmmm...has this been posted already?
The Revolutionary Communist Party USA is a product of the mass movements of the 1960's. Many of its founders, including their leader, Bob Avakian, came out of the student movement of the time, particularly the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). When the RCP was founded in 1976, the formation of a new communist party of the US working class was being widely discussed among the most serious revolutionaries. But, although the party was organized under the banner of anti-revisionism, it was in fact a new revisionist party, taking up Maoism from an elitist petty-bourgeois stand characteristic of their approach then and since, and they cling to their Maoist ideology as a dogma. At first they pandered to backward ideas among the workers from the right, then they entered a phase of left economism, or left trade unionism, and then, in the late 1970's, abandonment of working class organizing altogether while furiously waving the red flag. (1) True to its Maoist ideas, the RCP's picture of socialism is bureaucratic state capitalism ruling over the masses in their name, and the equation of state ownership with a socialist economy.
. Today, revolutionary ferment in society, and the study and debate of revolutionary theory, have yet to make a new upsurge. Every group calling itself revolutionary is small, with anti-revisionists (Marxists in more than name only) being the smallest of the small. In these conditions the RCP is a significant force in the left-wing movement. They get their strength, partially, because of the weakness of the anti-revisionist trend. They attract activists through revolutionary posturing in the anti-war, anti-racist and other popular movements, posing as the most revolutionary force out there. Yet, their leftism is illusory, because their greatest source of strength is through alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie, and to make those alliances, they must drop their revolutionary phrase-mongering and fall back to liberal emotionalism. In other words, for all their left posturing, their petty bourgeois outlook and their alliance with the left wing of the liberal bourgeoisie drives them to refuse to wage a real struggle against the liberal and opportunist politics dominating these movements.
. One feature of the party that stands out is their adulation for Avakian. May 1st of this year the RCP introduced a newly formatted, renamed newspaper called Revolution to much fanfare. In that issue they pour on the worship of Avakian particularly thick, but examples abound elsewhere also, in other issues before and after, on the web, and in talks. RCP members refer to themselves as "comrades and students of RCP Chairman Bob Avakian", and argue that "if you want to change the world . . . you need to know Bob Avakian". They talk of the need to "cherish him and defend" him, because "a leader like this only comes along once in a great while". We are called on to read his memoirs and listen to "the whole 11-hour DVD set" of Bob Avakian speaking, and hold parties to view it with everyone we know. One article describes an immigrant working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, who takes his one day off on New Years day to travel to the Rose Bowl parade and "tell people about Bob Avakian", and claims that in the projects in LA people now greet each other by "putting their fists to their hearts and shouting out, 'B. A. '". Someone even "begins to cry as he hears of the future envisioned by Bob Avakian -- 'People need this kind of leader to unleash their creativity'". One acolyte is quoted on their website saying "if Lenin were alive today, he'd sound a lot like Bob Avakian". (2) At demonstrations, these students of Avakian have chanted "The earth is quakin'/ Follow Bob Avakian/ The empire's shakin'/ Follow Bob Avakian!"
Defense of the cult of Bob
. As much as they might like readers to believe that this adulation arose spontaneously, it didn't. Avakian is a skilled self-promoter. He uses all sorts of demagogical techniques to show his supposedly great wisdom and depth of knowledge: name-dropping, referring to "back in the day", and tossing around "communist"-sounding phrases like "dialectical relationship" and "unity as well as opposition". Avakian tries to bolster this cultism by spinning a theoretical web around it. (3) He argues that people give more weight to the arguments put forth by "people who have established themselves within any field or institution as some kind of authority". According to him, in revolutionary politics, this is positive and should be fostered. He labors to assure us that he doesn't support tyrannical cults, "no matter whether they represent the proletariat or not", or cults in which "certain individuals stand outside of the party and the overall interests of the proletariat; that they can substitute their own individual will or whims." What he doesn't do is talk about the class basis of those tyrannies, or what will prevent the RCP brand of cultism from devolving into the tyrannical cultism of Stalin or Mao.
. His argument rests on the correct proposal that particular ideas carry a certain prestige due to their having held up to criticism and shown their correctness in practice; this assertion is uncontroversial, one relevant example being the writings of Marx and Engels. Yet, the RCP turns this on its head: both in their theoretical justifications and in their practice, rather than analyzing the difficult questions today, instead they seek to build up their prestige, and hope no one will notice the emptiness of their answers. In fact, because they are so devoid of answers, this cultism is the only basis on which it is possible to promote Avakian's work and that of other RCP "theorists".
