Rawthentic
24th September 2008, 07:31
Bill Martin: Going Forward From Here (Kasama Post #1) (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/bill-martin-going-forward-from-here-kasama-post-1/)
Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on September 23, 2008
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/kansasfield.jpg?w=300&h=199 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/kansasfield.jpg)
Traveling the road together by Bill Martin
Hello, friends.
Although I have been talking with some of you more directly in the past year, I have remained aloof in some ways from things unfolding around Kasama and around the RCP. Unfortunately, as someone attempting to be a radical intellectual and to contribute to understanding and changing the world, I have learned this need to take distance from the RCP itself.
As most of you will know, I co-authored the book Marxism and the Call of the Future (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/marxism_and_call.htm) with Bob Avakian. At the time I worked on the book, I thought things were on a different course within the RCP, on the question of working with intellectuals and artists, and on many other questions as well. We can discuss further whether or not things were really on a different course or if instead something else was in fact going on. Certainly there were many things happening in the RCP in recent years about which I either didn’t know or, apparently, was quite naïve. Clearly people who were actually in the party have a very different perspective on these things than I do.
For me, this whole scene is extraordinarily difficult. Even as I feel some excitement about getting on with things, going forward from here and reconceiving and regrouping, I also feel that in some sense my legs have been kicked out from under me, and I am also feeling the weight of the dissipation of a relationship that, though quite often difficult, problematic, troubled, and filled with turmoil, was also at key junctures enlivening and inspiring. This relationship goes back roughly twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, to the early 1980s. It is a relationship that involved discreet individuals, with whom at times I developed a good deal of closeness, but where at times I felt I wasn’t really dealing with a particular person, but instead an institution or perhaps another person altogether. I realize this is even more true for some who are participating in this effort of reconception and regroupment, and in some ways I have only encountered and begun to grapple with some of the dimensions of this interaction in the past year, and even somewhat only in recent months. As I said, I find it very hard, and there may be some specificities to this difficulty that have to do with being an intellectual. But I also recognize that it is even harder for some others, and you have my sympathy.
For the past year I also thought that I could just hang back, since, after all, my main activity is going to continue to be working with theory (or perhaps it is “academic fluff,” as footnote 16 (http://revcom.us/Manifesto/Manifesto.html#footnote16) to the recent RCP Manifesto puts it). In the past two years I thought I could just work on my books, including a book on the transition to post-Maoism in Badiou and Avakian. Then I began to think that the book needed to be “post-Avakian” as well. Now I don’t know what it will be, if anything (and I do have the bad habit of saying here or there, maybe in some public talk, that I’m making notes toward a project, and the next thing I know people are writing to ask if the thing is out yet). However, as I say in the following, I want and need and have a responsibility to go where the interesting conversations are to be had and where the worthwhile work is to be done. I feel that I have a responsibility to contribute to the development of Marxism and to the project of revolutionary communism, even while it is clear that all intellectuals, even those still in the RCP, are being disinvited from making theoretical contributions, and where I am now in the position of going back through the moments when I thought I was not only engaging with the work of the Party but where I also thought the party was engaging with my work.
I have reservations even about Marx—as some of you may know, if you read the Conversations book or perhaps some of my other work. But of course there is much in the core of Marx that should be affirmed, and this goes for Lenin and the Soviet Revolution and Mao and the Chinese Revolution and Cultural Revolution as well. It even goes for much of Bob Avakian’s work and the experience of the RCP, even if this is much more one-sided than the work of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. But clearly we are overdue to develop in new directions. Even while the aforementioned work will certainly remain in our “encyclopedia,” as Alain Badiou puts it, we in fact do need some new truth, some new experience, a new synthesis, and we need and await an “event.”
For my first post to Kasama, and at the urging of Mike Ely and others, I would like to share some documents from the past few months. I realize that I tend to be long-winded, which is perhaps an occupational hazard of being a theorist, and also a cultural aspect of being from the South. Of course it would be very interesting and gratifying to receive some comments on this post, but it is also fine with me if my longer posts either recede into the background of a more general discussion (especially of the sort that is emerging with some of the former RCP comrades who are getting in touch with Kasama) or instead go into the more specifically theoretical arena that some of the Kasama people are setting up. While I think much of the discussion at Kasama has been interesting and useful, and an important part of the work of regroupment, for myself I am a bit wary of spending too much time with internet debate. In any case, I thank you in advance for your patience and I hope something in these documents is of value to you. Here or there I have inserted an additional explanatory note in brackets.
Under the impression that things could possibly return to the opening in the RCP that I perceived (and that many perceived) in the period of roughly 2000 – 2006 (about which, again, I could have been quite mistaken or merely naïve, or possibly even self-deceived to some extent), I communicated many concerns to a leading party member (or who at least I thought was leading; henceforth referred to as “LPM”) over the period since 2006 until spring 2008. For instance, upon reading some of the material that was published in the Revolution newspaper leading up to the completion of Away With All Gods! , I communicated that I thought there was much in Bob Avakian’s perspective on religion that was wrong-headed and unhelpful. Finally, at the end of May, 2008, I met with this LPM and gave this person the following document. Upon a quick reading of the document in my presence a rather long argument ensued (I made some notes in the aftermath of the argument and may write them up for sharing here at some point), and I have not had any direct contact with anyone from the party since that time. There are three documents:
My document of May 24, 2008, which is here almost in full;
A letter which I received about a month later, which I will not present in full, but instead will simply characterize and quote from (the language of it will be familiar to many readers);
Lastly, a letter I wrote in response a few days later, on June 12, 2008. I have received no response to that letter.
* * * * *
Bill Martin, 5.24.08
Thoughts on the present situation with the RCP, and the Kasama Project [draft]
1. This is not, for me, a matter of breaking with something, since I was never a member of the RCP. I have been, in the past, a supporter, or fellow traveler, or something undefined. I have tried to be a helper and a “conversant.” I have at times taken some serious risks for the sake of this trend; I am not putting this “on the table” as any kind of bargaining point—my goal is to integrate my life and work into the great aim of achieving a future for humankind, a future that I think necessarily involves revolution and the achievement of communism. All I am saying is that I have worked with people who are part of this effort, and even if much of the work I have done has been intellectual and theoretical work, it ought to be clear that I do not come to any of this without the sort of gravity that ought to attend this work.
2. Even so, let’s face it, theoretical work that is done by others than the designated theorists of the ICM is not especially appreciated, and indeed it is generally denigrated. There is a great tradition, from Lukacs to Adorno and Sartre to Derrida and Badiou that has been treated as worse than worthless. (I thought that things in RCP might be changing on this score, but apparently I was wrong.) Even Gramsci is treated as worthless because, after all, he didn’t win. Obviously, this (among other things) makes the recent critique of instrumentalism ring false.
