IrisBright
25th September 2008, 22:06
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.
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.