. For example, they don't have a serious analysis of the revolutions in either Russia or China, or how and why they ended in repressive state capitalist regimes. Instead, they provide pat answers: in the Soviet Union, "when Stalin died in 1953, capitalist forces inside the Communist Party, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, staged a coup"; in China, "after Mao died in 1976, rightist forces, led by Deng Xiaoping from behind the scenes, staged a coup . . .". (4) The fact that both these countries were already repressive regimes with little or no mass participation in political life at the time of these "coups" is a fact to be apologized away, as "mistakes" Stalin made, or outright denied, as in their enthusiasm for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. By contrast Marx and Engels studied the revolutions of their time deeply, and communists today need to do serious study of the revolutions since. They also studied capitalism as it existed in their day. While the basic principles they discovered about capitalism then still apply today, capitalism has developed since then. Lenin furthered their study, but capitalism has developed since Lenin's time too. Communists need to draw lessons from these developments to effectively fight the struggles of today, and the RCP has no answers here either. They also don't have any serious ideas about how to develop a proletarian movement independent of the Democrats and their allies. Instead, their answer is fear-mongering and cultism, and assertions of how really, really revolutionary they are. Marxism can't be satisfied with providing simple answers. It has to continually test and retest its basic methods and standpoint by applying them to new questions, and breaking new ground.
. In place of this, on the one hand the RCP tries to promote a sense of panic, with accounts that "history is full of examples of people . . . passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined" and that if "things are left in the hands of those in power, we could be living in a world where old traditional shackles meet new technology. . . . This horrible vision would be a society where modern-day imperialism would be run by religious fanatics. Your worst nightmare meets your worst nightmare" [their emphasis]. (5)
. On the other hand, they seek to promote a sense of security, that all of the questions are being studied and answered by a wise and thoughtful Avakian. The above quote continues: "But today, at the very moment we are haunted by a new 'Dark Ages' mentality, the communist project is going through a Renaissance, as Bob Avakian has reimagined the process of socialist revolution. We have a fighting chance. . . ." Another example is from an interview, posted to several indymedia web sites, of Sunsara Taylor, a frequent contributor to the RCP newspaper:
"Because I have followed and studied Chairman Avakian I do have answers and something to say to people! To know that there is somebody that we can have so much confidence in let me tell you, things can get really crazy in the middle of such an intense struggle. . . . It's easy to stress out in the middle of all this, but it's important to step back for a minute and see that our Chairman is leading us to solve all these problems. He's somebody who is voluntarily and very eagerly saying that he will give his life to the people and there's a lot riding on what he does. But he doesn't stop and complain. He solves the problems and he leads people to solve the problems. I try to emulate that and it makes a big difference". (6)
. The message is clear. RCP members don't need to think, don't need to ask questions, don't need to "stress out" about anything, because Avakian is going to answer everything which needs to be answered.
. In the "Individual Leaders . . ." article and elsewhere, in place of really grappling with difficult questions, he repeatedly uses pseudo-dialectics to make it sound like he is doing so. In this technique of argumentation, he makes two contradictory statements and calls it "a dialectic", but makes no effort to talk about how they relate to each other. Then he simply picks whichever side of the so-called-dialectic suits his needs, and ignores the other. One critic on the web described this as waving the "dialectical magic wand".
. For example, he brings up the "dialectical relation" between cultism and "initiative and creative critical thinking among party members and the masses following the party", but says nothing more about the question. Cultism stifles intellectual initiative among the masses, but Avakian finds it more convenient for his argument to say "dialectical relation", and then prattle on about "the positive and necessary aspect" of cultism. In the same article, he states that "on the other hand . . . truth . . . in the beginning is always in the hands of the minority of people" and that "Mao makes the statement that people should follow whoever has the truth in their hands." He raises this point a couple of ways, and then again simply returns to his discussion of the supposed positive nature of cults. Again, he doesn't discuss the relationship between the two ideas.