3. So, perhaps it will be taken as “breaking” with the RCP, even if this is not my intention, if I were to have some discussions with some people around the Kasama Project, even if, as an intellectual, that is where some of the more interesting discussions are to be had. I am trying to make my own contributions to the development of a new synthesis, “post-Mao” and “post-Maoism,” and I do not see at this time how interesting conversations with the RCP or BA are going to happen. I recently completed a long book that is aimed at being such a contribution, Ethical Marxism: the categorical imperative of liberation (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/ethical_marxism.htm) [EM]. It was a long and difficult process to write this book; some of the difficulty included a terrible and ridiculous struggle around the preface written by Slavoj Zizek for the ConversationsConversations book was closing up, and now this opening seems all but closed up. Why has this happened? book. [This story will have to be told at another time.] That struggle revealed, to me, that the RCP was not really ready to work with radical intellectuals. In retrospect, it seems to me that the struggle revealed that the opening that was represented by the
[B]4. Clearly there is the sense that we do not need further work on the post-Mao synthesis, because this synthesis is now finished, in the form of BA’s New Synthesis. The only “discussion” to be had is aimed at assimilating the NS. Meanwhile, what is profoundly interesting and difficult is that this NS has been issued in dribs and drabs, only in the form of talks (and not systemically developed writing), where there has been little done to deepen the arguments for each of the elements of the so-called synthesis (much of what is done instead is chanting the mantras of science, truth, and the centrality of BA to the revolutionary project of our present time—without, it can be added, much deep insight into the character of this time, for that matter) or, especially, to show the intermotivation of the elements.
5. The declaration of the New Synthesis is premature, and for more than one reason. I would even say, to be fair, that the declaration is desperate, and one can see what is driving this desperation, and it is not simply some egotistical or megalomaniacal impulse coming from BA. We are very late in the day. We are no longer just “coming from behind,” we are coming from way, way behind, and we are coming from perhaps more than one stage of things behind.
Furthermore, and I think this is something that is not very well appreciated, in some respects we are too far into the supposed new synthesis without having all of the understanding and assessment that we need of the previous syntheses, even though I think BA has done essential and important work in bringing the Maoist synthesis together. (At the same time, it is also very interesting that there have been several Maoist syntheses on the table, even in the RIM [Revolutionary Internationalist Movement], not unrelated to each other, but still having significant differences that were not discussed in a way to which some of us, at least, had access. I know there were political considerations at play here, for instance in the way that differences between BA’s and Abimael Guzman’s sense of Maoism could be discussed, but the overall effect was that (i) people were kept in the dark about how all of this really works, and (ii) the impression is conveyed that the work of creating the new synthesis is only for a couple of major leaders, and indeed it is really only for one particular leader.)
Even so, we still need to understand the qualitative stages of theory that are represented by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and, in my view, we also need to do two other things:
i) we need to learn from the tradition that I would like to call “philosophical Marxism” (again, Lukacs to Badiou, etc.), and of course others who are outside of the strict MLM (and BA, I guess) canon (in EM I propose a distinction between “philosophical Marxism” and “revolutionary movement theory” that I think could be helpful, even though I don’t mean it as absolute, and there is also need for “bridging concepts”);
ii) we need to retrieve the work of those who were cast by the wayside out of some sense of orthodoxy. Indeed, the fact that neither of these things are happening is yet another indicator of the continuing prevalence of orthodox and otherwise very constrained thinking in the RCP.
The New Synthesis is premature in part because it isn’t worked out very well and there are a lot of problems with it, problems that could have been worked out to some extent if the opening of the previous period had continued, and if there had been some sense that “we need a new synthesis,” as opposed to the idea that the NS is here and complete, justified by the special role of BA as a leader/theoretician and that “sometimes theory outruns practice.”
The desperation of the declaration of the New Synthesis and of BA as a leader of world-historic importance, “on the level of a Lenin or a Mao,” is not hard to see or understand, especially when there is not much in the way of practice to underpin these things in recent decades, but also an unwillingness to go deeply into the reasons for this. I would say the primary reason is that the previous paradigm, Maoism, even while we still need to understand it, learn from it, and build on it, has also played itself out. (And it may be that the previous paradigm is something like a combination of Maoism and “sixties-ism.”) The very idea that we need a new synthesis is a recognition of this point, that an event can be exhausted, played out, “saturated,” it has essentially given us all that it can give us. This is complicated, because this doesn’t mean that we don’t still try to understand the event or phenomenon or sequence, or that what we do later doesn’t “come after” what came before. Our new synthesis will be “post-Mao” and “post-Maoism” (and even post-sixties, and so on).
But it is also the case that the declaration of the NS is premature because a new synthesis awaits an event that is unanticipated (here, by the way, I think Derrida and Badiou are quite close)—otherwise, “theory outruns practice” is just a form of subjectivism.
[Here I am removing a sentence that goes to security questions, though it goes to political line as well.]
6. Yes, I understand that the proletariat and the oppressed will have to be audacious if we are to achieve the aim of a liberated world for humanity, but to convince yourselves that this New Synthesis is really together, and that BA is really the Mao of now, through hyped-up presentations and declarations and whatnot, goes fundamentally against truth—and I think you know this, otherwise you wouldn’t have to declare these things so loudly and with such a jacked-up tone.
The emphasis on truth has a number of problems—I don’t know if I can develop this at length now. The theory of truth that I’m hearing from BA, despite declarations to the contrary, is a rather crude and unsophisticated re-tread of positivism and correspondence theory; in fact, it is barely that, it is more just a repeated mantra of “truth” that is about one step removed from Ayn Rand’s “A is A.” This theory depends on being untruthful about the work people have done for many decades on epistemology and ontology—as usual, no theory outside the canon even exists, or, if it exists, it is worse than worthless.
Second, the emphasis on truth is not backed up with truthfulness about many things in the history of the ICM or the RCP, for that matter. Third, if you believed in truth, then, for example, you would have recognized that much of this recent theoretical work from BA is not very good, and you wouldn’t have to, instead, scream it into being good.
7. In particular, Away With All Gods! is just not a very good book, it has some really serious problems, one of which is the continued practice—and this goes to the problem of truth as well—of mainly basing the work around a system of self-quotations. I would add to this the problem of closing a book that supposedly refutes “religion” (whatever that is, one would never know from reading the book) by making a declaration for the “absolute” and for certainty, without having any sense of the modalities under which these terms might operate.
8. You want people to “engage” with BA, even while he doesn’t engage with anyone else (that business about Marx spending ten years in the reading room of the British Museum was truly laughable), but instead just references his own work incessantly (along with superficial engagements with a few texts that are not exactly in the “heavy hitters” category, as with the engagement with Lerner and Armstrong in AWAG!), and then, when there is something like a real engagement, the primary approach to this is not in terms of truth, which just goes right out the window on most points, but instead ad hominem attacks. This is nothing but an enforcement of insularity, and it allows you to hold to your “truth” in some pristine and unchallengeable form—I guess that’s why it helps to bolster the absolute at the close of BA’s most recent work, as if there is any notion that is more religious, in a certain sense.
9. The RCP and BA have done some good things, they have kept the flame burning for certain ideas—and I did try to speak to this in my chapter on Maoism in EM. That chapter was completed in the fall of 2006, and unfortunately was not published until the end of March 2008. It may be that all of the work in that book will be meaningless to you, since it is outside of your narrow canon. In the chapter I expressed hope for what I called the “next synthesis,” but I was also trying to forestall the idea that this is already a finished thing. Clearly, it is not a finished thing, even as you conceive it, or else you could put it out there as a developed, systematic work, instead of just as a bunch of scattered talks and self-validating declarations (it’s the new synthesis because BA has conceived it, BA has conceived it, therefore it is the new synthesis). I guess your insularity doesn’t allow you to see how silly a lot of this looks to everyone else, and therefore the way that this sullies even further the reputation of our cause. Marx came out of the reading room with Capital, an undeniable work, everyone had to deal with it, such was its intellectual force. (For a group that places such an emphasis on reality, it is very telling that it cannot see how unreal this comparison to Marx in the reading room is.)
I don’t know why it is that BA cannot write, but instead just gives these talks that have such a large amount of self-references, but this is a real problem—again, everyone seems to see this but the people in the RCP, and even they see it, I feel pretty sure, but cannot recognize the truth of the problem. I’m not saying there aren’t some good things in the talks, but still.
As I said to you before, the fact that the phrase “the train has left the station” was used to describe the supposed completeness of the new synthesis is especially galling to me, in light of our conflict over the Zizek foreword.
[I was asked to ask Slavoj Zizek to write a foreword for the Conversations book. I warned the person who asked me to do this that he might not know what he was getting into, but, as usual, this person wanted to press forward. Prof. Zizek was very forthcoming, and then BA didn’t like what Zizek had written. I had some differences with what Zizek had written as well, but I also didn’t see that as the point—and, indeed, the fact that BA and his intermediary (of course I was not dealing with BA directly on any of this) did see this as the main point was once again a demonstration that they had very little sense of the intellectual world that they supposedly wanted to engage with and be engaged by. There ensued a weeklong struggle that was one of the worst weeks of my life, and the publisher of the book also had an interest in having the foreword. There was also very little sense that you do not ask a very well-known intellectual to do something for you and then throw it back in their face. At one point I said to BA’s intermediary that the train had left the station on the foreword; that, having asked of it, we had to use it. I was told this was a completely undialectical formulation, and basically reactionary. So, to learn that this was what Mike Ely had been told on the New Synthesis was extremely galling. In the end, Zizek made a couple of changes to the Foreword, on my request, and I added a note to the Introduction responding to a few points that Zizek had made—perhaps the first time that a foreword was accompanied by an author’s response—and I think an interesting and provocative voice was added to the whole discussion. I doubt that BA viewed it this way, and I received a somewhat harsh criticism from him around the whole affair. For his own role in making me so miserable that I seriously considered packing it in altogether, he had no comment or criticism.]
10. If we really need a new synthesis—I agree that we do—then surely this will also mean a rethinking of the idea of the party, or of organization, as well—and I could develop a number of themes related to this. Wasn’t there a different conception of organization in every previous synthesis? Instead, it seems like the conception now is just an even more narrow version of Lenin’s conception. Maybe that is warranted, but I’d like to see the argument. In any case, I don’t see how I could work within this conception, as an intellectual—but then, I think there is intellectual work to be done, on the new synthesis, and I guess you don’t think that.
There has to be a new conception for two reasons: things are different in the present of our global society, and the previous conception is largely played out. This requires some very creative thinking, and new kinds of engagements, but also real engagements with the people. None of this, in my view, points toward reviving economism (though I think we should also rethink the term, and here is where I have proposed a critique of the whole model based on interests—in some ways not unlike Badiou—even while we might also look at what Zizek says in the Parallax View about political economy and the “pure political” theories of Badiou and others).
There has to be a new conception and some new practice, therefore two things follow for me (and maybe not for everyone else): i) perhaps there is the possibility of a significant morphing of the RCP, into what is needed or something closer to that, and I would say this would first of all involve reconnecting to the opening that occurred in the period of roughly 2000-2006; it would also involve some very significant ruptures—the next synthesis needs to be not only post-Mao, but also post-Avakian, and I mean this latter in both positive and negative ways (perhaps BA himself can become post-Avakian; I do feel a lot of warmth toward BA and wish that this could happen, but I don’t know if I can hold out much hope); ii) I want to be where the interesting conversations are that might lead to the next synthesis, and that doesn’t seem to be the RCP for the most part. Again, for me it isn’t a matter of breaking with anything, unless it is seen that way from your side. As with the treatment of Mike Ely and others associated with the Kasama Project, I think that would be very foolish. We need to rethink Maoism and to think post-Maoism, and no good purpose is served by narrowing this project, or of claiming the revolutionary communist project in some narrow and indeed propertarian and authoritarian way.
It is very clear that the New Synthesis, as conceived by BA, is not a significant rupture, and that ought to tell you some things.
It is really too bad, even if sometimes understandable—but at other times just plain fucked-up and stupid—that so much has been squandered around this Party, so much of the basis for solidarity and radicality. If the Party just keeps going the way it has, I think it will be even more isolated, though I have no doubt that this will just play into its own self-justification—we’re right because everyone is against us. But everyone isn’t against you, it is instead that you have not managed to inspire people to be for you—and some of the problems in going forward with the “Engage” project are telling on this point, and works such as Away With All Gods! are not helping in the least, on the contrary.
So, I’m going to do my work, which may involve publishing this document with Kasama, so that it can be somewhat clear how I am going to go forward, and which may involve engaging in discussions about the post-Maoism synthesis with people grouped around Kasama. Of course, I will be happy to engage in such discussion with you or others around the RCP, if it is thoughtful discussion and not simply declarations that the train has left the station. Right now I’m not even sure that we have the train or the station, or at least I think it would be better if we didn’t assume that we do. If you have an argument for an alternative, one that somehow leads to dynamic intellectual work and a real contribution to the future of humankind, of course I am open to hearing it.
[end of this first document]
* * * * * *
I gave the preceding document to the LPM on May 25, 2008. If it may seem that I am soft-peddling certain things in the document, I should add that I was rather harsh, and angry, in person. On the one side, for instance, I said that I think AWAG! is a very bad book, even “a load of crap”; on the other side, the LPM said that it is a “great book.” Just lately I was thinking, on a less world-historic scale to be sure, that one might make an analogy to someone who told you that a rather middling album by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is the greatest piece of music ever recorded. Well, what kind of conversation could follow upon that? With whom or what is one even having an exchange (which could not really be a conversation)?
On about June 10, two and a half weeks later, I received an urgent missive, a one-page (single-spaced) letter, sent by overnight mail (for about $17), along with a copy of the document, with which I was already well familiar, “Some Crucial Points of Revolutionary Orientation—in Opposition to Infantile Posturing and Distortions of Revolution.” (http://revcom.us/a/055/crucialpoints.html) This letter came from the LPM, though one suspects that at least parts of it were composed by others. I can hardly bear to look at this letter—it makes me very sad and again, angry.
The letter opens with an expression of extreme disappointment and shock at my level of subjectivity and “the overall unprincipled character of my remarks and attitude.” The letter asserts the conclusion that these traits are indicative of my general political direction, and it says that publishing the document I had presented to the LPM, especially with the Kasama Project (in the letter this was put in scare-quotes) would represent a deepening of that direction. The letter says that, if I am determined to publish the document, I absolutely must not include a particular sentence, the one relating to security concerns, which I have now excised.
The rest of the letter speaks of differences that we have always had, and that appear now to be profound; in conclusion the letter says that, despite these differences, I have a responsibility to act on principle, and that “I [the LPM] will be expecting no less from you.”
Then the letter is signed by the first name of the LPM.
* * * * * *
I won’t dwell on some of the expressions in this letter, including the last bit; I have already put the letter back in the envelope—as I said, I can’t bear to look at it. But I can’t help but remark on the directionality of expectations, especially given that, in our contentious meeting, I was especially insistent that the LPM live up to some intellectual expectations, including the expectations of intellectual honesty and truthfulness.
For what reason I’m not entirely sure, but I responded to the letter. I was in deep anguish about the letter for two days and then wrote up my response, which follows.
* * * * * *
From Bill Martin, 6.12.08
Dear [first name of the LPM],
We don’t have a working printer here, so I’ll just write this out longhand and make a copy.
It was disturbing to receive your communication.
First and foremost, I have not sought to publish those comments, including the sentence you mentioned, anywhere, nor have I given a copy of those comments to anyone other than you.