. These and several other examples in that article alone, clearly show that his aim is not to shed light on the question, but to obscure the emptiness of his arguments, to assure his readers that he is really thinking about things deeply, to sound "communist" and thoughtful, and to make what are often very simple-minded, empty and wrong arguments seem deeper and richer and more all-sided. Real dialectical materialism is a tool to understand and clarify the laws by which change occurs. Simply stating two contradictory things and saying they have a "dialectical relation", and then choosing one (the "unity" between cultism and mass initiative) and ignoring the other (the "opposition" between them), clarifies nothing except the speaker's opportunism, and actually serves to obscure reality. (7)
read more... (http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/59745.html)
The Revolutionary Communist Party USA is a product of the mass movements of the 1960's. Many of its founders, including their leader, Bob Avakian, came out of the student movement of the time, particularly the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). When the RCP was founded in 1976, the formation of a new communist party of the US working class was being widely discussed among the most serious revolutionaries. But, although the party was organized under the banner of anti-revisionism, it was in fact a new revisionist party, taking up Maoism from an elitist petty-bourgeois stand characteristic of their approach then and since, and they cling to their Maoist ideology as a dogma. At first they pandered to backward ideas among the workers from the right, then they entered a phase of left economism, or left trade unionism, and then, in the late 1970's, abandonment of working class organizing altogether while furiously waving the red flag. (1) True to its Maoist ideas, the RCP's picture of socialism is bureaucratic state capitalism ruling over the masses in their name, and the equation of state ownership with a socialist economy.
. Today, revolutionary ferment in society, and the study and debate of revolutionary theory, have yet to make a new upsurge. Every group calling itself revolutionary is small, with anti-revisionists (Marxists in more than name only) being the smallest of the small. In these conditions the RCP is a significant force in the left-wing movement. They get their strength, partially, because of the weakness of the anti-revisionist trend. They attract activists through revolutionary posturing in the anti-war, anti-racist and other popular movements, posing as the most revolutionary force out there. Yet, their leftism is illusory, because their greatest source of strength is through alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie, and to make those alliances, they must drop their revolutionary phrase-mongering and fall back to liberal emotionalism. In other words, for all their left posturing, their petty bourgeois outlook and their alliance with the left wing of the liberal bourgeoisie drives them to refuse to wage a real struggle against the liberal and opportunist politics dominating these movements.
. One feature of the party that stands out is their adulation for Avakian. May 1st of this year the RCP introduced a newly formatted, renamed newspaper called Revolution to much fanfare. In that issue they pour on the worship of Avakian particularly thick, but examples abound elsewhere also, in other issues before and after, on the web, and in talks. RCP members refer to themselves as "comrades and students of RCP Chairman Bob Avakian", and argue that "if you want to change the world . . . you need to know Bob Avakian". They talk of the need to "cherish him and defend" him, because "a leader like this only comes along once in a great while". We are called on to read his memoirs and listen to "the whole 11-hour DVD set" of Bob Avakian speaking, and hold parties to view it with everyone we know. One article describes an immigrant working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, who takes his one day off on New Years day to travel to the Rose Bowl parade and "tell people about Bob Avakian", and claims that in the projects in LA people now greet each other by "putting their fists to their hearts and shouting out, 'B. A. '". Someone even "begins to cry as he hears of the future envisioned by Bob Avakian -- 'People need this kind of leader to unleash their creativity'". One acolyte is quoted on their website saying "if Lenin were alive today, he'd sound a lot like Bob Avakian". (2) At demonstrations, these students of Avakian have chanted "The earth is quakin'/ Follow Bob Avakian/ The empire's shakin'/ Follow Bob Avakian!"
Defense of the cult of Bob
. As much as they might like readers to believe that this adulation arose spontaneously, it didn't. Avakian is a skilled self-promoter. He uses all sorts of demagogical techniques to show his supposedly great wisdom and depth of knowledge: name-dropping, referring to "back in the day", and tossing around "communist"-sounding phrases like "dialectical relationship" and "unity as well as opposition". Avakian tries to bolster this cultism by spinning a theoretical web around it. (3) He argues that people give more weight to the arguments put forth by "people who have established themselves within any field or institution as some kind of authority". According to him, in revolutionary politics, this is positive and should be fostered. He labors to assure us that he doesn't support tyrannical cults, "no matter whether they represent the proletariat or not", or cults in which "certain individuals stand outside of the party and the overall interests of the proletariat; that they can substitute their own individual will or whims." What he doesn't do is talk about the class basis of those tyrannies, or what will prevent the RCP brand of cultism from devolving into the tyrannical cultism of Stalin or Mao.
. His argument rests on the correct proposal that particular ideas carry a certain prestige due to their having held up to criticism and shown their correctness in practice; this assertion is uncontroversial, one relevant example being the writings of Marx and Engels. Yet, the RCP turns this on its head: both in their theoretical justifications and in their practice, rather than analyzing the difficult questions today, instead they seek to build up their prestige, and hope no one will notice the emptiness of their answers. In fact, because they are so devoid of answers, this cultism is the only basis on which it is possible to promote Avakian's work and that of other RCP "theorists".