Now I wish I had not given the comments to you, either, or had that conversation with you. From the recent communication I see that it is silly to think that the RCP and BA are interested in anything other than strong affirmation. If I thought I was doing anything for the good of the world and the future of humankind, I would still play that game, your game based on your subjectivity [italics are underlined in original], but I don’t see anything good coming of this. I thought that you were breaking with instrumentalism with regard to intellectuals, and some good steps were made, and we even made some steps together, or so I thought, but the way the NS and BA have been put out there, as trains that have left the station, has closed this opening. Now I also wonder why I even gave a copy of my book to you, even though the RCP and BA receive as strong an affirmation there as they will ever receive from any intellectual, and especially from any philosopher. But just throw it on the trash heap with the rest of philosophy.
When we were talking about Away With All Gods! , I had not read (approximately) the last quarter of the book. It was hard for me to get that far, and even now I have perhaps ten pages to go. I got to the part where BA was explaining the idea of the syllogism, and that effects always come (temporally) after causes. In the latter case, I thought, “read some Aristotle, man!” But I guess the fact that Aristotle’s analysis of four categories of causality, even though it was important, very important, to Marx, isn’t worth thinking about for BA. But if the notion of final cause, a cause that reaches back from the future, in a sense, is not important to BA, in what sense can the future, or the call of the future, be important, either? What you’re left with is efficient causality, and that always leads to mechanical materialism and dogmatic thinking. Which fits with AWAG! , it is mere secular rationalism, not historical materialism, and not really a Marxist book. In my view the book has many other problems, too, but clearly you’re not interested in that—just chalk it up to subjectivism. In response to something I said about Badiou, you responded that Badiou is not trying to take responsibility for the ICM. Is that what AWAG! is supposed to represent, an act of responsibility? I would say it was very irresponsible to put that out there as representative of vanguard communist thinking. But I’m sure it will stir up something at a track meet, as per that recent Revolution article, among people who themselves will probably never read the book. But I’m sure that’s fine, too, because who needs people who do read books? Yes, my attitude is very “bad” at this point, because I am angry and sickened at the way things have gone, and maybe I was just naïve to think it ever could have been otherwise. I had written up a bunch of notes after our conversation, but I doubt that it would be worthwhile to send them. I wrote that sentence, which you’re censuring me for, because everything else in the last two years or so, and even for me with the argument over the Zizek foreword [to the Conversations book], has been so forced. Forced, but also contrived and hyped, with little, very little, of the rigor and science, or any reality to the embracing, that is always being called for. But I can see how it would be very problematic for me to worry in a public way about [the subject of the sentence I excised], even if I also think it is a legitimate worry that I wanted to express to you, at least. So, no, I won’t put that sentence out there, or any of the other stuff, for that matter. I’ll just try to do my work as best I can, that’s all I know to do. However, I would also warn you against drawing certain lines against me, not only because I find it very hurtful in a personal way (I know you find some of what I’ve said personally hurtful too, but I want that to divide into two: 1) yes, you personally need to think about what it means that you can wrap your mind around the NS [New Synthesis] being finished, AWAG! line, not you or even BA “personally,” which began to show great promise and now has closed up significantly), without any good coming of it (and really just reinforcing instrumentalism), but also because it is merely self-serving of you (and whomever) to deal with criticisms by putting the critics in the camp of subjectivism or even some kind of enemy. being a “great book,” etc.; 2) my anger is at this
You said when we were talking that we (you and I) were at an impasse. Perhaps. I think the world is at an impasse. Some elements of the NS are helpful here, and I will continue to study the documents on this that come out. If you or BA really do see how all of these elements form a synthesis, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate this systematically, and not to make hyped claims or charge me or others with subjectivism or the rest of the standard litany of insults. I think the hyped or forced claims, and poorly-formulated works such as AWAG! can actually contribute to the impasse. Perhaps I have contributed to the impasse as well, though I assure that my subjective aim is otherwise. I do think that, until BA and the RCP recognizes the dimensions of the ways that capitalism and imperialism have become postmodern (which even goes to what BA said about the syllogism, and the category of irrationality by itself just doesn’t get it), and the ways that fascism, “Christian fascism” and other forms of the current dynamic (repression, consumerism, low levels of culture, anomie, etc.) work within this postmodern field, and the way that this postmodern capitalism depends on fomenting and deepening the impasse, that it will be too easy to fall into deepening the impasse yourselves, or too shaped by it. Another secular rationalist response to religion is a good example of this, even if some of the politics of this response [AWAG! ] is better than the politics of some of the other secular rationalist critiques out there (on the other hand, as a secular rationalist critique, Daniel Dennett’s is better on every level). I can see how a crude sense of “truth” and certainty and rationality (and the attendant sense that others are irrational) would seem like a good response to the present impasse, but it isn’t. Ironically, it is a pathway to your own religion, and not a good one, either.
Please do not think I take any kind of pleasure in getting into this, I find it ridiculous and tiresome and intellectually debilitating that all of this has arisen at all. Please do not insult me further by telling me that BA can’t be the kind of intellectual I want him to be. Someone who can’t be bothered to systematically engage with some range of the more developed, deep, and thoughtful work in his field of inquiry (religion or whatever), and who instead spends an inordinate amount of verbiage quoting himself, is not an intellectual or someone who could have anything to do with intellectual ferment. On the contrary, this approach to a philosophically-heavy subject just makes our whole cause look ridiculous, and it shows contempt for thoughtful people. But go ahead and put your pre-formulated “explanations” on my objections; unfortunately, it is very hard to imagine anymore that you would do anything else. You’re right—it’s my subjectivism that leads me to think that constant self-references are a problem in theoretical work, especially “scientific” theoretical work; one would think that constant self-reference would be almost the very definition of subjectivism, but I guess that’s just a matter of form rather than content [this is something that the LPM said to me, that my challenging of the method of self-reference only goes to form, not content].
Okay, now I’m just getting pissed off thinking about this stuff, so I’ll just go back to my work, trying to add to the 2500 years of cant [BA once referred to Kant as “nothing more than cant,” a point we discussed in the Conversations book]; believe it or not, I wish you and BA the best in your own work.
Bill
* * * * *
Obviously there is a great deal more to discuss, even concerning the material presented here, and let me remind the reader that I knew nothing of the “Cultural Revolution (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/rcp-describes-avakians-self-coup-within-the-party/)” in the RCP or other aspects of reorganization that are discussed in the recent Manifesto. Neither did I know about the role that the Conversations book, including two parts in particular (on Kant and instrumentalism, and on homosexuality), played in internal party matters. It is ironic and very sad that, apparently, the discussion of instrumentalism in the book played a role in reinforcing instrumentalism in the party and, I can only assume, with people outside of the party (including yours truly). The greatest irony is that, apparently, it was decided for instrumental reasons that it would be good for a period to have a critique of instrumentalism, and now that period has passed and there has been a reassertion of the value of instrumentalizing people. This exchange of documents also occurred before the New Synthesis presentations were made in various parts of the U.S. To say the least it was painful to read the part of the presentation that supposedly stressed the importance of philosophy. Not the history of philosophy from Plato to Badiou—oh, hell no! Who needs that bourgeois crap and academic fluff? Instead what we need is that “truth is correspondence to reality.” Okay, I’ll quit (for now).
We are faced with a truly difficult task, to take account of Maoism and the attempt to develop and even surpass Maoism, and then to really surpass it, which means being open to something new. We have to carry forward Marx and Lenin and Mao and the experience of proletarian revolution, and even the real contributions of Bob Avakian, and there may be a few others we ought to bring forward. More than this, we might think further on the idea that we should not forget that communism is always bigger and deeper than any of the rest. “Human life is limited, but revolution knows no bounds.”
Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on September 23, 2008
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/kansasfield.jpg?w=300&h=199 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/kansasfield.jpg)
Traveling the road together by Bill Martin
Hello, friends.
Although I have been talking with some of you more directly in the past year, I have remained aloof in some ways from things unfolding around Kasama and around the RCP. Unfortunately, as someone attempting to be a radical intellectual and to contribute to understanding and changing the world, I have learned this need to take distance from the RCP itself.
As most of you will know, I co-authored the book Marxism and the Call of the Future (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/marxism_and_call.htm) with Bob Avakian. At the time I worked on the book, I thought things were on a different course within the RCP, on the question of working with intellectuals and artists, and on many other questions as well. We can discuss further whether or not things were really on a different course or if instead something else was in fact going on. Certainly there were many things happening in the RCP in recent years about which I either didn’t know or, apparently, was quite naïve. Clearly people who were actually in the party have a very different perspective on these things than I do.
For me, this whole scene is extraordinarily difficult. Even as I feel some excitement about getting on with things, going forward from here and reconceiving and regrouping, I also feel that in some sense my legs have been kicked out from under me, and I am also feeling the weight of the dissipation of a relationship that, though quite often difficult, problematic, troubled, and filled with turmoil, was also at key junctures enlivening and inspiring. This relationship goes back roughly twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, to the early 1980s. It is a relationship that involved discreet individuals, with whom at times I developed a good deal of closeness, but where at times I felt I wasn’t really dealing with a particular person, but instead an institution or perhaps another person altogether. I realize this is even more true for some who are participating in this effort of reconception and regroupment, and in some ways I have only encountered and begun to grapple with some of the dimensions of this interaction in the past year, and even somewhat only in recent months. As I said, I find it very hard, and there may be some specificities to this difficulty that have to do with being an intellectual. But I also recognize that it is even harder for some others, and you have my sympathy.
For the past year I also thought that I could just hang back, since, after all, my main activity is going to continue to be working with theory (or perhaps it is “academic fluff,” as footnote 16 (http://revcom.us/Manifesto/Manifesto.html#footnote16) to the recent RCP Manifesto puts it). In the past two years I thought I could just work on my books, including a book on the transition to post-Maoism in Badiou and Avakian. Then I began to think that the book needed to be “post-Avakian” as well. Now I don’t know what it will be, if anything (and I do have the bad habit of saying here or there, maybe in some public talk, that I’m making notes toward a project, and the next thing I know people are writing to ask if the thing is out yet). However, as I say in the following, I want and need and have a responsibility to go where the interesting conversations are to be had and where the worthwhile work is to be done. I feel that I have a responsibility to contribute to the development of Marxism and to the project of revolutionary communism, even while it is clear that all intellectuals, even those still in the RCP, are being disinvited from making theoretical contributions, and where I am now in the position of going back through the moments when I thought I was not only engaging with the work of the Party but where I also thought the party was engaging with my work.
I have reservations even about Marx—as some of you may know, if you read the Conversations book or perhaps some of my other work. But of course there is much in the core of Marx that should be affirmed, and this goes for Lenin and the Soviet Revolution and Mao and the Chinese Revolution and Cultural Revolution as well. It even goes for much of Bob Avakian’s work and the experience of the RCP, even if this is much more one-sided than the work of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. But clearly we are overdue to develop in new directions. Even while the aforementioned work will certainly remain in our “encyclopedia,” as Alain Badiou puts it, we in fact do need some new truth, some new experience, a new synthesis, and we need and await an “event.”
For my first post to Kasama, and at the urging of Mike Ely and others, I would like to share some documents from the past few months. I realize that I tend to be long-winded, which is perhaps an occupational hazard of being a theorist, and also a cultural aspect of being from the South. Of course it would be very interesting and gratifying to receive some comments on this post, but it is also fine with me if my longer posts either recede into the background of a more general discussion (especially of the sort that is emerging with some of the former RCP comrades who are getting in touch with Kasama) or instead go into the more specifically theoretical arena that some of the Kasama people are setting up. While I think much of the discussion at Kasama has been interesting and useful, and an important part of the work of regroupment, for myself I am a bit wary of spending too much time with internet debate. In any case, I thank you in advance for your patience and I hope something in these documents is of value to you. Here or there I have inserted an additional explanatory note in brackets.
Under the impression that things could possibly return to the opening in the RCP that I perceived (and that many perceived) in the period of roughly 2000 – 2006 (about which, again, I could have been quite mistaken or merely naïve, or possibly even self-deceived to some extent), I communicated many concerns to a leading party member (or who at least I thought was leading; henceforth referred to as “LPM”) over the period since 2006 until spring 2008. For instance, upon reading some of the material that was published in the Revolution newspaper leading up to the completion of Away With All Gods! , I communicated that I thought there was much in Bob Avakian’s perspective on religion that was wrong-headed and unhelpful. Finally, at the end of May, 2008, I met with this LPM and gave this person the following document. Upon a quick reading of the document in my presence a rather long argument ensued (I made some notes in the aftermath of the argument and may write them up for sharing here at some point), and I have not had any direct contact with anyone from the party since that time. There are three documents:
My document of May 24, 2008, which is here almost in full;
A letter which I received about a month later, which I will not present in full, but instead will simply characterize and quote from (the language of it will be familiar to many readers);
Lastly, a letter I wrote in response a few days later, on June 12, 2008. I have received no response to that letter.
* * * * *
Bill Martin, 5.24.08
Thoughts on the present situation with the RCP, and the Kasama Project [draft]
1. This is not, for me, a matter of breaking with something, since I was never a member of the RCP. I have been, in the past, a supporter, or fellow traveler, or something undefined. I have tried to be a helper and a “conversant.” I have at times taken some serious risks for the sake of this trend; I am not putting this “on the table” as any kind of bargaining point—my goal is to integrate my life and work into the great aim of achieving a future for humankind, a future that I think necessarily involves revolution and the achievement of communism. All I am saying is that I have worked with people who are part of this effort, and even if much of the work I have done has been intellectual and theoretical work, it ought to be clear that I do not come to any of this without the sort of gravity that ought to attend this work.
2. Even so, let’s face it, theoretical work that is done by others than the designated theorists of the ICM is not especially appreciated, and indeed it is generally denigrated. There is a great tradition, from Lukacs to Adorno and Sartre to Derrida and Badiou that has been treated as worse than worthless. (I thought that things in RCP might be changing on this score, but apparently I was wrong.) Even Gramsci is treated as worthless because, after all, he didn’t win. Obviously, this (among other things) makes the recent critique of instrumentalism ring false.
3. So, perhaps it will be taken as “breaking” with the RCP, even if this is not my intention, if I were to have some discussions with some people around the Kasama Project, even if, as an intellectual, that is where some of the more interesting discussions are to be had. I am trying to make my own contributions to the development of a new synthesis, “post-Mao” and “post-Maoism,” and I do not see at this time how interesting conversations with the RCP or BA are going to happen. I recently completed a long book that is aimed at being such a contribution, Ethical Marxism: the categorical imperative of liberation (http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/ethical_marxism.htm) [EM]. It was a long and difficult process to write this book; some of the difficulty included a terrible and ridiculous struggle around the preface written by Slavoj Zizek for the ConversationsConversations book was closing up, and now this opening seems all but closed up. Why has this happened? book. [This story will have to be told at another time.] That struggle revealed, to me, that the RCP was not really ready to work with radical intellectuals. In retrospect, it seems to me that the struggle revealed that the opening that was represented by the
[B]4. Clearly there is the sense that we do not need further work on the post-Mao synthesis, because this synthesis is now finished, in the form of BA’s New Synthesis. The only “discussion” to be had is aimed at assimilating the NS. Meanwhile, what is profoundly interesting and difficult is that this NS has been issued in dribs and drabs, only in the form of talks (and not systemically developed writing), where there has been little done to deepen the arguments for each of the elements of the so-called synthesis (much of what is done instead is chanting the mantras of science, truth, and the centrality of BA to the revolutionary project of our present time—without, it can be added, much deep insight into the character of this time, for that matter) or, especially, to show the intermotivation of the elements.