. For example, they don't have a serious analysis of the revolutions in either Russia or China, or how and why they ended in repressive state capitalist regimes. Instead, they provide pat answers: in the Soviet Union, "when Stalin died in 1953, capitalist forces inside the Communist Party, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, staged a coup"; in China, "after Mao died in 1976, rightist forces, led by Deng Xiaoping from behind the scenes, staged a coup . . .". (4) The fact that both these countries were already repressive regimes with little or no mass participation in political life at the time of these "coups" is a fact to be apologized away, as "mistakes" Stalin made, or outright denied, as in their enthusiasm for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. By contrast Marx and Engels studied the revolutions of their time deeply, and communists today need to do serious study of the revolutions since. They also studied capitalism as it existed in their day. While the basic principles they discovered about capitalism then still apply today, capitalism has developed since then. Lenin furthered their study, but capitalism has developed since Lenin's time too. Communists need to draw lessons from these developments to effectively fight the struggles of today, and the RCP has no answers here either. They also don't have any serious ideas about how to develop a proletarian movement independent of the Democrats and their allies. Instead, their answer is fear-mongering and cultism, and assertions of how really, really revolutionary they are. Marxism can't be satisfied with providing simple answers. It has to continually test and retest its basic methods and standpoint by applying them to new questions, and breaking new ground.
. In place of this, on the one hand the RCP tries to promote a sense of panic, with accounts that "history is full of examples of people . . . passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined" and that if "things are left in the hands of those in power, we could be living in a world where old traditional shackles meet new technology. . . . This horrible vision would be a society where modern-day imperialism would be run by religious fanatics. Your worst nightmare meets your worst nightmare" [their emphasis]. (5)
. On the other hand, they seek to promote a sense of security, that all of the questions are being studied and answered by a wise and thoughtful Avakian. The above quote continues: "But today, at the very moment we are haunted by a new 'Dark Ages' mentality, the communist project is going through a Renaissance, as Bob Avakian has reimagined the process of socialist revolution. We have a fighting chance. . . ." Another example is from an interview, posted to several indymedia web sites, of Sunsara Taylor, a frequent contributor to the RCP newspaper:
"Because I have followed and studied Chairman Avakian I do have answers and something to say to people! To know that there is somebody that we can have so much confidence in let me tell you, things can get really crazy in the middle of such an intense struggle. . . . It's easy to stress out in the middle of all this, but it's important to step back for a minute and see that our Chairman is leading us to solve all these problems. He's somebody who is voluntarily and very eagerly saying that he will give his life to the people and there's a lot riding on what he does. But he doesn't stop and complain. He solves the problems and he leads people to solve the problems. I try to emulate that and it makes a big difference". (6)
. The message is clear. RCP members don't need to think, don't need to ask questions, don't need to "stress out" about anything, because Avakian is going to answer everything which needs to be answered.
. In the "Individual Leaders . . ." article and elsewhere, in place of really grappling with difficult questions, he repeatedly uses pseudo-dialectics to make it sound like he is doing so. In this technique of argumentation, he makes two contradictory statements and calls it "a dialectic", but makes no effort to talk about how they relate to each other. Then he simply picks whichever side of the so-called-dialectic suits his needs, and ignores the other. One critic on the web described this as waving the "dialectical magic wand".
. For example, he brings up the "dialectical relation" between cultism and "initiative and creative critical thinking among party members and the masses following the party", but says nothing more about the question. Cultism stifles intellectual initiative among the masses, but Avakian finds it more convenient for his argument to say "dialectical relation", and then prattle on about "the positive and necessary aspect" of cultism. In the same article, he states that "on the other hand . . . truth . . . in the beginning is always in the hands of the minority of people" and that "Mao makes the statement that people should follow whoever has the truth in their hands." He raises this point a couple of ways, and then again simply returns to his discussion of the supposed positive nature of cults. Again, he doesn't discuss the relationship between the two ideas.
. These and several other examples in that article alone, clearly show that his aim is not to shed light on the question, but to obscure the emptiness of his arguments, to assure his readers that he is really thinking about things deeply, to sound "communist" and thoughtful, and to make what are often very simple-minded, empty and wrong arguments seem deeper and richer and more all-sided. Real dialectical materialism is a tool to understand and clarify the laws by which change occurs. Simply stating two contradictory things and saying they have a "dialectical relation", and then choosing one (the "unity" between cultism and mass initiative) and ignoring the other (the "opposition" between them), clarifies nothing except the speaker's opportunism, and actually serves to obscure reality. (7)
read more... (http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/59745.html)