5. The declaration of the New Synthesis is premature, and for more than one reason. I would even say, to be fair, that the declaration is desperate, and one can see what is driving this desperation, and it is not simply some egotistical or megalomaniacal impulse coming from BA. We are very late in the day. We are no longer just “coming from behind,” we are coming from way, way behind, and we are coming from perhaps more than one stage of things behind.
Furthermore, and I think this is something that is not very well appreciated, in some respects we are too far into the supposed new synthesis without having all of the understanding and assessment that we need of the previous syntheses, even though I think BA has done essential and important work in bringing the Maoist synthesis together. (At the same time, it is also very interesting that there have been several Maoist syntheses on the table, even in the RIM [Revolutionary Internationalist Movement], not unrelated to each other, but still having significant differences that were not discussed in a way to which some of us, at least, had access. I know there were political considerations at play here, for instance in the way that differences between BA’s and Abimael Guzman’s sense of Maoism could be discussed, but the overall effect was that (i) people were kept in the dark about how all of this really works, and (ii) the impression is conveyed that the work of creating the new synthesis is only for a couple of major leaders, and indeed it is really only for one particular leader.)
Even so, we still need to understand the qualitative stages of theory that are represented by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and, in my view, we also need to do two other things:
i) we need to learn from the tradition that I would like to call “philosophical Marxism” (again, Lukacs to Badiou, etc.), and of course others who are outside of the strict MLM (and BA, I guess) canon (in EM I propose a distinction between “philosophical Marxism” and “revolutionary movement theory” that I think could be helpful, even though I don’t mean it as absolute, and there is also need for “bridging concepts”);
ii) we need to retrieve the work of those who were cast by the wayside out of some sense of orthodoxy. Indeed, the fact that neither of these things are happening is yet another indicator of the continuing prevalence of orthodox and otherwise very constrained thinking in the RCP.
The New Synthesis is premature in part because it isn’t worked out very well and there are a lot of problems with it, problems that could have been worked out to some extent if the opening of the previous period had continued, and if there had been some sense that “we need a new synthesis,” as opposed to the idea that the NS is here and complete, justified by the special role of BA as a leader/theoretician and that “sometimes theory outruns practice.”
The desperation of the declaration of the New Synthesis and of BA as a leader of world-historic importance, “on the level of a Lenin or a Mao,” is not hard to see or understand, especially when there is not much in the way of practice to underpin these things in recent decades, but also an unwillingness to go deeply into the reasons for this. I would say the primary reason is that the previous paradigm, Maoism, even while we still need to understand it, learn from it, and build on it, has also played itself out. (And it may be that the previous paradigm is something like a combination of Maoism and “sixties-ism.”) The very idea that we need a new synthesis is a recognition of this point, that an event can be exhausted, played out, “saturated,” it has essentially given us all that it can give us. This is complicated, because this doesn’t mean that we don’t still try to understand the event or phenomenon or sequence, or that what we do later doesn’t “come after” what came before. Our new synthesis will be “post-Mao” and “post-Maoism” (and even post-sixties, and so on).
But it is also the case that the declaration of the NS is premature because a new synthesis awaits an event that is unanticipated (here, by the way, I think Derrida and Badiou are quite close)—otherwise, “theory outruns practice” is just a form of subjectivism.
[Here I am removing a sentence that goes to security questions, though it goes to political line as well.]
6. Yes, I understand that the proletariat and the oppressed will have to be audacious if we are to achieve the aim of a liberated world for humanity, but to convince yourselves that this New Synthesis is really together, and that BA is really the Mao of now, through hyped-up presentations and declarations and whatnot, goes fundamentally against truth—and I think you know this, otherwise you wouldn’t have to declare these things so loudly and with such a jacked-up tone.
The emphasis on truth has a number of problems—I don’t know if I can develop this at length now. The theory of truth that I’m hearing from BA, despite declarations to the contrary, is a rather crude and unsophisticated re-tread of positivism and correspondence theory; in fact, it is barely that, it is more just a repeated mantra of “truth” that is about one step removed from Ayn Rand’s “A is A.” This theory depends on being untruthful about the work people have done for many decades on epistemology and ontology—as usual, no theory outside the canon even exists, or, if it exists, it is worse than worthless.
Second, the emphasis on truth is not backed up with truthfulness about many things in the history of the ICM or the RCP, for that matter. Third, if you believed in truth, then, for example, you would have recognized that much of this recent theoretical work from BA is not very good, and you wouldn’t have to, instead, scream it into being good.
7. In particular, Away With All Gods! is just not a very good book, it has some really serious problems, one of which is the continued practice—and this goes to the problem of truth as well—of mainly basing the work around a system of self-quotations. I would add to this the problem of closing a book that supposedly refutes “religion” (whatever that is, one would never know from reading the book) by making a declaration for the “absolute” and for certainty, without having any sense of the modalities under which these terms might operate.
8. You want people to “engage” with BA, even while he doesn’t engage with anyone else (that business about Marx spending ten years in the reading room of the British Museum was truly laughable), but instead just references his own work incessantly (along with superficial engagements with a few texts that are not exactly in the “heavy hitters” category, as with the engagement with Lerner and Armstrong in AWAG!), and then, when there is something like a real engagement, the primary approach to this is not in terms of truth, which just goes right out the window on most points, but instead ad hominem attacks. This is nothing but an enforcement of insularity, and it allows you to hold to your “truth” in some pristine and unchallengeable form—I guess that’s why it helps to bolster the absolute at the close of BA’s most recent work, as if there is any notion that is more religious, in a certain sense.
9. The RCP and BA have done some good things, they have kept the flame burning for certain ideas—and I did try to speak to this in my chapter on Maoism in EM. That chapter was completed in the fall of 2006, and unfortunately was not published until the end of March 2008. It may be that all of the work in that book will be meaningless to you, since it is outside of your narrow canon. In the chapter I expressed hope for what I called the “next synthesis,” but I was also trying to forestall the idea that this is already a finished thing. Clearly, it is not a finished thing, even as you conceive it, or else you could put it out there as a developed, systematic work, instead of just as a bunch of scattered talks and self-validating declarations (it’s the new synthesis because BA has conceived it, BA has conceived it, therefore it is the new synthesis). I guess your insularity doesn’t allow you to see how silly a lot of this looks to everyone else, and therefore the way that this sullies even further the reputation of our cause. Marx came out of the reading room with Capital, an undeniable work, everyone had to deal with it, such was its intellectual force. (For a group that places such an emphasis on reality, it is very telling that it cannot see how unreal this comparison to Marx in the reading room is.)
I don’t know why it is that BA cannot write, but instead just gives these talks that have such a large amount of self-references, but this is a real problem—again, everyone seems to see this but the people in the RCP, and even they see it, I feel pretty sure, but cannot recognize the truth of the problem. I’m not saying there aren’t some good things in the talks, but still.
As I said to you before, the fact that the phrase “the train has left the station” was used to describe the supposed completeness of the new synthesis is especially galling to me, in light of our conflict over the Zizek foreword.
[I was asked to ask Slavoj Zizek to write a foreword for the Conversations book. I warned the person who asked me to do this that he might not know what he was getting into, but, as usual, this person wanted to press forward. Prof. Zizek was very forthcoming, and then BA didn’t like what Zizek had written. I had some differences with what Zizek had written as well, but I also didn’t see that as the point—and, indeed, the fact that BA and his intermediary (of course I was not dealing with BA directly on any of this) did see this as the main point was once again a demonstration that they had very little sense of the intellectual world that they supposedly wanted to engage with and be engaged by. There ensued a weeklong struggle that was one of the worst weeks of my life, and the publisher of the book also had an interest in having the foreword. There was also very little sense that you do not ask a very well-known intellectual to do something for you and then throw it back in their face. At one point I said to BA’s intermediary that the train had left the station on the foreword; that, having asked of it, we had to use it. I was told this was a completely undialectical formulation, and basically reactionary. So, to learn that this was what Mike Ely had been told on the New Synthesis was extremely galling. In the end, Zizek made a couple of changes to the Foreword, on my request, and I added a note to the Introduction responding to a few points that Zizek had made—perhaps the first time that a foreword was accompanied by an author’s response—and I think an interesting and provocative voice was added to the whole discussion. I doubt that BA viewed it this way, and I received a somewhat harsh criticism from him around the whole affair. For his own role in making me so miserable that I seriously considered packing it in altogether, he had no comment or criticism.]
10. If we really need a new synthesis—I agree that we do—then surely this will also mean a rethinking of the idea of the party, or of organization, as well—and I could develop a number of themes related to this. Wasn’t there a different conception of organization in every previous synthesis? Instead, it seems like the conception now is just an even more narrow version of Lenin’s conception. Maybe that is warranted, but I’d like to see the argument. In any case, I don’t see how I could work within this conception, as an intellectual—but then, I think there is intellectual work to be done, on the new synthesis, and I guess you don’t think that.
There has to be a new conception for two reasons: things are different in the present of our global society, and the previous conception is largely played out. This requires some very creative thinking, and new kinds of engagements, but also real engagements with the people. None of this, in my view, points toward reviving economism (though I think we should also rethink the term, and here is where I have proposed a critique of the whole model based on interests—in some ways not unlike Badiou—even while we might also look at what Zizek says in the Parallax View about political economy and the “pure political” theories of Badiou and others).
There has to be a new conception and some new practice, therefore two things follow for me (and maybe not for everyone else): i) perhaps there is the possibility of a significant morphing of the RCP, into what is needed or something closer to that, and I would say this would first of all involve reconnecting to the opening that occurred in the period of roughly 2000-2006; it would also involve some very significant ruptures—the next synthesis needs to be not only post-Mao, but also post-Avakian, and I mean this latter in both positive and negative ways (perhaps BA himself can become post-Avakian; I do feel a lot of warmth toward BA and wish that this could happen, but I don’t know if I can hold out much hope); ii) I want to be where the interesting conversations are that might lead to the next synthesis, and that doesn’t seem to be the RCP for the most part. Again, for me it isn’t a matter of breaking with anything, unless it is seen that way from your side. As with the treatment of Mike Ely and others associated with the Kasama Project, I think that would be very foolish. We need to rethink Maoism and to think post-Maoism, and no good purpose is served by narrowing this project, or of claiming the revolutionary communist project in some narrow and indeed propertarian and authoritarian way.
It is very clear that the New Synthesis, as conceived by BA, is not a significant rupture, and that ought to tell you some things.
It is really too bad, even if sometimes understandable—but at other times just plain fucked-up and stupid—that so much has been squandered around this Party, so much of the basis for solidarity and radicality. If the Party just keeps going the way it has, I think it will be even more isolated, though I have no doubt that this will just play into its own self-justification—we’re right because everyone is against us. But everyone isn’t against you, it is instead that you have not managed to inspire people to be for you—and some of the problems in going forward with the “Engage” project are telling on this point, and works such as Away With All Gods! are not helping in the least, on the contrary.
So, I’m going to do my work, which may involve publishing this document with Kasama, so that it can be somewhat clear how I am going to go forward, and which may involve engaging in discussions about the post-Maoism synthesis with people grouped around Kasama. Of course, I will be happy to engage in such discussion with you or others around the RCP, if it is thoughtful discussion and not simply declarations that the train has left the station. Right now I’m not even sure that we have the train or the station, or at least I think it would be better if we didn’t assume that we do. If you have an argument for an alternative, one that somehow leads to dynamic intellectual work and a real contribution to the future of humankind, of course I am open to hearing it.
[end of this first document]
* * * * * *
I gave the preceding document to the LPM on May 25, 2008. If it may seem that I am soft-peddling certain things in the document, I should add that I was rather harsh, and angry, in person. On the one side, for instance, I said that I think AWAG! is a very bad book, even “a load of crap”; on the other side, the LPM said that it is a “great book.” Just lately I was thinking, on a less world-historic scale to be sure, that one might make an analogy to someone who told you that a rather middling album by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is the greatest piece of music ever recorded. Well, what kind of conversation could follow upon that? With whom or what is one even having an exchange (which could not really be a conversation)?
On about June 10, two and a half weeks later, I received an urgent missive, a one-page (single-spaced) letter, sent by overnight mail (for about $17), along with a copy of the document, with which I was already well familiar, “Some Crucial Points of Revolutionary Orientation—in Opposition to Infantile Posturing and Distortions of Revolution.” (http://revcom.us/a/055/crucialpoints.html) This letter came from the LPM, though one suspects that at least parts of it were composed by others. I can hardly bear to look at this letter—it makes me very sad and again, angry.
The letter opens with an expression of extreme disappointment and shock at my level of subjectivity and “the overall unprincipled character of my remarks and attitude.” The letter asserts the conclusion that these traits are indicative of my general political direction, and it says that publishing the document I had presented to the LPM, especially with the Kasama Project (in the letter this was put in scare-quotes) would represent a deepening of that direction. The letter says that, if I am determined to publish the document, I absolutely must not include a particular sentence, the one relating to security concerns, which I have now excised.
The rest of the letter speaks of differences that we have always had, and that appear now to be profound; in conclusion the letter says that, despite these differences, I have a responsibility to act on principle, and that “I [the LPM] will be expecting no less from you.”
Then the letter is signed by the first name of the LPM.
* * * * * *
I won’t dwell on some of the expressions in this letter, including the last bit; I have already put the letter back in the envelope—as I said, I can’t bear to look at it. But I can’t help but remark on the directionality of expectations, especially given that, in our contentious meeting, I was especially insistent that the LPM live up to some intellectual expectations, including the expectations of intellectual honesty and truthfulness.
For what reason I’m not entirely sure, but I responded to the letter. I was in deep anguish about the letter for two days and then wrote up my response, which follows.
* * * * * *
From Bill Martin, 6.12.08
Dear [first name of the LPM],
We don’t have a working printer here, so I’ll just write this out longhand and make a copy.
It was disturbing to receive your communication.
First and foremost, I have not sought to publish those comments, including the sentence you mentioned, anywhere, nor have I given a copy of those comments to anyone other than you.
Now I wish I had not given the comments to you, either, or had that conversation with you. From the recent communication I see that it is silly to think that the RCP and BA are interested in anything other than strong affirmation. If I thought I was doing anything for the good of the world and the future of humankind, I would still play that game, your game based on your subjectivity [italics are underlined in original], but I don’t see anything good coming of this. I thought that you were breaking with instrumentalism with regard to intellectuals, and some good steps were made, and we even made some steps together, or so I thought, but the way the NS and BA have been put out there, as trains that have left the station, has closed this opening. Now I also wonder why I even gave a copy of my book to you, even though the RCP and BA receive as strong an affirmation there as they will ever receive from any intellectual, and especially from any philosopher. But just throw it on the trash heap with the rest of philosophy.
When we were talking about Away With All Gods! , I had not read (approximately) the last quarter of the book. It was hard for me to get that far, and even now I have perhaps ten pages to go. I got to the part where BA was explaining the idea of the syllogism, and that effects always come (temporally) after causes. In the latter case, I thought, “read some Aristotle, man!” But I guess the fact that Aristotle’s analysis of four categories of causality, even though it was important, very important, to Marx, isn’t worth thinking about for BA. But if the notion of final cause, a cause that reaches back from the future, in a sense, is not important to BA, in what sense can the future, or the call of the future, be important, either? What you’re left with is efficient causality, and that always leads to mechanical materialism and dogmatic thinking. Which fits with AWAG! , it is mere secular rationalism, not historical materialism, and not really a Marxist book. In my view the book has many other problems, too, but clearly you’re not interested in that—just chalk it up to subjectivism. In response to something I said about Badiou, you responded that Badiou is not trying to take responsibility for the ICM. Is that what AWAG! is supposed to represent, an act of responsibility? I would say it was very irresponsible to put that out there as representative of vanguard communist thinking. But I’m sure it will stir up something at a track meet, as per that recent Revolution article, among people who themselves will probably never read the book. But I’m sure that’s fine, too, because who needs people who do read books? Yes, my attitude is very “bad” at this point, because I am angry and sickened at the way things have gone, and maybe I was just naïve to think it ever could have been otherwise. I had written up a bunch of notes after our conversation, but I doubt that it would be worthwhile to send them. I wrote that sentence, which you’re censuring me for, because everything else in the last two years or so, and even for me with the argument over the Zizek foreword [to the Conversations book], has been so forced. Forced, but also contrived and hyped, with little, very little, of the rigor and science, or any reality to the embracing, that is always being called for. But I can see how it would be very problematic for me to worry in a public way about [the subject of the sentence I excised], even if I also think it is a legitimate worry that I wanted to express to you, at least. So, no, I won’t put that sentence out there, or any of the other stuff, for that matter. I’ll just try to do my work as best I can, that’s all I know to do. However, I would also warn you against drawing certain lines against me, not only because I find it very hurtful in a personal way (I know you find some of what I’ve said personally hurtful too, but I want that to divide into two: 1) yes, you personally need to think about what it means that you can wrap your mind around the NS [New Synthesis] being finished, AWAG! line, not you or even BA “personally,” which began to show great promise and now has closed up significantly), without any good coming of it (and really just reinforcing instrumentalism), but also because it is merely self-serving of you (and whomever) to deal with criticisms by putting the critics in the camp of subjectivism or even some kind of enemy. being a “great book,” etc.; 2) my anger is at this
You said when we were talking that we (you and I) were at an impasse. Perhaps. I think the world is at an impasse. Some elements of the NS are helpful here, and I will continue to study the documents on this that come out. If you or BA really do see how all of these elements form a synthesis, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate this systematically, and not to make hyped claims or charge me or others with subjectivism or the rest of the standard litany of insults. I think the hyped or forced claims, and poorly-formulated works such as AWAG! can actually contribute to the impasse. Perhaps I have contributed to the impasse as well, though I assure that my subjective aim is otherwise. I do think that, until BA and the RCP recognizes the dimensions of the ways that capitalism and imperialism have become postmodern (which even goes to what BA said about the syllogism, and the category of irrationality by itself just doesn’t get it), and the ways that fascism, “Christian fascism” and other forms of the current dynamic (repression, consumerism, low levels of culture, anomie, etc.) work within this postmodern field, and the way that this postmodern capitalism depends on fomenting and deepening the impasse, that it will be too easy to fall into deepening the impasse yourselves, or too shaped by it. Another secular rationalist response to religion is a good example of this, even if some of the politics of this response [AWAG! ] is better than the politics of some of the other secular rationalist critiques out there (on the other hand, as a secular rationalist critique, Daniel Dennett’s is better on every level). I can see how a crude sense of “truth” and certainty and rationality (and the attendant sense that others are irrational) would seem like a good response to the present impasse, but it isn’t. Ironically, it is a pathway to your own religion, and not a good one, either.
Please do not think I take any kind of pleasure in getting into this, I find it ridiculous and tiresome and intellectually debilitating that all of this has arisen at all. Please do not insult me further by telling me that BA can’t be the kind of intellectual I want him to be. Someone who can’t be bothered to systematically engage with some range of the more developed, deep, and thoughtful work in his field of inquiry (religion or whatever), and who instead spends an inordinate amount of verbiage quoting himself, is not an intellectual or someone who could have anything to do with intellectual ferment. On the contrary, this approach to a philosophically-heavy subject just makes our whole cause look ridiculous, and it shows contempt for thoughtful people. But go ahead and put your pre-formulated “explanations” on my objections; unfortunately, it is very hard to imagine anymore that you would do anything else. You’re right—it’s my subjectivism that leads me to think that constant self-references are a problem in theoretical work, especially “scientific” theoretical work; one would think that constant self-reference would be almost the very definition of subjectivism, but I guess that’s just a matter of form rather than content [this is something that the LPM said to me, that my challenging of the method of self-reference only goes to form, not content].
Okay, now I’m just getting pissed off thinking about this stuff, so I’ll just go back to my work, trying to add to the 2500 years of cant [BA once referred to Kant as “nothing more than cant,” a point we discussed in the Conversations book]; believe it or not, I wish you and BA the best in your own work.
Bill
* * * * *
Obviously there is a great deal more to discuss, even concerning the material presented here, and let me remind the reader that I knew nothing of the “Cultural Revolution (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/rcp-describes-avakians-self-coup-within-the-party/)” in the RCP or other aspects of reorganization that are discussed in the recent Manifesto. Neither did I know about the role that the Conversations book, including two parts in particular (on Kant and instrumentalism, and on homosexuality), played in internal party matters. It is ironic and very sad that, apparently, the discussion of instrumentalism in the book played a role in reinforcing instrumentalism in the party and, I can only assume, with people outside of the party (including yours truly). The greatest irony is that, apparently, it was decided for instrumental reasons that it would be good for a period to have a critique of instrumentalism, and now that period has passed and there has been a reassertion of the value of instrumentalizing people. This exchange of documents also occurred before the New Synthesis presentations were made in various parts of the U.S. To say the least it was painful to read the part of the presentation that supposedly stressed the importance of philosophy. Not the history of philosophy from Plato to Badiou—oh, hell no! Who needs that bourgeois crap and academic fluff? Instead what we need is that “truth is correspondence to reality.” Okay, I’ll quit (for now).
We are faced with a truly difficult task, to take account of Maoism and the attempt to develop and even surpass Maoism, and then to really surpass it, which means being open to something new. We have to carry forward Marx and Lenin and Mao and the experience of proletarian revolution, and even the real contributions of Bob Avakian, and there may be a few others we ought to bring forward. More than this, we might think further on the idea that we should not forget that communism is always bigger and deeper than any of the rest. “Human life is limited, but revolution knows no bounds.”